Welcome, everyone. I'm Liana Grancea, Executive
Director of the Center for European and Russian
Studies, and standing in for our Director,
Laurie Hart, who unfortunately wasn't able to
join us today. So it's my great pleasure today
to welcome you to our book talk Ghosts of War:
Nazi Occupation and Its Aftermath
in Soviet Belarus, and of course,
to introduce the speakers. Franziska Exeler
and Jared McBride, today's author and critic.
But first, I'd like to thank our UCLA co-sponsors,
the Department of History, the Alan D. Leve Center
for Jewish Studies, and the Promise Institute for
Human Rights at the School of Law. I also want
to thank our long-time community partners at the
Southeast European Film Festival in Los Angeles
for spreading the word about our events and
this one in particular. And last but not least,
many thanks to our colleague Lenka Unge, who has
made all the arrangements for this talk, and
rearrangements since this is being rescheduled.
After the author's presentation and
discussant's comments and questions, we will
open the discussion to all participants,
so please feel free to post your questions
in the Q&A section and we will read them out
in the order that they have been posted
once we open the floor to the audience.
And now to the introductions and I will be brief.
Franziska Exeler is Assistant Professor of History
at Free University Berlin and a research fellow at the
Center for History and Economics at Magdalene College,
University of Cambridge. She received her
doctorate in history from Princeton and held
postdoctoral fellowship at the European University
Institute in Florence and the International Center
for the History and Sociology of World War II and
Its Consequences at the Higher School of Economics
in Moscow. Ghosts of War was published by Cornell
University Press, has received wide praise and
is the recipient of the 2021 Ernst Fraenkel Prize awarded
by the Wiener Holocaust Library in London.
One of them. Jared McBride, is Assistant Adjunct
Professor in UCLA History Department. He
specializes in the regions of Russia, Ukraine
and Eastern Europe in the 20th century. And
his research interests include nationalist
movements, mass violence, the Holocaust,
inter-ethnic conflict and war crimes prosecution.
His research has been funded by Fulbright Hays,
the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon
and Guggenheim Foundations, and has been published
in numerous journals - Holocaust and Genocide
Studies, Journal of Genocide Research, The
Carl Beck Papers, Ab Imperio, Kritika, and Slavic Review.
He is currently completing a book manuscript on local
perpetrators and interethnic violence in
Nazi-occupied Western Ukraine, which we look forward to
bringing to you as soon as it's published. Thank
you both for accepting our invitation.
Thank you so much for the invitation and for the
kind introduction. I'm particularly honored to
have Jared McBride discuss the book since
he is an expert on the Second World War in
Eastern Europe. So let me begin with some
of the larger questions that motivated me to
write the book and I will share my screen
in the hope that it's going to work out.
Yes, I hope this should be working.
This book project has been a long project,
as probably most dissertations that
were eventually revised at some point, you know,
it seemed it almost fell apart, then we're put
together again with lots of new archival research.
But at the very beginning of this
book stood three questions, essentially.
The first one was, what I wanted to find out
was, what is the scope for individual agency
in extreme moral circumstances such as wartime
occupation? The second question that I wanted
to find out was, how do states and societies,
social communities and individuals confront
the legacies of war and occupation, and what do
truth, guilt and justice mean in that process?
And the third question that interested me was, how
does the process of confronting the past play out
within authoritarian states? Scholarship on
transitional justice usually assumes that seeking
justice and accountability in the aftermath of
war and violence contributes to the development
of more pluralist democratic spheres.
I wanted to know what seeking
justice for wartime atrocities meant and looked
like in a dictatorship like the Soviet Union.
The book then examines people's choices, and their
choices' choices, and the Nazi occupation and the
ways in which these shaped postwar Soviet rule.
It does so through the lens of Soviet Belarus,
a Soviet republic, an East European border
that was particularly affected by the war.
The Soviet Socialist Republic of Belarus was
established in 1919 out of the turmoil of
war and revolution. The Republic was initially
quite small, as you can see on this map here. So
initially it really only consisted of what is here
indicated in number one, then grew in the interwar years,
sort of added territories to the east and
then doubled its territory in population and size
when following the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the
Soviet Union annexed Eastern Poland. And then
Northeastern Poland became Western Belarus.
So these are then sort of the west and have
number four that you can see on
that map. And on the map to the right,
you can see the Soviet annexations of 1939 and
With the exception of Bialystok region,
which was handed back to Poland in 1945, so the
western most part of Belarus, the Soviet Union,
then between these territories after the war.
On June 22, 1941, Germany broke the pact
and invaded the Soviet Union. Belarus was
then under German occupation from the
summer of 1941 to the summer of 1944,
when the Red Army liberated the region from Nazi
war. German occupation brought incredible death
and destruction to the Soviet western regions,
and Belarus was among the hardest hit places.
About 19 to 22 percent of the population that by
June 1941 lived in the territories, that
would constitute post-1945 Belarus, were
killed or died as a direct result of the war.
This included almost the entire Jewish population
of the republic, an estimated 500,000 to 607,000
people. And as part of so called anti-partisan
campaigns, the Germans also erased approximately
in Nazi occupied Europe, and killed up to 345,000
civilians, some of them Jews, but the overwhelming
majority of non-Jewish rural residents.
For people in occupied territory,
it was impossible not to come into
contact with the occupation regime, not least
because in the regions under their control,
the German authorities depended heavily
on the employment of Soviet citizens.
Willingly or unwillingly, on their own initiative,
or much more reluctantly, some people became
complicit or entangled in German crimes. Most
notably, this included the local policemen and
town mayors, who took part in the Holocaust.
But there were also many more ways, an entire
sort of broad range and spectrum, in which an
individual could become entangled in German
policies. For example, as an office clerk or as a
teacher or more general, be in contact with them.
What is more, during the war, Belarus emerged
as the center of Soviet partisan warfare against
the Germans. This meant, for civilians in occupied
territory, that it was not only impossible not to
come in contact with the German occupation regime,
but it was also impossible to stay neutral in the
fight between Soviet Partisans on the one hand,
and Germans and local policemen on the other hand.
In parts of western Belarus, this precarious
situation for civilians was further complicated
by the presence of Polish partisans, so units
of the army [. . .], and in southern Belarus
towards the end of the war by the presence of
Ukrainian nationalists. When the Red Army then
returned in the summer of 1944, one question
hovered over encounters between the returning
Soviet authorities and those who had lived under
German rule between soldiers and family members,
evacuees and colleagues, Holocaust survivors and
their neighbors. What did you do during the war?
Let me say a few words just about the outline
of the book. So the book begins with the first
chapter at the turn of the 20th century
and then extends from the war years into
the postwar years. So the first chapter kind of
provides the historical background looking at
this region as a particularly contested space and
also the different ways in which Soviet rule came
to eastern and to western Belarus. The second
chapter then zooms in on to the war years and
looks specifically at wartime choices and looks
at different moments in time, the Holocaust,
the Soviet partisan movement, or the development
of the Soviet partisan movement, and traces
individual choices under Nazi rule. And
chapters 3 to 6 then look at sort of
the short and the longer postwar.
So it starts with a moment of return in 1944,
then followed by a chapter on trials, so the
Soviet politics of retributions, means and meanings
of punishment, retribution and justice and what
can be called the treason or collaboration trials,
then proceeds with a chapter that looks
specifically at the ways in which non-state
actors or individuals try to grapple with what I
call the ghosts of war, so the wartime choices,
how they tried to find out what others did
during the war, how they responded when they
assumed or knew or otherwise surmised that
somebody had become complicit in German
crimes and the different ways, both through
Soviet state channels and non-state channels,
or a combination of the both in which they then
sought accountability for wartime wrongdoings.
