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Of Loss and Loot: Stalin-Era Culture, Foreign Aid, and Trophy Goods in the Soviet Union during the 1940s*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Nathalie Moine
Nathalie Moine*
Affiliation:
CNRS-CERCEC
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Abstract

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This article focuses on the influx and circulation of foreign objects in the Soviet Union during the 1940s in order to investigate the specific role of these objects during World War II. It reveals how the distribution of humanitarian aid intersected with both the (non)recognition of the genocide of Soviet Jews during the Nazi occupation, and with Stalinist social hierarchies. It explains why erasing the origins and precise circumstances through which these objects entered Soviet homes could in turn be used to hide the abuses that the Red Army perpetrated against their defeated enemies. Finally, it revises the image of a Soviet society that discovered luxury and Western modernity for the first time during the war by reconsidering the place and the trajectories of these objects in Stalinist material culture of the interwar period.

Type
Poverty and Profit-Making
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 68 , Issue 2 , June 2013 , pp. 219 - 258
Copyright
Copyright © Les Éditions de l’EHESS 2013

Footnotes

*

The author wishes to express her gratitude to the following individuals for their generous assistance in the preparation of this article: Juliette Cadiot, François-Xavier Nérard, Gábor Rittersporn, Brandon Schechter, and Paul Schor.

References

1. Brodsky, Joseph, “Spoils of War,” in On Grief and Reason: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 3–21.Google Scholar

2. Regarding the presence of Western goods in post-Stalin-era Soviet society, see Zakharova, Larissa, S’habiller à la Soviétique. La mode et le Dégel en URSS (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2011)Google Scholar; Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Zhuk, Sergei I., Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960-1985, (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010).Google Scholar

3. Regarding objects that came from abroad “thanks to” the war, see Dunham, Vera S., In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976)Google Scholar. Through an interpretation of fiction published during the 1940s, this book demonstrates how, at the end of the war, the Stalin administration was able to create a veritable pact with a large segment of Soviet society by rehabilitating the search for material comfort as fair compensation for the people’s sacrifices and efforts, but also for their political allegiance. The approach of the present study is different, however, because literary texts, important testimony from witnesses of the realities of the period, as well as their shared perceptions, must be understood as constitutive elements of the imaginary of the authors and actors of “primary” sources that are not in themselves narratives.

4. Among many studies of the spoliation of Jewish property and the forms of restitution and compensation, see in particular Dean, Martin, Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Constantin Goschler and Philipp Ther, eds., Raub und Restitution. “Arisierung” und Rückerstattung des jüdischen Eigentums in Europa (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003); “Spoliations en Europe,” special issue, Revue d’histoire de la Shoah 186 (2007). Regarding the case of Jews in France, among the many publications that followed studies conducted by the Matteoli Commission (Antoine Prost, Rémi Skoutesky and Sonia Étienne, Aryanisation économique et restitutions (Paris: La Documentation française, 2000)), see Tal Bruttmann, Aryanisation économique et spoliations en Isère, 1940-1944 (Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 2010); Laurent Douzou, Voler les juifs. Lyon, 1940-1944 (Paris: Hachette Littératures, 2002); Florent Le Bot, La fabrique réactionnaire. Antisémitisme, spoliations et corporatisme dans le cuir, 1930-1950 (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2007). The matter of compensation received by victims has been considerably less well studied. For some information, see Voldman, Danièle, La reconstruction des villes françaises de 1940 à 1954. Histoire d’une politique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997)Google Scholar.

5. Jessica Reinisch, “Internationalism in Relief: The Birth (and Death) of UNRRA,” in “Postwar Reconstruction in Europe: International Perspectives, 1945-1949,” ed. Mark Mazower, Jessica Reinisch, and David Feldman, Past and Present Special Supplement 6 (2011): 258-89; Laura Hobson Faure, “Un ‘plan Marshall juif’: la présence juive américaine en France après la Shoah, 1944-1954.” (PhD diss., EHESS, 2009).

6. Sophie Cœuré, La mémoire spoliée. Les archives des Français, butin de guerre nazi puis soviétique, de 1940 à nos jours (Paris: Payot, 2007); see also Sumpf, Alexandre and Laniol, Vincent, eds., Saisies, spoliations et restitutions. Archives et bibliothèques au XXe siècle (Rennes: PUR, 2012)Google Scholar.

7. Dreyfus, Jean Marc and Gensburger, Sarah, Des camps dans Paris. Austerlitz, Lévitan, Bassano, juillet 1943-août 1944 (Paris: Fayard, 2003)Google Scholar; Annette Wievorka, Le pillage des appartements et son indemnisation (Paris: La Documentation française, 2000).

