Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the
Age of Socialism

AMIR WEINER

Therefore as soon as a spark appears it must be snuffed out, and the yeast separated from the vicinity of the dough, the rancid flesh cut off, and the mangy animal driven away from the flock of sheep, lest the entire house burn, the dough spoil, the body rot, and the flock perish. [The heretic] Arius was one spark in Alexandria; but because he was not immediately suppressed, the entire world was devastated with his flame.

 

St. Jerome, Commentariorum in Epistolam ad Galatas libri tres.1

In the wake of the disintegration of the Soviet polity, scholars have thoroughly reevaluated basic categories in Soviet history such as class, ethnicity, and nationality, as well as the policies associated with them. Amazingly enough, however, with rare exceptions, these categories and policies have been treated as the context for evaluating Soviet practices rather than being contextualized themselves. This essay seeks to advance the current discussion by situating these concepts within the overarching Soviet enterprise: the unfolding revolutionary transformation of society from an antagonistically divided entity into a conflict-free, harmonious body. The view of society as a malleable construct went hand in hand with a continuous purification campaign seeking to eliminate divisive and obstructing elements. Exclusion and violence, in this light, were not random or merely preventive police measures that delineated the boundaries of the legitimate and the permissible but, rather, integral parts of the ongoing community-structuring enterprise.2 I trace the rationale of the Soviet Marxist quest for purity by focusing on three crucial components: the correlation between the progression of the revolutionary time line and the measures taken to realize the socialist utopia, the impact of Nazism and capitalism on the Soviet political and social calculus, and the sites of excision. The marked emphasis on ideology does not deny nor diminish the impact of circumstances, especially those of the magnitude experienced during World War II, or the role of institutions such as the political police, the NKVD, which had a vested interest in a permanent purge. It does explain, however, why the Soviets reacted in the unique way they did to the same circumstances experienced by other polities, why their unique punitive institutions were created in the first place, and why the regime pursued its purification campaigns well after the conditions that initiated them had dissipated.3	1
Marxist regimes struggled with assigning primacy to either the "objective" category of class origin or to the "subjective" criteria of conduct and experience. In polities founded on the Marxist premise of the primacy of acculturation, but simultaneously engaged in the constant eradication of social strata presumed to be illegitimate, the tension between nurture and nature was constant.4 It intensified as the Soviet polity advanced along the road to socialism and communism and radicalized its purification policies both qualitatively and quantitatively. Following the establishment of socialism and especially in the wake of World War II, social and ethnic categories and practices were totalized in a marked shift: enemy groups previously considered to be differentiated, reformable, and redeemable were now viewed as undifferentiated, unreformable, and irredeemable collectives. This totalization of the Marxist sociological paradigm challenged the commitment to the primacy of nurture over nature in the ongoing social engineering project, inviting comparison with contemporary biological-racial paradigms, most notably, that of Nazi Germany—a comparison the Soviets were well aware of yet wanted to avoid at all costs. The absence of genocidal ideology and institutions allowed for different modes and sites of total excision from the socio-ethnic body within the socialist utopia. Still, Soviet contemporaries continued to confront the ever-present shadow of the biological-racial ethos.	2
The Soviet purification drive operated on a universal-particularistic axis, combining the modern European ethos of social engineering with Bolshevik Marxist eschatology.5 Their fusion created a stable menu of categories and practices and a dynamic mode of applying them. The Soviet state emerged and operated within an ethos aptly named by Zygmunt Bauman as the "gardening state," which appeared ever more universal in the wake of the Great War. This cataclysmic event brought to fruition the desires for a comprehensive plan for the transformation and management of society, one that would create a better, purer, and more beautiful community through the removal of unfit human weeds. It was, in a word, an aesthetic enterprise. The unprecedented increase in the capacities and aspirations of the state went hand in hand with the view of society as raw material to be molded into an ideal image. The transformation—or removal—of the individual and the community became the accepted goal of the state both in its welfare and its punitive policies.6	3
