Katrin Boeckh Stalinismus in der Ukraine. Die Rekonstruktion des sowjetischen Systems nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Harrassowitz Verlag Wiesbaden 2007. 605 S., 41 Tab., 2 Ktn. = Veröffentlichungen des Osteuropa-Instituts München, Reihe Geschichte, 71.
With this Habilitationsschrift, Katrin Boeckh aims to show how Stalinism, understood as the Soviet regime at the time of Stalin’s supremacy, re-established itself in a large region of the Soviet Union that had been under German and Romanian occupation during the Second World War. After three chapters covering 135 pages about Soviet Ukraine before and during that war, the core of the book begins: five chapters covering 400 pages. They discuss Communist party members and state officials; Soviet propaganda; repatriated Ukrainians and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA); “national minorities” (Poles, Jews, and Germans – not Russians); and various social groups.
The chapter about the Communist Party and the state bureaucracy describes the purge that began in 1944, and argues convincingly that even though there were no show trials, its primary goal was intimidation (Terror) and not revenge for collaboration with other states. As before the war, Soviet propaganda reached most people not via the radio but through newspapers. Boeckh describes how, in a notable exception to the trend in the Soviet Union of that time, the Russian language received less support in western Ukraine than Ukrainian. Here she also discusses the republican commission on Nazi war crimes.
About a third of all Soviet forced laborers in the Reich had been Ukrainian. Deemed traitors by officials and many fellow-citizens, most nevertheless could return to their former homes, where they were supposed to erase their alleged shame through work for the state. In this context, in a baffling error, Boeckh even mentions the alleged proposal by NKVD chief Beria of the 22nd of June 1944 to deport all Ukrainians who had lived under the Germans (p. 293). (The proposal had no chance of being accepted, she adds.) But the proposal was in a document that has been known to be a forgery as early as 1992 (See E. N. Moskal’ Seiateli vrazhdy [Po povodu odnoi provokatsii “Literaturnoi Ukrainy”], in: Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal (1992) No. 4–5, pp. 38–40).
The reports of republican party leader Khrushchev and his subordinates consistently underestimated the strength of the UPA, even though that group ultimately killed, between 1944 and 1955, at least 30,000 civilians and military men. In giving the regions (oblast’) targets and deadlines for the fight against the UPA, Boeckh argues, the republican Communist Party generally handled that threat as it handled the economy. All the same, the Soviet regime arrested, killed, or deported from western Ukraine about half a million people, against the backdrop of amnesty offers made at least six times. One aspect that is missing in this otherwise thorough discussion is the role of the Red Army, described in recent work by the Kiev historian Vladyslav Hrynevych.
The chapter on “national minorities” describes the forced migrations from 1944 across the new state border with Poland and Czechoslovakia and points out that the goal was not, for instance, the total removal of all Poles from Ukraine. (By the fall of 1947, over 221,000 Poles had remained in Soviet Ukraine and a surprisingly large number, nearly 80,000, were still in western Ukraine.) As for the Jews, the goal was to “remove them from public display as a national and religious minority” (p. 416). The Soviet regime did not allow them any special place in the commemorations of victims of the Nazis. Had it done so, then, as Boeckh intriguingly assures us, the Soviet anti-Jewish campaign that began in 1948 “would have met with misunderstanding or even resistance” (p. 405).
The last major chapter, about social groups, discusses women, war orphans, and religious organizations. It conforms to the standard view that Moscow subordinated social policy to economic affairs. Boeckh seems to conclude that the Soviet regime mostly failed in its attempt to assimilate western Ukrainian women (p. 451). Then follows a gripping description of homeless children and the attempts to handle them. The long and interesting discussion of religious communities that rounds off this chapter shows that persecution befell all of them, but the methods varied.
The book concludes that in post-war Ukraine, the Stalinist state demonstrated its resilience and achieved this feat in part because of its remarkably flexible approach. In this large Soviet republic, Stalinism was violent but not always, it oppressed less entire groups (such as Ukrainians) than specific individuals, and it attempted to encourage the people it held in near-slavery. Based on the information provided in this book, it is tempting to agree; but I wonder if the conclusion would survive a detailed analysis of the fate of the peasants, who are neglected, and in particular the great famine of 1946–47, which Boeckh merely calls a disaster that Stalin could see coming (p. 119).
All the main works are mentioned in this book, if sometimes in passing, as with Amir Weiner’s important monograph “Making Sense of War” (p. 30). Boeckh even finds time to argue with Soviet Ukrainian historians (pp. 140, 166 n. 97, 175, 361). I suspect that non-specialist readers will shy away from this book, which looks very clearly like a dissertation. Chapters have subsections such as “5.2.1.2”; there are no photographs; the index reveals only pages with the most important names and places; and while there is a steady flow of references to Soviet newspapers and archives in cities such as Kiev, Odessa, Lviv, Kharkiv, Moscow, and Berlin, eyewitness accounts are virtually absent, apparently for no other reason than that Boeckh considers them less useful (p. 45). This book is intended for specialists who are looking for a fact-filled discussion of Ukraine during Stalin’s final years and for ideas for further reading, and it succeeds in this aim.
Karel C. Berkhoff, Amsterdam
Zitierweise: Karel Berkhoff über: Katrin Boeckh Stalinismus in der Ukraine. Die Rekonstruktion des sowjetischen Systems nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Harrassowitz Verlag Wiesbaden 2007. 605 S., 41 Tab., 2 Ktn. = Veröffentlichungen des Osteuropa-Instituts München, Reihe Geschichte, 71. ISBN: 978-3-447-05538-3 , in: http://www.dokumente.ios-regensburg.de/JGO/Rez/Berkhoff_Boeckh_Stalinismus_in_der_Ukraine.html (Datum des Seitenbesuchs)