The Historiography of the Holocaust

The Holocaust and the Soviet Union 285
the contentious nature of commemoration and its importance for Soviet-Jewish
self-identity.
Late Stalinism and the Jews
The tasks of post-war reconstruction in the Soviet Union were daunting: over
20 million people had been lost from the population, and many more maimed
and crippled; huge tracts of land laid waste; immense property damage, especially
to housing stock; and industrial production devoted almost entirely to the
military. The breakdown of relations with Russia’s wartime allies, especially
the United States, and the beginnings of the Cold War had serious implications.
Instead of a programme of post-war reconstruction, aided by the West, Soviet
citizens were advised that ‘the war with Fascism ends, the war with Imperialism
begins’. Rather than a general demobilization, the Red Army remained under
arms in order to occupy former enemies as they were transformed into new
‘fraternal socialist allies’. There was a similar change in thinking about the
West: wartime allies were transformed from courageous friends into dangerous
adversaries, intent on re-establishing or creating empires, and committed to
the destruction of the USSR. Those who had been ‘in the West’, either as Soviet
prisoners of war, wartime refugees or forced labourers in Germany, as well as
those who had had extended contact with western military forces, were now
considered ideologically suspect. This was even more the case for areas that
had been under German occupation (much of the Ukrainian SSR), or were
newly annexed to the USSR (areas of eastern Poland incorporated into the
Ukrainian and Belorussian republics, and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia
and Lithuania, and Moldova, taken from Romania). A massive campaign of
national indoctrination was launched, seeking to restore ideological rigour, to
warn against the wiles and machinations of the West and to undermine renewed
national feeling, which was condemned as ‘bourgeois nationalism’.
This ideological campaign is usually referred to as the Zhdanovshchina
(Zhdanovism) after the party’s chief ideological spokesman, Zhdanov, who led
the cultural campaign until his death in 1948. The campaign denigrated everything
western, denied any cultural influence of the West on the East, and attacked
artists and critics accused of ‘kowtowing to the West’ as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’.
The security forces launched vigilance campaigns against those who
had links with foreign spies and against internal traitors, especially ‘bourgeois
nationalists’. 27
These campaigns left the leadership of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee –
who were also, it should be remembered, the leaders of Yiddish-based Soviet
Jewish culture – terribly exposed. All the assignments they had been ordered to
perform were now transformed into criminal acts. For example, the JAC had
been specifically ordered to establish and maintain links with the West. Its