Snapshots in TimeIdentity Formation, Repression, and State-Building in the Soviet 1930s from Ukraine to the Far East
On 3 or 4 April 1938, Maksim Semyonovich Lozovskii woke up in the Kirov prison hospital. He had a broken femur in his right leg, crushed bones in his left leg and foot, and a crushed elbow joint in his right arm. In addition, he had a severe concussion and no memory of how he had arrived there. In the coming days and months, he eventually pieced together what happened. Lozovskii, a Jewish man and cousin by marriage of the oblast party committee (obkom) first secretary Abram Stoliar, had been Kirov's first chairman of the city executive committee (gorispolkom) and an obkom member. He had been tasked with transforming Kirov from a small provincial city into a new regional capital, and his efforts are still visible in the cityscape today. He was arrested on 27 March 1938 and taken before the deputy head of the Regional Administration of the People's Commissariat [End Page 455] of Internal Affairs (UNKVD) in Kirov, Boris Pavlovich Bol´shemennikov, who laughed at him when Lozovskii said his arrest had to be a mistake. Bol´shemennikov then rather menacingly informed him that here he was not a member of the obkom (i.e., he had no power), and he was not leaving.
Lozovskii reported that he was then locked in a dark basement room for a while before being brought for questioning; there, he was subjected to sleep deprivation, verbal abuse, and the use of stress positions and was beaten with a ruler. He was also informed that if he did not confess, the interrogators would arrest his wife.1 On 1 or 2 April, he wrote out a confession dictated by one of the interrogators. When Bol´shemennikov was shown the confession, he tore it up and told Lozovskii he would be taken downstairs.
What happened next is unclear, but Lozovskii reported that he remembered hallucinating from lack of sleep (he had been beaten and sleep-deprived for at least six days at this point). Lozovskii remembered thinking he was talking to his family and then got it in his mind that he was not on Soviet territory but with the enemy because of how he was being treated. So, it is likely he freaked out and jumped out the second-story window. However, one of the interrogators claimed in his incident report that Lozovskii hit him before going out the window, and I think it is not outside the realm of possibilities that the interrogator "helped" Lozovskii out the window. Either way, Lozovskii was severely injured. He was in a cast for two months, and because of substandard care at the prison hospital (which the doctor apologized for), his left leg was shortened by 3.5 centimeters, and he had to wear an orthopedic insert to walk after this incident.2 The charges against Lozovskii were dropped on 13 January 1940, and he was released from custody.3 He had his party membership restored in February 1940 and left Kirov for Leningrad. When the war broke out, despite his ailments, he volunteered for the army; he died on the Leningrad front in September 1942.4
Lozovskii's personal story is one of contradictions, a formerly oppressed minority raised into a position of power by the party, directly involved in [End Page 456] the transformation of a small backwater city into a more industrialized regional capital, then accused and abused by fellow party members that he had worked with closely (Bol´shemennikov, who was also Jewish, was a fellow obkom member, for example), before being freed by judicial review and accepted back into the party. Despite the horrors he had faced during repression, he was willing to rejoin the party and give his life defending the Soviet state against fascism.
As illustrated in Lozovskii's biography, the interwar period was a tumultuous time within the Soviet Union. The party and state faced challenges on how to construct a socialist state that served to create a Soviet identity while promoting linguistic and cultural identities for national minorities, how to develop agriculture and industry, how to build socialism in one country, and how to address perceived internal threats among native and foreign ethnic minorities, to mention the most obvious. Eventually, a patchwork of sometimes contradictory policies emerged that set about creating autonomous regions for ethnic minority groups, promoting minority languages, pushing for collectivization and rapid industrialization, which triggered mass migrations of people across the Soviet Union. The state would try to control and police this chaos via passportization as well as calls for increased vigilance to rein in and stamp out nationalist tendencies, Trotskyism, and later "enemies of the people."
This review essay seeks to explore some of these contradictory currents in Soviet state-building by looking at state-building efforts, both negative and positive, in three distinctly different parts of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)—Ukraine, the Kirov region in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), and the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR) in the Far East—utilizing both micro-historical and transnational studies approaches. While not explicitly the focus of all three books, Soviet Jewish citizens' various roles as organizers, party members, victims, and repressors serve to guide us through these books and demonstrate how individuals could perform various roles in interwar state-building efforts.
