Class War or Race War

The Inner Fronts of Soviet Society during and after the Second World War

Tamás Kende

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781032577333
• eBook ISBN: 9781003810599
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Class War or Race War is more than an anti-thesis of the master narrative regarding the Soviet state antisemitism. Kende not only refutes the originally anti-Communist myth of the systemic nature of (state) socialism, but tries to re-, and deconstruct, the origins of this myth.

With intensive use of historical documents, memoirs and the related historiography, the book attempts to make historical sense from the myth it intends to refute. Kende goes beyond the contemporary perceptions of the "Jewish question" and antisemitism, and with close reading of original documents, reconstructs the real frontlines of the Soviet society of the 1940s, which were not constructed along identity-political lines. The book reinvests the long-forgotten understanding of social classes in an allegedly classless and monolithic society. The spontaneous formations of the actual frontlines in the hinterland, or on the actual fronts (battlefields, in the Red Army) lacked the participants' class consciousness, thus its occurrences in the form of conflict producing historical records were recorded as acts of antisemitism. As the book advocates, Jews could have been found on both sides of the inner frontlines of Soviet society during and right after WWII.

An insightful read for scholars of Soviet history that presents a bold and challenging interpretation of the regime and its flaws—both perceived and real.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Anti-Semitism as a window to the possible history
• 1 Perceptions of a pogrom
• 2 Jewish Communism versus Bolshevik Anti-Semitism or the Quest for the Right Adjective
• 3 Post-war anti-Jewish violence in the collective memory of the Soviet Jewry
• 4 Evacuation and anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union during WWII
• 5 Other inner frontlines: Housing, hunger, and food supply in Jewish memoirs
• 6 The rising Jewish self-esteem
• 7 Selected but not elected: The Jewish Antifascist Committee and the rise of Soviet-Jewish national pride
• 8 Contemporary echoes of the Holocaust
• 9 Anti-Semitism or inner frontlines on the front: The Red Army’s soldiers on the Jewish question
• 10 Jews remembering Jews on the other side of the frontline in the post-war period
• 11 The spontaneous “Us” and “Them” in a pogrom in Uzbekistan through the eyes of a Soviet Jewish child
• Conclusion: Class and/or race
• Sources
• Bibliography
• Index