Black Earth(78)

The Judeobolshevik myth, which worked as politics in the doubly occupied territories, could be applied with similar results when the Germans reached the prewar Soviet Union. Once developed, this technique of separating Jews from others could be applied anywhere in the Soviet space. The fact of past Soviet rule and the clarity of German anti-Jewish stereotypes combined to create an easy and callous excuse for murder, from the top of the system to the bottom. A Ukrainian policeman in the Galician town of Wi?niowiec could stop a Jew on the street and ask him: “Tell me, my friend, what did you do under the Soviet regime?” and then beat him regardless of the answer. The beating was the answer. As in the doubly occupied lands, in the prewar Soviet Union Jews were sacrificed for the holy lie of the collective innocence of others. In the end, it mattered little, from the Jewish perspective, whether a given territory had been ruled by the Soviets for a matter of decades or for a matter of months. Either way, Jews present on these territories when the Germans arrived were going to suffer and die.

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In doubly occupied western Ukraine, the Germans could exploit the aspirations of Ukrainians to a national state. They could try to put to use the frustrations of two decades of Polish rule and two years of Soviet rule. In central and eastern Ukraine, under Soviet rule for two decades, nationalism had far less resonance. Although the Germans brought west Ukrainian nationalists with them, these collaborators found few interlocutors and were not usually instrumental in German policies in central and eastern Ukraine. Nevertheless, the killing of the Jews took place with the same efficiency.

In Zhytomyr, the major city of northwestern Soviet Ukraine, there was no memory of a recent Soviet occupation, but rather experience of two decades of Soviet rule. No deportations were under way when the Germans arrived, as had been the case in the lands the Soviets had annexed in 1939 and 1940. But, as in the doubly occupied regions, the NKVD had been holding Soviet citizens in prisons in the vicinity. In a number of cases the NKVD shot prisoners and left the corpses behind. As the inhabitants of Zhytomyr suspected, these very prisons had been sites of a much larger Soviet killing campaign not long before. In September 1938, the Red Army had gathered precisely in the Zhytomyr region as Soviet leaders spoke of a fraternal rescue of Czechoslovakia by way of an invasion of Poland. The NKVD meanwhile murdered large numbers of civilians, especially Polish men. The NKVD shot more than four hundred Soviet citizens in the area on the day that the Munich accords were signed, removing the occasion for war and an intervention in Poland. When war came a year later, the Soviet Union was an ally of Nazi Germany rather than an enemy; inhabitants of the Zhytomyr region, like all Soviet citizens, were then treated to almost two years of praise of Hitler’s regime. This was followed from June 1941 by the Nazis’ own propaganda: leaflets from airplanes equating Jews with communists.

When war came to Zhytomyr on July 9, 1941, in the form of a German invasion, the men of the SS had already passed through the lands that the Soviets had just annexed; they had their political formulas ready and could be confident of success. Wherever the Germans found corpses left by the NKVD, they blamed the Jews and usually shot some. On August 7, 1941, Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C undertook the simple scenography in Zhytomyr. Its members shot two Jews accused of working for the NKVD. Then they asked the gathered public, mostly Ukrainians and Poles, “With whom do you have to settle a score?” The answer had already been given. The crowd responded: “The Jews!”

In this way the bulk of the Soviet population was released from its past, since essentially everyone in a city such as Zhytomyr had been associated with the Soviet regime. By appearing at the shooting and participating in an exchange with the German murderers, local people were doing their part in a bloody revision of history and general assignation of blame to the Jews. Here as everywhere, the lies and the killing were intimately connected. Although the Judeobolshevik myth also functioned within the Soviet Union itself, people in Zhytomyr generally knew that Jews were not responsible for communism. But once Soviet citizens had said out loud that Jews should be killed as punishment for communism, and watched as Jews were in fact killed, they could hardly admit that they had lied. In this way the killing itself drove forward the myth of Judeobolshevism. Mendacity supported murder; murder supported mendacity.

Kharkiv was the major city of northeastern Soviet Ukraine, near the border with Soviet Russia, with a significant Russian minority. Its inhabitants had suffered horribly in both the famine of 1932–1933 and in the Great Terror of 1937–1938. As a boy from a Jewish family remembered those years, “Every day kids would come over and say ‘Mom’s been arrested’ or ‘Dad’s been arrested.’?” In Kharkiv, as elsewhere in the prewar Soviet Union, arriving Germans were greeted with bread and salt. The Germans relied upon local collaborators who were placed in charge of largely unchanged local administrations. Although the Germans did bring a few west Ukrainian nationalists to Kharkiv, the collaborators were almost entirely Soviet citizens: Ukrainians, Russians, and others. The Germans appointed a mayor to head the Kharkiv administration and vice mayors for each of the city’s nineteen districts, whose borders followed those of Soviet police precincts. Subordinate to the vice mayors were the building supervisors, in general the same people performing the same function that they had under Soviet rule: monitoring an apartment house and reporting on its residents.