The European impetus to sculpt society seemed to develop boundlessly and across ideologies. From Russia, Maxim Gorky observed in late November 1917 that "the working class is for [V. I.] Lenin what ore is for a metalworker . . . He [Lenin] works like a chemist in a laboratory, with the difference that the chemist uses dead matter . . . [whereas] Lenin works with living material."7 But Bolshevik Marxism was not alone in its refusal to accept human nature and society as they were. Rather, the tension between nature and nurture was encoded within the larger pan-European view of modernity whereby political authorities increasingly sought to define and manage virtually all critical public and private spheres. The expanding welfare state and the cleansing state were opposite ends of the inclusionary-exclusionary axis, which became the trademark of transformative modern politics.8 Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, the remapping of Europe increasingly evolved around what was referred to as "voluntary resettlement," "population exchanges," or the "unmixing of peoples," a rather polished, ex-post-facto legitimization of ethno-religious cleansing.9 By the late 1930s, the chronological starting point of our discussion, the transformation of society had already been established as a cross-ideological phenomenon, involving liberal, socialist, and fascist polities alike.10 And so in 1942, Eduard Benes, the figurehead of liberal democracy in Central Europe, could state as a matter of fact that "national minorities are always a real thorn in the side of individual nations," and that the ideal state of linguistic and national homogeneity could be reached only by extensive population transfers.11 A little less than two years later, in a meeting with Joseph Stalin, Benes concluded that "the defeat of Germany presents us with the singular historical possibility to radically clean out the German element in our state," a policy that was faithfully executed at the end of the war.12 This powerful ethos would wane only in the mid-1950s, when European regimes and parties appeared to accept some limits on their transformative powers.13	4
Whatever its ideological coloring, social engineering possessed a tremendous capacity for violence. The mobilization of the legal and medical professions for the goal of perfecting society shifted the political discourse to new realms. The pretense of scientific criteria and measures to study and work on the population meant that the state would employ the most advanced and radical tools in its quest for a purer, better society. The urge to maximize the management of society gave birth to a myriad of institutions for activities such as passport control, surveillance, and physical and mental cataloguing, without which the radical transformation of populations could not have taken place.14 And it was perfectly logical that the most radical forms of mass extermination were preceded by smaller scale destruction of groups categorized as incompatible and irredeemable both medically and legally, then supplemented by military-industrial methods of operation.15	5
Where the paradigm of modernity falls short is by not providing a satisfactory explanation for the evolution of purification drives in totalitarian systems. If the urge to perfect societies stemmed from the universal axis of modernity, its implementation acted on clearly particularistic urges. First, the "gardening state" blossomed throughout Europe no less than in the Soviet Union. In the wake of the Great War, the European political landscape was marked by planned economies, elaborate surveillance systems, and thoroughly politicized eugenics research. Yet it was the Soviet polity that ended up with teleology as its economic modus operandi alongside a system of concentration camps, mass deportations, and killings.16 Indeed, the Soviets went out of their way to underline this difference. Unlike the Philistines who constantly lament brutality and the loss of lives and preach reconciliation, the ultimate goal of the social engineering project—a genuine moral-political unity of society—could be reached only through an irreconcilable and violent struggle, declared Soviet ideologues.17 Second, the campaign to eradicate internal enemies within the totalitarian state intensified after all residues of political opposition had been crushed and, in the Soviet case, following the declaration that Socialism had been built.18 Terror becomes total, Hannah Arendt observed, when it becomes independent of all opposition.19	6
The key to the distinctive development of the Soviets' purification drive lay in the volatile fusion of historical time and its ultimate goal. It was an eschatological worldview in the sense of belief in an end to History; it was apocalyptic in its belief in the imminence of the End and that, in the wake of reaching socialism, Soviet people were living at the final stages of History; it was millenarian in its belief that the final cataclysm would be followed by the kingdom of communism, namely a conflict-free and harmonious society, the very feature that set it apart from other totalitarian enterprises, which espoused a cyclical conception of time and envisioned an endless struggle for domination and survival.20 The quest for purity was neatly tied to the distinguishing aspect of the Bolshevik utopia: from the moment of its establishment in power, the Soviet regime imposed a time line marking concrete stations on the road to realization of the communist utopia. Thus in 1947, the draft of the party program set the goal of "building of a communist society in the USSR in the course of the next twenty to thirty years," and in 1948, a leading political theoretician could declare confidently that,	7
if it was possible to organize a socialist society on the whole within twenty years from the moment of the triumph of Soviet power under the most difficult circumstances, then it is entirely possible to assume that after the triumphant conclusion of the Patriotic War and the restoration of the ruined people's economy, two more decades will be enough to roughly erect the highest stage of communism. Therefore, the generation which in 1920 was fifteen to twenty years old will live in a communist society.21