And then it concludes with a chapter on the
ways in which the Soviet state inherited
the years of Nazi occupation. So under the
heading of Belarus, the Partisan Republic,
how this conflicted with a lot of wartime memories
of individuals in Belarus, but also different
ways in which, within limits, individuals could contest
the Soviet state narrative and at the same time
strive to be included in it. And it also has a
note on wartime losses, which numbers are often
political and which I assess different estimates on
wartime losses that are being discussed both in
the scholarly literature, but also on the ways in
which the current, the authoritarian government
under Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus today,
how they use the different uses to which they
put these tremendously high number and then
the human losses of the war. And to the left
you can see a map of Soviet Belarus in its
post-1945 borders. So without Bialystok region, which
was handed back to Poland and then the dotted
line indicates the pre-1939 Soviet-Polish border.
To be able to fully capture the complexity of
human behavior, my analysis draws on a wide
range of different sources and perspectives.
So these ranged from Soviet and German state
documents to letters, memoirs, short recollections
and oral history interviews in different European
languages. And the voices of individuals are
really something that I've tried to make central
to my analysis. These were, to name just a few
individuals like [. . .]
These four individuals,
which you can see here on the slide,
they came from different backgrounds, Jewish and
Christian, religious and secular, from Belarusian,
Yiddish, Russian or Polish speaking families.
And they also come from western or eastern Belarus,
from the new and the old Soviet part of the
republic indicated here in yellow on the map.
What they had in common was that they
called this East European borderland home,
and like countless others, their lives were
transformed by the Second World War.
Now, the remain of the talk, I'd would like to speak
about two issues in particular. The first one,
Soviet trials, or what we can call the Soviet
treason or collaboration trials, and then
the more personal ways of seeking justice and how
that could clash with the official war narrative.
And I would like to then conclude with a few
thoughts on comparison. After the trend
of Soviet power in 1944, the pursuit of truth
was a common goal for individuals, communities,
and the Soviet authorities alike. Yet they often
held different understandings of what that meant.
For local party leaders, state security
officers, so the NKVD and the NKGB, and
members of the judiciary, finding out
what people in occupied territory had
done was a task of utmost importance. Inextricably
linked to the re-establishment of Soviet authorities.
The authorities were determined to punish local
participation in German atrocities, and during
the first postwar occupation years, they prosecuted,
for example, many policemen who had taken
part in the Holocaust and the killing of other
civilians. At the same time though, the search
for alleged traitors was about defining who and
who had not been loyal to Moscow during the war.
As military tribunals translated complex moral
gray zones of war and occupation into the
language of treason, external pressures
or intent were not taken into account.
Mitigating circumstances were only recognized
if an individual had gone over to the partisans,
thereby proving that he was willing to die
for the Soviet Union. So this is really the
only case in which I could find that, or which
I found that military tribunal systematically
took mitigating circumstances into account. So
the cases of individuals who first fought on the
German side as policemen, for example, and then
during the war went over to the partisans side.
That phenomenon was perhaps, on a side
note, actually not a marginal phenomenon.
The data that we have of the partisans, who were
active in Belarus during the war, it pertained
to about 10% of partisans who had previously,
prior to joining the Soviet partisans,
either been policemen for the Germans or else
worked on German institutions. And this was also
a sort of a phenomenon encouraging people
to come over to the Soviet side that really
came from the topmost level, sot to say. It was
a policy that was put in place by Ponomarenko,
who was the head of the Soviet Partisan
Movement, and it was approved by Stalin.
These tensions then between on the one hand
wanting to punish local participation in
German atrocities, yet at the same time also
thinking about the war as a test of people's
loyalties, these tensions then continued to
inform later Soviet trials. Most people who
are charged with wartime treason were prosecuted
until the early 1950s. After Stalin's death in
efforts, the state moderated its punitive
policies and in 1955 issued a partial amnesty.
In the 1960s then, domestic and international changes
spurred a second wave of trials. As the statute
of limitations did not exist for treason, the
prosecution of Soviet citizens accused of wartime
collaboration continued until the late 1980s.
So there's much, much more that one could say
about the trials and I'd be really happy to do so
later on. There are just three points that I'd
like to raise today. For one, we can see that
contrary to official wartime proclamations,
namely that traitors only deserve one fate,
death as Stalin said in a July 1941 speech, we
can see that punitive practices were not static,
but rather varied over time, alternating
throughout the postwar years between more lenient
and stricter, less active and more expensive
phases. The punishment was particularly strict in
the war years, in particular in the first
sort of reconquest phased in early 1942
when it was particularly harsh and indiscriminate,
when somebody as we know from
[. . .] in western Russia, who worked
as a cleaning lady for the Germans,
could in some cases did receive the same sentence
as a local policeman. During the war years then,
the authorities published a set of instructions
that kind of aimed to clarify the legal basis of
punishment. But the real turning point,
I think, in the Soviet politics of
punishment really comes in early 1944. So by
the time when large parts of the Soviet western
regions had already been liberated and sort
of Red Army was preparing for a major offensive.
And we can see here that punishment becomes
somewhat less strict, with a ratio of death
sentences to prison sentences further dropping
in the immediate postwar years. I think this has
a lot to do with considerations about the way in
which the returning Soviet authorities wanted to
present themselves vis-à-vis the population
and formerly occupied territory. So it has a
lot to do with domestic, but also in some parts
changes in the international sort of structure.
The second point I'd like to make is that we
see different kinds of trials that were taking
place. Different types of shifts
and visibility. So in the first
wave, as the Red Army is sort of pushing the
German army from the Soviet western regions,
the trials usually take place in public.
And here on the slide you can see
an example of one of these
trials. This image was taken
in a village of northwestern Russia, which the Red
Army had retaken by the fall of 1943. On trial
was a man by the name of Bazylev, who'd during
the German occupation served as the head of
this village. He's standing in the center right of
the photo, sort of in front of what looks like a
jury of three officers, surrounded by at least four
armed guards. Others soldiers were probably
his fellow villagers, most of them women.
I think this image shows or suggests, obviously
every image is staged, but this image, I think,
so suggests just how improvised and quick these
Red Army trials were. We know from memoirs by
prosecutors who worked for the Red Army
military tribunals that these trials took
place throughout every district
in the liberated territories.
They're usually conducted within one or two
days, sometimes just within a couple of hours.
Once the troops then moved westward,
the prosecution of civilians wartime
treason primarily became the
responsibility of the state security organs.
And this is also when the majority of
prosecutions then takes place in
secret without audiences that can attend, often
usually also without defense lawyers and the
like. But there are a couple of select trials
that then were chosen to take place in public.
Although, and this is kind of a subcategory of
these trials, trials of Soviet citizens who are
accused of collaboration with the Germans
during the war, the trials that took place
in the mid to the late 1940s, were
public, meaning that public, like local
audiences were allowed to attend. They were usually
not much publicized beyond the locality in which
they took place, which is a difference then
to the 1960s trials, which are geared both at
domestic audiences, but also increasingly
towards a much more global audience.
