Making sense of war: the Second World War and the fate of the Bolshevik Revolution

Abstract

Amir Weiner. Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. xv, 416 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. $39.50, cloth. Among a number of historical fields that I try to keep an eye on, that of Soviet history stands out for the intense intellectual excitement it is currently generating and the impression it gives that we are living in an era of great discoveries and rapid breakthroughs in scholarship. The Soviet period is being fundamentally rethought, with implications for historians' understanding of the whole of twentieth-century history. All the postwar investment in Soviet studies has come to an impressive maturity (the massive accumulation of practitioners, institutions and knowledge), at the same time that the Soviet archives have opened and also at a time when discourse analysis and new ways of understanding nationalism have informed the younger generation of scholars. Among the major texts of this new wave of Soviet studies is Amir Weiner's study, Making Sense of War. Although it is not evident from the title, this is a case study of the Vinnytsia region southwest of Kiev in the immediate aftermath of World War II/the Great Patriotic War. It is a rich tale of Red Army veterans, partisans, Jews, Ukrainian nationalists, collective farmers and local and central Communist Party authorities. It has been researched in archives in Moscow, Kiev, Vinnytsia, New York, Stanford, Toronto and Jerusalem, making use, inter alia, of the documentary legacy of the German occupation administration, the Vinnytsia city council, the Jewish AntiFascist Committee, and of the Communist party and security organs. It is not possible in a review to reproduce the complexity of Weiner's argument. He shows that in the aftermath of the war, the war became the new central myth of the Soviet state, overriding the former myths of the Bolshevik revolution and class struggle. Former kulaks who distinguished themselves at the front were now war heroes whose social origin was of no importance. Red Army veterans took power in state and party organs on the local level. They were hostile not only to those who had collaborated with the German occupation authorities, but also to those who tried to stay on the sidelines during the war, mainly peasants. They even distrusted the partisans who remained behind enemy lines. The Communist party spent several years examining the behaviour during the war of those of its members who lived under the German occupation and survived. Did they immediately resist the German authorities? If not, they were expelled. Eighty percent of the Communists who stayed behind as the front moved eastward were purged. The war was all. Even the suspect peasantry was incorporated into the myth. The peasants' initial neutral or even pro-German attitudes were forgotten; instead their ultimate loyalty to the Soviet regime and the contribution their sons made to the war effort were celebrated. What had happened ten years earlier-collectivization, resistance, famine-was also forgotten, hidden behind the screen of the war. Many of the collective farms were now headed by veterans. Only one group was excluded from participating in the new myth: Jews. There was to be no place constructed therein for the specific Jewish suffering during the war. …