A year later, communism was said to be around the corner, with each day bringing forward more evidence of the triumphant march to communism, including the markers of communist harmony—liquidation of the great schisms between mental and physical labor and between town and village—as the first secretary of the All-Union Leninist Communist League of Youth (Komsomol) assured the delegates to the Eleventh Congress of the organization in March–April 1949. The "overwhelming majority" of Soviet youth, noted another secretary, already possessed "all the elements of the character of the man of Communist society."22 On the eve of the Nineteenth Party Congress in October 1952, Stalin threw his personal weight behind the matter when he sought in his last major work on Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR to rush the march toward the higher stage of communism by creating a central barter system that would replace collective farm property and commodity exchange in the countryside, which he viewed as the last existing obstacles to a full-blown communist economy.23 And with the addition of the new socialist "shock brigades"—the People's Democracies in East Asia and Europe—which altered the pre-war isolation, "the mighty motherland" was said to be in the flower of its strength, possessing "everything necessary for building of a complete communist society."24
These time markers had a direct impact on the definition of the "weeds" intruding on the harmonious garden and the measures taken to uproot them. Groups and individuals perceived to be hostile were continuously referred to in biological-hygienic terms, whether vermin (parazity, vrediteli), pollution (zasorenost'), or filth (griaz'), and were subjected to ongoing purification.25 Yet the implications of this biological-hygienic rhetoric were not static. With the declaration of Socialism built, the victorious outcome of the Great Patriotic War, and communism in sight, the eradication of "this debris of the old world, a weed that somehow grew up between the stones of our radiant building,"26 assumed even more urgency. In his well-known speech at the February–March 1937 plenary session of the Central Committee, Stalin explicitly identified the new type of internal enemy in the age of socialism, the elusive one, a theme that he had already begun to develop in 1933 at the completion of collectivization. Since official ideology and its institutional implementation were infallible, errors and failures could be attributed only to the ill-will of individuals. After several decades of socialism in power and constant purges, the continued existence of such human weeds must be a result of their devious and elusive nature. Like a cancer, they mutated themselves in different forms and various locations. And since this vermin could not repent, it had to be removed from the body in its entirety. The question was only how. The former brand of internal enemies, argued Stalin, was openly hostile to the Soviet cause by virtue of social origin and professional orientation and could not be mistaken for anything other than that. The new saboteurs, on the other hand, were "mostly party people, with a party card in the pocket, i.e., people who formally are not alien. Whereas the old vermin turned against our people, the new vermin, on the contrary, cringe before our people, extol our people, bow before them in order to win their trust."27 Such enemies, reasoned Stalin, would resort to the most extreme measures in their struggle against the Soviet state. The latter must guarantee the excision of this vermin from its midst.	8
Stalin's warning was repeatedly invoked in the postwar purge campaigns but with an additional edge. The moral-political unity gained by the relentless and thorough purge was posited against the proliferation of "fifth columns" in the rest of Europe, which, in the Soviet view, was a major factor in its quick collapse before the Nazi onslaught.28 With the announcement in mid-January 1953 of the uncovering of the "Doctors' Plot," a group of physicians, the majority of whom were Jews, accused of plotting to murder Soviet leaders, Komsomol'skaia pravda reminded Soviet youth that even when defeated the enemy does not rest. "Having won the war we turned to construction again because we love life and youth, because we want to make our land a flourishing garden. But while we build we must remember that the enemy will continue to send spies onto our home front, to recruit all kinds of scum in order to undermine our strength, to poison our joyous, happy life . . . the greater the successes in building communism in the USSR, the more active and vile the operations of the imperialists and their myrmidons," concluded the call for vigilance. Like the biblical serpent, these enemies were the most elusive imaginable. "The spies and saboteurs sent to us by the imperialist intelligence services or recruited by them within the country from among incompletely routed anti-Soviet scum do not operate openly. They operate 'on the sly,' they mask themselves in the guise of Soviet persons to penetrate our institutions and organizations, to worm their way into confidence and conduct their foul work," was Izvestiia's editorial from the same day. An unwaivering vigilance was required in order to "ensure the cleansing of people's minds from the survivals of capitalism, from the prejudices and harmful traditions of the old society," concluded the editorial.29	9
The arrival of socialism ordained new sites of excision. First, with the destruction of antagonistic classes, internal enemies became enemies of the people and were to be sought in new realms.30 By then, it was the nationality question that harbored the clearest and most present danger to the moral-political unity of all the people, declared Stalin in the Seventeenth Party Congress of 1934, underlining the increasing ethnicization of the Soviet social body and the shift in the search for the enemy within. The fight against recurrences of nationalist views had become the most critical task in the struggle against the last vestiges of capitalism in the consciousness of people, echoed Dmitrii Chesnokov, a prominent party ideologue, in 1952. The residue of "zoological" chauvinism, especially in regions that were temporarily exposed to fascist propaganda during the German occupation, represented a stubborn intrusion on Soviet harmony and called for the most severe measures if harmony was to be maintained, Chesnokov concluded.31	10