And the third point I'd like to raise about
these trials is that we can see that there's
a professionalization of the administration of
justice happening. By that I mean that later
trial records, especially from the early 1960s
on, are far more extensive than the trials that
were conducted in the immediate aftermath of Nazi
occupation. Still I think it's important to
stress that this didn't mean that we also
see an increase in due process of law.
So the Soviet collaboration trials continue to
lack fundamental standards of rule of law, such
as an independent judiciary, independent defense
attorneys and the assumption of innocent until
proven guilty that form the precondition for any
trial to be considered as impartial as possible.
In contrast to the Soviet authorities were
preoccupied with the question of political
loyalty for many inhabitants of postwar Belarus,
confronting people's wartime choices was a highly
individualized process. Contingent on
a multitude of interacting factors,
circumstances and personal experiences. Most
of these in Belarus lay in ruins. Entire rural
districts had been burnt down and large parts
of the population were uprooted or displaced.
For private individuals, the moment of return
was first and foremost about the much hope
for reunion with family members. Returning home,
however, also led to encounters with former
neighbors and friends, fellow villagers
and colleagues. These encounters not only
threw into sharp reveal that some, in particular
Jews, had lost more than others during the war.
They also, and inevitably so, raised
questions about people's wartime behavior.
Now, one might probably assume that in a
dictatorship like Stalin's Soviet Union,
individuals would shy away altogether from talking
about the war in ways that might deviate from the
official line. That wasn't the case though.
As neighbors and acquaintances met in
social settings, they did talk frankly about the
war at times, including sensitive topics such as
violence committed by Soviet partisans against
civilians in occupied territory. And it seems
when it came to sort of approaching neighbors
directly, asking them what had happened in a
particular locality during the war, it seems that
it was often Holocaust survivors who survived with
the partisans or who fought with the Red Army, who
were the ones who did this, sort of who approached
neighbors directly, asking them what had
happened in their hometowns during the war.
But if people spoke about taking furniture from
Jewish apartments, stealing food from villagers,
or serving the German organized police forces,
they usually always referred to other locals as
having done such and such things, not themselves.
And they needed a lot of personal determination
and assistance to overcome people's reluctance to
respond to uncomfortable questions, in particular
ones that might have brought to light their
own entanglement and wrongdoings.
When individuals found out or surmised that
members of their pre-war social communities
have become complicit or entangled in Nazi
crimes, or that their neighbors had taken
advantage of other people's plight,
they responded in different ways.
Some sought comfort in the social relations that
had survived. The friendship and solidarities that
had not been destroyed by what people
had done or not done during the war.
Often, people cut all ties with those
whom they suspected of wrongdoings,
Yet others decided to altogether sever the bond
to the local community. Whether this entailed
leaving one's hometown, region, or Belarus,
or possibly even the Soviet Union itself,
which as an option was only open to a small
group, namely some ethnic Poles from western
Belarus and Holocaust survivors as well
from western Belarus, were able to leave
the Soviet Union under the conditions of the
As varied as people's responses to the ghosts
of war were, one sentiment was widely shared
by inhabitants of Belarus, the urge to seek
justice and retribution that is punishment that
people believe to be morally right. In its most
extreme form, retribution meant revenge and violence.
For example, by beating up a fellow villager
accused of having worked for the Germans,
which was reported from villages from
eastern and western Belarus in the fall of 1944.
I actually only came across such cases for
that particular sort of the first weeks and
at most months after the Soviet return.
I think the reason for that was that
the Soviet state security organs were able to
bring any... Simply to establish kind of their
networks, but also more generally to bring
the region much sooner under control than,
for example, western Ukraine. So I think there
was also less room for people to kind of engage
in these spontaneous acts of violence. What usually
then happened is that if the state security organs
heard about it, they would let it go on for
one or two days, and then eventually would arrest
somebody. So the vengeance violence mostly
takes the form of beatings. Yet individuals
also pursued many other less physical means of
retribution. Some did so privately, for example,
by confronting neighbors directly, demanding the
restitution of property that these had acquired
during the war. At times that was successful, at
times not. It turned out to be more successful if
somebody who reclaimed property was or during
the war had been a member of, for example
the Soviet partisan movement, or former Red
Army soldier. Beyond these private efforts,
many individuals found themselves brought into
contact with the Soviet state. In the efforts
to determine what Soviet citizens had done under
Nazi rule, the authorities relied heavily on local
information on an assortment of names, clues and
stories. Some of these were supplied unwillingly,
such as when torture during interrogations made
people provide or fabricate incriminating material
about friends or neighbors. Or when people
were blackmailed into becoming informers.
Others agreed to become informants for the state
security organs because they saw this as a chance
to punish locals they believed guilty of crimes
committed in the name of German power. While
some consented to pass on information to the state
after they were approached by its representatives,
many more acted on their own initiative and
wrote letters to the central authorities.
Testifying to the state, whether
to the members of the
extraordinary state Ccmmission, or if
possible, as a witness at a public trial,
was another means to which individuals
could seek justice as they understood it.
In doing so, some people found that their
individual notions of what constituted
morally right punishment overlapped or even
were congruent with those of the regime.
When the authorities acted on the tip and arrested
a neighbor they believed to have committed crimes,
even someone who otherwise was not sympathetic to
Soviet power could see the state as a guarantor of
justice. The same could apply to individuals who
served as witnesses in court. Although,
as we also know, especially from research
on the aftermath of the civil war in former
Yugoslavia, that is a very complicated question.
The extent to which serving, for example,
as a witness in a court can make somebody feel
that for him or herself, justice had been done.
The widespread desire for punishment, in other
words, made it possible for some inhabitants
of postwar Belarus to find more justice.
But the state's legal system was
and remained profoundly illiberal.
At the same time, of course, interaction with
the authorities came at its own risk. People
who engaged with the state could only do so on the
terms set by the authorities. There are boundaries
to what could be said and done, and investigations
could backfire on those who initially set them
in motion. Nowhere did this become more visible
than in the many property conflicts. What belong
to whom was an immensely contentious question in
the immediate postwar years. A deeply personal,
at the same time, highly political question. The
death and displacement of hundreds of
thousands of people, and in particular the
region's Jews and the destruction of houses
as a result of military operations or German
punitive actions meant that a lot of property,
be it apartments, furniture, or clothes, had passed
through many different hands during the war.
Just how did you manage to move into a new
apartment during the war? Because the Germans had
burnt down your house as punishment for ties to
the partisans or because the partisans,
as it happened in a few cases, had burned down
your house as punishment for ties to the Germans,
or because a bomb had destroyed your house
and you simply needed a new place to stay?
Property contracts also were not limited to
housing questions. How did you come to acquire
new furniture or clothes? How did you come to own
a cow during the war? Did you take it from the
collective farm after the Soviet state took
it from you during the collectivization of
agriculture in the 1930s? Or did you receive it
from the Germans for services rendered to them?
And if you bought it from someone,
how did that person acquire it?
These questions arose when trying to
solve the widespread property conflicts, which is
why we can read them as one of the ways in which
people in Belarus grappled with the ghosts of war.
Sorting them out was an inherently difficult
task, both practically as well as morally. And
Red Army soldiers, Holocaust survivors, or
former partisans often turn to the state,
asking the authorities to settle the question
of ownership or occupancy rights in their favor.
In doing so, they had no choice but to work with
Soviet normative categories, with the authority's
notions of right and wrong wartime behavior.
