******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
On 6/11/18 12:39 PM, A.R. G wrote:
I'm curious why the USSR which prided itself on fighting the Nazis would try to suppress a film portraying the genocide of Jews or building a narrative of Soviet/Russian sympathy with the victims of Nazism. What was the logic of this? Were they trying to defend themselves from accusations that the USSR was part of a Jewish plot? And even if that were the case, wasn't that primarily a scare tactic used /outside/ of the USSR? What was the rationale behind the USSR suppressing such a film /within/ the USSR? In short, what was the logic of anti-Semitism where it was deployed by the Soviets?
Keep in mind that the film was based on a short story by Vasily Grossman. Wikipedia mentions:
Grossman participated in the assembly of the Black Book, a project of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to document the crimes of the Holocaust. The post-war suppression of the Black Book by the Soviet state shook him to the core, and he began to question his own loyal support of the Soviet regime. First the censors ordered changes in the text to conceal the specifically anti-Jewish character of the atrocities and to downplay the role of Ukrainians who worked with the Nazis as police. Then, in 1948, the Soviet edition of the book was scrapped completely. The poet Semyon Lipkin, Grossman's friend, believed it was Joseph Stalin's post-war antisemitic campaign that cracked Grossman's belief in the Soviet system:
In 1946... I met some close friends, an Ingush and a Balkar, whose families had been deported to Kazakhstan during the war. I told Grossman and he said: "Maybe it was necessary for military reasons." I said: "...Would you say that if they did it to the Jews?" He said that could never happen. Some years later, a virulent article against cosmopolitanism appeared in Pravda. Grossman sent me a note saying I had been right after all. For years Grossman didn't feel very Jewish. The campaign against cosmopolitanism reawoke his Jewishness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Grossman _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
