The Historiography of the Holocaust

19
The Holocaust under Communism
Thomas C. Fox
Although western journalists, and sometimes scholars as well, not infrequently
suggest that under communism no discussion of the Holocaust occurred, this is
hardly true. An event of such magnitude could not be airbrushed from history
books, not even communist ones, but it could be rewritten within the confines
of a comforting teleological narrative. That narrative was in turn part of the
master narrative of Marxism. Within the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact
nations all discussions of the Holocaust took place inside that master narrative
and hence evidence similarities. Within the parameters of that discourse, however,
the discussion could emphasize different points, not infrequently according
to the exigencies of Soviet domestic and/or foreign policy. Additionally, the
individual national histories of the countries involved – their own Holocaust
legacies of perpetration and victimization – invariably coloured the post-war
discussions.
Within the framework of orthodox Marxist thinking, oppression based on
ethnicity, race or gender generally held the status of a ‘secondary’ phenomenon;
Marxists viewed antisemitism, for example, as a distraction created by the ruling
classes to divert the attention of the oppressed from their true oppressors. Jews
(or blacks or women) functioned within this system as scapegoats. By changing
the economic system, citizens could relegate such matters as antisemitism or
misogyny to the proverbial dustbin of history. In the Soviet Bloc of socialist,
classless societies, the so-called ‘Jewish Question’ had been officially resolved.
Because antisemitism was theoretically impossible in such societies, it no longer
existed.
Other, less theoretical, elements also shaped the communist view of the Holocaust.
Chief among these was Stalinist antisemitism and its legacy. Although
scholars differ about the range and reasons for that antisemitism, there is no
argument that it had fateful and sometimes fatal ramifications for Eastern Bloc
Jews. Recent archival research in the former Soviet Union has located antisemitic
documents dating from the early 1940s; 1 none the less, the crisis of the Second
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