Much has been written about the leaders responsible for and the causes and consequences of repression. In broad terms, most existing works focus on the victims or agents of repression, with Stalin and the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU)/People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) leadership usually being the primary focus. Even after the opening of Soviet-era archives, this was the dominant approach for a long time.5 In recent years, some historians have begun to focus on those lower-level [End Page 457] state security workers who implemented repressive measures, carried out interrogations, and who, on occasion, fell victim to repression themselves. Among the most recent works is the edited volume, The Secret Police and the Soviet System: New Archival Investigations, which draws largely on the opening of non-Russian KGB archives, notably in Ukraine after 2015. It covers materials from the 1930s through the period when Andropov headed the organization and looks at aspects of state security forces' activities, ranging from mass repression to experimentation with photography and criminal identification to issues of human rights.6
Another is Oleg Khlevniuk's recent article that explores how informal patronage networks among NKVD officers enabled some to resist repressive pressure from above. He analyzes the situation of convicted Chekists in labor camps, mechanisms for their early release, and ways that they sought to restore their social status.7 Timothy Blauvelt takes a regional approach; drawing on Georgian archival sources, he examines conflicts among the various levels of state security organizations (Georgian, Transcaucasian, and USSR) over institutional interests and how these competed with those of individual actors, leading to the formation of informal patronage networks or "clans," which helped their members advance their careers and provided mutual protection, within the state security organs.8
________
Lynne Viola and Marc Junge's edited volume Laboratories of Terror: The Final Act of Stalin's Great Purge in Soviet Ukraine adds to this scholarship and builds on the previous work of its editors.9 This volume is a collection of seven micro-historical case studies that examine the arrests and trials of various state security workers who had implemented various repressive [End Page 458] campaigns in 1937–38 in different parts of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The introduction provides key historical background to understanding these micro-histories, explaining mass operations under NKVD Order 00447, the "kulak" operation, and the nationalities operation, all of which targeted large swaths of ordinary citizens and which relied primarily on extrajudicial bodies such as troikas to summarily pass judgment on the accused. It also provides their perspective as to why the top Soviet and party leadership decided to end repression and how Stalin's renunciation of violations of socialist legality destroyed important patronage networks within the NKVD and paved the way for the arrests of NKVD leaders and personnel. Interestingly enough, in the introduction Viola and Junge do not discuss the repression of the communist district and regional leadership, who were usually processed through judicial organs such as military or regional courts, and which was a repression campaign distinct from the ones mentioned above. This oversight is especially odd given that these communists were frequently the star witnesses against the state security workers who had abused them.
Some chapters are excellent. Chapter 2, by Andrei Savin and Aleksei Tepliakov, focuses on the interrelationships between the Communist Party, state security police, and state authorities. Savin and Tepliakov concentrate on how the balance of power swung in favor of the state security forces as repression ramped up and how the pendulum swung back in favor of the party and state authorities in 1938 and set the stage for the Beria amnesty and the 17 November 1938 directive that halted the mass operations. They also make clear the different yet overlapping repressions (mass operation 00447, the kulak operation, the nationalities operations, and repression aimed at the communist leadership of Odessa oblast and its constituent districts) and how victims of the first three were quickly funneled through extrajudicial organs and, if they survived, knew little about their case, making them poor witnesses.
As a result, when investigations into UNKVD workers' misconduct began, it was the communist survivors—who usually went through judicial organs, spent months in detention, were well versed in the details of their investigation, and had sufficient status, connections, and clout to protest their convictions—who became the star witnesses. The communist survivors testified that the UNKVD workers had lost sight of their place in the hierarchy of Soviet power and acted as if they were above the formal trappings of legality and the party itself. The resulting investigations focused on the restoration of proper hierarchy and socialist legality. The chapter, [End Page 459] which also highlights the ultimately unsuccessful strategies the UNKVD workers used to defend themselves, adds greatly to the readers' understanding of repression and the subsequent backlash against its perpetrators by highlighting the key role played by the communist victims and the role that the imbalance between the party and state security forces played in driving the arrests and trials of leaders of the Odessa oblast UNKVD—all of whom, save one, were executed.
Chapter 7, by Jeffery J. Rossman, is exceptionally well written and raises a fundamental question for understanding repression: "What motivated the rank-and-file NKVD officers to commit gross violations of socialist legality, such as fabricating cases, abusing suspects and coercing witnesses into giving false testimony" during the 1937–38 repression? To answer this question, Rossman studies the case of Georgii Kocherginskii, who served as head of the NKVD Transportation Department of the Northern Donetsk Railway from November 1937 to August 1938. Rossman concludes that Kocherginskii, who was from a suspect background, having been born in Latvia to a Jewish father and a German/Latvian mother and still having family in Riga, was zealous to prove himself to superiors. He found protection in patronage networks of other Jewish NKVD workers who occupied critical leadership positions. Reliance on these patronage networks also instilled a fear of failure in Kocherginskii that drove his campaign to unmask enemies, a perspective that arose from a deep-rooted belief that class enemies infiltrated the Soviet Union and his jurisdiction. Looking at Kocherginskii's actions, Rossman illustrates how situational factors drove his decisions to violate socialist legality and how he motivated his subordinates in a similar fashion, heaping praise on those who fulfilled impossible quotas and terrorizing those who did not. Rossman's chapter allows the reader to understand some of the psychological motivations behind the perpetrators of repression, which are often notoriously difficult to uncover and remain underexamined in the historiography because of the inaccessibility of appropriate sources.
Other chapters—such as chapters 1, 4, and 6, by Valeriy Vasylyev and Roman Podkur, Vadym Zolotar´ov, and Serhii Kokin—cover important protagonists but lack a strong central thesis and critical analysis of the presented materials and fail to address or make connections to broader historiography on repression. As a result, the reader is not clear what conclusions can be drawn from such materials (other than the chapters' subjects being deeply unpleasant people) and how this research ties into or illuminates a new facet of the broader study of repression in the USSR. Chapters 4 [End Page 460] and 6, which examine David Aronovich Pertsov, who led the Kharkov and Odessa NKVD and the NKVD in Zhitomyr, respectively, do have a strong narrative structure and tell an easy-to-follow and richly detailed historical narrative. But without the broader context provided by historiography and analysis of the presented materials, these chapters present more as kraevedenie (local narrative history), leaving the reader unsure as to why this story is important or how representative it is of broader trends.