Second, Soviet relations to the parallel modern politics across the European continent were not merely phenomenological. Rather, the Soviets were constantly checking their methods in the European mirror. The anxiety of potential degeneration into a zoological ethos was strongly present in the minds of Soviet contemporaries. Throughout the 1930s, Soviet leaders, notably Stalin himself, reacted vehemently against any suggestion that their sociologically based model of the human subject could be equated with any biologically based, genetically coded enterprise, whether the racial Nazi polity or eugenics and euthanasia policies, which enjoyed widespread acceptance during that decade. When the totalization of categories and practices in the wake of the war drove home the inevitable comparison with the Nazi racial-biological code, the Soviets went out of their way to emphasize that their destruction of internal enemies was not genocidal and that, unlike the death camps, their own penal system remained true to its corrective mandate.32	11
The specific sites of purification derived from this anxiety. The acute Soviet awareness of being equated with the Nazi racial-biological enterprise and the fact that total excision did not necessarily imply physical elimination pointed to other sites of purification in addition to deportations or executions. Memory was a key political arena where the body social was delineated. Inclusion and exclusion within the Soviet body were defined to a large degree through both the commemoration of cataclysmic events and the simultaneous erasure of the counter-memories of groups and events deemed incompatible with communist harmony. In the highly stylized Soviet polity, hierarchies of commemoration reflected the political status of groups. World War II played a central role in this process, especially as the experience of the war turned into the core legitimizing myth of the Soviet polity, along with the denunciation and removal of some key elements of the Stalinist regime and the routinization of other fundamentals of the revolutionary ethos.33 The exclusion of certain groups from official representations of the wartime Soviet fighting family and the denial of particularistic suffering destined groups to political invisibility, depriving them of official recognition of their distinct, collective identities.	12
This essay examines the varieties of the Soviet purification drives as they evolved in relation to two groups that came to epitomize the obstacles to harmony from the late 1930s on: the Ukrainian nationalist movement (a political-ideological effort identified with its place of origin, Western Ukraine, but often substituted for the entire Ukrainian nation) and the Jewish minority.34 The sites of the Soviet drive explored here are the central-western regions of Ukraine, which served as a laboratory for social-ethnic engineering for every political movement that gained the upper hand there, beginning with the deportations of Germans, Poles, and Jews by the czarist government in 1915, and followed by the upheavals of the civil war, collectivization drive, and famine. From the early 1930s, the population in these regions was subjected to consecutive deportations of ethnic minorities and mass executions during the Terror, followed by Nazi population policies and Ukrainian nationalist ethnocentric policies, and finally by the resumption of the Soviet purification drive in the wake of World War II. The history of these regions offers a unique insight into the evolution of Soviet population policies.	13
As the Nazi war machine began to roll back across the European continent, nations appeared determined to exact revenge on those deemed collaborators with the Nazi occupiers. Following humiliating defeats and years of occupation, the purge of the national body became the order of the day. On the surface, the European purification enterprise appeared universal and grappled with common core dilemmas regarding its form, extent, limits, and categories.	14
In their search for solutions to these dilemmas, nations referred primarily to familiar paradigms. Indeed, most European countries had had prior experience in mass exclusionary and reintegrative social operations. In the wake of the Great War, during which many of these nations had been occupied, European countries acquired rich experience in the use of amnesty legislation and the resocialization of political opponents and criminal offenders, albeit with different degrees of success and popular approval. For instance, bitter debates over the reintegration of World War I collaborators took place in Belgium, which delayed amnesty legislation until 1937, while in the Netherlands the resocialization policy of criminal offenders was enacted methodically through an extensive network of prison and aftercare associations, including churches and trade unions. It came as no surprise that the relapse of some of the rehabilitated collaborators in Belgium into similar criminal behavior during the Second World War worked to toughen attitudes toward amnesty and rehabilitation, while in the Netherlands the resocialization programs and facilities for criminals were easily converted to reintegrate their World War II black sheep.35	15