This means that in consequence it was, of course,
impossible to seek justice for wartime wrongdoings
believed to have committed in the name of the
Soviet state. A peasant could not complain
to Minsk for instance that Soviet partisans had
stolen his cow during the war. Doing so would have
meant that he would have made himself suspicious.
The partisans were officially deemed
unambiguous heroes and defenders of the
social motherland. So why, in other words,
had he not given it voluntarily to them?
In the Soviet narrative of the war as an old
people's war, Belarus occupied a special place
as the republic where the so-called old
people's partisan war had taken place.
According to this narrative, the local population,
both the Republic's eastern and western part, had,
with the exception of a few,
stood firmly behind Soviet power.
In this respect, meriting the use of war and
occupation was also about the creation of a
new linear story of Soviet Belarusian statehood,
one that firmly united eastern and western values
under the banner of the Partisan Republic,
as the postwar republic came to be known.
After 1953, this general Soviet war
narrative and its specific Belarusian
version became more inclusive and within
limits some of its aspects could be contested.
Still, because of the centrality of the old
people's partisan war to postwar Soviet Belarusian
statehood, there was no space to acknowledge
that the relationship between Soviet partisans
and civilians in German occupied territory had
been fragile, unequal, fraught with conflict, and
at times antagonistic. This exclusively positive
depiction of the Partisans civilian relationship
was and remains to this day, non-negotiable in
Belarus, and for that matter in Russia, too. And
in other words, violence that was
committed by Soviet partisans against
civilians is a political taboo and challenging
it comes with high professional and social costs,
especially now as we see that Belarus
has instituted its own memory laws.
Russia already has memory
laws in place that
for an individual to challenge these taboos
carries these particular or potential threats.
How then did individuals live with conflicting
narratives? Sorry, I shouldn't probably say narratives.
How did they live then with the fact that there
was an initial official narrative in place, but
their own experience of the war
differed from the official narrative. Some
strategy or some ways in which individuals in
postwar Belarus tried to make sense of this
discrepancy between the official and private
memory was that they distinguish between
"real partisans" who could be honored and
"bandits". They were attempting to rationalize
the abuse that they encountered from
the latter. So, you know, this apologist
who interviewed both in western and
eastern Belarus and village inhabitants,
when they recounted their war time experiences
to talk about those who were partisans,
and they called them partisans, and others, usually
people who had taken food from them against their
will, or had else sort of threatened them in
some ways, would not call them partisans,
even though they were members of the partisan
movement, but they would say that these people,
they did not belong to the real partisan
movement, that they were the bandits.
Thereby you could rationalize the abuse that
they had encountered from the bandits
and reframe your wartime experiences. Although
this reframing of their wartime experience could
publicly only be articulated at the cost of
exclusion from the larger political community.
Those who felt that Soviet power had done
them an injustice, either during the war
at the hands of the partisans, or also after the
war at the hands of Soviet officials, therefore
resorted to particular strategies in order to
be able to mobilize the state on their behalf.
They wrote letters to party leaders in which they
accused others of being German accomplices. Well,
the efforts often turned out to be unsuccessful
because it often then triggered investigations,
which might have then led to two other
things being uncovered. The authorities
usually benefited from them. On a more abstract
level, you can say that these complained letters
to the regime acknowledge that the
Soviet state alone had the means to
settle the conflicts brought forward by the
authors. And I think that this affirmation
of Soviet state authority shouldn't
be underestimated. In particular,
when we consider how rapidly institutions in the
western regions collapsed in the summer of 1941.
In that sense, you can say that regardless
of the author's intentions, each letter to the
state contributed to the rebuilding of Soviet
power in the aftermath of Nazi occupation.
Or put differently, unintentionally confronting
the past, had a regime stabilizing effect,
strengthening the mechanisms of power in an
authoritarian state like the Soviet Union.
Sorry, I have a bit of a cold. Okay, I'd like
to conclude with a few thoughts on comparison.
So one of the challenges in writing
this book was to account for
people's pre-war experiences with the Soviet rule, and
how these pre-war experiences with Soviet rule
then impacted the choices that they
made under German wartime rule,
which is an issue that is tied to the question of
comparison, and more specifically the question
of western Belarus, which had only become
Soviet in 1939, differed from eastern Belarus,
which prior to the war had been Soviet for
roughly two decades. And also if Belarus
differed from the other Soviet republics that
were under German occupation during the war.
There is some long answer to this
question and then there's a short one.
So my short answer would be it depends. In other
words, there's no simple, all encompassing answer,
but it depends very much on what we compare,
on the particular issues that we are looking at.
So for the postwar period, for example, it is
difficult to identify a clear contrast between
western and eastern values when we compare the
way some individuals in Belarus investigated,
assessed and grappled with the question of wartime
behavior. And the reason for that is that this
process of confronting the ghost of
war as such was highly individualized,
multidimensional, contingent on a multitude
of interacting factors, circumstances and
personal experiences, which is why we cannot
detect a clear sort of east-west pattern.
For the war years, the picture is a bit
different with some differences between the
new and the old Soviet territories, but also
some similarities. If we take the question of
inter-ethnic relations for example, we can
see that when it comes to the question of
behavior in the Nazi occupation, the
civilian population in eastern Belarus
did not differ fundamentally from the
civilian population in western Belarus.
The one exception to this is the extent of local
anti-Jewish violence in the summer of 1941.
So during the transition from Soviet to a German
rule, when a wave of local pogroms swept through
the east European border lands. That level of
local violence was highest in the Bialystok region,
which was then the westernmost part of western
Belarus, and then from 1945 on again, part of
Poland, much lower than the other regions
of western Belarus with a few smaller-scale
pogroms taking place and possibly nonexistent in
eastern Belarus, for which these local programs
have not been recorded. And I think an
important factor here is the presence or the
absence of small radical nationalist groups,
that acted as catalysts of communal violence.
However, once the Germans began to establish their
occupation regime, they could depend on
both western and eastern Belarus, just like in
the other western republics of the Soviet Union,
on the participation of a small
group of people, who primarily in
their capacity as local policemen
actively took part in the Holocaust. Similarly,
we see that in their treatment of their Jewish
neighbors, the non-Jewish civilian population
in western Belarus displayed the same
behavioral spectrum as in eastern Belarus,
ranging from acts of rescue and providing
shelter to expropriating Jewish property,
blackmailing or denouncing neighbors and
hiding or even taking part in the killings.
This existence of a spectrum of human behavior,
of course, doesn't exclude the existence of
quantitative differences within it. We know
from [. . .] work on Bessarabia and
Transnistria, which correspond roughly to
the territories of modern-day Moldova and
southwestern Ukraine, that there were substantial
differences in how the non-Jewish populations
treated the region's Jewish populations during the
war, when both regions were under Romanian rule.
So she showed in her work that when these
two regions were under Romanian rule until 1944,
the civilian population in Bessarabia had a more
antagonistic attitude and the civilian population in
Transnistria a more cooperative attitude
towards the Jews during the Holocaust.
With the exception of the summer of 1941, such
regional differences cannot be detected clearly for
Belarus, at least not for the regions that constitute
the post-1945. Where eastern and western
Belarus did differ was the type of
support networks that people could draw.
As a result of two decades of civilization,
inter-communal relations among certain urban
groups in eastern Belarus, so mostly younger
people, those who no longer practice religion,
and people who closely identified with
the Soviet project, were less defined for
traditional social and religious markers
of identity than in western Belarus
during the war. This increase the chances
that Jews in the urban centers of eastern
Belarus would be able to depend on the
help of non-Jewish friends or colleagues,
especially if they were fellow
Communist Party members.