8. Hessler, Julie, A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917-1953 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Borders of Socialism: Private Spheres of Soviet Russia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Marina Balina and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds., Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style (London: Anthem Press, 2009); Crowely, David and Reid, Susan E., eds., Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

9. 60 percent in 1943 according to Edward C. Carter, State Archives of the Russian Federation, Moscow (Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, hereafter “GARF”), collection (fond, hereafter “f.”) 8581, inventory (opis’, hereafter “op.”) 2, file (delo, hereafter “d.”) 59, page (list, hereafter “l.”) 75.

10. GARF, f. 5283, op. 2a, d. 21, l. 81, 86, 95 and d. 44, l. 127v. Gruliev’s family origins, part Russian and part Jewish, support the assumption that he had linguistic knowledge that allowed him to at least minimally navigate Soviet realities and was particularly sensitive to the fate of Jews in Soviet territory. However, his excessively insistant attitude permanently inconvenienced the Soviet authorities.

11. GARF, f. 5283, op. 2a, d. 21, l. 79-79v, 86 and 92-93. Jewish evacuees were also the subject of Gruliev’s demands inquiring about their situation in the region of Saratov, where Russian War Relief (RWR) prepared an aid program. GARF, f. 5283, op. 2a, d. 21, l. 79-79v (July 1944).

12. In a proposal in August 1945, Vladimir Kemenov, president of the Pan-Soviet Society for Cultural Rapprochement between the USSR and Foreign Countries (Vsesoiuznoe Obshchestvo Kul’turnoi Sviazi s zagranitsei, VOKS), suggested to the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs that, as well as the local RWR warehouses and orphanages that benefited from its aid, Carter be taken to visit the emblematic sites that officially representated the martyrdom of the city at the time: the urban reconstruction plan, accompanied by the lead architect, the “Defense of Leningrad” exhibition and the devastated imperial palaces in the area. An additional sign of the importance attributed to the American guest and the role of this official visit in the Soviet staging of the fate of Leningrad, he also planned for a meeting with the Party First Secretary, Petr Popkov, who led the city during the siege, GARF, f. 5283, op. 2a, d. 44, l. 126. Regarding the Stalin-era construction of official memory of the siege of Leningrad, see Kirschenbaum, Lisa A., The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. GARF, f. 5283, op. 2a, d. 44, l. 148-52.

14. Shimon Redlich, Propaganda and Nationalism in Wartime Russia: The Jewish Antifascist Committee in the USSR, 1941-1948 (Boulder: East European Quarterly, 1982); Berkhoff, Karel C., Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda During World War II (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. In other words, ethnic belonging, in terms of Soviet vocabulary and categories.

16. Mordekhai Altshuler, Itsak Arad and Shmuel Krakovskii, Sovetskie evrei pishut Il’e Erenburgu 1943-1966 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1993), 140-42 and 222, letter dated July 22, 1944. The author of the letter only hinted at the specificity of the fate of Jews under the Occupation, through the still-uncertain numbers of victims: of two hundred thousand Jews before the war, he estimates that about two hundred were, like him, able to return. Regarding discrimination against the survivors of the Odessa ghettoes during the distribution of American donations, see also the letter of Tatiana Mironovna Shapiro, July 1944, ibid., 143-4.

17. Kostyrchenko, Gennadii Vasilievich, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR ot nachala do kul’minatsii, 1938-1953 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiia”/Materik, 2005)Google Scholar, June 1944, 52-57 and Shimon Redlikh, Evreiskii antifashistskii komitet v SSSR 1941-1948. Dokumentirovannaia istoriia (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1996), November 1944, 123-25.

18. Regarding the renewal of this ancient (and still hotly debated) question due to the opening of the archives, see Kostyrchenko, Gennadii Vasilievich, Tainaia politika Stalina. Vlast’ i antisemitizm (Moscow: Mezhdunaronye otnosheniia, 2003)Google Scholar, and David Brandenberger, “Stalin’s Last Crime? Recent Scholarship on Postwar Soviet Anti-Semitism and the Doctors’ Plot,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 1 (2005): 187-204.

19. Georgi Fedorovich Aleksandrov, chief of the propaganda sector of the Central Committee, October 1945, in Redlikh, Evreiskii antifashistskii komitet, 130. He is the author of a note concerning Soviet artists dated August 17, 1942 that is considered one of the first explicit examples of state-sponsored anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. Note dated February 19, 1947 from Grigorii Chumeiko, director of the foreign policy sector of the Central Committee, to Andrei Zhdanov, regarding a request by Jewish émigrés of Ukrainian origin to be permitted to be directly in contact with Ukrainian Jewish communities, ibid., 135. See Kostyrchenko, , Tainaia politika Stalina, and Rucker, Laurent, Stalin, Israel et les juifs (Paris: PUF, 2001)Google Scholar.