Despite its shortcomings, this compendium offers scholars new ways to ponder the fate of those who carried out mass repression in the USSR based on previously unstudied materials in the Ukrainian archives. As such, it makes an important contribution to historiography on the subject.
________
Pavel Chemodanov's Viatskii Interbellum also uses micro-historical analysis to provide a deeper understanding of key events in the 1920s and 1930s. This book comprises nineteen short chapters that provide a snapshot of key historical events and figures within Viatskaia guberniia (later the Kirov region, which was formed in 1934 as a krai and then became an oblast in 1936). The author, a former employee of the Archive of Social and Political History of the Kirov Region (GASPI KO, the former party archive) and a former rare books librarian at the Regional Research Library named after A. I. Gertsen (Alexander Herzen) in Kirov, draws on his rich knowledge of local archival and library holdings to highlight thought-provoking case studies based on never before published materials. He also includes many photographs and scans of original documents, which makes this tome visually very engaging. This work covers the Bolsheviks' rise to power at the end of 1917, despite them being a small minority party in Viatka, the development of agriculture, and intra-union economic ties up through World War II, as well as treatments of notable figures like the architect Ivan Charushin, who had been a Constitutional-Democrat (Kadet) but also ended up designing key buildings in Kirov for the Bolsheviks such as the Central Hotel and Dom chekistov, which housed the NKVD leadership and UGB (Administration for State Security) employees.
Of particular interest are the five case study chapters on repression, as they add to our larger understanding of the phenomenon within the USSR and provide a glimpse at how it was carried out within a largely rural, provincial area in the RSFSR. This provides an important counterpoint to much of the abovementioned scholarship, which explores repression [End Page 461] in non-Russian union republics. The first case study focuses on the priest Veniamin Liapidovskii, who was sentenced to death by the Special Troika of the plenipotentiary representative (polnomochnyi predstavitel´) of the OGPU of Nizhgorodskii krai (of which Viatskaia guberniia was part from 1929 to 1934) on 15 May 1930. Chemodanov primarily utilized materials from Liapidovskii's judicial-investigative case file, which is kept in a special repository for repression victims' case materials in GASPI KO to write this chapter. I have accessed these materials for my research, and they are a treasure trove of information, particularly as the central NKVD archives are not open to researchers in Russia.
Liapidovskii was arrested on charges of agitating against grain procurement, distributing illegal religious literature, and creating an anti-Soviet group to sabotage agricultural work in Shurminskii and Urzhumskii raions. Liapidovskii denied the charges against him during interrogation, even noting he had turned over seventy-five poods of grain to the state in 1929. But like many of those who went through the troikas, he was not subject to lengthy interrogation. He was arrested on 12 March 1930, and the final indictment against him was sent to the troika on 5 April 1930. Chemodanov notes that the charges against him were largely the invention of the investigators and demonstrates that political repression was often not completely under the control of the center but rather dictated by local concerns. Additionally, this chapter provides an interesting glimpse of repression in the early 1930s rather than the more widely studied 1937–38 period. In another chapter, titled "Khroniki Bol´shogo Terrora: Delo 'Viatskogo filiala IPTs (Istinno-Pravoslavnaia Tserkov´)" (Chronicles of the Great Terror: The Case of the Viatskii Branch of the True Orthodox Church), Chemodanov discusses the fate of Orthodox Church leaders in Kirov in 1937–38, which follows a rather predictable path to a tragic outcome.
Another case study ("Falyonki-Kharbin: Sud´ba emigranta Ivana Miklina" [Falyonki-Kharbin: The Fate of Emigrant Ivan Miklin]) examines the fate of Ivan Artem´ovich Miklin, who was born in Falyonki in the future Kirov region and migrated to Harbin to avoid the conflict of the Civil War. He returned to the Soviet Union in 1933 and was arrested and executed as a Japanese spy in 1938. In this chapter, Chemodanov explores the reasons many Russians fled to Manchuria, how the Japanese invasion in 1931 affected their decisions to return home, and how such immigrants were categorized as spies during repression in the late 1930s.
The last two case studies focus on the fates of two Jewish regional party leaders, who had moved to Kirov when the region was organized at the end [End Page 462] of 1934. The first, "Organizator i zhertva: Zhizn´ i gibel´ Abrama Stoliara" (Organizer and Victim: The Life and Death of Abram Stoliar), focuses on the life and death of Kirov's first kraikom (kraevoi komitet)/obkom first secretary Abram Iakovlevich Stoliar, a Jewish man who had been born in Zabaikal´skaia oblast. Like many of his cohorts, Stoliar joined the party shortly after the revolution and rose steadily through the ranks.