So in this respect, we see that higher
pre-war levels of inter-ethnic integration in
eastern Belarus shaped the makeup
of support networks during the war.
That's also reflected in differences in how
legacies of pre-war Soviet rule form the choices
that individuals in western and eastern Belarus
made under Nazi occupation. So we'll leave
it at that. Thank you for your time and I look
forward to Jared's comments and the discussion.
Thank you, Franziska, so much. And now we'll
hear from Jared and after his comments and
possibly a few questions to which you might want
to answer, we'll open it to the larger audience.
A reminder for everyone to post their
questions in the Q&A section. Thank you.
Super. Thanks, I was going to remind everyone
to ask questions while I'm talking and we'll
come to them in a second. So I want to thank
both the UCLA Center for European and Russian
Studies and their Director, Laurie Hart, as well
as the staff, Liana and Lenka, and the History
Department for co-sponsoring this event today and
bringing really a leading scholar in our field,
Franziska Exeler, to discuss her award winning
book. And the award was already mentioned. I was
going to mention it too. So I'm so happy to have
Fraziska with us today for several reasons. First,
to have a book like this come out during a time
of war in the region, is vital. Though Franziska's
book is about Russia, Ukraine's
authoritarian neighbor, I still think it's
really important that new research on the region's
past is published and supported, so we can not only
put to rest the ghosts of the most vicious war
of the 20th century, but prepare to deal with the
ghosts of the current war. Sadly. And second,
from a personal perspective, over the years,
I've had a chance to learn from friends, discuss
work through publications, conferences and
conversations. I'll note I was a dissertation
defender many years ago, so it's really a real
pleasure to see a decade plus of work finally
come to fruition in the form of this book.
So decades of research, and Franziska mentioned
this, decades of research for a single book, or a
decade or so, is a pretty good encapsulation of
what it means to be a scholar of the region in
which Belarus falls. Exeler's book is a research
triumph that brings together materials from dozens
of archives in seven countries, newspapers
and oral histories. The book's central
arguments revolve around the horrific choices
the population of Belarus had to undertake
during the Nazi occupation, as well as the ways
in which postwar Soviet Belarus sought to come to
terms with wartime violence from various vantage
points, be they individual, to the state, and many
experiences in between. Far from more traditional
studies that overemphasize state repression or
paint monochromatic pictures of the population as
solely collaborators, heroes or anti-Semites,
Exeler deftly crafts a narrative that shows
the negotiations at all levels of Belarusian
society to come to terms with the war. At the
end of the day, probably unsatisfactory to all,
but certainly a captivating story worth reading about.
To craft these arguments, Exeler employs a
laser-like precision in putting her own findings in
conversation with existing scholarly literature,
all conveyed through lucidly written prose. Woven
throughout the text are many vignettes of average
Belarusian lives, like a female partisan fighter
returning to Minsk who had not seen her son for
three years, or a Jewish survivor returning to
his town after the war to see what had become
of his community. This made me think of the
recent Hungarian film 1945. Overall, the book
represents the best of new work on Belarus and
the war in the last decade or so, and should be
read alongside works by authors
like Per Rudling, and the regional studies
also on similar themes as well, which
should be put in conversation with this book,
like Jeffrey Jones' on Russia...
So my comments, moving forward
here, in questions will focus on three
points: wartime behavior, regional comparative
frames, and injustice. And so these are just
for conversation. We'll see if we get any
questions and we'll go from there. So
the first point on wartime behavior. So Exeler's account
of wartime behavior is dynamic and reflects the
best of new research on the broader borderland
region under Nazi occupation. In particular when
it comes to the behavior of local populations
in Belarus under the Nazis, she stresses two
extremely important points, temporality and
contingency. Exeler argues that how locals
chose to interact with the Nazi occupation powers
was not fixed. So in chapter two, she writes:
"While the occupiers clearly circumscribed
local space for action, the size of that space
was neither the same for everyone nor static over
time. Moreover", she writes, "in short, complicity
in entanglement were questions of degree, and
both people's decisions and their consequences
varied over time. So the decisions whether or
how to work with the Germans and collaborators
or even the Soviet partisans could change over
time as the conditions changed. For example,
a local mayor or policeman may move from being an
open and willing collaborator of the Germans at
one point in the war, to someone later in the war,
maybe perhaps in the same position, but playing
both sides." Clandestinely, supporting the Soviet
partisans as one example. She likewise notes
that the reasons for both joining many of these
groups and institutions and moving between them
often was not rooted in personal characteristics
or ideology. For example, the chances of joining a
Soviet partisan unit could hinge far more upon
an individual's geographical location to the
forests where Soviet partisans were based, rather
than any deep-seated connection to Soviet power.
One particular strength of these arguments is that
it helps explain often contradictory behavior we
see in these “collaborators”. So in one
example Exeler mentions a mayor, who
despite taking a position that inevitably made
one very complicit with the worst of Nazi crimes,
decided not to turn over any local communist
while in this position to the Nazis. So
essentially providing cover for people in
the community. As a result, she formulates
an understanding of complicity as shades of
gray, one of degrees and one of contingency.
You've heard some of these words already in the talk
today. The stress on this temporal dimension of
behavioral variation and the importance of
contingency is crucial, in my estimation, of
moving the historiography beyond the pitfalls
of over categorization that puts individuals in
tiny boxes. It also stresses that the choices at
one point of the war do not necessarily capture
the range of behaviors throughout the occupation,
nor define them as individuals beyond the wartime
conflict, despite states', not just the Soviet
state, but many states' interests in doing so.
I don't have any particular questions on these
points, but I just wanted to stress them because
I thought they were really well articulated in
the book and I welcome any follow up from Franziska.
On the comparative frames. So the geographical,
and this has already been covered in the talk,
but I'll just read my comments because I have
them prepared, the geographical focus in the book
provides its own useful "natural experiment"
for all who use this kind of term
as historians. So while on the surface we might
actually tend to think of Belarus bifurcated
into two entities, the Soviet eastern region,
part of Soviet Union since 1921, the western half, that had
been part of Poland, integrated in 39. Yet there
is the special status of Bialystok region which
we've already heard about today, both in terms
of its integration into the Soviet Union in 39,
as well as its special status under the Nazi
occupation. And this makes the wartime comparison
here three-fold rather than rather than two. So
this tripartite comparative frame is actually most
intriguing, to my eyes, when it comes to the summer
population of Belarus. So the volume and intensity
of anti-Jewish violence in Bialystok versus
western Belarus, versus eastern Belarus offers a
useful puzzle. How to explain why there were more
pogroms in, or at least more violence generally
in Bialystok. So building on comparative works in
other regions, Exeler offers that the presence of
far-right Polish groups in Bialystok region explains
the variation there, versus the more kind of
neutral Belarusian inflected western Belarus.
Now, this argument seems to align with
newly emerging theories about far-right
groups as drivers of pogrom violence, or at least
the organized forms of it. The western and eastern
comparison and its lack of violence also
provides an interesting abstract to
the 1939 debate and the well-worn argument that
programs were driven solely by the experiences or
new experiences under Soviet power following the
Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact. And this was just
commented on at the end of your talk. So I
will kind of repeat this here. So Exeler's
findings, I would say, and maybe we
can follow up on this here, seem to both
support in terms of eastern Belarus, but not
support in terms of western Belarus,
argument about a similar natural experiment
in Bessarabia, Transnistria. So at this point,
I'd be kind of interested in maybe hearing a
little more, although you did talk about it
at the end of your talk, about the ability
to kind of extrapolate these patterns across
the wider region, which is something we're in
the process, I think, of doing at this time.
