No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Remaking Soviet Society: the Filtration of Returnees from Nazi Germany, 1944–49
Abstract
The end of the Second World War in Europe brought liberation from Nazi captivity to several million Soviet citizens. Most had been taken westward by the Germans as prisoners of war or as forced labourers seized in occupied territories. A small minority of Soviet men had, voluntarily or not, joined the enemy’s armed forces. Over the subsequent months and years, the majority of these Soviet displaced persons returned to their places of origin. Their journeys home, however, were not simple trajectories. The time they had spent abroad, outside the purview of Soviet military commissars or intelligence operatives, marked them in the eyes of the Stalinist state as suspect. Both before and on their return to Soviet territory, repatriated citizens were confined in holding stations and camps, where they were subjected to ‘filtration’ (fil’tratsiia) pending their return home or alternatively their further resettlement or deportation. Referring to recently declassified political police records from Kiev region in Ukraine, this chapter considers the role and significance of the encampment, investigation and registration of returnees. It seeks to relate these practices of power to the postwar reconstruction of society and to the establishment of new normative identities and autobiographical narratives.
ANNOTATION. This article analyses the Soviet system of repatriation of Lithuanian citizens from the Third Reich, and the verification of their political credibility (filtration) in the Lithuanian SSR in 1944–1952. It aims to establish how people managed to come back and elude repatriation institutions and compulsory filtration procedures, how many people returned in this way, how they managed to adapt to the system, and how this group of people was treated by the regime’s internal affairs and security agencies. KEYWORDS: repatriation, filtration, war refugees, Soviet repatriation policy, verificationfiltration committees.
Based on interview files and archival materials, this paper reconstructs the experiences of Kalmyk displaced persons (DPs) against the backdrop of the shifting international refugee regime in post-World War II Europe. Kalmyks came to western Europe in two waves: at the conclusion of the Russian Civil War in 1920 and during the German retreat from the Soviet Union in 1943–44. After the war, the majority of Kalmyks were repatriated; those who remained in Europe primarily ended up in DP camps in the American zone of western Germany. This paper details the strategies used by Kalmyk DPs to avoid repatriation to the Soviet Union and eventually secure resettlement in the United States in 1951. Individual histories offer insight into how the Kalmyks as a group made themselves legible to the international community in light of a changing geopolitical environment and evolving racial regimes.
This history of the Red Army as an institution is frequently described in terms of its proximity to the Stalinist purges. Especially in wartime, the strategic deployment of terror begs the question of whether it was an effective motivational technique compared to other methods of non-coercive motivation such as propaganda or awards of medals. Examining various case studies and memoirs, it becomes clear that terror tended to reduce morale and group cohesion, while positive motivators were far more effective at ensuring an effective fighting force. When soldiers feared being caught in the net of terror, they were less likely to trust their comrades, and more likely to act in self, rather than group, interests. As terror decreased, activity such as desertion or voluntary capture declined across all fronts. Soldiers worked far more effectively as a unit, with increased confidence in decisions by high command. This result strongly contests the frame that Soviet soldiers acted as a scared collective, willing to sacrifice themselves out of fear. Rather, Soviet soldiers performed at their best when they trusted in their fellow soldiers and believed the other side was more barbaric than their own.
At the end of the Second World War, mass forced migration and population movement accompanied the collapse of Nazi Germany's occupation and the start of Soviet domination in East-Central Europe. Hugo Service examines the experience of Poland's new territories, exploring the Polish Communist attempt to ‘cleanse’ these territories in line with a nationalist vision, against the legacy of brutal wartime occupations of Central and Eastern Europe by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The expulsion of over three million Germans was intertwined with the arrival of millions of Polish settlers. Around one million German citizens were categorised as ‘native Poles’ and urged to adopt a Polish national identity. The most visible traces of German culture were erased. Jewish Holocaust survivors arrived and, for the most part, soon left again. Drawing on two case studies, the book exposes how these events varied by region and locality.
s Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6.4 (2005) 797-831
Once I received a request for information from a well-known British historian of medicine about something virtually unknown in Western historiography—the Soviet "academic" commission for the investigation of Nazi crimes. This inquiry turned out to be the impetus for my investigation into the social history of scholarship during World War II. A preliminary search showed that my colleague was thinking of the Chrezvychainaia gosudarstvennaia komissiia (ChGK)—the "Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Crimes of the Fascist German Invaders and Their Accomplices, and of the Damage They Caused to Citizens, Collective Farms, Public Organizations, State Enterprises, and Institutions of the USSR." A series of "Reports" (Soobshcheniia) on Nazi war crimes in Soviet and Polish territory was published under the imprimatur and in the name of this commission in Russian and English in 1943–45. The transformation of the commission into an "academic" institution in the minds of Western historians most likely occurred because six of its ten titular members were academicians of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
The fact that the Stalinist "Extraordinary State Commission" could be viewed in the West as academic is quite telling, and demonstrates just how effective, propaganda-wise, the Soviet leadership was in its choice of who would play the role of "public prosecutor" of fascism. How and why did the Soviet authorities specifically select representatives of the scholarly elite to present testimony about Nazi atrocities to Western public opinion? What was the role of these representatives, and what was the level of their genuine participation in the process of preparing the future international war crimes tribunal on Nazism? Finally, what significance did the participation of a sizable group of scholars in the work of the ChGK, from academicians to research assistants, have for the postwar development of Soviet scholarship and the scientific community? These questions were initially the reason I began examining the investigation of war crimes, which might at first glance seem far removed from the field of the social history of science.
It became impossible, however, to study these historical and scholarly processes without a firm understanding of the declared and undeclared tasks of the ChGK, its visible and invisible participants, the authors and editors of its final "Reports," and the ways the commission created, collected, and drew general conclusions from the documents it generated. At the same time, it proved rather difficult to find treatment of the subject of Nazi war crimes investigations in the USSR in Western, Soviet, and Russian historiography alike. After the publication in the late 1940s and early 1950s of the monographs of B. S. Utevskii, M. Iu. Raginskii, and S. Ia. Rozenblit, which were products of the spirit and constraints of that time, subsequent published historical works on the subject tended to be primarily journalistic or legal in nature. Even after the ideological break of the 1990s, the subject has been treated mostly in the context of studying the fate of foreign prisoners of war.
The following account of the creation of the Soviet Commission for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes, therefore, emerged from a search for basic answers about a virtually unknown topic. In discussions with colleagues, the following overview evoked polar-opposite reactions that ran the gamut from enthusiastic approval to complete rejection. The conclusions may be provocative, but it is hoped that the investigation will at least prompt a much closer historical look at the sources discussed.
In contrast to Europe and the United States, the historical pedigree of national-level public investigations was equally undistinguished in both the Russian empire and the USSR. In states with hierarchically stratified imperial bureaucracies, such initiatives almost always threatened to backfire against the authorities themselves. Motivated by the instinct of self-preservation, the Russian authorities nurtured and encouraged the civic weakness of unconsolidated "society" on the one hand, while on...
This book is a groundbreaking study of the historical reasons for the divergence in public health policies adopted in Britain, France, Germany and Sweden, and the spectrum of responses to the threat of contagious diseases such as cholera, smallpox and syphilis. In particular the book examines the link between politics and prevention. Did the varying political regimes influence the styles of precaution adopted? Or was it, as Peter Baldwin argues, a matter of more basic differences between nations, above all their geographic placement in the epidemiological trajectory of contagion, that helped shape their responses and their basic assumptions about the respective claims of the sick and of society, and fundamental political decisions for and against different styles of statutory intervention? Thus the book seeks to use medical history to illuminate broader questions of the development of statutory intervention and the comparative and divergent evolution of the modern state in Europe.