Stoliar was given free rein to staff the party organs of the newly formed Kirov region when he was appointed as kraikom first secretary in December 1934. Stoliar and his "family circle" (which included family members; the gorkispolkom chairman Lozovskii was his cousin-in-law) were responsible for the development of the newly renamed Kirov city into a regional capital thanks to construction projects like the Drama Theater, the Central Hotel, Dom chekistov, the House of Soviets, and a great number of housing blocks for the oblast elite and barracks for workers. Chemodanov explores how Stoliar shaped Kirov before being transferred to Sverdlovsk in 1937. It was in Sverdlovsk that his fate was sealed, as was that of the more than ten people Stoliar had brought with him from Kirov. Among them were Boris Zakharevich Berman, the former first secretary of the Udmurt republican party committee (reskom) (Kirov administered Udmurtiia until December 1936) and obkom third secretary, the Kirov gorkom first secretary Aleksei Petrovich Grachyov, as well as Stoliar's personal secretary and Kirov native, Grigorii Ivanovich Ziablitsev.
All of these men were arrested on suspicion of being part of a Right anti-Soviet organization plotting to overthrow the Soviet state; they were all executed. Chemodanov examines the specific charges against Stoliar and how his life, like that of so many party functionaries in the 1930s, was one where both their successes and demise were tied tightly to their role as a party member.
The last case study ("Ot docheri portnogo do 'vraga naroda': Piat´ zhiznei Mizy Borevoi" [From Tailor's Daughter to "Enemy of the People": The Five Lives of Miza Boreva]) focuses on Miza Isaevna Boreva (figs. 1–2), a Jewish woman from Odessa who worked as the head of the cultural enlightenment department for the Kirov obkom from 1936 to 1939 (her official employment record lists it as 1939, even though she was arrested in 1938, because she was acquitted).
Chemodanov notes that, like Stoliar, Boreva rose from humble beginnings through the party. She had started her working life as an apprentice hatmaker and then joined the Red Guards in 1918 in a support role, being forced to evacuate from Odessa following the German attack in March [End Page 463]
Miza Boreva in 1936
Source: GASPI KO f. P-1290, op. 17, d. 391, l. 3.
1918 and joining a regiment that saw combat in both Crimea and the Caucasus. She studied briefly at the Institute of Red Professors in 1923, and after giving birth to a child, she finally finished her studies in 1931. She was working in Kazakhstan in 1934 but requested a transfer, which resulted in her becoming the first secretary of the Slobodskoi raikom in the Kirov region before Stoliar appointed her to obkom work in 1936. She was arrested on 29 April 1938 on article 58 charges as an alleged member of the same Right anti-Soviet organization that Stoliar allegedly headed. While in prison, she was subject to lengthy interrogations, including brutal beating [End Page 464]
Miza Boreva after her arrest in 1938
Source: GASPI KO f. P-6799, op. 1. d. SU-370, t. 1, l. 156.
by NKVD interrogators Semyon Grigorievich Pavlovskii (fig. 3) and Ivan Matveevich Romanov, that resulted in the loss of her unborn child.
While not mentioned by name in Chemodanov's monograph, Pavlovskii and Romanov deserve some attention. Although both were interrogators, they do not fit neatly into a single category and had complicated professional and personal lives.
Pavlovskii was born into a Jewish family in the village of Novo-Dubel´n in Rizhskoi (Riga) guberniia in 1906, but in 1907 or 1908 his family moved back to the city of Bobruisk, Mogilev oblast (Belarus; still within the Pale of Settlement). Later, he and his sister moved to Moscow. At the beginning of 1934, the Moscow party committee sent Pavlovskii to work in the NKVD organs. He started off working as an upolnomochennyi (agent) for [End Page 465]
Semyon Grigorievich Pavlovskii
Source: GASPI KO f. P-1290, op. 17, d. 3552, l. 3.
[End Page 466] the Leninskii district department of the NKVD in Moscow city, and then in December 1934 he was transferred to work as an upolnomochennyi and then a criminal investigator for the UNKVD of Moscow oblast.
At the beginning of 1937, he was promoted to criminal investigator in the Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB) NKVD USSR system and then deputy head of a section for GUGB NKVD USSR. He was consistently promoted while working in the Moscow and then USSR NKVD organizations and officially recognized for his good work, being awarded the "Badge of Honor" (Znak pocheta) in July 1937 by the Central Executive Committee (TsIK) USSR. He did have a slight mishap with his party card in February 1938. He accidentally burned up his party card in the incinerator when he was disposing of some archival materials, which earned him a strict party reprimand from the party committee of the GUGB and may have also been why he was exiled to Kirov.
