"Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population": The Holocaust in the Soviet Media, 1941-45

Abstract

When Nazi Germany invaded expanded Soviet Union in June 1941, how likely was it that Soviet media would report in a substantial way mass murder of of Europe, known today as Holocaust or Shoah? There was a precedent in a Soviet public record about Nazi antisemitism. On 30 November 1936, Pravda reported Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov's speech of five days earlier on occasion of new Soviet constitution. Condemning fascism for its hostility toward Jews, Molotov cited a previously unpublicized comment by Iosif Stalin that antisemitism, like any form of racial chauvinism, is most dangerous vestige of cannibalism, and added that brotherly feelings for Jewish would define our attitudes toward antisemites and antisemitic atrocities wherever they occur. The Soviet press also covered pogroms in Germany in November 1938, referring to a massacre of a defenseless Jewish population. That same year, two Jewish filmmakers could release Professor Mamlock, first Soviet film depicting persecution of in Germany. (1) But Stalin, himself a killer of millions, was not interested in people killed by Nazi Germany and its allies. During war with Germany, what mattered to him were Soviet citizens who offered armed resistance and prevented exploitation of occupied regions. (2) Despite an awareness of their difficult if not desperate situation, he suspected all others no longer living under his control of treason, for reasons that likely must remain unclear. Many Soviet officials and journalists shared or adopted this suspicion. Even some who were themselves of Jewish descent did so: David Iosifovich Zaslavskii, a prominent commentator who specialized in public denunciation of intellectuals, was able to visit sites of murder of of Kharkiv in December 1943. Those killed were less stable and worthy part of Soviet Jewry, part that more and more lost both personal and national dignity, he wrote in his private diary. Many even seemingly had deserved to die: Any Jew who, for whatever reason, remained with Germans and did not kill himself, condemned himself to death. When, in addition, he, for private gain, his children with him and thus exposed them to death, he is a traitor. (3) When to suspicion one adds Stalin's personal, if usually hidden antipathy to Jews, (4) likelihood that readers of main Russian-language Soviet newspapers such as Pravda, Izvestiia, Trud, and Krasnaia zvezda and those listening to Soviet central radio could find out that Nazis were targeting in particular seems slim indeed. Nevertheless, as I argue here, they could. Such explicit reports did exist and were more numerous than has been assumed. Although Soviet media items often attempted to conceal that Nazis were deliberately killing all Jews, this never became a policy. It was nothing but a tendency that never became entirely consistent. Reports about three meetings in Moscow of representatives of Jewish and various articles by II'ia Grigor'evich Ehrenburg mentioned as victims. Other articles that appeared on various occasions also did so. Even as late as November 1944, as present study reveals, Pravda wrote that 1.7 million had been gassed to death at Birkenau. All investigations of presentation of Nazi mass murder by Soviet media during war with Nazi Germany focus on campaign known today as Jewish Holocaust. The first studies, written at a time when intense antisemitism pervaded Soviet lift, emphasized a total or near-total about mass murder of Jews. Thus Solomon M. Schwarz wrote in 1951 that the very fact of wholesale extermination of Jews was shrouded in silence and kept out of Soviet newspapers. (5) Gennadii Vasil'evich Kostyrchenko wrote in his Tainaia politika Stalina (Stalin's Secret Policy, 2003) of a Soviet wartime cover-up (zamalchivanie, umolchanie) about Hitlerite genocide of [Soviet] Jews. …