Medicine at the Border explores the pressing issues of border control and infectious disease in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in the ‘age of universal contagion’.1 This book places world health in world history, microbes and their management in globalization, and disease in the history of international relations, bringing together leading scholars on the history and politics of global health. Together, the authors show how infectious disease has been central to the political, legal and commercial history of nationalism, colonialism, and internationalism, as well as to the twentieth-century invention of a newly imagined space for regulation called ‘the world’.
A text for this chapter may be found in ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ by Immanuel Kant. The eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher included in the ‘Idea’ the observation: ‘The problem of establishing a perfect civic constitution is subordinate to the problem of a law-governed external relationship with other states, and cannot be solved until the latter is solved.1 Towards such an end, Kant believed that a considerable contribution could be made by enlightened absolutism of a monarchical variety. It is unlikely that he would have found the same enthusiasm for the latter-day republican-enlightened absolutism introduced by Lenin and the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution of 1917. Moreover, the concept of global class conflict persuaded the new government to reject what they believed to be outdated concepts of the state and of its external relationship. However, by the 1930s, when World War II was arising out of the ashes of the First, little of this ideology remained alive and the practice of diplomacy had resumed a more traditional shape.
Editor's IntroductionThe Victory and the Victors“How to Live After the War?”: The Conflict of Expectation and Reality
In 1989, when archival discoveries were about to revolutionize the history of the Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis published a pathbreaking article entitled “Intelligence, Espionage and Cold War Origins.” While Gaddis expressed serious doubts as to whether anyone had ever established that espionage had positively affected larger historical developments, he did render one sober and perceptive conclusion that did not rely on unencumbered access to Soviet, American, or British archives: espionage had heightened the atmosphere of distrust on all sides, and probably did more to escalate tensions than to abate them. “Was it all worth it, from the Russians’ own standpoint? There is good reason to doubt whether the benefi ts Stalin gained from spying on his allies during and after the war counterbalanced the problems created for him once his indulgence in espionage became known.”
Issues of restitution that now so dramatically affect the fate of the "Smolensk Archive" were discussed in the Grimsted article , "Archival Rossica/Sovietica Abroad: Provenance or Pertinence, Bibliographic and Descriptive Needs," Cahiers du Monde Russe et Sovietique XXXIV , no. 3 (juillet-septembre 1993): 431-19, which first appeared in a Russian version , "Zarubezhnaia arkhivnaia Rossika i Sovetika: Proiskhozhdenie dokumentov ili ikh otnoshenie k istorii Rossii (SSSR), potrebnost ' v opisanii i bibliografii," Otechestvennye arkhivy, 1993, no . 1, pp . 20-53. A short report on the fate of the Smolensk Archive was presented at a conference on "Archival Rossica Abroad" in Moscow in December 1993, sponsored by the State Archival Service of Russia (Rosarkhiv) , but it was only subsequently that more of the American documentation presented here was uncovered.
Preface Introduction 1. Good and Evil in Communism 2. A Voyage toward the Light 3. The Bolshevik Discourse on the Psyche 4. From a Weak Body to an Omnipotent Mind 5. Looking into the Oppositionist Soul Epilogue: Communism and Death Notes Index
Three historians comment on the articles. John Connelly considers the moral and historiographical meanings of "collaboration" and "collaborationism" and suggests that even those cases that Friedrich documents do not make Poland into a collaborationist country. In fact, the Nazis were disappointed that Poles refused to collaborate. Connelly emphasizes the complicated choices and intentions among the Polish population and calls for bringing together both the heroic (and true) tale of Polish resistance with the disturbing (and true) tale of Polish accommodation to the slaughter of the Jews. Tanja Penter adds to the discussion the results of her own research in the records of military tribunals for trials of Soviet citizens accused of collaborating with the Germans. These data confirm the Soviet regime's extremely broad understanding of collaboration and provide insight into the collective biography of collaborators. They also suggest which crimes the regime believed most harmful to its integrity. While it is difficult to determine motives and even intentions from these trials, these data, like Jones's, indicate the immense loyalty problem that the Soviet government faced in its occupied territories. Martin Dean calls attention to the difficulties of weeding out collaborators in the postwar Soviet Union and agrees with Jones on the limits of representing the "reality" of collaboration. He notes the reluctance, raised by both Friedrich and Jones, of postwar communist governments and nationalists to deal publicly with the phenomenon. Contrasted to the desire in postwar Europe to deal quickly with war criminals, collaborators, and traitors so that people could move on with their lives, Dean emphasizes the necessity and possibility for historians to write a full history of wartime collaboration, one that recognizes multiple human motives and the responses of hundreds of thousands of individuals who had to take far-reaching decisions under swiftly changing circumstances.
