Survival and Subversion during the Great Patriotic War

After spending several decades in the shadows of the Cold War, the Great Patriotic War and its impact on the bodies and minds of Soviet citizens has become a booming field of scholarly investigation.¹ Because of this research, the war has come to rival the October Revolution as an event that redefined Soviet ideological narratives and reshaped life in the USSR for decades. The Soviet Union’s 1945 victory was a paradoxical turning point that seemed to shore up Soviet legitimacy internationally while cultivating doubts and demands at home. Amir Weiner, Elena Zubkova, and Mark Edele, among others, have argued that the war fostered in Soviet citizens a certain self-assertiveness and sense of entitlement for material benefits, political reforms, and transparency from the regime.² Recently, scholars have tackled this monumental conflict and its repercussions city by city, highlighting how local communities endured the war and then rebuilt their lives and environs, often in conflict with official reconstruction efforts.³

Laurie R. Cohen’s Smolensk under the Nazis and Richard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagin’s The Leningrad Blockade contribute substantially to this investigation of World War II’s transformative effects on Soviet society. Much of the existing research on this theme focuses on discontent that sprouted after the war, when the regime failed to reward its citizens’ sacrifices with a better quality of life.⁴ By contrast, Cohen and Bidlack and Lomagin highlight civilian experiences during the early and most devastating years of the war, 1941–42. Both of their studies are heavily archival, rigorously documented, and comprehensive. Smolensk under the Nazis is a traditional monograph, while The Leningrad Blockade is half monograph, half document collection. In addition to providing a detailed history of the siege, it includes 66 archival documents, a chronology, and numerous diagrams, which promise to be useful both for scholars and teachers of the blockade. Both works are driven by two questions: How did Soviet citizens survive the war? And did their political attitudes and allegiances shift as a result of that ordeal? In both studies, the power dynamics between the local population and state, party, or military leaders (be they Soviet or German) take center stage, and they raise critical questions about the war’s impact on popular attitudes.

Wartime Smolensk and Leningrad, as well as the authors’ approaches to them, differ in significant and illuminating ways. Unlike besieged Leningrad, which has been the subject of some 400 books by Bidlack’s count (3), Smolensk has received little scholarly attention. Cohen’s work brings a wealth of information to light about its 26 months under German occupation. Smolensk is an important case study, Cohen argues, because of its historical role as Russia’s bulwark against invaders en route to Moscow (4, 11). The city “epitomized the historically besieged, occupied, and recaptured Russian town” (8). Moreover, Smolensk illuminates how the experience of German occupation differed for a predominantly Russian population as opposed to that of non-Russian peoples in the Soviet Union and in East Central Europe, for whom arguments about Russian barbarism and ethnic inferiority had greater purchase.

Cohen’s detailed yet expansive history begins with an overview of imperial and prewar Soviet Smolensk before it delves into the invasion of the city, the new civic order established under German occupation, and the re-Sovietization of the city after it was liberated in 1943. The work is structured chronologically and thematically; it offers a “before” and “after” picture of Smolensk as well as thematic sections on specific aspects of the occupation including food policy, war crimes and violence, reeducation efforts, partisan activity, and the dissemination and reception of propaganda. Cohen’s central claim is that the Smolensk community, although caught between the totalizing ideologies of Stalinist...