Неизвестные страницы Великой Отечественной войны: советская и постсоветская историография проблемы нацистских концентрационных лагерей

Abstract

The history of the Great Patriotic War is of paramount importance for all generations of Russian people. The tens of millions of our compatriots who died in combatting with the Third Reich cannot be forgotten. The remembrance about the heroic feats of the Soviet people in the struggle against Nazism is one of the fundamentals in the historical memory of Russia. However, the recent years have seen growing attempts to cast doubt on the decisive contribution brought by the Soviet Union in the defeat of Nazi Germany. Attempts to revise the course and results of World War II and Great Patriotic War are used primality for political purposes to discredit the past and, as a consequence, the present of our country. On the eve of the 75th anniversary of the Great Victory of Soviet people over fascism, these attempts are scaled up. One of the tragic pages of the Great Patriotic War is the theme of Nazi concentration camps, through which hell millions of Soviet people passed. In the Soviet historiographic space, this topic was silenced for a long time, also due to fear that the system of Nazi concentration camps could be compared to GULAG — the Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps, which operated in the Soviet Union. The investigations that were carried out in the period from the 1960s to the first half of the 1980s were mainly devoted to the struggle of prisoners against the camp system, whereas the matters concerned with setting up and operation of concentration camps and the actions of their administrations were beyond the topics being studied. It is only from the middle 1980s that the Soviet historical science could update the source, theoretical, and methodological bases and start an open dialogue with representatives of foreign historical thought. And it is since the late 1990s — early 2000s that a stable interest has emerged — now in the Russian historiography — to the history of Nazi concentration camps that were set up on the temporarily occupied territory of the Soviet Union as part of the Great Patriotic War history. This was encouraged by the fact that a much wider scope of documental sources from the national and foreign archives became available, and due to the fact that Russian historians joined the European historiographic context. At present, the scope of new research areas being developed (historical anthropology, the history of everyday life, etc.) includes scientific projects aimed at studying the everyday life of concentration camp prisoners, their “survivability strategy”, and setting up of active and passive resistance to violence in camps. The aim of the article is to analyze the main trends in studying Nazi concentration camps in the Soviet and post-Soviet historiography. It is exactly the history of the system of Nazi concentration camps that shows the inhuman nature of Nazi ideology in its entirety. Besides, this topic demonstrates the huge role the Soviet Union played in freeing the prisoners of concentration camps. By addressing this problem, the researchers will get a broader vision of the Great Patriotic War, and students will gain new knowledge about this tragic but at the same time heroic page of our history.