Less expected was the early realization that the prosecution of collaborators was not a challenge to the pre-war order but, rather, a manifestation of its continued power. A full investigation of collaboration—and not merely of those who served in the German punitive and propaganda institutions—threatened to open a Pandora's box of de facto accommodation by many of the sitting bureaucratic, judicial, and economic elites. In essence, the entire existing order. And since the latter showed no signs of acquiescence, the debate soon devolved into partisan politics. Public life under Nazi occupation was left out of the investigation, as were numerous high officials who fit well into the renewed conservative order.36 While the postwar European state was busily extending its domain into practically every sphere of society, the temptation to recall strayed, yet seasoned, bureaucrats was easily rationalized. The impact of the unfolding Cold War could not be ignored, either. In Hungary, a tiny communist party vying for more members opted for mass recruitment of none other than the rank-and-file of the Arrow Cross, the fascist organization now in disgrace whose class orientation was deemed more important than its political past.37 On both sides of the European divide, the developing conflict dictated a facade of national unity. Unpleasant and painful reminders were shelved, or rather erased from the official memory of the war.	16
Wartime experience, however, defied a universal definition of collaboration. In the vengeful atmosphere of devastated Poland, attending concerts at which German music was performed was deemed a collaborative act by the secret courts. At the same time, in so many countries from France to Norway to Hungary, the very same people both collaborated and resisted in accordance with their perceptions and expectations of German policies and the changing tide of the war.38 Neither martyrs nor evildoers were in the majority in Nazi-occupied Europe. And it was precisely this gray mosaic that stood in the way of national reconstruction.	17
At its core, the purge of collaborators was not merely about retribution or restoration. Deep down, it was about the shaping of postwar society. Purification was a transitional medium between the imperfect past and the improved—if possible, perfect—society of the present and future. If the European experience is taken as a whole, it appears that a precondition for the success of purification was an ideal representation of the people as a positive, undifferentiated entity. "The People" as one mythic group had to be exonerated from charges of collaboration. The charge of collaboration was assigned to isolated patches of weeds. In a concrete, tactical calculus, the blame for the initial humiliating defeats and atrocities would be shifted from segments of one's own society to an alien element. A dignified future required a heroic past. And if the past was to be a guide to the future, it had to be painted in crisp colors. No shades of gray would interfere with the heroic tale of the struggle between good and evil.39 And so, as quickly as the vengeful spirits arose, so, too, did they abate. All over Europe, retribution against alleged collaboration faded away at a truly amazing pace, and arguments in favor of the reintegration of convicted collaborators surfaced shortly after the end of the hostilities.	18
The Soviet experience, too, pointed to an earlier paradigm, but one that accentuated the sharp distinctions between totalitarian and other political enterprises. The Soviet policy of purge was not merely reactive. Nor was it conditioned by tactical requirements. Rather, purification and reintegration were complementary components of the colossal project of building a new socialist polity. Specific developments in the domestic and international arena affected the choices of targets, but the goals and methods of dealing with these targeted groups and individuals were subjected to an ongoing endeavor of restructuring. If the study of the horrifying wartime losses and destruction helps to explain the harsh retaliation of the Soviets, then the reading of the war into the progressing revolutionary narrative elucidates the unique choices of methods.	19
The war was not merely an unpleasant accident, nor was it a customary clash between two major powers. It was the realization of a historical nightmare, one that Soviet power expected from the moment of its inception. Throughout the 1930s, Soviet citizens were constantly warned against the evils of German fascism and its implications for the USSR. The dominant theme of the Terror in 1937–1938 was the excision of fascist agents from the Soviet body politic. If the alleged crimes of the sinners in the late 1930s were presumed to anticipate the forthcoming catastrophe of the capitalist encirclement, then the alleged crimes in the 1940s were perceived as the full-blown actualization of the worst fears of the preceding decade. In the postwar official narrative, the war was perceived as the inevitable outcome of historical forces. "It would be wrong," declared Stalin in his election speech on February 9, 1946, "to think that the Second World War was a casual occurrence or the result of the errors of any particular statesmen, though mistakes were made. Actually, the war was the inevitable result of the development of world economic and political forces on the basis of modern monopoly capitalism."40	20
In this light, collaborators were not the by-products of the war but eternal enemies whom the war and occupation helped uncover. Their destruction was therefore not merely an act of defense but the execution of the Will of History. The passage of time did not work to moderate the punitive policies against those accused of collaboration. Whereas French politicians were quick to interpret public opinion surveys supporting a reconciliation bill as a mandate for enacting amnesty, Valentin Ovechkin's pleas for compassion toward those who went through the hell of occupation remained unheeded.41 "Solicitude for the welfare of traitors who helped the Nazis lacerate France shows up the present-day collaborationists in their true colors. Birds of a feather," was the bitter reaction of Soviet newspapers when the French National Assembly launched the debate over the final legislation of mass amnesty for convicted collaborators in December 1952.42 As Europe was moving fast on the road to amnesty and rehabilitation, the Soviet Union in contrast intensified its campaign of retribution.	21
