Regarding babyn yar and ussr.
Regarding babyn yar and ussr.
cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3237566
I posted this on lemmygrad but also posted here for discussion. I'm sure this was discussed before but I still want to ask.
If you remember a while back there was a tweet from blinken about ussr and babyn yar. If you don't remember, he asserts that "Ussr buried the atrocity and says ukraine is suffering now".
Anyway afterwards there was a deluge of discussion all around about how disgusting the tweet was but also some people were loud about how he is actually right. And also refer to some wikipedia citation.
So I will list the points I saw at the time:
- Soviets downplayed holocaust and never mentioned jews being singled out in babyn yar.
- That broadly only mentioning as soviet citizens dying in atrocities done by fascists and refusal to acknowledge roma people.
- That originally the extraordinary commision mainly downplayed babyn yar.
This brings me to the actual stuff I want to talk. Mainly there is a narrative at least that only liberalization made it possible for the victims of holocaust heard in post ussr. And that the soviets were very antisemitic and downplayed romani or other oppressed people by branding them as counter revolutionary.
What are your thoughts on this? On the narrative that liberalisation made the victims of holocaust heard and before that Ussr was only trivializing holocaust by mentioning them as soviet citizens.
The immediate contribution of Unwelcome Memory is to dispense with the much-established conventional wisdom that claims that the Soviet Union’s totalitarian social control made any expression of Jewish Holocaust remembrance impossible. In contrast, Zeltser demonstrates that Soviet Jews actively mobilized across the country to erect memorials to their loved ones. Not only, he shows, were these monuments numerous, but they also often explicitly signaled presumably prohibited “ethnic content” by Hebrew lettering or inscriptions. While Zeltser’s analysis certainly confirms the general understanding of Holocaust memorialization in the USSR as rarely commemorating Jewish victims as Jews but instead as “noncombatant Soviet citizens” or “Soviet civilians,” many of the local monuments found creative ways to still signal that the victims were killed as Jews—by either the use of language or by visual symbols, such as the Star of David or an image of a menorah.
This finding complicates the story often told about Holocaust memory in the Soviet Union—and often the larger Eastern European space—that assumes this memory to have been absent until well into the 1980s and 1990s. Zeltser implies that the reason for this misconception was largely ideological—it fit the Western narrative of the Soviet frozen society
Zeltser carefully defines what he considers a Jewish Holocaust memorial—those that include meaningful Jewish involvement and participation and not, for example, the 1976 monument at Babi Yar, which was established with no Jewish participation or involvement at all (37). He then documents at least 733 cities, towns, or villages where Jews themselves erected a monument after the war and before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He calculates that some kind of a memorial was put up in 49 percent of locations where Jews were shot, while tens of thousands of Soviet Jews participated in some kind of memorialization during the Soviet period (26). This shows a much more vibrant culture of Holocaust memory than many of the accounts of the Soviet period allowed for.
Significantly, in documenting these grassroots memorials Zeltser further demonstrates the unique feature of memorialization in the Soviet Union: As most Soviet Jews were shot in the “Holocaust by bullets” and not deported to camps elsewhere in occupied Europe, the culture of memorialization and the aesthetic of monuments and ways of remembering developed differently than memorialization based on the experience of Western, Central, and Southern European Jews who mostly died in camps far from their homes. It is this unique feature of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union—the fact that most victims died very close to where they lived—that reflected itself in small, local monuments on locations of mass shootings, making them more directly linked to the places where the victims lived and died, and to their surviving family members, than was the case with major memorial sites at death camps that were far removed from Jews’ hometowns, their deaths more abstract, their proper burials and gravesite visits largely out of reach.
There are multiple things going on here.
Firstly, the Soviet Union didn’t agree that the Holocaust was a unique event, seeing the targeting of Jewish people as part of a set of atrocities that included the mass enslavement and murder of Slavs and others, so there was a preference to memorialize the mass suffering caused by the Nazis, eg to also memorialize the tens of millions of Slavic peoples who were killed as well as the mass murder of Jewish people. This has been interpreted or presented by some as a form of holocaust denial since it’s vaguely a denial of the uniqueness of the holocaust as a uniquely Jewish experience.
Secondly, the experience of the holocaust in the Soviet Union was different. It was more local. So there are many local memorials instead of a few large centralized memorials.
Thirdly, the west pushes a narrative of the USSR trying to “flatten” ethnic differences as a way of making the USSR seem inhuman and totalitarian. The USSR was very against ethnic nationalism but actually celebrated ethnic diversity and ensured ethnic rights in ways that you never saw in the west. The opposition to ethnic nationalism is often portrayed as opposition to ethnic diversity but this is a conflation. And after all it was the opposition to ethnic nationalism that played a large role in the Soviet hostility to the nazis.
Fourthly, if you want to judge which side opposed nazism more strongly in reality then don’t judge it by statues and monuments. Judge it by how many Nazis were still in power after the war in East Germany compared to West Germany. If the west was truly against the Holocaust then they would have cleaned house but they didn’t. In East Germany they actually removed the nazis from power.
Lastly, it’s worth remembering which side actually liberated the camps. It was the Soviet’s who actually defeated the nazis and ended the holocaust.
Good read, thank you.
I'll try to paraphrase the stuff I gathered from people who were condemning the whole soviet policy towards ethnic nationalism and some of the points you mention:
Soviets used nazis as an excuse to do mass deportation akin to trail of tears.
Soviets could also have done the same atrocities like nazis but just cause nazis were an active threat, hence they didn't do mass atrocities like babyn yar towards suspected ethnic groups and settled on deporting.
Soviets handwaved nazi killings saying "it was cause they are communist and not cause of antisemitism"
People who say otherwise whitewash ethnic cleansing and denial.
These are some of the stuff I recall from some people and like certain other sources that were circulating with the claims.
One source is some review article. The other one was a video from a channel called "WorldWarTwo". I don't have the link I'll find it. But the video essentially says "The stalinist regime never mentions jews or judaism in the trails. The soviets want to push the agenda that soviets are bigger victims than china or poland. They just want to push us vs them narrative."
I don't know like overall people seem to just say that soviets never had intentions to liberate but just put in the position and that stalin was running a despotic regime of oppression. Hell the article I mentioned which people spam from wikipedia calls the 2014 ukraine coup "A revolution of dignity".
Soviets used nazis as an excuse to do mass deportation akin to trail of tears
if this is referencing Volga Germans or Crimeans, yes it's sort of apt and a gravely mistaken policy. if its talking about like the expulsion of germans from the sudetenland & poland... no. maybe try not genociding your neighbors?
Soviets could also have done the same atrocities like nazis but just cause nazis were an active threat, hence they didn't do mass atrocities like babyn yar towards suspected ethnic groups and settled on deporting
because the nazis only massacred millions of people because they had resources to spare? why wouldn't the soviets have scratched their secret genocide itch after the war?
Soviets handwaved nazi killings saying "it was cause they are communist and not cause of antisemitism
the nazis conflated jewishness and bolshevism god forbid they listen to the nazis explanation of their actions