20. Redlikh, Evreiskii antifashistskii komitet, 120. Regarding the case of the Poles, see Catherine Gousseff, “‘Kto naš, kto ne naš.’ Théorie et pratiques de la citoyenneté à l’égard des populations conquises. Le cas des Polonais en URSS, 1939-1946,” Cahiers du monde russe 44, no. 2-3 (2003): 519-58; for more concerning the Armenians, see Mouradian, Claire, “L’immigration des Arméniens de la diaspora dans la RSS d’Arménie, 1946-1962,” Cahiers du monde russe 20, no. 1 (1979): 79–110 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21. Redlikh, Evreiskii antifashistskii komitet, 115-16.

22. Regarding the attempts of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to respond to the expectations of foreign correspondents, see in particular the lists of names of Soviet Jews who escaped from different localities, sent abroad by the Committee in 1944, which figured among the accusations leveled against the Committee after the war, GARF, f. 8114, op. 1, d. 973.

23. This explains the presence of numerous documents concerning this question of aid in the archives of the Central Committee preserved at the GARF, whose files were carefully selected by the Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (Ministry of Governmental Security), and numerous recopied and/or translated documents (particularly from Yiddish). These were described at length by Abakumov in a note dated December 4, 1950, in which he cited in particular the letter of Mikhoels dated October 28, 1944, which denounced the indifference of the Soviet Red Cross concerning Jews in its distribution of foreign aid: Kostyrchenko, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm, 139-47. Curiously, Mikhoels’ famous letter, referred to as a draft in Abakumov’s note, is available in the archives of the Committee in its definitive version, received by Molotov and annotated in his hand on October 29, 1944, more precisely a “certified copy,” Redlikh, Evreiskii antifashistskii komitet, 122.

24. A renaissance facilitated by new legislation and a greater tolerance from which religious denominations represented on Soviet soil generally benefited. Yaacov Ro’i, ed., Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union (Ilford: F. Cass, 1995).

25. Ro’i, Yaacov, “The Reconstruction of Jewish Communities in the USSR, 1944-1947,” in The Jews Are Coming Back: The Return of the Jews to their Countries of Origin after WWII, ed. Bankier, David (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2005), 186–205 Google Scholar, especially 196-97.

26. GARF, f. 6991, op. 3, d. 28, l. 227.

27. Veniamin Fedorovich Zima, Golod v SSSR 1946-1947 godov. Proiskhozhdenie i posledstviia (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), 146. See also Woodbridge, George, ed., UNRRA: The History of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, 3 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950)Google Scholar.

28. Reinisch, “Internationalism in Relief.” Food aid for the Republics of Byelorussia and Ukraine represented respectively 49 percent and 53 percent of the aid sent by UNRRA in the equivalent of US dollars, followed by supplies for industrial reconstruction (29 percent and 28 percent), clothing, textiles, and shoes (11.5 percent and 9 percent), supplies for agricultural reconstruction (9 percent) and medical equipment and supplies (1.6 percent and 1.3 percent). See Woodbridge, UNRRA, 2: 250.

29. UNRRA, Economic Rehabilitation in the Ukraine, Operational Analysis Papers, 39 (1947), 68 and 72; UNRRA, Economic Rehabilitation in Byelorussia, Operational Analysis Papers, 48 (1947), 42 and 49, n. 2. According to this final report, 70 percent of the foodstuffs sold in Byelorussian shops during the spring and summer of 1946 came from the UNRRA, even though the Soviet government had not confirmed this figure. Other supply sources in which UNRRA goods were not commercialized were the famous gastronom food shops in which un-rationed luxury goods were sold at prices affordable only to the privileged few in Soviet society, as well as the kolkhozian markets, where access was more democratic, but whose prices were also incomparably higher than those of rationed goods sold in government shops. Regarding the Soviet postwar distribution system, see Hessler, Social History.

30. UNRRA, Economic Rehabilitation in the Ukraine, 77-78; UNRRA, Economic Rehabilitation in Byelorussia, 53-54.

31. Johnston, Timothy, Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life under Stalin, 1939-1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 95–97;CrossRefGoogle Scholar the author neglects the omnipresence of zagranichnye podarki in Soviet reports from the 1940s, however.

32. GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 315, l. 2-2v.

33. “We prisoners, we have heard talk about gifts from abroad that had worried camp authorities ... In the lists, these woolen marvels were designated as “second hand,” which was far more expressive, understandably, than “used” or obscure initials such as “w/u” (was used), which are not comprehensible for a man of the camp.” Varlam Chalamov, “Prêt-bail,” Récits de la Kolyma (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2003), 506.

