The Soviet partisan movement and the Holocaust

Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Volumn 14, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 1-27

  Slepyan, Kenneth ^a  

^a TRANSYLVANIA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34247315740     PISSN: 87566583     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hgs/14.1.1     Document Type: Article

References (155)

1. For two recent examples see Shimon Redlich, ed., War, Holocaust, and Stalinism: A Documented History of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1995)
2. and John Garrard, "The Nazi Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Interpreting Newly Opened Russian Archives," East European Jewish Affairs 25: 2 (1995), pp. 4-40
3. For an overview of Soviet treatment - or non-treatment - of the Holocaust, see Zvi Gitelman, "Politics and Historiography of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union" in Zvi Gitelman, ed., Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 14-42
4. John A. Armstrong, ed., The Soviet Partisans in World War II (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964)
5. Matthew Cooper, The Phantom War: The Gentian Struggle Against the Soviet Partisans (London: Macdonald and Jane's, 1979)
6. C. Aubrey Dixon and Otto Heilbrunn, Communist Guerrilla Warfare (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954)
7. Edgar Howell, The Soviet Partisan Movement, 1941-1944 (Washington: Department of the Army, 1956)
8. See for example Reuben Ainzstein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe (London: Elek Books, 1974), pp. 275-396
9. Shalom Cholawsky, The Jews of Byelorussia During World War II (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1998)
10. Dov Levin, Fighting Back: Lithuanian Jewry's Armed Resistance to the Nazis, 1941-1945 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985), especially pp. 179-228
11. Nechama Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)
12. According to Leonid Smilovitsky 15,000 Jews joined the Belorussian partisans. See his "Righteous Gentiles, the Partisans, and Jewish Survival in Belorussia, 1941-1944," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 11:3 (Winter 1997), p. 318
13. Shmuel Spector estimates that 4,200 Jews served in the Ukrainian partisan movement: "Evrei v partizanskom dvizhenii i podpol'e v Ukraine," in Shadow of the Holocaust: Second International Symposium: Lessons of the Holocaust in Contemporary Russia (Moscow, 1997), p. 82
14. Reuben Ainzstein asserts that approximately 25,000 Jews served in the entire partisan movement; Ainzstein, p. 394. In addition to the Jewish partisans, Lester Eckman and Chaim Lazar estimate that between 13,000 and 15,000 Jews were sheltered in family camps located in the partisans' zone of operations, although Yitzhak Arad puts this number at no more than 10,000; see Eckman and Lazar, The Jewish Resistance: The History of Jewish Partisans in Lithuania and White Russia during the Nazi Occupation, 1940-1945 (New York: Shengold, 1977), pp. 84-85
15. and Arad, "Jewish Family Camps in the Forests: - An Original Means of Rescue," in Michael Marrus, ed., The Nazi Holocaust: Historical Articles on the Destruction of the European Jews; Volume Seven, Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust (Westport, CT: Meckler, 1989), p. 222
16. On the number of Jews murdered on Soviet territory, see Zvi Gitelman, "Soviet Jewry Before the Holocaust," in Bitter Legacy, p. 26
17. Sergei Maksudov, "Jewish Population Losses of the USSR from the Holocaust: A Demographic Approach" in Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey Gurock, eds., The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi-Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941-1945 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), p. 212
18. and Yitzhak Arad, "The Holocaust of Soviet Jewry in the Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union," Yad Vashem Studies XXI (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1991), p. 47
19. On Soviet nationality policy see Richard Pipes, The Fonnation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)
20. Yuri Slezkine, "The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism," Slavic Review 53:2 (Summer 1994), pp. 414-52
21. and Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993)
