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57 5 The Holocaust on the Thawing Screens From the Fate of a Man (1959) to Ordinary Fascism (1965) In 1953, Stalin died. Two years later, Khrushchev’s speech at the Twentieth Party Congress heralded the so-called Thaw, often understood as a period of relative liberalization in both politics and culture. But a closer look reveals that the process of liberalization was actually rather tentative, and that new signs of thaw were interspersed with plenty of familiar freezing. In that schizophrenic atmosphere, when filmmakers constantly tried to navigate a treacherous terrain of the permissible and the forbidden, scores of significant films were made, and more scripts were in development. Several of them dealt with the Holocaust. At first, cinema was slow to warm up to the changes: it takes much longer to make a film than to write an article or a poem. More important, as the Russian film scholar Josephine Woll notes, the film industry was decimated by various purges and persecutions during Stalin’s reign and was paralyzed by party interference.1 But eventually the filmmakers do heed the call for truth telling and for a revival of idealism characteristic of the era. By 1956, the first Thaw movies appeared: instead of stodgy monumental epics or varnished kolkhoz musicals, the filmmakers cautiously turned to the everyday and the ordinary. The hero was brought off his pedestal, especially in war films. New physical types emerged on screens.2 One of such new types was a Jewish officer, the first Jew on Soviet screens in over a decade.3 Several other filmmakers gingerly followed this precedent, gradually chipping away at the pompous, inflated version of the war, and revising it to include “the trench truth” based on actual experiences. But the atmosphere was far from encouraging: the regime provided mixed messages, here permitting innovation and openness, and there demanding unconditional obedience to the party line and socialist-realist orthodoxy. In 1957–1959, in the absence of a clear signal, filmmakers followed a line of “caution and retrenchment.”4 In the early 1960s, signals remained equally mixed, but liberals felt encouraged . Some controversial literary works were published, and Khrushchev still continued to acknowledge the crimes of Stalin’s regime. The publication of Evgenii Evtushenko’s 1961 poem “Babi Yar” became a catalyst for a renewed conversation about Holocaust memory.5 Conservatives launched an attack against 58 The Phantom Holocaust the poet, yet he incurred no official sanctions. Moreover, Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony, parts of it set to the poem, premiered soon after. In November 1962, at an officially sponsored conference, Mikhail Romm spoke openly about Jewish filmmakers persecuted during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, and advocated for accountability and even openness to the West.6 But by the end of 1962, there was an about-face. Khrushchev visited an avant-garde art show, and dismissed it with brash and vulgar criticism.7 This escapade marked a return to a repressive policy of party oversight of the arts, and the rejection of any “corrupting” (read Western or avant-garde) influences. By the spring of 1963, the situation had deteriorated: at a meeting with writers and artists, Khrushchev gave a speech clearly laying out a repressive policy. This speech gave him a chance to finally opine on the controversy surrounding “Babi Yar,” which according to him was among the works of art presenting “a distorted view of the Jewish situation in our country.” Here is what he found so distorted: “The poem implies that only Jews were victims of fascist crimes, whereas many Russian, Ukrainian, and Soviet people of other ethnicities fell at the hands of Hitlerite henchmen.” This was the closest the Soviets ever came to stating an official policy regarding the Holocaust (familiar to us as universalization ). Khrushchev concludes, “The ‘Jewish Question’ does not exist here.”8 But, of course, the Jewish question very much existed in the Soviet Union. Starting in the late 1950s, the Zionist movement was reemerging, Jewish samizdat was spreading both literary fiction and legal materials, and a handful of enthusiasts were teaching Hebrew. This nascent movement was interconnected with attempts to memorialize the sites of mass executions in Riga, Kiev, Vilnius, Minsk, and other places. Informal ceremonies at these sites became gathering points for young Jews. The suppression by the regime only reinforced their growing national and religious identification.9 Late 1963 and early 1964 continued to be tense times for artists and filmmakers : on one hand, significant films were still made and groundbreaking works of...

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