34. Zubkova, Elena Yu. et al. eds., Sovetskaia zhizn’, 1945-1953 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2003), 83–88 Google Scholar. Apparently, Gulag prisoners were also aware of being victims of the rapacity of local leaders: “Worn-out knitted suits, second-hand sweaters and jumpers collected on the other side of the ocean for the detainees of the Kolyma had been absconded with by the wives of the Magadan generals who had almost fought over them,” Chalamov, “Prêt-bail,” 507.

35. Russian State Archives of Social and Political History, Moscow (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii, hereafter “RGASPI”), f. 17, op. 122, d. 139, l. 83-92.

36. Regarding the absence of recognition by Russian historiography and, more generally, by Russian society of the behavior of Red Army soldiers in Germany, see Budnitskii, Oleg, “The Intelligentsia Meets the Enemy: Educated Soviet Officers in Defeated Germany, 1945,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, no. 3 (2009): 629–82 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 635 and following.

37. Naimark, Norman M., The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Krisztián Ungváry, The Siege of Budapest: 100 Days in World War II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

38. See the letter from a Red Army soldier and former kolkhozian on his arrival in Prussia, Eastern: “They took the livestock from the best farms in Europe. Their sheep are the best Russian merinos, and their shops are piled with goods from all the shops and factories of Europe. In the near future, these goods will appear in Russian shops as our trophies,” Merridale, Catherine, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 260.Google Scholar

39. RGVA, f. 32900, op. 1, d. 458, l. 42-42v, 94-5, 98 and 112-16.

40. Budnitskii, “The Intelligentsia Meets the Enemy,” 633.

41. “The jamboree involved no guilt. Even today, the veterans can talk of it without embarrassment, as if recounting a particularly fruitful rummage sale. Getting the best things was a sign of skill, of concern for one’s family, of an ability to deal with the new beast, capitalism,” Merridale, Ivan’s War, 279.

42. The retouching of the famous photograph by Evgenii Khaldei showing a Red Army soldier who had climbed to the top of the Reichstag, his arm holding the Soviet flag initially decorated by several wristwatches, does not contradict this idea of tolerance, but demonstrates instead the widespread nature of this practice, which led Khaldei, having chosen his model, to not even notice this detail until later.

43. Upon exiting the cellar in which she had hidden after the Russians arrived, a woman from Berlin described one of her first sightings of the invaders, before she was serially raped a few hours later, as follows: “On the road, the Russians had climbed onto freshly stolen bicycles. They taught each other to ride, holding themselves as stiffly as Susi, the female chimpanzee in the zoo, crashing into trees and bursting into laughter like children,” Une femme à Berlin. Journal, 20 avril-22 juin 1945 trans. Françoise Wullmart (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). The author of the journal expressed pleasure at having witnessed this ambivalent scene. See also the autobiographical narrative of Sándor Márai concerning the beginnings of the Soviet occupation of Hungary, Memoir of Hungary, 1944-1948, trans. Albert Tezla (Budapest: Corvina, 1996) as well as his novel, Libération, written at the end of the siege of Budapest but published posthumously (Paris: Albin Michel, 2007).

44. Gelfand, Wladimir, Deutschland-Tagebuch, 1945-1946. Aufzeichnungen eines Rotarmisten (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2005), 78–82.Google Scholar This kind of scene became commonplace in descriptions of the good female Soviet with respect to German women, who had allegedly become rather wild.

45. The first Soviet cameras were as rare as they were mythical, because they were produced in the model orphan camp (besprizorniki) called Felix Dzerzhinsky. The FED 1 came out in 1934, and one was produced for every five hundred inhabitants in 1937. Photography development material was just as scarce and expensive, meaning that amateur photography remained quite limited before the 1950s. See Narskii, Ivan, Fotokartochka na pamiat’: semeinye istorii, fotograficheskie poslaniia i sovetskoe detstvo (avtobio-istoriograficheskii roman) (Cheliabinsk: Èntsiklopediia, 2008), 317–18.Google Scholar

46. A revealing fact concerning the perspective of contemporary Russian society, including the intelligentsia, on this aspect of the war is that the first group photograph of the three child-heroes of a recent novel was taken by an old, patriotic military doctor who had a “superb trophy camera,” revealing interesting prerevolutionary manners in private scenes. Ulitskaia, Liudmila, Zelenyi shater (Moscow: Èksmo, 2011), 22–25.Google Scholar

47. Gelfand, Deutschland-Tagebuch, 205, January 14, 1946.

48. Ibid., 267, May 22, 1946, and 302, August 27, 1946. He most likely learned these skills in May 1946, when he was in frequent contact with a cultivated Polish family who came from regions annexed by the USSR. Ibid., 308, September 11, 1946.

49. Ibid., 306, September 6, 1946, and 308, September 7, 1946. These photographs of the occupation echo the better-known and certainly more widespread practice of German soldiers in occupied territory photographing both young women and scenes of atrocity. Still, Gelfand’s journal does not seem to indicate that his goal was to photograph traces of the war.