Based on archival and other materials from Rostov-on-Don, a major industrial center in southern Russia, Jeffrey W. Jones examines the different representations of "collaboration" apparent in Soviet society during and after the war. Jones analyzes several different levels of discourse: inner party deliberations and reports on the subject, depictions of collaborators and their actions in the local party press, questions and comments of workers and others at public meetings as recorded by party officials, and Cold War and post-Cold War era memoirs and interviews. These sources overlap to a significant degree but deal with the complex issue of collaboration in nuanced ways, stressing different themes and asking different questions. The evidence reveals a subtle divide in the perception and representation of this issue between party leaders and the population at large while also showing that the party's public assurances of cossack loyalty contrasted with a widely shared assumption of cossack disloyalty.
The Soviet commission is well known for the reports it published but also misunderstood for the scope of work it accomplished in the field. This article explores the circumstances in which it was created. It discusses models followed by the Soviets responsible for creating the commission, which drew on Russian or Western experiences in the First World War. It then shows how the work of gathering information followed a more general pattern which blended local initiatives with the involvement of other institutions. By transforming itself into several local commissions, the central commission could reaffirm the legitimacy of Soviet actors in power, who were then in the process of reconquering territory. At the same time, the accumulated material offers a vision of the period of occupation which is a great deal more complex than that produced by those published communiqués which, for several decades to come, would contribute to the official story of the war. Finally, the article shows the practical uses of this information in the postwar trials, still not well known, which were led by Soviet authorities against war criminals, enemy soldiers or collaborators.
List of Photographs, Maps and Tables Introduction Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations The Soviet Occupation of Eastern Poland, 1939-41 'Operation Barbarossa' Mass Killings in the Autumn of 1941 Local Police Organization, 1941-44 The Ghetto 'Liquidations' of 1942-43 Local Administration and Exploitation, 1941-44 Partisan Warfare, 1942-44 Post-war Fates of Collaborators and Survivors Conclusion: Local Collaboration in the Holocaust Notes Archival Sources Bibliography Maps Appendix A: Demography of the Holocaust in the East Index
Powers of Freedom, first published in 1999, offers a compelling approach to the analysis of political power which extends Foucault's hypotheses on governmentality in challenging ways. Nikolas Rose sets out the key characteristics of this approach to political power and analyses the government of conduct. He analyses the role of expertise, the politics of numbers, technologies of economic management and the political uses of space. He illuminates the relation of this approach to contemporary theories of 'risk society' and 'the sociology of governance'. He argues that freedom is not the opposite of government but one of its key inventions and most significant resources. He also seeks some rapprochement between analyses of government and the concerns of critical sociology, cultural studies and Marxism, to establish a basis for the critique of power and its exercise. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in political theory, sociology, social policy and cultural studies.
