Ghosts of War

Nazi Occupation and Its Aftermath in Soviet Belarus

Franziska Exeler

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781501762734
• eBook ISBN: 9781501762758
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

How do states and societies confront the legacies of war and occupation, and what do truth, guilt, and justice mean in that process? In Ghosts of War, Franziska Exeler examines people's wartime choices and their aftermath in Belarus, a war-ravaged Soviet republic that was under Nazi occupation during the Second World War.

After the Red Army reestablished control over Belarus, one question shaped encounters between the returning Soviet authorities and those who had lived under Nazi rule, between soldiers and family members, reevacuees and colleagues, Holocaust survivors and their neighbors: What did you do during the war?

Ghosts of War analyzes the prosecution and punishment of Soviet citizens accused of wartime collaboration with the Nazis and shows how individuals sought justice, revenge, or assistance from neighbors and courts. The book uncovers the many absences, silences, and conflicts that were never resolved, as well as the truths that could only be spoken in private, yet it also investigates the extent to which individuals accommodated, contested, and reshaped official Soviet war memory. The result is a gripping examination of how efforts at coming to terms with the past played out within, and at times through, a dictatorship.

CHAPTER 1

Contested Space

An East European Borderland before 1941

Ol’ga Bembel’-Dedok and Vladimir Khartanovich, Chasia Bornstein-Bielicka, Litman Mor and Zofia Brzozowska, Vasil’ Bykaŭ, Lev Ovsishcher and Zinaida Suvorova were strangers to one another. Their personal lives did not intersect, at least not in any way that they were aware of. They spoke and wrote in different languages—Belarusian, Polish, Yiddish, and Russian—and they held different religions: Russian Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Judaism. Ol’ga Bembel’-Dedok was a Russian-speaking artist who lived in Minsk, Chasia Bornstein-Bielicka a Socialist Zionist from Grodno, Vladimir Khartanovich a Belarusian nationalist and communist sympathizer from a small village near the Naliboki forest, and Zinaida Suvorova a Komsomol activist from a religious Jewish family from Orsha. While Zofia Brzozowska’s family was part of the landed Polish gentry in the Novogrudok region, Litman Mor came from a Yiddish-speaking family from Polesia, Vasil’ Bykaŭ from a Belarusian-speaking peasant family, and Lev Ovsishcher from a Jewish family from Vitebsk oblast.

As different as these eight individuals were, what they had in common was that they called the same place their home: a predominately rural region that stretched from Grodno and Brest in the west to Vitebsk and Gomel’ in the east, encompassing larger towns like Minsk and Mogilev and smaller ones like Novogrudok and Bobruisk, with dense forests and swamps, hot summers and snowy winters, isolated villages and few major roads. Located on the edge of Eastern Europe, this multilingual and multireligious region was a true borderland all the way into the mid-twentieth century: a contested space where imperial and national rivalries met, a construct of the political imaginary and simultaneously object of competing civilizing missions, and a place where different political actors, locals and nonlocals, could test out their national and social engineering projects.1 Over the course of the centuries, it formed part of Kievan Rus’, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Russian empire. During the First World War and the wars that subsequently followed, these lands were repeatedly turned into battlefields, with armies moving back and forth across the region. The 1921 Polish-Soviet peace treaty, also known as the Treaty of Riga, finally brought peace, but it also redrew boundaries across Eastern Europe. The western half of the region—with towns like Grodno, Brest, and Baranovichi—became part of the newly created Second Republic of Poland, while the eastern half of the region—with towns like Minsk and subsequently Vitebsk, Mogilev, and Gomel’—became part of Soviet Belarus. In September 1939, after the Red Army invaded eastern Poland and the region was annexed to the Soviet Union, northeastern Poland became western Belarus, and what until then had been Soviet Belarus alone became the eastern part of the expanded republic. Just two years later, on June 22, 1941, Berlin broke the pact with Moscow and attacked the Soviet Union. Within weeks, all of Belarus found itself under Nazi occupation, where it remained until the Red Army reconquered the republic in the summer of 1944.

This chapter introduces the tumultuous early twentieth-century history of the lands that would come to form post-1945 Soviet Belarus, from the beginning of the century until the eve of German invasion in June 1941. It does so through the lives of the eight individuals introduced earlier, who, alongside others, will resurface repeatedly throughout the book. In their native region, the “Age of Extremes” culminated in the German occupation from 1941 to 1944, yet as this chapter shows, the region had already experienced much violence before 1941.2 By examining how personal lives were affected by the larger shifting political force field, the chapter pays particular attention to the radical transformations that the Bolsheviks enacted in this East European borderland. It also discusses how the different ways in which Soviet rule came to eastern and western Belarus—to the former as a revolution from within, to the latter as a revolution from abroad—altered interethnic relations before 1941. In turn, these different Soviet legacies would, to varying degrees, influence the choices that inhabitants of Belarus subsequently made under Nazi rule.