After his transfer to Kirov in August 1938, he worked as a department head for the UNKVD. While working there, some of his coworkers criticized his abusive interrogation methods, which was unusual and likely means Pavlovskii's interrogation methods were exceptionally brutal. For example, on 11 January 1939, when discussing their former boss Viktor Ivanovich Iurevich's expulsion as an enemy of the people, Nikolai Fyodorovich Chirikov stated that he had complained about illegal arrests and the administration's inhumane relations with workers. He noted that many obkom workers (such as Boreva) had been arrested illegally and then subsequently freed and noted it was related to the interrogation methods used. He claimed that there were cases of arrested people being beaten and put on the "conveyor" and claimed that the head of the Fourth Department, Pavlovskii, used such methods. Pavlovskii left Kirov in the second half of 1939 but left an indelible impact on the lives of those people he had interrogated.10
Ivan Matveevich Romanov was born in 1897 in the village of Sergievskoe into a worker's family at the Kolomenskii factory in Moscow [End Page 467] oblast. From 1931 through 1937 Romanov worked as an upolnomochennyi for the Secret-Political Department (SPO) OGPU/GUGB NKVD USSR. He enjoyed at least some professional success. In 1933, Ivan was awarded a medal and a watch from the OGPU for operational/undercover fieldwork. From 1937 through 1939, Romanov worked in Kirov, first as the assistant head of the Fourth Department and then the interim assistant head of the Second Department of the UNKVD. However, Ivan's life was beset with tragedy. It appears there was a family history of mental illness. One of his brothers committed suicide in Petrograd in 1915 for reasons that are unclear. Ivan was also hospitalized for psychiatric problems in April 1922. He fell in love, got married, and started his own household in 1923. His wife was named Aleksandra Georgievna Romanova, and they had a daughter named Valentina. Aleksandra worked until September 1934 as a metal miller at the Moscow-Belgorod-Baltic railway repair plant. However, tragedy struck at the end of 1934. Aleksandra was struck by a car. It took her four months to die. Ivan was left to raise his daughter as a single father. It is possible this personal tragedy, combined with mental health issues, caused him to become the sadistic interrogator the arrestees in Kirov knew him as.11
Studies of investigators rarely look at the human/domestic side of their lives, which is a facet I am exploring in my ongoing research. This human aspect, particularly as a loving husband and father in Romanov's case, provides a sharp contrast to the gut-wrenching testimony I uncovered that Boreva gave to the circuit session of the Military Tribunal of the Ural Military Oblast (UralVO) about her treatment at the hands of her interrogators. Such dichotomies in behavior raise difficult questions about how and why these men could carry out such actions.
Boreva told the court that for four months she had told the truth, that she was not part of any anti-Soviet group, but she was ignored. [End Page 468]
In response, I heard only obscenities from the investigator and one question: "Who recruited you?" I was arrested while pregnant, and when they put me in solitary confinement, I started to "freak out." Then I was transferred to a cell for eight where ten people were placed. I was lying in an unhealthy environment, on bunks near the stove, and I had a premature birth. The child was born alive, but for some reason he was later found [dead] in the restroom. [It is unclear if she killed the baby, the interrogators did, or if it died and was dumped.] Even a woman who was not arrested would have difficulty surviving this and may have been mentally disturbed and I, still sick, was called in for questioning.
I'm telling the court honestly now. I was beaten and held out, but I couldn't resist for long. I was shocked. I was called to Romanov. The room was shared. I heard a man being beaten in the next room. I thought, "it's nothing, they are beating an enemy," but I was shaking. Romanov jumped at me and shouted, "We'll arrange this for you tomorrow too." I felt like I was going crazy. I sat up all night and thought, "since I worked with Stoliar and others, that means I'm an enemy." The next day, Pavlovskii came running into the room and attacked me with obscene language. Without thinking, I said that I would write a statement. They let me go. Then they again called Pavlovskii for interrogation.
It may not be clear to the court what I experienced. My ears were buzzing [the investigators were telling her] that Stoliar had recruited me. The investigators dictated all the testimony to me. I twisted the facts about existing shortcomings in [my and the obkom's] work. I didn't know what to write, who I recruited into the right-wing organization. I just wrote down the names of all my friends. I began to write against those who wrote statements against me. This was a result of the fact that I was in solitary confinement, and my condition was serious. Even now, I've been losing blood for three months now. I'm ill.
I've been in prison for a year. Once, I asked to see the head of the NKVD, [Ivan Alekseevich] Iudin [technically he was deputy chief], and told him that I couldn't lie anymore. He did not accept my refusal to testify. He started scolding me. But I did not confirm the testimony or give any new testimony. I won't lie anymore.
She then told the court that she had asked the procurator Salmin, and NKVD employees Iudin, Il´ia Stepanovich Rogozhnikov, and Pavlovskii to be allowed to write to the Central Committee and Stalin. They told her such a bastard (svoloch´) could not write to Stalin.
Boreva then testified that she was taken into another room where she could hear another prisoner being abused. She stated: "It would be better if they had beaten me than to show another person being beaten. A man was beaten with whips. [Viktor Filippovich] Falaleev and Romanov were there. [End Page 469] I didn't see the man being beaten; I recognized from his voice that it was probably Zholudov.12 I couldn't sit still."13
After losing her child and enduring such treatment, Boreva's case was eventually closed by the UNKVD for lack of evidence on 20 December 1939. Chemodanov notes that Boreva was readmitted to the party on 14 January 1940. Acquittals and return to positions of authority were common for party members arrested in Kirov if their case remained in Kirov. A year later, she was the head of the arts department for the Kirov regional executive committee (OblIK). In December 1941, she was transferred to work as the first secretary of the Uninskii district party committee (raikom) in the Kirov region. But Boreva was again subject to repression. At the end of 1943, Boreva and the head of the Uninskii district executive committee (RIK) Okishev were summoned to the obkom and accused of hiding grain from the state.
