Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

When Nazi Germany invaded the expanded Soviet Union in June 1941, how likely was it that the Soviet media would report in a substantial way the mass murder of the Jews of Europe, known today as the Holocaust or Shoah? There was a precedent in a Soviet public record about Nazi antisemitism. On 30 November 1936, Pravda reported Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov's speech of five days earlier on the occasion of the new Soviet constitution. Condemning fascism for its hostility toward Jews, Molotov cited a previously unpublicized comment by Iosif Stalin that "antisemitism, like any form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism," and added that "brotherly feelings for the Jewish people" would "define our attitudes toward antisemites and antisemitic atrocities wherever they occur." The Soviet press also covered the pogroms in Germany in November 1938, referring to a "massacre of a defenseless Jewish population." That same year, two Jewish filmmakers could release Professor Mamlock, the first Soviet film depicting the persecution of Jews in Germany.¹

But Stalin, himself a killer of millions, was not interested in the people killed by Nazi Germany and its allies. During the war with Germany, what mattered to him were the Soviet citizens who offered armed resistance and prevented the [End Page 61] exploitation of the occupied regions.² Despite an awareness of their difficult if not desperate situation, he suspected all others no longer living under his control of "treason," for reasons that likely must remain unclear. Many Soviet officials and journalists shared or adopted this suspicion. Even some who were themselves of Jewish descent did so: David Iosifovich Zaslavskii, a prominent commentator who specialized in the public denunciation of intellectuals, was able to visit the sites of the murder of the Jews of Kharkiv in December 1943. "Those killed were the less stable and worthy part of Soviet Jewry, the part that more and more lost both personal and national dignity," he wrote in his private diary. Many even seemingly had deserved to die: "Any Jew who, for whatever reason, remained with the Germans and did not kill himself, condemned himself to death. When, in addition, he, for private gain, kept his children with him and thus exposed them to death, he is a traitor."³

When to the suspicion one adds Stalin's personal, if usually hidden antipathy to Jews,⁴ the likelihood that readers of the main Russian-language Soviet newspapers such as Pravda, Izvestiia, Trud, and Krasnaia zvezda and those listening to Soviet central radio could find out that the Nazis were targeting Jews in particular seems slim indeed. Nevertheless, as I argue here, they could. Such explicit reports did exist and were more numerous than has been assumed. Although Soviet media items often attempted to conceal that the Nazis were deliberately killing all the Jews, this never became a policy. It was nothing but a tendency that never became entirely consistent. Reports about the three meetings in Moscow of "representatives of the Jewish people" and various articles by Il´ia Grigor´evich Ehrenburg mentioned the Jews as victims. Other articles that appeared on various occasions also did so. Even as late as November 1944, as the present study reveals, Pravda wrote that 1.7 million Jews had been gassed to death at Birkenau.

All investigations of the presentation of Nazi mass murder by the Soviet media during the war with Nazi Germany focus on the campaign known today as the Jewish Holocaust. The first studies, written at a time when intense antisemitism pervaded Soviet life, emphasized a total or near-total silence about the mass murder of the Jews. Thus Solomon M. Schwarz wrote in 1951 that "the very fact of the wholesale extermination of Jews" was "shrouded in silence" and "kept out of the Soviet newspapers."⁵ Gennadii Vasil´evich Kostyrchenko [End Page 62] wrote in his Tainaia politika Stalina (Stalin's Secret Policy, 2003) of a Soviet wartime cover-up (zamalchivanie, umolchanie) about the "Hitlerite genocide of the [Soviet] Jews." The Soviet leadership, allowing for just a few exceptions, "decided … to remove any reference...