One of the aspects of police control in the Soviet Union that the recent opening-up of the archives has shed new light on is the restrictive system of internal passports and urban residence permits that was introduced in 1932. The article examines the origins of this system and traces its subsequent development during the 1930s, up until a major overhaul of the regulations in force in September 1940. The passport system served as an instrument for monitoring, counting and registering population flows in and out of urban and selected non-urban areas, and for keeping the strategically more important of these areas free of persons that were held to be “socially undesirable”. Its initial implementation involved the “social cleansing” of the larger towns and the border-zone and large-scale expulsions from these areas. In subsequent years it served as a lever of control that was put in place whenever it was found expedient to rid one area or another of potential “enemies” or troublemakers, and to prevent people that could become so from settling there. The categories of people that were subject to settlement restrictions changed over time, depending on the regime’s security concerns. The number of areas where settlement restrictions were in force increased significantly in the course of the 1930s. Whilst effective in achieving its repressive aims, the passport system faced much larger difficulties in implementing the more systematic forms of control over population movements that had been envisaged at the outset. This made it the typical Stalinist instrument of control – crude and selective, but decisive.
Drawing from research in archives in Moscow, Kyiv, and L´viv, this paper examines the role of gender in the Soviet counter-insurgency in West Ukraine during and after World War II. By the spring of 1944 the Ukrainian Insurrection Army (UPA) and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) became increasingly dependent upon women and girls to perform duties vital to the Ukrainian nationalist rebels. In response, the Soviet secret police adapted counter-insurgency strategies to target the female element in the anti-Soviet underground. Soviet agentura or informants’ networks were increasingly focused on women recruits, even as special tactics were developed to terrorize women rebels. Soviet police tactics had the effect not only of terrorizing Ukrainian women in gender-specific ways, but they also provoked a brutal reaction from within the Ukrainian underground itself, so that moskal´ki – ethnic Ukrainian women “collaborators” – became the targets of reprisals carried out by special underground rebel punitive units.
Ukraine experienced two very acute demographic crises during the Soviet era: the 1933 famine and the Second World War. While different estimates of total losses have been produced previously, we have tried here to distinguish the specific impact of the crises on mortality from their impact on fertility and migration. Taking into account all existing sources of registered data and estimates, a painstaking reconstruction of annual demographic changes has been produced and complete annual life tables have been computed for the years 1926-59. Life expectancy at birth fell to a level as low as 10 years for females and 7 for males in 1933 and plateaued around 25 for females and 15 for males in the period 1941-44.
Zhertvy dvukh diktatur. Zhizn’, trud, unizhenie i smert’ sovetskikh voennoplennykh i ostarbeiterov na chuzh-bine i na rodine (Moscow: ROSSPEN), esp
- Pavel Polian
- P Polian
The Last Secret: Forcible Repatriation to Russia: Penguin;first published by André Deutsch
- N Bethell
Zalozhniki vtoroi mirovoi voiny: Repatriatsiia sovetskikh grazhdan v 1944-1953 gg (Moscow: Prilozhenie k gazette
- . A Iu
- Arzamaskin
- IA Arzamaskin
Repatriatsiia sovetskogo mirnogo naseleniia i voennoplennykh, okazavshikhsia v okkupatsionnykh zonakh gosudarstv antigitlerovskoi koalitsii Naselenie Rossii v 1920–1950-e gody: Chislennost
- A A Sheviakov
Soviet Plenipotentiary for Repatriation (see below), to Ministers of State Security and of Internal Affairs
- F I Letter
- Golikov
Sud’ba “Smolenskogo arkhiva”
- V N Shepelev
- VN Shepelev
The Soviet Home Front
- J Barber
- M Harrison
Postwar Soviet Society: The “Return to Normalcy”
- S Fitzpatrick
Problema sovetskikh peremeshchennykh lits (1944–1956) Rossiia v XX veke. Voina
- V N Especially
- Zemskov
Sowjetische Zwangsarbeiter vor und nach 1945 Ein doppelter Leidensweg
- Bernd Bonwetsch
Problema sovetskikh peremeshchennykh lits (1944-1956)
- V N Especially
- Zemskov
- VN Zemskov
Sowjetische Zwangsarbeiter vor und nach 1945
- Bernd Bonwetsch
- B Bonwetsch
Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the ‘Immigrant Menace
- A M Kraut
- AM Kraut