War, Revolution, and Civil War

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the region that Ol’ga Bembel’-Dedok and Vladimir Khartanovich, Zofia Brzozowska, Lev Ovsishcher and Chasia Bornstein-Bielicka, Vasil’ Bykaŭ, Litman Mor and Zinaida Suvorova called their home overlapped in large part with five Russian imperial provinces (gubernii): Vil’na, Grodno, Minsk, Vitebsk, and Mogilev. It was in the last province that Ol’ga Bembel’-Dedok, the oldest of these eight individuals, was born in 1906. She was a native of the city of Gomel’. Her parents had moved there from the countryside, but ties to the village remained strong: Ol’ga Bembel’-Dedok usually spent her childhood summers with her grandparents.3 The first European wave of industrialization had mostly bypassed this poor and overwhelmingly agricultural region, with its dense forests and extensive marshes and swamps. Most of the rural population belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church, yet others also adhered to Roman Catholicism or smaller Christian groups.4 Many peasants spoke a Belarusian vernacular, commonly referred to as the local language, the simple language, or the “language from here” (pa tuteishamu). Overall, according to the first Russian imperial census of 1897, speakers of Belarusian as their native or first language (rodnoi iazyk) constituted, to varying extents, the largest language group in the five northwestern provinces—Vil’na, Grodno, Minsk, Vitebsk, and Mogilev. Depending on one’s geographical location, whether further to the west or the east, Polish or Russian vernaculars were also frequently spoken. In everyday interaction, people often mixed these Slavic languages, making it difficult to draw neat linguistic boundaries. Further to the north, Lithuanian and Latvian vernaculars were spoken as well, whereas further to the south, Ukrainian vernacular was common, too.5

Census taking is, of course, one of the classical tools whereby modern states govern their populations, and as such, censuses reflect aims and biases particular to each state. Since the 1863 Polish Uprising, Russian imperial officials had viewed anything Polish as a threat to imperial power, and thus sought to make it less visible in public life. It is therefore quite likely that census takers deliberately increased the number of Belarusian-speakers in Vil’na, Grodno, Vitebsk, Minsk, and Mogilev provinces at the expense of Polish-speakers—just as the interwar Polish state would, in turn, use census taking as a way to increase the number of Polish-speakers at the expense of Belarusian-speakers.6 Regardless of the exact numbers, though, the 1897 census clearly attests to the multilinguality and multireligiosity of the region. It also shows that in contrast to the overwhelmingly Christian and Slavic-speaking rural population, the urban population was mostly Jewish.7 This settlement pattern can in large part be traced back to the residency restrictions that the Russian imperial government, in the wake of the annexation of Polish-Lithuanian territories, had imposed on the empire’s Jewish population in 1791. Jews were only allowed to reside within the borders of the so-called Pale of Settlement, which included the five northwestern imperial provinces. They could settle outside the Pale only under exceptional circumstances and with government permission. After 1882, the government also prohibited Jews from purchase or lease of land in rural areas.8

By the turn of the twentieth century, half of the population of Minsk spoke Yiddish as its first language. In smaller towns, the percentage of the Jewish population was usually higher. These were the East European shtetls, also called mestechki in Russian, where traditional Jewish religious life shaped most social interaction. In Pinsk, a town to the east of Brest, 90 percent of the residents were Jewish.9 Other languages spoken in towns and cities were Polish, which had been used by the aristocracy and royal administration in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Russian, the administrative lingua franca of the tsarist empire. Vil’na (today’s Vilnius), the historical heart of this region, was predominantly a Yiddish and Polish-speaking town, with Russian as the language that people used in encounters with the state.10 In towns, the region’s multilinguality was even more pronounced. Many urban residents grew up speaking more than one language. This did not necessarily mean that they were fluent in most of the region’s main languages, but many knew them well enough to be able to engage in basic interaction—for example, at the market.11 At the same time, this was a region with a stark difference between towns and villages. The majority language—Belarusian dialect in its different variations—was primarily a rural language, seldom spoken by urban residents. Yiddish and Jewish culture, in contrast, were largely absent from the countryside. Like elsewhere in rural Europe, nationality mattered little, if at all, to people. The main marker of identity—and thus the main factor that set communities apart—was religion. Whereas boundaries between the different Christian denominations could be blurry, they were quite visible between Christians and Jews, which further contributed to the divide between the rural and the urban landscapes.12

