It has long been a truism that the Holocaust, the extermination of European Jewry, was marginalized or even excluded from public memory in the Soviet Union, and that this was largely due to a one-sided emphasis on a commemoration of World War II that foregrounded the heroic, unified, and victorious struggle of the population against the Nazi regime, led by Iosif Stalin and the Soviet army. Recent studies such as Arkadii Zeltser's Unwelcome Memory have offered more nuanced analyses, showing that there were in fact quite a few memorials to the destruction of Jewish communities. Alexandra Tcherkasski adds to this correction by analyzing the entwined politics of history, cultural politics, and memorial culture. Complemented by a micro-study of several memorials and memorial sites, Tcherkasski's critical review of the relationships, networks, and discursive interactions between these various strands of politics and larger trends in cultural representation shows that a careful examination of what she calls the “relational politics” (relationale Politik) of Soviet war memory calls on us to reevaluate long-standing assumptions about the lack of Holocaust memory in the USSR.
The book is based on Tcherkasskis’ dissertation, defended at the University of Hamburg in 2019. German universities still require that doctoral dissertations are published as is for the doctoral degree to be conferred, and this somewhat outdated practice has its limitations. Dissertations are rarely written as books, and many of them would benefit from substantial revisions for readability and a more engaging narrative—“Hier ruhen . . .” is no exception. The upside of such unadorned publications is a wealth of detail and references, offering specialists in the field the opportunity to meticulously trace the author's work.
The volume begins with an Introduction that discusses methodological approaches and analytical categories in detail. Chapter 2 reviews the “Soviet approach to World War II,” which here means the respective Soviet historiography and major tendencies of memorial culture. The following third chapter offers a fresh take on Soviet nationality policy, demonstrating in particular its impact on the historiography of WWII. The title of Chapter 4 is a misnomer; instead of broaching the “Soviet government's position on the ‘Jewish question’ and the Murder of the Jews,” major parts of the chapters are devoted to strategies of Jews to commemorate the dead, followed by an innovative study of Soviet cooperation with foreign institutions such as the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine or the Mémorial du Martyr Juif Inconnu in France that illuminates the contradictory nature of Soviet memory politics. The final chapter consists of micro-studies of the history of select memorials including Babi Yar, Salaspils, Rumbula, and Jungfernhof (Jumpravmuiža).
The book's major insights are well argued and grounded in a wealth of sources, substantiating and explicating well-known critiques of the Soviet portrayal of the Holocaust. Tcherkasski helpfully reminds the reader that the framework of Soviet postwar representations of WWII was set in the first weeks of the war, when it was labeled the Great Patriotic War, thus firmly placing it in the tradition of wars and military campaigns conducted by the Russian empire and precluding a more complex understanding of the war that does not prioritize Russians’ participation and experience.
The most innovative assessment of Soviet memory politics results from the author's dedicated work to evaluate them in light of Soviet nationality policies. These policies’ focus on the so-called titular nations and a hierarchy of nationalities within the Soviet Union effected two tenets of how the war experience is portrayed. Representations of war and occupation foregrounded the experience of the titular nations in each respective republic that was under occupation: Belarusians took center stage in depictions of war and occupation in the BSSR, Ukrainians in depictions of war and occupation in the UkrSSR, and so on. Secondly, all cultural and historiographical works, whether they concerned WWII or not, listed different nationalities’ experiences according to a hierarchy of their overall status within Soviet politics, with, again, titular nations of the union republics favored over nationalities associated with autonomous republics, regions, or districts (in this order). Combined, Jews had little chance to make it prominently, if at all, into portrayals of the war, since war and occupation did not take place in a “Jewish” republic, and their “national space” was an Autonomous Region, an administrative unit of marginal significance. We have to thank Tcherkasski for disentangling the connection between Soviet nationality policy as a whole and Soviet memory politics.
Similarly, she traces a crucial turning point in the portrayal of Jews’ wartime experiences to the deliberate redaction of a translation of the so-called Reichenau Order, which was published in the Soviet Union in January 1942. Where the original order speaks specifically of the extermination of the Jewish population, Stalin's intervention resulted in the replacement of the word “Jewish” with “Soviet,” thereby erasing evidence for the Nazi regime's systematic targeting of the Jewish population. And yet, Tcherkasski complicates what could be read as strong evidence for often rather broad claims about Soviet memory politics regarding the marginalization of the Holocaust. Her analysis of sites where both Soviet Jews and Jews who had been deported from other German-occupied countries were murdered, such as the Iama in Minsk, or Salaspils, reveals that Holocaust memory was possible, but if and only when it referred to the murder of “foreign” Jews. These foreign Jews served as something akin to a memory shelter for Soviet Jews, since they were otherwise subsumed under Soviet victims (116). Furthermore, she extends Zeltser's encyclopedic view of Holocaust memorials by showing how Jewish cemeteries served as “grey zones” that allowed for Jewish communities to commemorate Holocaust victims by, for instance, placing matzevot in their memory that blended in with other grave stones. Tcherkasski identifies these and others as forms of “private memory,” which one might find troubling, given their very public display. A more nuanced analysis of the “private” and the “public” in the Soviet context may have been productive here.
Overall, the analysis is thoughtful and carefully researched, though at times this reader wondered if more could have been done, given the strings of documents that are cited under individual footnote without making use of them (see for instance footnote 19 on 76 or footnote 183 on 122). Other minor errors include the use of contradictory dates for the establishment of a monument in Ponary/Paneriai (46 and 93), and Chapter 4 is in large parts rather repetitive—a restructuring of the analysis would have helped to streamline the presentation.
Tcherkasski offers a range of new and detailed insights into the various domestic political agendas that shaped the perception and representation of the Holocaust within the Soviet Union and offers a welcome correction to the still dominant western/west European perspective.