Ultimately, Soviet purification drives were never restrained by circumstances. The purge of the party—the vanguard of the Soviet polity—was not subject to administrative-managerial requirements, nor did the admission that many communists had not risen to the occasion form an obstacle to the purge.43 When the population at large was purged, entire ethnic groups were stigmatized as collaborationist and deported into the Soviet interior. Within the grand scheme of social engineering, even the loss of face was not a weighty factor. And no external pressure, such as the European Court exerted on Belgium in 1961, was allowed to interfere with the pursuit of purity.	22
However, the Soviet purification drive was not entirely different from the European purge. If the postwar experience of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia is any indication, it appears that multi-ethnic formations in many ways comprised a distinct effort at purification. Wherever collaboration was presumed to have had an ethnic face, the process of the purge continued well beyond that of the more homogenous polities and assumed a more vindictive character.44 Indeed, here lay the gravest challenge to the ideal representation of the "Good People," a challenge that resonated most clearly in the Soviet Union. One could think, and with considerable justification, that the uninhibited savagery of the German occupation of the Soviet territories would perpetuate the myth of the "Good People" and make the purge of the collaborationist weeds a common national enterprise. Finding themselves at the bottom of the Nazi racial hierarchy, the Slavic populations soon discovered that the various distinctions the Nazis applied to each of them mattered little in the New Order. But the harmonious representation of the People collided with the unintended legacy of Soviet pre-war nationality policy. The racially based Nazi ethos had fallen on fertile ground. The principled cultivation of ethnic particularism by the Soviets, be it the creation of ethno-national territories or the ethnicization of the enemy-within category, rendered critical segments of society susceptible to ethnically based visions and practices. In such a milieu, the occupation of the non-Russian Slavic republics for most of the war, and the slightest preferential treatment by the Germans, triggered contemporaries' reflection on the consequences of the ethnicized Soviet world.45 In many regions, the Soviet nation-building project had to be reconciled with the ethnic legacy of collectivization, famine, and deportations. Similarly, the postwar translation of ethnically based hierarchies of heroism into hierarchies of loyalty was a powerful challenge to the myth of the "Good People." This leads us to consider briefly the nature of the Soviet purification drive as it evolved prior to the cataclysm of World War II, against which background the magnitude of the postwar cleansing must be measured.	23
In a polity built on the premise of "national in form, socialist in content," ethnicity was not expected to become the primary category in social engineering. Early on, however, the brutal experience of the Don Cossacks during the Russian civil war and the suspicion cast on the Polish and German minorities throughout the 1920s made it clear that this neat distinction between form and content was difficult to maintain.46 As the Soviet crusade approached the realm of socialism, the tenuous balance between social and ethnic origins increasingly tilted in the direction of the latter. True, class would continue to be the raison d'être of the revolutionary enterprise to the very end, a concept written into the structure of each and every Soviet institution. It was not for nothing that Stalin, the very person who renounced class heredity as a detrimental factor in determining political legitimacy, went out of his way to scorn party members in the Seventeenth Party Congress who "dropped into a state of foolish rapture in the expectation that soon there will be no classes and therefore no class struggle."47 But overshadowed by Stalin's often-quoted remark was the addendum that the survivals of capitalism were "much more tenacious in the sphere of the national problem . . . because they are able to disguise themselves in national costume."48 The threats to the aspired harmony assumed an ethnic face.	24
The conflation of class and ethnic categorization resurfaced with a vengeance once collectivization began. Soviet power forcefully drove home the ethnicization of class-enemy categories, especially when applied to the ethnic mosaic of the border regions. Already at the onset of the assault on the well-off peasants, or kulaks, in January 1930, local party organizations were ordered by the Ukrainian Central Committee to "devise special perspectives with regard to the national minorities districts (Germans, Bulgarians, and others)."49 And since Poles—as well as Germans and Jews—were perceived as kulaks by nature, they were marked for collectivization regardless of socioeconomic status.50	25
The ascendance of ethnicity within the excision enterprise was further accentuated when deportations commenced in March 1930. The Politburo's order specifically targeted ethnic Poles irrespective of the stage of collectivization and regardless of their material position.51 Indeed, only half of those deportees from the border belt of the Ukrainian Republic in 1930 were classified as kulaks.52 With socialism built, ethnic hostility replaced class antagonism as the primary category intruding on harmony, a shift that was underscored when the purification drive accelerated in the mid-1930s. Well before deportations resumed in early 1935, every ethnic German living in the Soviet Union was "individually registered to the fullest extent" and his or her personal data transmitted to the Central Committee.53 On November 5, 1934, the Central Committee in Moscow ordered local authorities throughout the Soviet Union to "remove the hostile anti-Soviet element from the German villages and deport them out of the region and to apply the harshest methods against the most active ones." The decree was implemented despite awareness of a steep decline in the absolute number of ethnic Germans in the border regions during the preceding period.54	26