A criminal case against them was opened on 15 January 1944, and Boreva was expelled from the party again. The case was eventually dropped, and she appealed to the Party Control Commission in Moscow to restore her party membership. Chemodanov notes that after Crimea was liberated, Boreva was dispatched to become the first secretary of the Simferopol gorkom, where she worked until 1948, when she was fired for being Jewish (Chemodanov phrases it as a Central Committee resolution saying all people of Jewish nationality should be let go from party organs). Chemodanov notes that such a party resolution did not officially exist, but Boreva's friend who recounted the incident to him likely referred to the order liquidating the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in November 1948 and the subsequent targeting of Jewish workers. It is unclear if she ever returned to party work before her death in 1969.
Chemodanov's work allows the reader to appreciate many facets of repression and victims: priests, party leaders, and those with connections outside the country. He also covers a significant time period, well beyond the late 1930s, and investigates how gender and nationality played a role in people's fates. In this way, his regional and local foci enrich and, in some cases, complicate our understanding of repression.
While Chemodanov's work is incredibly rich in archival sources, he does not engage much with secondary sources or historiography. Though this is common for Russian authors, particularly those who do regional [End Page 470] history (kraevedenie), it makes it difficult for the reader to know why his work is important for the study of Soviet history and how it compares and contrasts with other studies on the subject. But given the increased difficulty that Western scholars face in accessing Russian archival sources, studies like Chemodanov's are key sources of new archivally based information.
As we have seen, particularly in the cases of Stoliar and Boreva, Soviet Jews occupied a variety of roles in Soviet society, from party functionaries to ruthless interrogators like Pavlovskii. The transformation of Jewish culture and the integration of Jews into broader Soviet society has been a topic of great interest to many scholars.14
________
Gennady Estraikh's The History of Birobidzhan: Building a Soviet Jewish Homeland in Siberia also examines Soviet attempts to create a secular Soviet Jewish identity. The History of Birobidzhan is a slim book of 153 pages, including notes, bibliography, and index. It is divided into seven chapters that cover 1928 through the present.
The book has many strong points. It does an excellent job of contextualizing Jewish life in the pre-Birobidzhan period. Estraikh notes that because of the restrictions placed on Jews prior to 1917, Jews had developed a parallel society that was separated legally, religiously, socially, linguistically, and even gastronomically from their neighbors in what would become the Russian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian republics. While the shtetls tended to be impoverished, socially conservative, and religious ("backward," in Bolshevik parlance), many Jews had integrated successfully into the professional community in the empire. And Jews were also well represented among the intelligentsia and overrepresented among a range of antitsarist, revolutionary parties. After the Bolsheviks came to power, they abolished the tsarist restrictions on the Jewish community, making Jews equal under the law, but they struggled to figure out how to transform the impoverished shtetls and transform Jews into a secularized segment of the working class.
But, as Estraikh notes, the Bolsheviks quickly established an institutional framework to attempt to address these issues by creating the [End Page 471] Commissariat of Jewish Affairs and Jewish Sections within the Communist Party. While these organizations were instrumental in weeding out non-Bolsheviks from Jewish political organizations and placing the network of Jewish organizations founded before or in the early years of the revolution under party and state control, they did little to address the dire economic situation many Jewish communities faced. Shimen Dimanshtein, a yeshiva graduate and top Bolshevik functionary in charge of Jewish issues, noted that the revolution had brought misfortune for many of the shtetl inhabitants who had been self-employed artisans, petty traders, former business and property owners, and religious functionaries. Such people were especially unsuited for the new Soviet world. Many of them ended up being lishentsy, or politically disenfranchised because their pasts led them to be classified as class-alien or exploiters. Up until 1936, a significant number of Jews faced curtailed rights as lishentsy, a status that was abolished with the introduction of Stalin's new constitution.15 According to Estraikh, how to transform these people into honest workers and peasants was the focus of the Soviet leadership's programs aimed at Jews in the 1920s. One of the ways that the Soviet state tried to transform the Jewish community was by putting heavy emphasis on Jewish farming and getting the economically deprived shtetl dwellers to turn to agriculture. The latter effort led to the resettlement of many Jews to agricultural colonies in Crimea and Ukraine, which created tensions with the local populations, particularly in Crimea.
Soviet leaders toyed with the idea of resettlement as a way of addressing economic woes and creating a more secular Jewish culture on a much grander scale, which resulted in the formation of the Birobidzhan project. The project was initiated by the state rather than Jewish activists and was designed to address pressing economic issues and redefine Soviet Jews as a secular ethnic group. Estraikh notes that from the beginning the Soviets rejected the Zionist concept of a nation for Jews from around the world as reactionary and nationalist. Birobidzhan was conceptualized as a counterbalance to the Zionist endeavor in Palestine.
