Kyiv as a Regime City: The Return of Soviet Power after Nazi Occupation by Martin J. Blackwell (review)

Martin J. Blackwell's book follows a recent trend of studying the process of transition of authority from Soviet rule to Nazi occupation administration and back to the Soviet regime during World War II in cities such as Lviv, Minsk, and Odessa.¹ This new way of looking at the post-war period implies the exploration of a broad range of issues on the local case of one city, be it restoring the administrative structure or solving the problem of returnees. A special and highly sensitive topic is the fortunes of the Jewish population that managed to survive the German occupation or was returning to the reconquered cities from the evacuation or exile to the Soviet rear. These people were particularly vulnerable, caught in the middle between the repressive Stalinist regime, Ukrainian nationalist guerrillas, and unruly decommissioned soldiers, returning from the war and often prone to anti-Semitism.

This study is an important contribution to this recent historiographic trend and the field of urban history in general. The author depicts the reconstruction of Kyiv as a new Soviet city after 1943 by analyzing the multilayered policies of the Party's Central Committee in Moscow and the recently reestablished municipal administration. As he states in the introduction, "this book's goal is to … show why the propaganda of the Stalin regime at the beginning of the Cold War emphasized anti-Semitic and statist discourse" (Pp. 1–2). In other words, a certain ideological continuity with the Nazi occupation administration was caused by the Soviet authorities' desire to win over the sympathies of the Ukrainian majority by playing the anti-Semitic card as, presumably, resonating with the sentiments of the population.

The book tackles several research questions. First, the author wants to find out why Kyiv's Communist leaders, who never hesitated to resort to extreme police measures against the population, were reluctant to purge "dangerous elements" after the war. Kyiv's population grew rapidly and reached 700,000 by 1946, including many "usual suspects": former Gulag prisoners, Ukrainian nationalists, and social marginals. It seems all the more strange since, as the author shows, the concentrated efforts of the administration to mobilize voluntary labor for repairing damaged buildings were unsuccessful (and thus a campaign of terror might be viewed as a powerful argument).

Second, Blackwell studies the experience of returnees to Kyiv. The scarcity of housing in a city devastated by war made the rapid influx of the population particularly problematic and provoked heated discussions in the Communist administration. Ukrainian party authorities were striving to provide housing to the mobilized workforce, the decommissioned soldiers, and other categories of returnees, while also preserving their own privileges.

Last but not least, the book explores the efforts of local authorities to restore legitimacy of the Soviet regime among Kyiv's inhabitants. To this end, the government promoted the idea of its indispensability under the circumstances of postwar devastation, manipulated most of the influential local social groups, and channeled the popular discontent into attacks on designated scapegoats, first of all Jews. Overall, the book explores the "state-society relationship in Kyiv" in order to understand "how the Stalin regime promoted its hegemony, in general, by the end of the 1940s" (P. 6).

The study is substantiated with a wealth of documents from Ukrainian archives holding collections of the CPSU committees of various levels, as well as the republican government. The correspondence between these bodies allows the author to reconstruct a nuanced picture of the local political dynamics. The correspondence between Ukraine's party leadership and Stalin's central administration in Moscow puts this picture into the broader perspective of Soviet postwar history.

The book is divided into three sections, each consisting of two chapters. The first section, "Resettlement," elaborates on the problem of returnees to Kyiv: chapter 1 covers the period between the fall of...