The ethnicization of categories intensified the drive to homogenize the Soviet body social. Those marked for deportation were classified as "undesirable elements," and the enterprise was officially characterized as a "cleansing of the mass pollution of the [Polish] national village soviets."55 Hand in hand, scores of national soviets and schools were declared artificial and counterrevolutionary institutions. On the path to communism, the reference to any structure as an artificial creation by a foreign organization marked it as a weed to be uprooted from the Soviet garden. It seemed no accident that district authorities were ordered to explain to parents that children should be instructed in their "mother tongue," and consequently several hundred schools were converted to Ukrainian language schools.56 The same rationale was offered in late 1937 when the Organizational Bureau of the Central Committee (Orgburo) decreed the liquidation of a large number of national districts and village soviets (German, Polish, Estonian, Finnish, Koreans, Bulgarians, and others) throughout the entire union. The Orgburo declared them to be artificial creations that did not correspond to their national composition and, even worse, the creations of "enemies of the people led by bourgeois nationalists and spies."57 Simultaneously, the Far East region was cleared of all ethnic Koreans,58 and large numbers of Germans, Poles, and Latvians were arrested or executed regardless of their social class, occupation, or geographical location. In some Ukrainian regions, arrests and executions eliminated almost all Germans and Poles.59	27
Finally, the Terror delivered a brutal message regarding the limits of redemption in the wake of triumphalistic socialism. In his canonization of the history of the Communist Party, the Short Course, Stalin celebrated the physical annihilation of the elusive enemies who managed to survive previous cycles of purification. With Socialism built, extermination was the only way to cope with those who had not yet redeemed themselves.60 It seemed no accident that the first salvo of the ensuing terror was directed at the punished and pardoned. Indeed, the latter figured prominently in the Politburo resolution of July 2, 1937, "Concerning Anti-Soviet Elements." Having been punished and stripped of their hostile class identity, these individuals and groups appeared to have redeemed themselves through productive labor, which won them not only the restoration of voting rights but also the release of some from the special settlements. Indeed, only two years earlier, the rehabilitation of former kulaks was trumpeted as the triumph of nurture over nature. Celebrating the completion of the White Sea Canal, the authors of the special commemorative volume noted that "on the whole kulaks were the hardest to educate . . . but even in these half-animals, the idolaters of private property, the truth of collective labor at last undermined a zoological individualism."61 Accordingly, on January 25, 1935, all former kulaks regained their voting rights.62 But two and a half years later, the Central Committee identified recently rehabilitated former kulaks as the principal anti-Soviet element, responsible for a barrage of diversionary acts in the countryside. In spite of regaining their civil rights and permission to return from exile to their homes, they had allegedly resumed hostilities against the socialist state. In essence, they proved to be immune to socialist corrective measures and were consequently irredeemable. They were marked for immediate arrest and execution.63 In the era of socialism, redemption was not offered twice.	28
Still, the pre-war cleansing policies maintained several key features that set them apart from those of the postwar era. First, they aimed largely at cleansing specific territorial space—mainly border regions populated by minorities with an external active homeland—or politically suspicious segments of these communities, but not entire peoples, which meant that targeted groups were treated as differentiated entities.64 The lists of deportees from villages with "concentrated Polish and German populations" were to include "independent peasants who did not fulfill their obligations to the government and unreliable collective farmers [kolkhozniki]," just as the arrest and execution lists for these nationalities at the height of the Terror consisted of mainly political émigrés, alleged spies, and people working in sensitive industries. Equally important, deportees often remained within the boundaries of the Ukrainian Republic.65 Hence, even after the conclusion of repetitive waves of deportations, border regions were still populated by tens of thousands of members of the deported groups, just as members of the marked groups residing outside the targeted region were left unharmed, notably including Koreans.66	29