Estraikh highlights that Jewish resettlement and development projects, particularly Birobidzhan, drew close attention and even involvement of foreign organizations and became a factor in foreign relations. This is another of the book's strong points. Estraikh does an exceptional job of demonstrating the international nature of the Jewish community and how the Birobidzhan project was viewed and supported by that [End Page 472] international community rather than simply viewing it as an isolated project within the USSR. He states that international Jewish organizations' involvement in supporting Jewish development within the Soviet Union predated Birobidzhan. For example, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee—developed in the wake of World War I—engaged in a project, the American Jewish Joint Agricultural Cooperation (Agro-Joint), designed to supervise the resettlement of Soviet Jews in farming colonies. The strong, active support of Soviet state plans among many Jewish activists outside the USSR stemmed from the perception that the USSR of the 1920s offered a more favorable environment than Palestine. Yiddish was recognized as a state language, teachers were being trained in Yiddish to staff new Yiddish-language schools, and Jewish culture gained wider recognition with the establishment of the Kiev-based Institute for Jewish Proletarian Culture of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and the Jewish Department of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences.
When the establishment of a Jewish Republic in Birobidzhan was announced, Jewish organizations worldwide sent supplies and money to support the endeavor. The Organization for Jewish Colonization in Russia (ICOR), which was founded by American communists in 1924 and then developed branches in Canada, sent $55,000 worth of tractors, machines, motors, and tools to Birobidzhan in 1929. The Argentinian Jewish Organization PROKOR (or PROCOR) also contributed aid to the resettlement project. Additionally, hundreds of foreign settlers from Lithuania, Argentina, the United States, France, Romania, and Poland, and some people from Palestine, moved to Birobidzhan starting in 1931. Many of these people had once lived in the territory of the Russian Empire and were now returning, but few stayed long as the conditions in the Far East were harsh and the infrastructure woefully underdeveloped. Estraikh argues that Hitler's rise to power, along with growing antisemitism in countries like Poland, made the idea of resettling in Birobidzhan increasingly popular in Europe and even in the Americas.
In 1936, the Soviets even released a talkie film, Seekers of Happiness, to an international audience featuring Jews who came from abroad to settle in the JAR. However, few foreign Jews, fewer than 1,400 people, were permitted to move to the JAR between 1931 and 1936, and by the end of 1936 the Soviets closed the territory to international settlers as the international situation worsened and fear of spies and wreckers within increased. As repression took hold in the later 1930s, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, German, and Romanian Jews who had settled in Soviet territory, often as political [End Page 473] immigrants, stood a strong chance of being persecuted as spies. But Estraikh points out that Birobidzhan served important rhetorical purposes during World War II and the Cold War and was featured in sources targeted at Jewish audiences abroad. By looking at how foreign organizations provided aid to Soviet projects and how Jewish audiences abroad reacted to various developments, Estraikh provides an important global context for the Birobidzhan project, demonstrating how it was interconnected with the international Jewish community. He shows that the Soviet government always had to contend with the opinions of the Jewish diaspora abroad when making policy.
Despite its many strengths, The History of Birobidzhan has some shortcomings. As a slim volume, many issues addressed in the work are not examined in depth. For example, chapter 3 on repression only addresses the arrests of a small circle of literary elites and top party leaders. Little is said about everyday victims and the overall scale of repression. Part of this may be because of the book's source base. In contrast with the first two books, The History of Birobidzhan relies almost entirely on published sources and historiography. There are no archival sources in the bibliography. While published secondary sources have allowed the author to explore the opinions of the Jewish community abroad and Jewish literary and cultural figures within the country in depth, information about daily life in the region and everyday inhabitants is lacking. However, given the book's slim nature and well-written prose, it would be an excellent resource to use with students at the undergraduate and graduate levels to help them explore the topic of Jewish identity in the USSR.
________
In conclusion, through the lens of micro-history and regional history, the works discussed contribute significantly to the historiography of provincial and Jewish life during the interwar period and beyond. These sorts of studies are key for decentralizing the historiographical narrative, which traditionally has focused on centers of power like Moscow. Viola and Junge's Laboratories of Terror provides an essential exploration of the lives of state security workers involved in mass repression, providing a detailed examination of their arrests and trials. This micro-historical approach brings to light the complexity of Soviet repression and the individuals caught in its machinery as both perpetrators and victims.
Similarly, Chemodanov's regional study offers a multifaceted view of repression and interwar life. By examining gender, nationality, and [End Page 474] personal connections, Chemodanov enriches our understanding of how Soviet policies impacted different segments of the population. Finally, The History of Birobidzhan provides valuable insight into the transformation and secularization of Jewish identity and how such transformations were viewed internationally. Ultimately, these works demonstrate the value of regional and micro-history in illuminating personal biographies and the diverse paths Soviet citizens, especially those with Jewish heritage, navigated during intense political and social upheaval. By focusing on specific regions and individuals, these studies reveal how personal and political trajectories intersected under Stalin's regime. As such, future research should continue to emphasize regional studies and micro-historical approaches, offering detailed examinations of personal experiences and connecting them to broader patterns of repression and survival in the Soviet Union. Such studies would enrich our understanding of Soviet history and contribute to the ongoing conversation about the legacies of Stalinism. [End Page 475]
Vyatka State University
198 Lenin Street
Kirov, Russian Federation 610002
samlomb@hotmail.com
Samantha Lomb is a lecturer at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. She is the author of Stalin's Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft Constitution (2018); "Moscow Is Far Away: Peasant Communal Traditions in the Expulsion of Collective Farm Members in the Vyatka–Kirov Region 1932–1939," Europe-Asia Studies 74, no. 10 (2022): 1769–92; "Nashi/ne Nashi, Individual Smallholders, Social Control, and the State in Ziuzdinskii District, Kirov Region, 1932–1939," in Social Control under Stalin and Khrushchev: The Phantom of a Well-Ordered State, edited by Immo Rebitschek and Aaron B. Retish (2023); and editor of Win or Else: Soviet Football in Moscow and Beyond, 1921–1985 (2024). She is currently working on a project about the party and state leadership at the district and oblast levels in the Kirov region in the late 1930s.
