Anti-Semitism and inner fronts in the USSR during World War II

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper focuses on anti-Semitic atrocities in the cities of Rubtsovsk on 4–5 July and Kiev in early September 1945. My intention is to look behind the anti-Semitic incidents (or the incidents which were interpreted as anti-Semitic ones in advance) to disclose inner frontlines within Soviet society that were constructed during and right after the war. Behind the incidents, one can discern grave social conflicts which endangered the public and social order of the Soviet Union during and after the war. The massive wave of migration, referred to as evacuation and re-evacuation, hit the liberated western territories of the USSR most heavily, and especially the Ukraine. The housing stock of the cities was heavily damaged in the liberated territories, which made the countless and endless conflicts over housing even tenser. This was true in the city of Kiev, from where many Jews had been evacuated at the beginning of the war, and where Jews who returned tried to assert their legal claims to their residences, which in the meantime had been occupied by migrants displaced within the territory of the Soviet Union by the upheavals of the war. Although the latent tensions and social-political conflicts during and right after the war within Soviet society sometimes took the form of anti-Semitic incidents, the characterization of the processes underway exclusively as manifestations of anti-Semitism seems reductive and simplistic, especially as part of a Geistesgeschichte. The possible conflicts caused by the massive evacuation and re-evacuation cannot be reduced to the revival of an allegedly traditional anti-Semitism. Even in the war-time and/or post-war Soviet Union, anti-Semitism was a ‘cultural code,’ i.e. a language through which certain taboos could be named. The allegedly unified Soviet society in fact was divided between the actual ‘Us’ and ‘Them’, the Haves and the Have Nots, the system and its critics.