22. Studies focusing specifically on Jewish nationality policy include Salo W. Baron, The Russian Jew Under Tsars and Soviets (New York: Macmillan, 1964)
23. Zvi Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics: The Jewish Sections of the CPSU, 1917-1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972)
24. Nora Levin, The Jews in the Soviet Union since 1917 (New York: New York University Press, 1988)
25. and Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
26. Cited in Robert Weinberg, Stalin's Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland: An Illustrated History, 1928-1996 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 14. Weinberg writes that Stalin also rejected the idea that the Georgians, among others, formed a nation, on the grounds that they lacked a common economic life and had long been divided into petty principalities
27. See for example Jeffrey Veidlinger, "Let's Perform a Miracle: The Soviet Yiddish State Theater in the 1920s," Slavic Review 57:2 (Summer 1998), pp. 372-79
28. Weinburg, p. 13
29. Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 183-85
30. Lewis Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society Between Revolutions, 1918-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 156-61
31. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 101-9
32. Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 45-66
33. For discussions of the socio-economic consequences of Soviet polices on Jews see Levin, The Jews in the Soviet Union, vol. 1, pp. 152-67, 239-57
34. Pinkus, pp. 89-98
35. Cholawsky, pp. 11-20
36. and Dov Levin, Fighting Back, pp. 21-23, provide analysis for Western Belorussia and Lithuania respectively after annexation in 1939 and 1940
37. For discussions on the impact of collectivization on peasant society see Viola, op. cit.; and Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)
38. On the famine see Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)
39. Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia: Terror, Propaganda, and Dissent, 1934-1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 83-90
40. Gitelman, "Soviet Jewry Before the Holocaust," pp. 7-8
41. Pinkus, pp. 84-88
42. For examples of Ponomarenko's anti-Semitism see Hersh Smolar's recollections in his The Minsk Ghetto: Soviet-Jewish Partisans Against the Nazis (New York: Holocaust Library, 1989), pp. 151-52, 161-62
43. On Stalin's anti-Semitism see Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1970), pp. 262-63, 292-93
44. and Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a Friend (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 181
45. Gitelman, "Soviet Jewry," p. 9
46. Colonel I. G. Starinov, Over the Abyss: My Life in Soviet Special Operations (New York: Ivy Books, 1995), p. 56
47. Cited in A. F. Fyodorov (Fedorov), The Underground Committee Carries On (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952), p. 237
48. Kenneth Slepyan, "The People's Avengers": Soviet Partisans, Stalinist Society, and the Politics of Resistance, 1941-1944 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1994), pp. 217-26
49. According to P. K. Ponomarenko, Red Army soldiers comprised between ten and twenty percent of the total number of partisans, although these proportions were significantly higher in 1942 and the first half of 1943: Vsenarodnaia bor'ba v tylu nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov, 1941-1944 (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), pp. 30-31
50. Zvi Bar-On, "On the Position of Jewish Partisans in the Soviet Partisan Movement" in European Resistance Movements, 1939-1945: First International Conference on the History of the Resistance (New York: Pergamon, 1960), p. 229
51. Jack Nusan Porter, ed., Jewish Partisans: A Documentary of Jewish Resistance in the Soviet Union During World War II (New York: University Press of America, 1982), vol. 1, pp. 107-11
52. Jack Kagan and Dov Cohen, Surviving the Holocaust with the Russian Jewish Partisans (London: Valentine Mitchell, 1998), pp. 69-70
53. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985), vol. 1, p. 291
54. See articles by Jürgen Förster, Orner Bartov, and Christopher Browning in David Cesarani, ed., The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation (London: Routledge, 1994)