So what is particularly helpful in this discussion of
pogroms is that Exeler still digs deeper and shows
variation even within the regions themselves, at
times employing negative cases. So just to paint
what we are saying, where violence didn't occur. So
she notes the lack of violence in Grodno versus the
more violent neighboring Bialystok. Similarly,
across the so-called border in neighboring
[. . .] there is widespread violence
despite the lack of Polish nationalists there,
showing that the nationalist argument does
not hold sway across the border here. So like
elsewhere in the book, Exeler is careful to say
that there's no model causal explanations for this
variation in violence, despite the fact that it
seems, at least parts of it seem to overlap with
popular general theories we've had about pogrom
violence over the last 20 or 30 years. One comment
from myself here would be, when dealing with this
variation, I wonder whether there are maybe worth
considering the role of apolitical actors or just
simply kind of what we might call kind of criminal
gangs as driver of some of this violence across
these artificial borders. There is an emphasis
in a lot of the literature on assumed grievances
with the Soviets and nationalist aspirations based on
anti-Semitism, but sometimes it's more kind of
rogue-like violence in summer 41, maybe worth
considering as a perhaps explanation for some
of this variation and also incredibly difficult
to detect through a lot of the sources. It is
a part of the conversation we've already had.
So now I turn to the last point for my comments,
and this is on justice. So the book discusses
at length issues related to postwar justice in
distribution, drawing from several standalone
articles from the author [. . .], which
occurred to everybody to read as well. The book
makes persuasive argument about the fact that
postwar justice changed over time, responding to
both domestic and international demands, noting
the various waves of trials and in offering a
distinct periodization of understanding these
trials, while consistently negotiating,
"ideological imperatives versus
pragmatic concerns" to use Exeler's words. So
characterization of the Soviet state as ambivalent
runs counter to some previous academic, and I would
definitely say popular accounts, of Soviet justice
that posit an all knowing and brutal Soviet state
bent on punishing the guilty and the innocent for
wartime transgressions. Now seen through the prism
of mass scale deportations of entire nations,
widespread arrests in violence, suppression of
insurgencies in this region, we need not wonder
where this framing originally came from. However,
as Exeler explains, that Soviet state is not
necessarily seen in postwar Belarus cases against
wartime collaborators. She explains that the
Soviet judicial system was ill equipped to deal
with the many shades of gray that often defined
wartime behavior and we see this in various sentencing
for similar crimes, a lack of clear definitions
for unacceptable behaviors, interagency feuds,
and in an amenability to leave wartime behaviors
behind for decades to come. All of these things
plagued the Soviet state when it came
to a kind of clear and defined approach to justice
or, even retribution after the war. Now, while I
find this framing and argumentation persuasive,
I just offer two questions for the purposes of
discussion. So the first is about periodization.
Exeler remarks that the politics
of retribution certainly evolved over time.
Can we say the same thing about the ambivalent
state? And so it seems that post 61, the Soviets
are pretty clear about what the public purpose
of these trials are in an international audience, right?
And so the trials, as Exeler notes
here and also in other writings,
are a useful tool for the Soviets to make
moral arguments about the lack of war crimes
prosecution in the West, right, from the sixties
onward. So given this stance, and I'm aware that
book study kind of stops in the early sixties,
but given this stance, how would we periodize this
ambivalence? Meaning, would you say it's an
ambivalent state on this issue for the entirety
of the postwar period until the collapse or that
that's really kind of a culminating break there?
The second question. Before the second question,
I'd like to probe a little deeper on this concept
of ambivalence. So when we're considering on a
whole, the functioning of justice, say, from 44
to 53, the sheer chaos surrounding many of these
cases and everything from sentencing to appeals,
is this more of a story of state
incompetence rather than ambivalence?
So to be clear, I don't think these things
are mutually exclusive, but I also find this
ambivalence characterization quite convincing.
I'm just thinking out loud here with
you. I wonder how ambivalent a dysfunctional
state can be. It almost seems a little, and this
is tongue in cheek, it almost
seems complimentary of the
Soviets to imply there were two or three coherent
ideas about what to do in these trials and that
these coherent ideas were fought over in some
distinguishable manner. And maybe I'm, you know,
that's not a fully accurate take, but
I'll be interested to hear some thoughts
on this. So does this framing work better than a
portrayal of a state simply failing about due to a
lack of personnel, established practices, limited
oversight, no checks and balances, problematic
legal theories, and just a complete lack of
infrastructure to carry out the monumental task
of assessing what millions of people did during
an occupation? Things that were all very clearly
described in the book. So in other words, do we
see so much variation in how justice is administered
because the actors aren't sure which approach to
take or that they're just simply making things up
as they go along? Which I think, from a bird's eye
view, looks like ambivalence, but maybe from the
bottom up or reading the trials up looks more like
ineptitude. So and perhaps this is also, kind of
reframing the question, is a question of agencies,
you know, who exactly are the ambivalent parties,
per se? The police don't seem terribly
ambivalent, but is the ambivalence coming from
their clash with folks in the judicial branch
or in the party? So maybe that's another way
to think about that question. And so just a couple
throwaway comments here to finish up on justice.
So in terms of comparative frames on
postwar justice with places like Ukraine,
I was curious about the role of nationalism or
fear thereof in trials. And so in your opening
you mentioned a [. . .] who had some
nationalist paraphernalia in his possession. And
so just I was curious if we know, and we
may not know yet, how common it was to try to turn
Belarusians into nationalists and collaborators
at the same time in these trials? So in the case
of Ukraine, given their side as the nationalist
insurgency, the charge of nationalism was actually
quite useful because if you couldn't prove someone
was a collaborator to the degree you wanted, you
could always just sort of throw the nationalist
charge at them as a backstop in a lot of these
cases. And so that had me thinking, this chapter
had me thinking comparatively with Ukraine.
And there's obviously a much smaller, almost
non-existent nationalist insurgency
in Belarus, so I'd be curious to see your kind of
long-term discussion, what that comparison looks
like in terms of justice. And then finally, my
last point here. I'd be remiss not to mention the
discussion of specialists and administrators,
this kind of "special types of
collaborators" who worked with the Germans in
the book in light of the current war in Ukraine.
So there's some great data, Exeler describes
how most schoolteachers, it was actually a shocking
amount, maybe not, but remained
in German-occupied territory
and had no connection to the resistance.
But the Soviet state was in no position to
punish all of these teachers if it wanted
a functional education system after the
war. So they had to settle for retraining,
something likely to be haphazard at best.
And at this very moment in time, right, we
see the Ukrainian state began to struggle with
similar such issues. And even this issue of
teachers looms large with claims by the
Ukrainian state that any teacher who had taught
under the Russian occupation would need to be
investigated. And so this comes up with a lot of
stories that we're reading in New York Times
and elsewhere right now. Recent reporting
show citizens, investigators, prosecutors already
struggling again with the shades gray about what
people did or did not do under the current Russian
occupation. So overall, mass-scale investigations
of all teachers is likely to large for a state
currently at war and perhaps even after the war,
and maybe not a dissimilar predicament to
the Soviets. So of course, we will note that
the Ukrainian state is very different now than
in Soviet Belarus after the war. So back to my
comment in the beginning, there's a lot to learn
from this book, not just about Belarus during
World War II, but about our current
moment, sadly, as well. So I have probably had
at least three more pages of comments, but that's
great for now. We can talk about that another time.
