Smolensk under the Nazis: Everyday Life in Occupied Russia by Laurie R. Cohen (review)

Oftentimes, histories of World War II devolve into studies of hordes of faceless people who are both the victims and perpetrators of great and awful violence—the terrible power and the deep-rooted ideologies that drove these people become the centerpiece of the narrative. Laurie Cohen’s Smolensk under the Nazis: Everyday Life in Occupied Russia, however, is one of many works that turn this tide by giving names, faces, and voices to everyday people who lived through the occupation and the attempted colonization of Smolensk. Cohen argues that these survivors do not share a collective singular memory of the event and do not contextualize themselves solely as a group who survived Nazi occupation. Instead, ethnicities, gender, views on collaboration, or military service experiences colored the experiences of Smolensk civilians and shaped their self-conception, further eroding the American belief in an undifferentiated Soviet horde and the Soviets’ memorialization of the uniform experience of the “Great Patriotic War.”

The work begins with a thorough methodological explanation of the psychoanalytic approach that Cohen uses with her interviews. This section serves as a strong, concise primer on cross-cultural oral history interviewing, as well as a clear explanation of the oral history interviewing process Cohen employed. Her reflections on the process of interviewing are enlightening and clearly explain how one can analyze interviewees’ nonverbal communications—in particular, the value of silence—alongside verbal ones. Cohen’s detailing of these best practices is both concise and erudite.

After a discussion of methodology, Cohen moves on to an analysis of pre-war Revolutionary Smolensk and its preparations for war with Germany. The war comes suddenly, and the citizenry feel the sweeping effects of a large-scale draft and the declaration of war. Cohen is able to individualize this chaotic and frantic period of evacuation before advancing German forces by looking at the disruptions created in the everyday lives of the interviewees—in particular, the unsettling and terrifying nature of air raids, artillery barrages, and the rapid and frenzied retreat of Soviet forces. The interviewees’ inability to escape from such regular disturbances forms a central theme throughout Cohen’s narrative; in this moment of immobility, the residents are forced to endure the colonial policies of Nazi occupation.

It is here that the work shines most. Cohen tackles mundane yet integral facets of everyday life, such as working, housing, banking, entertainment, and Nazi-controlled government. Such life is portrayed as both continuous with the previous Soviet government way of doing things and disrupted by inequalities—such as housing or medical care—between Germans and Soviet civilians. Additionally, Cohen and her interviewees discuss some of the atrocities, including rape, mass execution of Jews, forced collection into the Ostarbeiter program, and others experienced during the occupation. Throughout Cohen’s entire recounting of this period, the lived experiences, feelings, and beliefs of the individuals who survived events work as the clear drivers of her narrative. She expertly weaves her analysis alongside her interviewees’ experiences and other secondary sources.

The next two chapters focus on Stalinism/Nazism and propaganda, analyzed through partisan and German publications, but they feel out of place within the broader narrative arc of the work and might work better as a compelling article about competing modes of propaganda.

Cohen’s most significant uses of oral history are in her section on group perceptions and in a short chapter on gender relations. In the first, the collective view on collaboration is an excellent contrast to the Soviet authorities’ view that every civilian who lived under Nazi control was, to some degree, a collaborator. In the second, the interviews provide an excellent analysis of gender’s role in the survival of single women under harsh conditions, especially as it relates to sex crimes, which remain a horrifyingly frequent but understudied component of Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe. Though Cohen’s work here does feel abbreviated and in need of greater explication, especially the section...