55. for the argument that the Final Solution began only with the failure of Barbarossa, see Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The "Final Solution" in History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988)
56. Daniel Romanovsky, "Soviet Jews under Nazi Occupation in Northeastern Belorussia and Western Russia," in Gitelman, Bitter Legacy, pp. 234-36
57. Mordechai Altshuler, "Escape and Evacuation of Soviet Jews at the Time of the Nazi Invasion: Policies and Realities," in Dobroszycki and Gurock, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, p. 97. A significantly higher proportion of Jews living within the pre-1939 borders of the USSR was evacuated to safety, as they had more time and more certain knowledge of Nazi intentions; Altshuler, pp. 97-99
58. Levin, Fighting Back, p. 28
59. Cholawsky, pp. 12-14
60. Levin, pp. 21-25
61. Jan Gross, "The Jewish Community in the SovietAnnexed Territories on the Eve of the Holocaust," in Dobroszycki and Gurock, eds., The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, pp. 155-71. The mythic linking of Jews and Communists was especially unfortunate as it enabled nationalist groups in the occupied territories to connect their military-political struggle for independence with the genocide of the Jews
62. See the concerns expressed by the members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee; Redlich, pp. 211-12
63. Izvestiia TsK KPSS #7 (1990), p. 211
64. Smolar, pp. 127-28
65. RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 1067, ll. 183-84
66. RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 1067, l. 242
67. RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 1067, l. 241
68. RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 1067, l. 211
69. Gregory Linkov, "Women Spies" in Porter, v. 1, pp. 164-67
70. Smilovitsky, p. 313
71. Shmuel Spector, "The Jews of Volhynia and Their Reaction to Extermination" in Marrus, Jewish Resistance, pp. 191-218
72. Smilovitsky, passim
73. and Romanovsky, pp. 236-41
74. Indeed, during the Civil War tens of thousands of Jews in the former Pale of Settlement were killed in pogroms, primarily by marauding White and Cossack bands. Richard Pipes argues that these massacres served as a precedent for the Holocaust; Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 106-14
75. Viola, pp. 100-31, 175-79
76. For the normalization of the Jewish genocide for Belorussians and Ukrainians, see Cholawsky, pp. 280-84
77. and Mordechai Altshuler, "AntiSemitism in Ukraine Toward the End of World War II" in Gitelman, Bitter Legacy, pp. 77-90
78. Romanovsky, pp. 237-38, 240
79. Dina Porat argues that the enthusiasm of Lithuanian nationalists moved German officials to extend the role of local units in the Final Solution: "The Holocaust in Lithuania: Some Unique Aspects" in Cesarani, The Final Solution, pp. 159-74
80. M. I. Koval, "The Nazi Genocide of the Jews and the Ukrainian Population, 1941-1944" in Gitelman, Bitter Legacy, p. 52
81. Smolar, p. 125
82. Koval, p. 53, argues that it symbolized the shared interests of Ukrainians and Jews
83. RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 1062, l. 51
84. RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 14, l. 40; NA HR ORF, f. 2, raz. 2, op. 4, d. 25, l.5
85. Smilovitsky, p. 317
86. Eckman and Lazar, pp. 84-85
87. Arad, "Jewish Family Camps," p. 222
88. Ainzstein, pp. 305-6
89. Zvi Bar-On, p. 242
90. Philip Friedman, "Jewish Resistance to Nazism: Its Various Forms and Aspects" in European Resistance Movements, p. 197
91. Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present (New York: Schocken, 1989), p. 221
92. Leni Yahil, The Holocaust; The Fate of European Jewry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 487
93. USHMM, 1996.A.169 (Yad Vashem) Roll 33, M-37/412 (TsGOO Ukrain, f. 62, op. 1, d. 129, p. 3)
94. Omer Bartov, Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp. pp. 59-105
95. See also Alexander Dallin, Gennan Rule in Russia, 1941-1945: A Study in Occupation Policies (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1981)
96. Theo. Schulte, The German Anny and Nazi Policies in Occupied Russia (New York: Berg, 1989)
97. Gitelman, Century, p. 197
98. Official Soviet figures state that 1,710 towns and settlements, and more than 70,000 villages were completely or partially destroyed; John Barber and Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II (London: Longman, 1991), p. 42
99. RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 88, d. 637, l. 7
