Black Earth(56)

Ukraine is fertile

She gives her grain to the Germans

And she herself goes hungry.

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In its newly acquired lands, the Soviet Union created material, psychological, and political resources for the Germans, openings for future Nazi power in eastern Europe that had not existed before 1939. Though the Soviets did not intend to create these resources, their availability was decisive for the course of events after the Germans invaded these lands. This was true in eastern Poland in 1939 and would be all the more true in the Baltic states after their occupation and annexation by the Soviet Union in summer 1940.

In putting an end to capitalism, the Soviets created a material resource. From the Soviet perspective the goal was equality, but equalization means losses for some and gains for others. Even before the Red Army arrived, local “communists went mad, carrying out revisions by night and robbing and killing Poles.” Joel Cygielman, a Jew fleeing the German invasion in his own automobile, lost it to a Soviet officer who threatened him with a grenade. In Kovel, Jews who greeted the Red Army with flowers found that the soldiers were interested only in what was in their shops. Soviet soldiers at first stole what they could and then bought what remained on the strength of an overvalued ruble. Local communists placed in positions of authority used the pretext of arms searches to rob their neighbors.

The end of the Polish civil code was experienced by most people as the legalization of theft. If property could be taken by the state, perhaps it was permissible to take it back again. The lack of legal assurances to property made those who claimed new land or residences believe that they themselves had to make sure that the previous owners never came back. Jews had the most urban property to lose, and usually lost it: in the double sense of the nationalization of their goods and the deportation of their persons to Soviet Kazakhstan. The Soviet Union did not discriminate against Jews as such; it was an anti-antisemitic entity that criminalized ethnic discrimination. Given the social structure of the market economy in eastern Poland, however, Soviet measures against capitalism affected Jews more than others. To be sure, eastern Poland was generally a very poor territory, although its society was far more prosperous than that of the Soviet Union to which it was to be leveled. Mendel Szef, a dairyman from ?uck, put matters this way: “after the occupation of our country, it was said that all are equal, rich and poor, but it turned out that all are poor, since the rich were arrested and sent to the depths of Russia.”

The massive scale of Soviet deportations and executions permitted a social revolution in both the countryside and the towns, as people scrambled for the tens of thousands of suddenly empty farms and homes. In the countryside of eastern Poland, where rural unemployment exceeded fifty percent in the 1930s, people were hungry for land. Not everyone took land from their neighbors, but many did. Here, as in all such cases, peasants knew that if they did not take a vacant farmstead, someone else would. Some Ukrainian peasants who refused to claim land from deported Polish neighbors were forced to do so at gunpoint. In many towns most of the good stone houses were owned by Jews, who were often deported to the Gulag. For their neighbors in wooden huts or hovels, a move to the center of town and residence in a stone house were the peak of imaginable social advancement. The Soviets did not expropriate Jews as a racial group. Even so, the fact of the prior expropriation of a large number of Jews created an opportunity, if an unexpected one, for the Germans who would later arrive. When Soviet power was replaced by German, non-Jews could try to get their property back, but Jews could not. The property that Jews had already lost could be claimed by others. The initial Soviet expropriations, swift and systematic, were racialized by the subsequent German arrival.

Most Jews in eastern Poland were of very humble means. Nevertheless, Jews provided the connection between peasants and markets, countryside and city. In other words, much of what Soviet officials would see as speculation, profiteering, and the like was commercial activity usually carried out by Jews. In Poland’s Volhynia district, for example, 75 percent of the registered traders (14,587 of the 19,337) were Jews. The radical devaluation of the Polish currency and then its abolition in December 1939 destroyed the social position of Jews who had some savings or investments. The end of debts denominated in Polish currency was a relief for many but a burden upon Jewish lenders and, indeed, the removal of their source of authority in communities. The ceaseless Soviet propaganda against commerce as such was, in fact though not in intention, directed against Jews, and weakened their standing.

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In altering the character of politics, the Soviets created a psychological resource. Jews were given the appearance but not the reality of power. After the arrival of the Red Army in September 1939, local Jews appeared in visible positions of responsibility in greater numbers than had ever been the case between the wars. The Polish central government had acted to make sure that even towns with a Jewish majority did not have a majority of Jews on the city council. Although there were a few Jews in the Polish police and the Polish administration generally, the tendency was to keep those numbers low. The change in autumn 1939 was, therefore, experienced as dramatic. The Soviets had no particular desire to promote Jews as such, although a few commanders and officials opined that Jews were more reliable than Poles. Still, Jews were among those who were available and exhibited the willingness and skills to take up new positions. Jews were never the majority of local collaborators with the Soviet regime; Belarusians and Ukrainians were overall far more numerous. Local Jews never held real power, with the exception of a few weeks in autumn 1939, and that on a very local scale, and alongside other, non-Jewish, collaborators. Nevertheless, the change of regime made Jews collectively vulnerable. When the Germans invaded, the actual administrators of the new Soviet territory, the Soviet officials from the east, could marshal the resources they needed to flee. But the local Jews, those who had collaborated with the Soviets and those who had not, generally remained behind.