50. Ibid., 269, letter to his mother dated May 27, 1946. Gelfand was certainly predisposed towards photography: he regularly had his portrait taken by professional photographers and mailed numerous snapshots to his mother and his other women correspondents. He also papered the walls of his room in Germany with purchased and found photographs.

51. In addition to utilitarian clothing, Gelfand’s mother ordered a radio receiver through him, ibid., 181, letter dated November 15, 1945.

52. Knyshevskii, Pavel, Moskaus Beute. Wie Vermögen, Kulturgüter und Intelligenz nach 1945 aus Deutschland geraubt wurden (Munich: Olzog Verlag, 1995)Google Scholar.

53. Budnitskii, “The Intelligentsia Meets the Enemy,” 657. Regarding the frenzied mailing of packages by the Germans during occupation, including from the USSR and particularly from the Ukraine, see Aly, Götz, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, trans. Chase, Jefferson (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007)Google Scholar.

54. Merridale, Ivan’s War, 281.

55. Gelfand, Deutschland-Tagebuch, 180, letter to Gelfand from his mother dated November 15, 1945, in which she asked him not to write her any longer at her work address, and particularly to send no packages.

56. Edele, Mark, Soviet Veterans of the Second World War: A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society, 1941-1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Gelfand left Germany in more modest circumstances, with two “small but heavy” suitcases and two bags. Gelfand, Deutschland-Tagebuch, 312, September 26, 1946.

57. Ibid., 204-5, January 14, 1946, and 211, January 21, 1946.

58. Ibid., 176-77, November 6, 1945.

59. Knyshevskii, Moskaus Beute.

60. Knyshevskii, Pavel N., Dobycha: Tainy germanskikh reparatsii (Moscow: Soratnik, 1994), 120–21.Google Scholar

61. Gelfand, Deutschland-Tagebuch, 218, letter to his mother, January 26, 1946: purchase of a “good” receiver with five lamps for four thousand marks; 280, June 23, 1946: a radio valued at two thousand marks that he traded for two suits; 300, testimony of August 28, 1946.

62. Vaissié, Cécile, Russie: une femme en dissidence. Larissa Bogoraz (Paris: Plon, 2000), 39.Google Scholar

63. Valérie Pozner, “Le sort des films trophées saisis par les Soviétiques au cours de la Seconde Guerre mondiale,” in Sumpf and Laniol, Saisies, spoliations et restitutions, 147-64.

64. See Fürst, Juliane, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 200-49.

65. Edele, Soviet Veterans, 91.

66. GARF, f. 5446, op. 49a, d. 467, l. 12-18. Regarding reparations policies, see Fisch, Jörg, Reparationen nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1992)Google Scholar.

67. GARF, f. 5446, op. 49a, d. 2848, l. 1-3, I am grateful to Juliette Cadiot for bringing the existence of this file to my attention. Regarding the participation of the commercial authorities of the government in the black market as an invariable feature of the operation of the Soviet economy, see Tamara Kondratieva, “Les personnes matériellement responsables sous le régime de propriété socialiste,” in Les Soviétiques. Un pouvoir, des régimes, ed. Tamara Kondratieva (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2011), 113-30.

68. Regarding Stalin’s personal involvement in reducing Ponomarenko’s power at the helm of Byelorussia by appointing Gusarov a year earlier on February 27, 1947, see Khlevniuk, Oleg V. et al., Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) i Sovet ministrov SSSR, 1945-1953 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2002)Google Scholar, 47n1.

69. The Byelorussian leadership was also denounced for embezzling public resources in order to build private homes, demonstrating similar disinterest in the misfortunes of the citizens whom they served, many of whom were forced to live in earthen huts, and the same profit motive, as some rented out the houses that they built with public funds, or resold them at “speculative” prices.

70. GARF, f. 8131, op. 37, d. 3187, l. 17, report by the prosecutor’s office of the Nikolaev (present-day Mykolaiv) region, April 1946.

71. Regarding this “war of the services,” see Petrov, Nikita, Pervyi predsedatel’ KGB Ivan Serov (Moscow: Materik, 2005)Google Scholar. Except when otherwise stated, this book is the source of information concerning this affair.

72. In his own defense, Serov in turn accused Abakumov of arranging to have twenty carloads of loot delivered to Moscow despite the fact that the war was at its peak, and of having loaded an airplane bound for recently liberated Crimea with trophy goods. Although he was not as highly placed, Sidnev admitting to using SVAG aircraft or Serov’s planes to transport large amounts of seized goods to furnish his Leningrad apartment. See also the repeated use of regular Byelorussian flights and Ponomarenko’s personal airplane to transport several tons of carpets and other highly valuable items back to Minsk, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 122, d. 308, l. 92.

