First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946 by Jeremy Hicks, and: The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe by Olga Gershenson (review)

Two new studies challenge received opinions about how the Soviet Union represented the persecution and mass murder of the Jews before, during, and after the “Great Patriotic War.” Many standard histories of World War II and its aftermath in the USSR—Alexander Werth’s classic Russia at War (1964), Amir Weiner’s Making Sense of War (2001), and Yitzhak Arad’s recent The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (2009) are representative examples—underscore the ambivalence, indeed, the outright hostility, of Soviet authorities toward singling out Jews as the Nazis’ particular targets. Candid reports or allusions to the slaughter did appear initially in official pronouncements and major news outlets, but they soon became infrequent and increasingly vague; Jewish victims were routinely described only as “peaceful Soviet citizens,” their ethnic identities suppressed. Accounts of the Nazis’ killing of Jews were relegated to small-circulation Yiddish newspapers such as Einikayt, sponsored by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.

The reasons for this suppression of terrible truths were complex. The Communists were, ostensibly, ideologically opposed to differentiating among civilian victims of different national groups, even as they ranked these groups according to their alleged contributions to the defense against the German onslaught.¹ Given the extent of civilian deaths, they also feared alienating other ethnic communities. One also must not discount, of course, the antisemitism of Stalin and his coterie. When the tide of war turned in the Allies’ favor, Soviet policies hardened. The regime became intent on constructing a bizarre, obfuscating master narrative about the war as a tragedy with an ultimately happy end: through superhuman efforts galvanized by their genius leader, Stalin, the diverse Soviet peoples had united to protect the socialist fatherland against the global fascist menace—and had triumphed. This forcefully imposed and carefully policed discursive framework could not accommodate—indeed, it seemed in direct competition with—the unmitigated tragedy of Soviet Jewry. Despite intermittent periods of cultural thaw, these policies made commemorating the Holocaust a taboo topic for almost the entire postwar history of the Soviet Union.

The exceptionally well-researched, detailed volumes under review both contest and augment the brief summary just offered of Soviet attitudes toward the Holocaust. Their focus is original. They write about the many films about Nazi atrocities against Jews and others produced by the Soviets from the mid-1930s onwards. This is a vital area of Soviet cultural production that the standard histories tend to overlook.² Jeremy Hicks focuses primarily on Soviet newsreel and propaganda documentaries, though he also considers in depth key feature films such as Herbert Rappoport and Adol’f Minkin’s 1938 drama, Professor Mamlock, and Mark Donskoi’s 1945 Nepokorennye (The Unvanquished [known in the United States as The Taras Family]). Olga Gershenson concentrates on fictional films, including Mamlock and The Unvanquished, that portray the Nazi war against the Jews, but she also discusses non-fictional compilation films such as Mikhail Romm’s Ordinary Fascism (1965). Hicks investigates the relatively brief period between the mid-1930s and the immediate postwar years with exceptional density of detail and clarity. The scope of Gershenson’s excellent volume is far broader—from the half decade before the war through the post-Stalin “Thaw” in the mid-1950s and the demise of Communism in the late 1980s to twenty-firstcentury, post-Soviet Russia. There is, in fact, surprisingly little overlap in their coverage; their books provide neatly complementary perspectives on what is clearly a much larger and more significant cinematic corpus than Western scholars of Soviet films, at least, have taken note of heretofore.

Even the most important surveys of Holocaust and Soviet cinemas omit most of the films Hicks...