100. Ilya Altman, "The NKVD and the Holocaust," unpublished paper presented at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, June 1998
101. USHMM RG 22.005M Rll 1 (RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 88, d. 480, l. 156)
102. NA IIR ORF, f. 2, raz. 2, op. 6, d. 20, l.3
103. NA IIR ORF, f. 2, raz. 2, op. 6, d. 9, l. 22
104. NA IIR ORF, f. 2, raz. 2, op. 6, d. 11, l. 11
105. Tec, pp. 45-46
106. Cited in Ainzstein, p. 355
107. Hilberg, vol. 1, p. 341
108. Spektor, "Evrei v partizanskom dvizhenii i podpol'e v Ukraine," p. 82
109. See Jürgen Förster, "The Relation Between Operation Barbarossa as an Ideological War of Extermination and the Final Solution" in Cesarani, pp. 85-102
110. RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 65, l. 22
111. For an analysis of the overall size of the partisan movement, see Armstrong, op. cit., pp. 35-36
112. and Slepyan, p. 142, ff 99
113. RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 28, ll. 33, 83, 143, 145; d. 1067, l. 179; NA IIR ORF, f. 2, raz. 2, op. 6, d. 14, ll. 12-13
114. RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 3, l. 14
115. RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 1060, l. 5, d. 1062, ll.50-52; d. 1085, l. 57; d. 1102, l. 5. This warming of Soviet policy toward the Jews is noted in several works, including Tec, pp. 108-9
116. and Nicholas Vakar, Belorussia, The Making of a Nation: A Case Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 193-94
117. Jeffrey Brooks, "Pravda Goes to War" in Richard Stites, ed., Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 19-21
118. Richard Overy, Russia's War: Blood Upon the Snow (New York: TV Books, 1997), pp. 202-3
119. Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941-1945 (New York: Dover, 1964), pp. 384-90, 674-80
120. RTsKhIDNI, f. 625, op. 1, d. 61, ll. 5-7
121. Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: The Suppression of the Truth about Hitler's "Final Solution" (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), p. 70
122. GARF, f. 6903, op. 20, d. 11, l. 77
123. NA IIR ORF, f. 2, raz. 2, op. 4, d. 117, l. 6
124. Levin, p. 183, Ainzstein, pp. 309, 315; Tec, pp. 94-96
125. Armstrong, pp. 114-16
126. Ponomarenko, pp. 120-21
127. RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 551, ll. 86-93, and d. 563, ll. 91-104
128. USHMM, RG 22.005M Roll 3 (RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 746, l. 220)
129. Tec, pp. 94-95; Smolar, pp. 122-23
130. Ainzstein, p. 310
131. Spector, "The Jews of Volhynia," pp. 213-16
132. Ainzstein, pp. 309-10, 331, 367
133. Cited in Tec, p. 74. Jewish partisans almost always referred to non-Jewish partisans as "Russian" regardless of their actual ethnicity
134. Cited in Tec, p. 105
135. Ainzstein, p. 355; NA IIR ORF, f. 2, raz. 2, op. 4, d. 117, l. 8
136. RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 750, l. 137
137. USHMM, 1996.A.169 (Yad Vashem) Roll 38, M-37/886 (TsGoo Ukrainy 69-1-9, pp. 2-3)
138. NA IIR ORF, f. 2, raz. 2, op. 4, d. 117, l. 8
139. Smolar, pp. 129-30
140. USHMM, 1996.A.169 (Yad Vashem) Roll 4, M-41/250 (State Archive of Belarus, 3500-2-44, p. 1)
141. Smolar, p. 128
142. Partisans of Vilna
143. Arad, "The Holocaust of Soviet Jewry," p. 41
144. Vsenarodnoe partizanskoe dvizhenie v Belorusii v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny: Dokumenty i materialy, tom 2, kniga 1 (Minsk: Belarus, 1973), pp. 185-87
145. RTsKhIDNI, f. 69, op. 1, d. 1062, l. 18
146. Vakar, pp. 193-94
147. USHMM, 1996.A.169 (Yad Vashem), Roll 4, M-41/260 (State Archive of Belarus, 4-33a-662, p. 24)
148. NA IIR ORF, f. 2, raz. 2, op. 4, d. 117, l. 5. One source estimates that 10,000 Jews managed to escape from the Minsk Ghetto, out of a prewar population of 80,000-90,000: Eckman and Lazar, p. 116
149. Tec, p. 109
150. Ainzstein, p. 306
151. USHMM, 1996.A.169 (Yad Vashem), Roll 32, M-37/192 (TsGoo Ukrainy 1-23-1576, p. 3)
152. For the role of victimhood in establishing political legitimacy see Omer Bartov, "Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust," American Historical Review 102:3 (June 1998), pp. 771-816
153. For the importance of victimhood in the Soviet cult of the Second World War see Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1994), esp. pp. 125-57
154. Davies, pp. 86-87, 128-29
155. Pavel Vershigora, Liudi s chistoi sovest'iu (Moscow, 1946)