The Historiography of the Holocaust

The Holocaust and the Soviet Union 277
Jews in the USSR on the eve of the Great Patriotic War
In 1939, Soviet Jewry numbered just over three million people, approximately
1.78 per cent of the population. 1 While a process of rapid urbanization was
apparent among the Jewish population, many Jews still lived in small towns,
the shtetl of Jewish lore. The rapid industrialization of the USSR and the need
for literate cadres provided numerous economic opportunities for Jews in the
Soviet Union, and helped to end the pre-revolutionary concentration of Jews
in trade and commerce. Jews were well represented in industry, white-collar
(managerial) positions, and in the professions and among state and party cadres.
Jews were also increasingly acculturated: the number of Jews declaring a Jewish
language to be their mother tongue dropped from 70.4 per cent in the census
of 1926 to 39.7 in the census of 1939. Soviet nationality policies, seeking to
undercut the appeal of Zionism and the Bund, assigned the Jews the status of
a national minority, with all the advantages attached to it in the Soviet system
of ethnic politics. 2 Antisemitism, seen as a weapon of the class enemy, was
outlawed. Jews collectively suffered the vicissitudes of Soviet nationality
policies. However, most Soviet policies tended to impact on the Jews as Soviet
citizens, rather than as Jews.
The acquisition of Eastern Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Moldova
as a result of the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact brought an additional
1.9 million Jews under Soviet rule. From this period of coerced annexation
produced the charge that Jews in the newly occupied territories welcomed the
Soviet forces and administration, or that they were prominently represented
among the commissars who imposed communist tyranny on unwilling subjects.
Whatever the truth of this claim in individual cases, it was hugely exaggerated
by Nazi propaganda. Indeed, Jewish political activists of all stripes were among
the first victims of the imposition of communist political uniformity. The
Jewish bourgeoisie were not spared the consequences of centralized economic
controls. Many Jews refused to ‘take the Soviet passport’ when the annexed
areas were formally made part of the Soviet Union. 3
The Holocaust in the Soviet Union
Scholars debate the exact time and circumstances surrounding the decision of
the Nazi leadership to implement the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question in
Europe’. There is no question, however, that the German attack on the Soviet
Union – triggering what the Soviets called ‘The Great Patriotic War’ – which
commenced on 21 June 1941, was accompanied by numerous instances of the
mass murder of Jews. The Wehrmacht quickly overran the territories that had
been seized by the Soviet Union in 1939. In a number of cities, such as Vilnius,
there were murderous pogroms directed against the Jewish population. The