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Four. Memory of Excision, Excisionary Memory The dictatorship of the proletariat has once more earned the right to declare: " I do notfightto kill as does the bourgeoisie: Ifightto resurrect toiling humanity to a new life. I kill only when it is not possible to eradicate the ancient habit of feeding on humanfleshand blood." (Maxim Gorky et al., Belomor)' IT COMESAS NO SURPRISE that the totalization of Soviet practices in the quest for purity brought to the fore the inherent tension between the biological and the sociological categorization of the enemy within, and consequently the inevitable comparison to Nazi Germany, the other totalitarian enterprise. Nowhere else was this issue exposed more clearly than in the Soviet policy toward its J ewish minority. In the wake of the war and the trauma of the Holocaust, conducted extensively on Soviet soil with the implicit and often explicit approval of the local populace, as well as a wave of popular and official anti-Semitism that swept the immediate postwar era, ordinary J ewish citizens and activists began to ponder the unthinkable : Was there a logical affinity between the two ideologies? For some there certainly was. In the small town of Nemyriv, J ews accused the local party leadership of deliberately impeding the evacuation o f the J ewish community to the Soviet rear when the Germans were already at the outskirts. As a result, the majority of the community perished at the hands of the Nazis, whereas the local party officials lived out the war in safety at the rear. Insult was added to injury when, following the liberation of Nemyriv, the above-mentioned leaders, who never saw the front, returned to town and looted J ewish property. When J ews, who had survived the war in the villages, the forests, and the partisans detachments, returned and asked for their belongings, they were rebuffed. In addition, charged the J ews, the local leaders actively collaborated and participated in the extermination of the local J ewish community. Thus, they concluded, the party's policy toward the J ews did not differ from that of the Germans.2 1 Gorky et al., Belomor, 338. 1 Verification by an instructor of the obkom rejected most of the charges the Jews raised and claimed that in most cases Jews recovered their property: 119 of 147 claims were settled 192 C H A PT ER THREE On 4 September 1945 Kiev erupted. A J ewish NKGB officer named Rozenshtein got into a fight with two uniformed servicemen in Kiev. The two called Rozenshtein a "Tashkent partisan" (a derogatory term, reserved mainly for J ews, for people who lived out the war years in the safety of Tashkent) and beat him severely. Rozenshtein shot the two to death with his personal revolver. During the funeral procession for the two servicemen on 7 September, a mob diverted the procession to the J ewish market and a pogrom erupted. Approximately one hundred J ews were severely beaten, of whom thirty-six were hospitalized and five died of their wounds. The NKVD increased its patrols in the city after a group of servicemen and civilians prevented the removal ofone of the instigators who had been detained, causing anti-Semitic agitation to spread across the city.3 The pogrom in Kiev took place in the wake of a series of similar, though less violent, episodes in eastern Ukrainian cities in the summer of 1944. Mobs of several hundred people in Dnipropetrov'k beat J ews to the shouts of "Death to the kikes" and "Thirty-seven thousand kikes had already been slaughtered, we'll finish off the rest," while, in Kiev, J ews swore to deal with the new incarnations of the Union of the Russian People [the prerevolutionary anti-Semitic organization] and to inflict an unforgettable "St. Bartholomew" [a reference to the massacre of the Huguenots in France in 1572] on Russians, if any of them touched a J ew.4 The reactions from both sides to the killing and the subsequent pogrom in Kiev exposed their polarized views of the J ewish wartime experience. On the one hand, the two officers echoed a prevalent popular view of the role and place of the J ews during the war. At the same time, their actions instigated explosive expressions of uncontrolled popular rage. The regime's uneasiness and ambivalence toward manifestations of popular anti-Semitism was evident in the sentencing of Rozenshtein. He was sentenced to death, but in the honorable military fashion of...

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