73. Akinsha, Konstantin and Kozlov, Grigorii, Beautiful Loot: The Soviet Plunder of Europe’s Art Treasures (New York: Random House, 1995)Google Scholar; Knyshevskii, Moskaus Beute; Margarita S. Zinich, Pokhishchennye sokrovishcha: vyvoz natsistami rossiiskikh kul’turnykh tsennostei (Moscow: In-t rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 2003).

74. GARF, f. 5446, op. 49a, d. 243, l. 38-39 and 51.

75. However, three individuals arrested in the same case received suspended sentences during their trial in October 1951, after more than three and a half years of detention that had driven one of them to the prison psychiatric ward.

76. The fact that both men used the same arguments can be explained by their proximity, but the theme of a “philistine swamp” (obyvatel’skoe boloto) is a moralistic trope in Bolshevik discourse.

77. Osokina, Elena, Zoloto dlia industrializatsii: “TORGSIN,” (Moscow: ROSSPÈN, 2009)Google Scholar, especially 83-102 and 118-46.

78. “Exactly a minute later a pistol shot rang out, the mirrors disappeared, the display windows and stools dropped away, the carpet melted into air, as did the curtain. Last to disappear was the high mountain of old dresses and shoes, and the stage was again severe, empty and bare,” Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Penguin, 1997), 130.

79. Ibid., 163-70.

80. Many of the inventories analyzed for this study were written by individuals evacuated early in the war to the Urals and to Central Asia. The particular relationship between these individuals and their assets is due to several factors. Having left most of their assets and property behind them, they could only imagine the worst, in other words, their total disappearance, and not only at the hands of the enemy. The question of the inventory and the preservation of property left behind by evacuees had, since the beginning of the war, given rise to a series of decrees intended to protect them from indelicate neighbors’ appropriations. GARF, f. 5446, op. 43a, d. 6328. In reality, the situation was far more confused. Many of the evacuees belonged to the Soviet elite and included some individuals of Jewish origin who may have been doubly concerned about their property. Regarding the social profile of evacuees and their experience of the war, see Manley, Rebecca, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

81. Moine, Nathalie, “La commission d’enquête Soviet sur les crimes de guerre nazis: entre reconquête du territoire, écriture du récit de la guerre et usages justiciers,” Le Mouvement social 222, no. 1 (2008): 81–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

82. Vaissié, Russie: une femme en dissidence, 61-62.

83. “If we leave aside ninety million peasants who prefer to sit on wooden benches, boards or earthen seats, and in the east of the country, shabby carpets and rugs, we still have fifty million people for whom chairs are objects of prime necessity in their everyday lives,” Ilf and Petrov, The Twelve Chairs, trans. John Richardson (London: Frederick Muller, 1965), 118.

84. Grossman, Vassily, Life and Fate, trans. Chandler, Raymond (London: Harvill Press, 1995), 81.Google Scholar

85. The average worker’s salary in the 1930s was three hundred rubles.

86. GARF, f. 7021, op. 28, d. 68, act 133. Obviously, evaluating market prices at the time of the creation of the act by the commissions distorts matters considerably: the coat was probably purchased for a far lower price, depending on when, and especially how, it was bought. See Moine, Nathalie, “Évaluer les pertes matérielles de la population pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale en URSS: vers la légitimation de la propriété privée?” Histoire et Mesure 28, no. 1 (2013): 187–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

87. Among a large number of studies of this question, see Kelly, Catriona and Volkov, Vadim, “Directed Desires: Kul’turnost’ and Consumption,” in Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution, 1881-1940, ed. Kelly, Catriona and Shepherd, David (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 291–313.Google Scholar

88. Note that the acts only rarely indicate victims’ professions.

89. GARF, f. 7021, op. 28, d. 68, act 121.

90. GARF, f. 7021, op. 28, d. 31, l. 142.

91. Regarding the official cult devoted to Pushkin, particularly during his jubilee year in 1937, see Platt, Kevin M. F. and Brandenberger, David, eds., Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

92. This author was found among the small travel kit that Strum’s mother took with her when she entered the Berdichev ghetto. It was essentially comprised of her most precious books, along with photographs, letters, and the basic necessities for sleeping, eating, and continuing to practice medicine. Her description serves to connect Anna Semenovna to an intelligentsia of Russian culture that was intimately familiar with nineteenth-century Russian-language authors and also possessed some acquaintance with certain French literary texts (she continued to give French lessons in the ghetto), whereas Ukrainian plebeians reminded her of “what [she]’d forgotten during the years of Soviet regime—that [she] was a Jew,” Grossman, Life and Fate, 81. It can easily be imagined that the same kind of self-representation operated in these somewhat dry lists of literary works. As opposed to Semenovna, however, who represented the intelligentsia which holds material possessions in contempt, victims of pillaging registered such cultural references as a sort of material comfort that was certainly equally meaningful to them, outside of the question of possible financial compensation.

