"Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population": The Holocaust in the Soviet Media, 1941-45.

When Nazi Germany invaded the expanded Soviet Union in June 1941, how likely was it that the Soviet media would report in a substantial way the mass murder of the Jews of Europe, known today as the Holocaust or Shoah? There was a precedent in a Soviet public record about Nazi antisemitism. On 30 November 1936, Pravda reported Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov's speech of five days earlier on the occasion of the new Soviet constitution. Condemning fascism for its hostility toward Jews, Molotov cited a previously unpublicized comment by Iosif Stalin that "antisemitism, like any form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism," and added that "brotherly feelings for the Jewish people" would "define our attitudes toward antisemites and antisemitic atrocities wherever they occur." The Soviet press also covered the pogroms in Germany in November 1938, referring to a "massacre of a defenseless Jewish population." That same year, two Jewish filmmakers could release Professor Mamlock, the first Soviet film depicting the persecution of Jews in Germany. (1) But Stalin, himself a killer of millions, was not interested in the people killed by Nazi Germany and its allies. During the war with Germany, what mattered to him were the Soviet citizens who offered armed resistance and prevented the exploitation of the occupied regions. (2) Despite an awareness of their difficult if not desperate situation, he suspected all others no longer living under his control of "treason," for reasons that likely must remain unclear. Many Soviet officials and journalists shared or adopted this suspicion. Even some who were themselves of Jewish descent did so: David Iosifovich Zaslavskii, a prominent commentator who specialized in the public denunciation of intellectuals, was able to visit the sites of the murder of the Jews of Kharkiv in December 1943. "Those killed were the less stable and worthy part of Soviet Jewry, the part that more and more lost both personal and national dignity," he wrote in his private diary. Many even seemingly had deserved to die: "Any Jew who, for whatever reason, remained with the Germans and did not kill himself, condemned himself to death. When, in addition, he, for private gain, kept his children with him and thus exposed them to death, he is a traitor." (3)