Footnotes
1. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial´no-politicheskoi istorii Kirovskoi oblasti (GASPI KO) f. P-6799, оp. 1, d. SU-845, t. 1, ll. 218–21. GASPI KO is now administered by TsGAKO, the Central State Archive of the Kirov Region (Tsentral´nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Kirovskoi oblasti). However, the buildings and collections of the former party archive remain separate from the state archive, hence the continued usage of GASPI KO to maintain clarity about where the files referenced are housed.
2. GASPI KO f. P-6799, оp. 1, d. SU-845, t. 1, ll. 221–23
3. "Kniga pamiati zhertv politicheskikh repressii v SSSR," Rodnaia Viatka kraevedcheskii portal, n.d., https://rodnaya-vyatka.ru/kp-repres?id=1925516.
4. "Rukovoditel´ goroda Kirova Maksim Lozovskii," Rodnaia Viatka kraevedcheskii portal, 19 July 2024, https://rodnaya-vyatka.ru/blog/3904/150724.
5. For example, J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, Yezhov: The Rise of Stalin's "Iron Fist" (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); M. Iunge [Marc Junge], B. Bonvich [Bernd Bonwetsch], and R. [Rolf] Brinner, eds., Stalinizm v Sovetskoi provintsii 1937–1938: Massovaia operatsiia na osnove prikaza No. 00447 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2009).
6. Michael David-Fox, ed., The Secret Police and the Soviet System: New Archival Investigations (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023).
7. Oleg V. Khlevniuk, "Corporate Solidarity in Stalin's USSR: Arrests and Release of NKVD Officers in the 1930s–1940s," Russian Review 84, no. 1 (2024): 1–15.
8. Timothy Blauvelt, "Institutional and 'Clan' Conflict in the Interwar Georgian and Transcaucasian Political Police, 1921–1939," Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 72, no. 1 (2024): 44–77.
9. Lynne Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Marc Junge, Stalinistische Modernisierung: Die Strafverfolgung von Akteuren des Staatsterrors in der Ukraine 1939–1941 (Bielefeld: transcript, 2020).
10. It is unclear where Pavlovskii went when he left Kirov, but it seems he remained within the state security organs. He had been promoted to lieutenant colonel of state security by November 1944, when the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet awarded him a medal "For Military Merits," and by August 1949, when the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet awarded him the order of the Red Star, he had achieved the rank of colonel. However, his fortunes soon changed, as he was arrested in 1951. It is unclear what the charges were, but he was released from custody on 29 May 1956. He died in 1964 at the age of fifty-eight and is buried in the Donskoi Cemetery in Moscow. GASPI KO f. P-1290, оp. 17, d. 3552, l. 8, https://nkvd.memo.ru/index.php/Павловский,_Семен_Григорьевич; GASPI KO f. P-2942, оp. 2, d. 15, l. 17.
11. His older brother Mikhail Matveevich Romanov had also lived in Moscow and had been a member of the Presidium of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (associated with Mikhail Tomskii) and a party member since 1903. But he was arrested on 3 April 1938, charged with active participation in the Right anti-Soviet terrorist organization, sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, and shot on 16 June 1938. He is buried in Komunarka, likely in a mass grave. It is not clear if Ivan considered this a tragedy or a black mark on his record. On 25 March 1939, Ivan was fired from the NKVD for not being able to fulfill his duties. It appears he remained in Kirov but was subsequently arrested. On 26 August 1941, he was sentenced to ten years in prison by the military tribunal of the NKVD troops of the Kirov region. It is unclear what the charges were or if he survived his prison term. He was never rehabilitated. GASPI KO f. P-1290, оp. 17, d. 4067, ll. 3, 5–7, https://nkvd.memo.ru/index.php/Романов,_Иван_Матвеевич.
12. Aron Davidovich Zholudov was the former head of ORPO (Department of Leading Party Bodies) and head of the school's department for the obkom when arrested. He was also Jewish and was later acquitted.
13. GASPI KO f. P-6799, оp. 1, d. SU-370, t. 1, ll. 104–5.
14. Anna Shternshis's fabulous Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), for example, looks at the policies of korenizatsiia (nativization), the formation of Jewish territories through migration, and the secularization of Jewish culture in order to trace the creation of a Soviet Jewish identity that disassociated Jewishness from Judaism. Another recent publication on the topic is Sasha Senderovich's How the Soviet Jew Was Made (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022).
15. Samantha Lomb, Stalin's Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft Constitution (New York: Routledge, 2018).