93. The painting in question is “A Morning in a Pine Forest” by the painter Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin (1832-1898), exhibited in the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow and in mass reproduction even to the present day, particularly on boxes of chocolate manufactured by the well-known “Krasnyi Oktiabr’” factory.

94. In Ilf and Petrov’s novel, the twelve chairs belonged to a certain Vorobianinov, marshal of the nobility converted into a government employee after the revolution. Learning that one of them contained an inestimable treasure, a discovery that launches the novel’s plot, he recalls the vanished salon of his former provincial home: “He clearly remembered the drawing room in his house, and its symmetrically arranged walnut furniture with curved legs, the polished parquet floor, the old brown grand piano, and the oval black-framed daguerreotypes of high-ranking relatives on the walls,” Ilf and Petrov, The Twelve Chairs, 15. Corny memories for the two satirists, this nostalgia probably did not seem quite as ridiculous to some readers.

95. The ambitious reconceptualization of 1920s lifestyles, which has remained highly theoretical but for which each detail was significant, went so far as to denounce, for example, the production of tea services for a determined number of guests (six or twelve depending on convention), which tended to preserve a mode of sociability oriented towards the domestic living space instead of promoting spending all of one’s time in the collective living space of the canteen. V. S., “Oformlenie byta. Proizvodstvennye organizatsii ne raskachalis’,” Iskusstvo v massy 4 (1930): 22-23, cited in Karen Kettering, “‘Ever More Cosy and Comfortable’: Stalinism and the Soviet Domestic Interior, 1928-1938,” Journal of Design History 10, no. 2 (1997): 119-35, here 126. The fact that Evdokia Samoilovna lists a tea service that is both made of expensive material and designed for a large number of guests, shows the extent to which prescriptions had limited influence, but also how the context of the war often permitted an inversion of values in terms of material possessions.

96. GARF, f. 7021, op. 100, d. 71, act 184. When she wrote her declaration, Iantovskaia was living in a house in Chirchik, a new city in Uzbekistan thirty kilometers from Tashkent. She was separated from her husband, who had disappeared in the Urals during the early stages of the evacuation. Like so many other evacuees, her standard of living had declined, although she claimed to be receiving a monthly income of one thousand two hundred rubles. Her letter is marked by virulent “anti-Kraut” Soviet patriotism, but her primary motivation was certainly related to her fierce desire to be reimbursed, leading her to include, amid dishes and pots and pans, six gold teeth and six dental crowns in the inventory. The anachronism suggested by this latter point, particularly given by a Jewish evacuee should not be surprising. The mercantile value of gold teeth was not first discovered by those who pilfered them from cadavers. When they needed to, individuals could conceive of having their teeth extracted and reselling them or trading them for bread and other staples. See “Svershilos’. Prishli nemtsy!” Ideinyi kollaboratsionizm v SSSR v period Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2012), 98 (respectively November 26 and December 2, 1941).

97. References to children’s furniture are extremely rare in inventories. One evacuee from Kharkov, Iakov Moiseevich Gurevich, mentions a children’s sofa, a small table, and three chairs for his two daughters. He belonged to a comfortable class with a modernist orientation in a number of domains: an expensive piano, a collection of two hundred record albums, and electric domestic items including an oven, kitchen elements, and an iron, GARF, f. 7021, op. 100, d. 53, act 171. Toys are also almost never referred to in inventories. Dmitrii Nikolaevich Golovastikov, an engineer at a factory that manufactured machines in Voronezh, had a similar profile: 250 records, a radio, highly serious reading material—technical, political, a bit of literature—as well as two porcelain dolls with eyes that closed, two “Ded moroz,” and even a string of electric Christmas lights, which is revealing in that such items were only re-authorized in 1936, GARF, f. 7021, op. 100, d. 71, act 194. References to children’s bicycles are encountered more frequently, however. Regarding the scarcity of toys in the Stalin-era Soviet Union, see Kelly, Catriona, Children’s World: Growing up in Russia, 1890-1991 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

98. GARF, f. 7021, op. 100, d. 53, act 158.

99. GARF, f. 7021, op. 100, d. 71, act 166.

100. GARF, f. 7021, op. 100, d. 71, act 194.

101. GARF, f. 7021, op. 28, d. 31, l. 20. Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovskii (1817-1900), a great lover of the navy and Romantic Russian painter who was popular both before the revolution and in the 1930s. In an article published at the end of the 1930s, Aivazovskii was cited among the painters whose works would best decorate Soviet interiors—provided the art afficionados acquired quality reproductions like those published by Izogiz. This article was typical of the lessons on rigidly defined official definitions of good taste published in the journal and aimed at Soviet middle-class women. Kravchenko, K., “O kartinakh i reproduktsiiakh,” Obshchestvennitsa 15 (1937): 17–19;Google Scholar Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi, Russian landscape artist, 1842-1910.

