'Beyond Totalitarianism - Stalinism and Nazism Compared'

The Quest for Order and the Pursuit of Terror 225of the Second World War. Interethnic wars raged in the Ukraine until the late1940s: the Bolshevik regime incited an unprecedented hate campaign againstGermans and Ukrainians. In nearly all regions Ukrainians were removed fromleading state and Party apparatuses and replaced with Russians from the centralgovernment. More than 150,000 Ukrainian rebels were killed; thousands ofGermans and Romanians fell victim to summary executions in the months followingthe war’s end. In total, between 1940 and 1953, more than 0.5 millionpeople were deported from the Ukraine. 154 In the Baltic republics, reacquiredby the Soviet Union in 1944, Bolshevik leaders conducted a “campaign ofdestruction” against national elites. 155 In the collective memory of the Balticnations, Stalinism is synonymous with attempted genocide.The fact that Soviet Jews were stigmatized as “agents” of Zionism andwere likewise held in captivity only corresponds to and confirms the perverselogic of Stalinist xenophobia. All that mattered for leading Bolsheviks was thatthe founding of the State of Israel created a homeland for Jews outside theSoviet Union. As a result, Jews inside the Soviet Union fell under suspicion,regardless of whether they recognized themselves as Jews or not. After 1947,state-sanctioned anti-Semitism assumed hysterical proportions and essentiallymerged with the existing anti-Jewish sentiment of many Russians and Ukrainians.By early 1953, at the latest, Stalin considered expelling all Jews from citiesin the European portion of the Soviet Union. Only the death of the dictatorin March 1953 spared Soviet Jews from the same fate as the Germans andChechens. 156 Stalin’s death was simultaneously the death of Stalinism. With154 RGASPI, f. 82, op. 2, d.897, ll. 106–23, 135–9, 143–5; Frank Golczewski, “Ukraine –Bürgerkrieg und Resowjetisierung,” in Kriegsende in Europa: Vom Beginn des deutschenMachtzerfalls bis zur Stabilisierung der Nachkriegsordnung, 1944–1948, eds. Ulrich Herbertand Axel Schildt (Essen: Klartext, 1998), 89–99; Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Postwar Soviet Society:The ‘Return to Normalcy,’ 1945–1953,” in The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union,ed. Susan J. Linz (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985), 134; Weiner, 59, 163–90; Pohl,“Russian,” 295–7.155 RGASPI, f. 82, op. 2, d.897, ll. 143–5; Toivo U. Raun, Estonia and the Estonians (Stanford,CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1991), 181–3; Laasi, 70–82; Zemskov, Spetsposelentsy v SSSR,155–6; Baberowski, Der rote Terror, 248.156 Weiner, 191–235; 287–90; RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d.904, ll. 27–35, 39; RGASPI, f. 82, op.2,d.148, ll. 126–31; Andrej D. Sacharow, Mein Leben (Munich: Piper, 1991), 177–8;ShimonRedlich, War, Holocaust and Stalinism: A Documented History of the Jewish Anti-FascistCommitee in the USSR (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995); Vladimir Naumov,“Die Vernichtung des Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitees,” in Der Spätstalinismusund die “jüdische Frage”: Zur antisemitischen Wende des Kommunismus, ed. Leonid Luks(Cologne: Böhlau, 1998), 123–6; Vladimir Naumov, ed., Nepravednyi sud: Poslednyi stalinskiirasstrel: Stenogramma sudebnogo protsessa nad chlenami Evreiskogo AntifashistskogoKomiteta (Moscow: Nauka, 1994); Iakov Etinger, “The Doctor’s Plot: Stalin’s Solution tothe Jewish Question,” in Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Ya’acovRo’i (Ilford: Cass, 1995), 103–24; Aleksander Lokshin, “The Doctors’ Plot: The Non-JewishResponse,” in Ro’i, 157–67; Zhores A. Medvedev, “Stalin i ‘delo vrachei’: Novye materialy,”Voprosy istorii 1 (2003): 78–103; Gennadii Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows: Anti-Semitism in Stalin’s Russia (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995); Arno Lustiger, Rotbuch:Stalin und die Juden (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1998), 108–22; Alexander Borschtschagowski,