Franziska, is there anything you want to touch on?
I don't see any questions just yet, but if
people have questions, they should feel free to put
them in here, or we can just have a conversation.
I'd love to respond. Thank you
so much for these really rich comments.
There's so much in there. And I think,
you know, I feel like finishing this book,
in many ways I felt like looking back at
the journey, and how it all started. And then
as I mentioned earlier, sort of after
the defense, I kind of thought, okay,
this is it. And then one of my
committee members said to me: No,
no, no. Think of the dissertation as
a very good first draft. Which was,
well, how should I put it? It was kind of like, wait
a moment, a draft? I thought it was done. And then
I went back to the archives. I reconceptualized
the entire piece. I ended up adding, making the
war years and a lot more prominent, adding another
chapter than the entire outline fell apart. So
it's been a long process, and I do feel like at end,
I do hope I was able to put it all together
in a convincing way. But obviously,
there are many things that I think
could still be researched further. And the
programs in the summer of 1941, although by now,
as Jared mentioned, we have a lot of research and
micro studies on that, and it continues to be one
of these areas or one of these issues where more
especially micro studies could be conducted if,
of course and that's always the other question,
archives or sources allow that. And here we also
can really come to the limits of certain things.
So what I wanted to briefly respond to your
comment on, you know, how this fits in a larger
sort of trans-regional kind of perspective. I
mean, as I wrote in the book, it is possible
that from a quantitative perspective that more
non-Jewish and urban centers in
Belarus, where we see
higher levels of inter-ethnic integration
before the war, we're willing to help
Jewish friends, neighbors or others during the
war than, let's say, in western Belarus. And
I think Diana has shown this really convincingly
for the case of Bessarabia and Transnistria.
You know, Bessarabia, having been under Romanian
rule in inter-war years, and Transnistria part of
Soviet Ukraine, I couldn't find that in
in the case of Belarus. But that doesn't
mean that's not possible. I think it's
incredibly difficult to do it quantitatively
if the contrast isn't as clear as I think it
was in the case of Bessarabia and Transnistria. So
even if these quantitative differences did exist,
and I'd say that they are rather small, and so
that in itself sort of confirms the argument about
one of the similarities between East and West.
The question about the ambivalent status is a
really interesting one. I think there's several
sort of issues here. I mean, for one, we do see
differences between overall the state security
organs on the one hand and the prosecutor's office
on the other hand. So they are, and have from the
prosecutors will look more at the technicalities
of law, I'd say, than the state security organs,
certainly, who are not ambivalent about what they
are doing. And, you know, the prosecutor's office
is appealing to the higher levels in Moscow,
saying that the state security organs aren't properly
qualifying crimes. And I think that one is
mostly a technical issue, because
both of them are part of
an illegal justice system, and
representatives of that system. So I think
the conflict is really about the technicalities,
the applicability of law to cases and vice versa.
I think I read the ambivalence as
reflected in the larger sort of state
policy, and that ambivalence also mostly
comes down, on the one hand, as a result of this
tension between, on the one hand there were people
who have committed crimes and who helped the
Germans commit crimes and you want to prosecute
them. But on the other hand, as you're saying,
there are these examples of people who have
a nationalist leaflet at home and then
get the same sentence ten years of forced labor, as
somebody, for example, who could receive
the same sentence, who first worked for the German
police forces, then went over to the partisans
side and because of that had a sentence lowered
from 25 to 10 years. So that kind of tension
contributes to this ambivalence.
But it's also that general thing than
the case of policemen and town mayors seem relatively
easy to judge. But then this, as you mentioned
in your comment, also this big gray zone kind of
starts already with the village heads
who often are simply appointed by their communities
or who used to be in the eastern part of Belarus,
often the heads of the collective farms. And in
the resources, the party representant is often speaking
of people who had worked under the
Germans or for the Germans.
the problem is that there's never a consensus
established on what that actually means. Now, how
does that relate to this ambivalent state?
Does that still make sense for the 1960s trials?
My narrative sort of ends in the
more in detail. Although I know from your work,
I remember you give a paper once on
showing how these Cold War dimensions, right, and
dynamics of how the Soviet Union was often rightly
accusing the US of harboring war criminals
and publications then coming out of the Ukrainian
emigrant community and vice versa. And I think
that these trials might be a bit different in that
they result from different global
dynamics and are geared at not just
domestic audiences, more so even
at international audience, of maybe up to
certain degrees. Because they are
public trials, in these public trials,
the state shows much less ambivalence
also because the people that they chose to
put on trial are usually the ones, who were...
How should I put it? Even if it's clear to
somebody that the actual trial is not
a fair trial, so it was unable to establish the
individual's responsibility or the responsibility
of the individual on trial, it seems highly likely
that the knowing what we know now, for example,
that they did commit some of these things.
So if you put a local policeman on trial, or you
put a member of the command on trial, it
seems highly likely that indeed they committed the
things that the Soviet state accuses them, right?
And I think in these 1960s trials,
the public trials, I'd say that
there's probably much less ambivalence.
It would be interesting to know what actually
happens in secret in the 1960s, like the
prosecutions that don't sort of feature,
or don't have that kind of audience, and how
those secret prosecutions actually continue,
but that, unfortunately, I don't know. So that's
another kind of avenue for further research, I'd say.
I can leave it at that for the time being.
Oh, nationalism. The nationalism component.
I've seen it in some trials as well, that
as you're saying, it's easy then...
and in some cases it does overlap probably,
that sort of in reality, somebody
had these both goals, or both
identities during the war.
In a similar line of argument: Oh, he
is the nationalist or, you know, he's
the son of a so-called kulak. And so then you
kind of put people or the existing categories
of individuals, who are considered hostile to the
Soviet state, so it's an easy way of doing that.
And it's very much the kind of the language of the
state security organs that comes through here. But
I think because the army essentially,
I mean, officially disbanded in early 1945,
some units continue to fight. State
security organs call them Lithuanian partisans,
Ukrainian partisans, Polish partisans in western
Belarus. There are also other groups, simply men who
end up in the forest for various reasons, and who
also present a challenge to the return of Soviet power.
But the situation is really not comparable to
western Ukraine, where we have the civil war then
developing between the state security organs
and the Ukrainian nationalists. I think the
situation from the Soviet perspective, or the
perspective of Soviet state security organs,
is much more stable and they are able to bring
this under their control. So they also don't
necessarily need, for example, the nationalist
card to kind of arrest or prosecute people,
because I think they don't see the
same kind of threat coming.
It's interesting, kind of the utility argument that
it doesn't. I mean in the Ukrainian case,
it serves a purpose, because if you
are mass deporting entire family,
their villages for supporting
the nationalists, you might as try
to accomplish the same goal through
the prosecutions of individuals.
And it's serving ideological purpose of tying
Ukrainian nationalists to the Germans.
And yeah, it's something that is always there,
right? It's always kind of a question of what,
you know, how did you get your position in the
police or mayor, and what you know, which Ukrainian
nationalist put you in that position, even though
in majority of these cases, probably nobody.
Then if you are back at this kind of temporal
dimension, somebody might end up
in the UPA later in the war, but not have been
connected to the UPA earlier in the war.