102. The Soviet government never seemed to have envisioned including in the list of art works taken by the enemy and potentially subject to being returned or compensation, anything other than works taken from museums and other public institutions. See Akinsha, Konstantin, “Stalin’s Decrees and Soviet Trophy Brigades: Compensation, Restitution in Kind, or ‘Trophies’ of War?,” International Journal of Cultural Property 17, no. 2 (2010): 195–216.Google Scholar

103. It was still probably too early for ordinary Soviets to evaluate the changes put in place by the Kremlin regarding religion. See Chumachenko, Tatiana A., Church and State in Soviet Russia: Russian Orthodoxy from World War II to the Khrushchev Years, trans. and ed. Roslof, Edward E. (Armonk: M. E. Sharp, 2002)Google Scholar.

104. GARF, f. 7021, op. 100, d. 53, act 243.

105. “Whose furniture do you want to know about? Angelov, first-guild merchant? Certainly. ... Taken from Angelov on December 18, 1918: Baecker grand piano, one, no. 97012; piano stools, one soft; bureaux, two; wardrobes, four (two mahogany); bookcases, one... and so on. ... The letter V it is. ... In one moment. Vm, Vn, Vorotsky, no. 48238, Vorobyaninov, Ippolit Matveyevich, your father, God rest his soul, was a man with a big heart... A Baecker piano, no. 54809. Chinese vases, marked, four, from Sèvres in France; Aubusson carpets, eight, different sizes; a tapestry, ‘The Shepherd’s Boy’; a tapestry, ‘The Shepherd’s Girl’; Tekke carpets, two; Khorassan carpets, one; stuffed bears with dish, one; a bedroom suite to seat twelve; a dining room suite to seat sixteen; a drawing room suite to seat twelve, walnut, made by Hambs,” Ilf and Petrov, The Twelve Chairs, 77-78.

106. Regarding the practice of seizing furniture immediately following the revolution, see the admirable reconstitution of a luxury apartment building in Petrograd by Zakharova, Larissa, “Le 26-28 Kamennoostrovski. Les tribulations d’un immeuble en révolution,” in Saint-Pétersbourg. Histoire, promenades, anthologie et dictionnaire, ed. Meaux, Lorraine de (Paris: R. Laffont, 2003), 473–505.Google Scholar

107. The famous photographs featuring representatives of the former elites add to the stories and testimonies. In the pictures, the figures are standing on a sidewalk awaiting a client, obliged to sell their last possessions during the Civil War to be able to purchase basic necessities.

108. The director of the asylum for the elderly to whom one of the twelve chairs had been attributed resold it to one of the characters in the novel, who pretended to be a perekoupchtchik, i.e., from the perspective of Soviet law, an intermediary illegally purchasing an item, whether or not it was government property, in order to resell it to a client and pocket the difference, Ilf and Petrov, The Twelve Chairs, 54-55.

109. The novel introduces us to the fate of another set of Gambs chairs, sought after in error by a greedy pope: seized from the home of the wife of a Stargorod general, they were given to “Engineer Bruns,” who left the city in 1923 for Kharkov, taking with him all of his furnishings, “and was looking after it very carefully.” He then traveled to Rostov, where he worked for a large cement manufacturer before being invited to work at the Baku refineries, where the furniture henceforth decorated his comfortable dacha, amidst the luxuriant vegetation of a hill overlooking Batumi, making Bruns into an avatar of the colonial elites, ibid., 55, 150, 211 and 287-92.

110. Which did not prevent the technician of the theater from clandestinely reselling the assets assigned to his theater to individuals, in this case to the heroes desperately seeking to acquire such bounty, ibid., 137-38, 164-68 and 280.

111. The Russian version of the article by Larissa Zakharova, “Le 26-28 Kamennoostrovski,” is also entitled “The Twelve Chairs,” an indication of the extent to which the novel, and its moral, were inextricably linked in the Soviet and post-Soviet consciousness, from its publication to the present day, with the fate of the assets of the former tsarist elites.

112. “‘It’s all here,’ he said, ‘the whole of Stargorod. All the furniture. Who it was taken from and who it was given to. And here’s the alphabetical index—the mirror of life! ... It’s all here. The whole town. Pianos, settees, pier glasses, chairs, divans, pouffes, chandeliers... even dinner services,’” Ilf and Petrov, The Twelve Chairs, 77.

113. This disappearance is clearly of variable rapidity depending on social level, age, etc. The nostalgia that developed for the Soviet material domain did not interrupt this process, given the extent to which it was itself a part of a Western mode of commercialization.