The First World War marked the first big political rupture in the region’s twentieth-century history, setting in motion a series of mostly violent political and social transformations over the course of the next years. Trying to seek advantage of the volatile situation, various political actors—locals and nonlocals, foreign governments and armies, socialists and nationalists—laid claim to this space-in-between, turning it into political laboratories where they could test out different national and social engineering projects.13 As fields and villages became battlefields, hundreds of thousands of people fled to the Russian interior. Among them was Vladimir Khartanovich’s family from the village of Achukevichi, not far from the town of Novogrudok in Grodno province. The Khartanoviches found refuge to the east in Mogilev province, where Vladimir was born in 1919.14 Refugees from the Polish-speaking parts of the Russian empire also arrived in the village not far from Gomel’ where Ol’ga Bembel’-Dedok’s grandparents lived.15 The Russian army deported from the border regions ethnic minorities that it deemed unreliable and potential German spies, a practice that affected primarily Jews and ethnic Germans. The situation grew worse when Russian defeats began to mount toward the end of 1914, and military authorities ordered the expulsion of Jews from the northwestern provinces, which also affected Jewish communities in Grodno and Vil’na provinces.16 In the early fall of 1915, the Central Powers made deep advances into imperial Russian territory, leading to the flight of even more people from the battle zones.17 The governments in Berlin and Vienna divided the newly conquered territories according to their spheres of interest and set up different civilian and military occupation regimes. For the remainder of the war, Mogilev and Vitebsk provinces, including the city of Orsha, where Zinaida Suvorova was born in 1914 into a religious Jewish family, would remain east of the front-line.18 Parts of Minsk province would be occupied by the Germans only in February 1918, after peace talks with the Bolsheviks failed and the German army extended its control eastward. Grodno and Vil’na provinces, however, had already come under German occupation in the fall of 1915, where they remained as part of the German military state Ober Ost until the end of the war in November 1918.

Ober Ost was a colonial project, a self-proclaimed civilizing mission through which the German military sought to bring culture, hygiene, and order to the East. It was also a nationalizing project, which included promoting the region’s non-Russian languages (instead of curtailing them, as tsarist Russia had done) through the creation of educational and cultural institutions. By supporting non-Russian nationalist projects and trying to foster the development of distinct national identities, Berlin hoped to destabilize the Russian empire. And indeed, this strategy opened up limited possibilities for local political activists, who sought to build nation-states under German tutelage.19 Among the inhabitants of the region, the German occupation of the First World War left a mixed legacy. Because the Ober Ost administration did not discriminate against specific ethnic or religious groups, it offered the Jewish population relief from the deportations and forced expulsions that they had endured in the first year of war at the hands of the Russian military. German occupation also brought relief from a wave of pogroms and violence, carried out mostly by Cossack units and directed against Jews, which had accompanied the imperial army’s retreat from April to October 1915.20 Local memories of the Germans as strict but overall relatively mild occupiers (especially compared to the violence inflicted by the Russian imperial army and after 1919 by the Polish army), had terrible consequences in the summer of 1941, when within hours or days, people had to make up their mind whether to flee east or not. The mother of Sulia Wolozhinski Rubin from Novogrudok “remembered the Germans from the First World War . . . She could not believe any harm would come to us.”21 Like Wolozhinski Rubin’s mother, many Jews who had lived through the German occupation of the First World War decided against fleeing in the summer of 1941, thinking that they knew what to expect from German rule.22

In 1917, the Russian empire crumbled as a result of war and revolution, followed a year later by the demise of the German empire. After the First World War ended in November 1918 and the German army retreated, the region remained heavily contested. By the time Lev Ovsishcher was born in 1919 in Bogushevsk, a shtetl not far from Vitebsk, the former Russian imperial provinces of Vil’na, Grodno, Minsk, Vitebsk, and Mogilev were in the midst of violent upheaval.23 As armies moved back and forth over the region, various political actors each proclaimed nation-states or socialist republics, one as fragile and short-lived as the other. Between 1918 and 1920, Belaru-sian statehood—whether in an exclusively national, socialist, or cosmopolitan form—was announced no less than six times.24 Two forces in particular were struggling with each other: the newly (re)created Polish state and the still small group of Bolsheviks. Minsk, until then under the control of the Bolsheviks, fell to the Polish army in August 1919, only to be recaptured by the Bolsheviks a little less than a year later, in July 1920. All the while, across the lands of the former Russian empire, the Bolsheviks were engaged in civil war battles with the White Army, which fought for the reinstatement of the Russian tsar; the short-lived Belarusian Insurgent Army under the command of Stanisław Bułak-Bałachowicz; the Revo...

Table of contents

• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Language, Transliteration, and Terms
• Introduction: Truth, Guilt, and Justice in an Illiberal State
• 1. Contested Space: An East European Borderland before 1941
• 2. At the Heart of Darkness: Wartime Choices, 1941–1944
• 3. Post-1944: The Moment of Return
• 4. Determining Guilt: The Soviet Politics of Retribution
• 5. Loss, Grief, and Reckonings: Personal Responses to the Ghosts of War
• 6. Belarus, the Partisan Republic: Narrating the Years of War and Occupation
• Afterword
• Note on Wartime Losses
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index