Or maybe some people are connected to
the UPA early in the war and then later
in the war they break with the nationalists.
But through the gaze of the Soviet state,
no one cares about that either. And so,
you know, if you can get someone as a
collaborator and a nationalist, then it's kind
of a win-win from that perspective. But yeah,
that makes a lot of sense
in the Belarusian case,
it's not really needed, or it's not perceived
as a security, perhaps a security threat
as well, or contemporaneous security threat,
then maybe it doesn't factor there.
Not to draw too many sort of, you
know, historical comparisons, but
in this really weird, convoluted way, what we
see happening in Belarus now is an attempt
to... There's now a new memory law
in place in Belarus as of last year,
which carries a sort of the law on the genocide
of the Belarusian people, as it's called,
And denying that "a genocide of the
Belarusian people took
place during the Second World War", whatever that
means. And that's also basically unclear.
But it essentially means going against the
official narrative of the state can carry
a prison sentence of up to ten years. So this is
quite a strict memory law in place. But one of the
reasons it seems, why the government
has put this law in place, is because they are
looking for a way to discredit
the protest movement. And they're
trying to draw a connection between the protest
movement that uses the right-wing red flag today and
Belarusian nationalists during the Second World
War, who align themselves with Germans. Interesting.
What I've heard from colleagues
in Belarus is that, at the moment a lot
of these files that are pertaining to
World War II are closed to researchers,
so even to researchers in Belarus, and that the
prosecutor's office is going through them because
they, you know, again want to find
new evidence on Belarusian nationalists
who collaborated with the Germans during the war,
and then tie sort of the presence of this flag,
which was also used by them during
the World War II, and is used now by the protest
movement against Lukashenko, bring that together in
this grander narrative of, if you are protesting
Lukashenko today, you are using the same
symbol, and so clearly you are a fascist.
And so here we have in some ways parallels then
to, you know, this kind of fascist rhetoric
which is used by Putin's government in the war
against Ukraine and the ways in which the images
of World War II are being utilized
to further present political projects.
Flags are a big part of that, too, the red
and black Ukrainian nationalist flag.
That's fascinating, especially in a discussion
of diaspora as well, of the famous
group of Belarusian collaborators, who
made their way to places like New Jersey and
New York after the war, if they got around
to roping them into this storyline yet.
That's a good question. I always felt like the
Ukrainian case has got more attention because
maybe they were more vocal, or more also larger
simply than the Belarusian community.
There are, I mean, you know, to the extent that
it was possible that you could publish books in
Belarus, there were also books that were quite,
you know, downplaying people's entanglements
or complicity with the Germans from
Belarusian nationalists today.
My sense is that there again,
maybe because of resources,
maybe the Belarusian community isn't quite
as organized, the emigrant community, it's
not quite as powerful. It doesn't really
resonate that much in Belarus today.
Even though there's stuff, there's
material from the Cold War, too.
I mean, they go back to the trials,
right, of those kind of robing in this larger
narrative of demonizing diaspora, demonizing
certain groups during the war, and kind of pulling
all these strings at once, and then see again,
pulling the strings in the last couple of decades
as well. Yes, absolutely. So I think these
trials, which, you know, take place in the
Baltic republics as well, obviously in
Belarus and in Ukraine, they often then make
that connection between often the absentia trials
of people who had left in 1944 with the Germans
and whatever they ended up in the US or
in the UK, and then are being put on trials in
absentia or also in person trials. But then using
these trials also to highlight that and correctly
so how the west German authorities, for example,
failed to prosecute, or the Americans, or the UK.
United Kingdom were turning a blind eye from
to who they had accepted as displaced persons.
That's a fascinating topic really, to look
at, what audiences these trials are tailored at,
because again, there are domestic audiences and
very local audiences, but also these sort of
more global audience. And I think
that the way you framed that,
I would put that as the number
one point. And also your
point too about in absentia trials. But yes,
who gets chosen is something I've been
interested in as well about. In 1976, you can
pick from dozens of people who are collaborators,
have now since returned from the gulags
and you're going to effectively retrial,
these people were always retried. You're going
to retry someone. Who you are choosing
the retry? So the official word, the first page
in these cases is that we found new evidence,
which was, of course, absurd, but also true
in some ways that we found that, you know,
they had killed another hundred people, even
though we just tried them for killing 5,000 people,
you know, 20 years ago. And there was this
other massacre we didn't realize. And so this
is a reason to restart a year-long
two-year-long investigation. But I think,
you know, thinking regionally of cases in
Latvia, Ukraine or Belarus, of, you know,
what individuals are chosen, who you
know, what puts that in motion.
To your point as well. I mean, it
does seem very choreographed, right?
Both in terms of how intense they are,
domestic play, and internationally.
My guess right now would be international more
than domestic because everyone's probably seen
this act by now domestically, but yeah, something
for future comparison and future research.
If there are no questions in the
chat. I mean I do think that especially
these 1960s trials can be super
interesting, because I don't think we really
have a good sense of differences within the
liberal justice, and differences within illiberal
contrasts. So there's quite a lot of sophisticated
literature, you know, going back to Judith Shklar
about all the flaws in trials that were conducted
by the Western allies and more generally, we know
that this moment of post-Cold War justice is
flawed across the board, just in terms of sort
of like from a strictly legal perspective, in terms
of the fairness of these trials, and that a lot of
the trials that the Western allies conducted also
didn't often live up to the legal standards
that they sought to uphold at home. But I think we
don't really have a good sense
of illiberal trials. You know, in the
literature on the theory of a war crimes
trials or international criminal law, there's
often the notion of Soviet show trials
invoked of the 1930s but that's with fabricated
evidence. And what you make of trials that were
not fair, but where those who are standing on trial
might have high probability and actually did commit
these acts. And so I think what the 1960s trials
with a close analysis could also contribute to,
is to give us a more refined understanding of
differences within the liberal justice and types
of trials where you have the illegal framework but
you have the actual acts. And then the question
is, do these trials fulfill the criteria to
actually be able to link the individual? And then
there's also the difference between like this very
technical legal perspective and maybe our later
perspective as historians, right? And the question
whether we would use different kinds of evidence
or you could come to reach a conclusion that
like from a strictly legal point of view, that
individual's responsibility hasn't been proven, but
from a historical point of view, when we bring
together all these different points of evidence,
testimonies, memoirs, we can see,
high likelihood or almost certainty that
yes, we do. So that would be, yeah, so much
to research, and so many fascinating new
projects and trials. Yeah, and I agree with
you especially on that point and people.
There's certainly a flavor of show trials in
all of these later trials. But we have to... that's
certainly part of the story. But we kind of need
to drill down and we can all agree that there
is an a illiberal legal system. If someone's not
coming to the debate, we implied by that. But that
is a base foundation. There's probably
a problem. But is it a liberal legal system?
There's certainly echoes of Soviet
legality from prior to the war. But there's
much more going on there. And your book
helps to engage with this, and many of your articles
engage with these issues. So yes, more
to discuss. So should we wrap it up there then,
Liana? We don't have time, unfortunately. But thank you
for a very interesting and thought-provoking
discussion. And thank you, Franziska, for all your
incredible work and as such fine-grained and nuanced
analysis. And also thank you for bringing in, you
know, contingency and ambivalence in all of this,
and giving them analytical weight. Hope to see
more of your work in the future, and yours, Jared, as
well. Thank you, everyone. We're going to
wrap it up here. Thank you so much.