Second, differentiation often left the door open for possible redemption. The GULAG doors kept revolving, with 20 to 40 percent of the inmates released annually.67 Rehabilitation of deported kulaks continued throughout the second half of the 1930s. The Council of People's Commissars Resolution on October 22, 1938, provided children of former kulaks with internal passports and the right to move to their place of choice (with the exception of closed districts), a right that elevated them not only above their previous status but also above the rest of the Soviet peasantry, which was deprived of passports and hence the right of free movement.68 Surveillance reports on deportees divided them into subgroups corresponding to their potential for redemption. Hence the 15,000 ethnic Germans deported in the spring of 1936 were split into a first group composed mostly of demobilized Red Army servicemen, who responded to the resettlement with optimism; a second group that felt cheated but could be redeemed with the right dose of propaganda; and a third, whose expectations of a German invasion and unification with their German brethren marked them as hopeless.69 Consequently, ethnic Germans throughout the Soviet Union were still regarded as reliable enough to be drafted into the Red Army, a policy that was bound to change only after this minority (and others) was targeted in its entirety with the outbreak of the war. Even Koreans residing outside the Far East were inducted into the Red Army, and their wartime exploits would be recognized and rewarded by the Soviet state.70	30
Notably, the war itself soon became a redemptive vehicle for pre-war outcasts. On April 11, 1942, the State Defense Committee (GKO) passed a resolution that allowed the drafting of former kulaks into military service. The spouses and children of the draftees were released from the special settlements and received passports. In 1943 alone, this cohort amounted to 102,520 people.71 As the head of the GULAG administration noted with unconcealed satisfaction, many of those released served with distinction, including five who had received the nation's highest award, Hero of the Soviet Union. Inmates, including "politicals" of the Terror era, were encouraged to follow these examples and win their way back into society. Nor should the release of some 43,000 Poles categorized as members of an "enemy nation" merely two years before be ignored.72 In 1944, the NKVD and the USSR Procuracy agreed not to prosecute former kulaks who left the special settlements for various wartime services and failed to return. Mass rehabilitation intensified in the postwar years. In 1946, the regime removed all limitations imposed on the families of former kulaks who had children in the Soviet Army, were participants in the Great Patriotic War, or received governmental awards, and on women who married local residents.	31
With World War II, the ethnicization of categories of the enemy within came full circle. An apparent consequence of the wartime redemption was the substitution of ethnicity for class as the dominant inmate category in the Soviet penal system. On the eve of the war, 90.9 percent of the 977,000 people recorded living in the special settlements were classified as kulaks or family members of kulaks.73 But on the eve of the final wave of releases in early 1954, members of the 1929–1933 generation numbered only 17,348 people.74 By then, the vacuum created by the release of 975,000 camp inmates to the front between 1941 and 1944 was filled with inmates from the nationalities deported during the war, the newly annexed Baltics, western Ukraine, and Belorussia.	32
The war saw a stark shift in the purge policies from cleansing certain spaces to cleansing peoples in toto. The pre-war focus on specific border regions was replaced by the targeting of each and every member of a stigmatized group regardless of geographical location or service rendered to the Soviet state. Whatever anxieties and inhibitions that had brought to a halt excision campaigns like that against the Cossacks in 1919 were now removed. Excision was intended to be total, irreversible, and pursued relentlessly. The treatment of ethnic Germans served as a model for this new stage. Hence the decree on the resettlement of the Volga Germans on August 28, 1941, was followed by decrees that extended resettlement to all ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union and that ordered the removal of all ethnic Germans from the ranks of the fighting Red Army. Remarkably, the decrees followed an earlier official recognition of the voluntary enrollment of the community for the Soviet cause and the heroic fight of some of its members against the Nazi invaders.75 Moreover, as one scholar aptly observed, the deportation resolution was framed as a prophylactic measure rather than a punitive one, where the Germans were accused of harboring scores of diversionist and hostile attitudes to Soviet power as opposed to performing concrete anti-Soviet acts.76 The same applied to all other ethnic groups marked for excision in the wake of the war. Whereas during the pre-war era the presence of relatives who had served in the Red Army or partisan detachments was enough to protect kulak families from being deported,77 by the end of World War II, officers and soldiers of the deported nationalities were severed from their units, often to be sent to the newly established special regime camps or work battalions while the war was still being waged.78 As indicated by the assault on the communal structure of the above communities as well as the Jewish community, the postwar calculus was indifferent to the security of the borders and the existence of hostile external homelands of stigmatized nationalities. The enemy within was ostracized and acted on as a totality. Those convicted of political crimes were exiled indefinitely upon completion of their sentences.79 With the building of communism set as a political goal and with a time line in place, the belief in the malleability of the human subject in general and of internal enemies in particular eroded.	33
Wartime conditions, especially in the occupied territories, furthered ethno-national divisions, for example, German differentiation of POWs (such as the release of ethnic Ukrainians),80 the passivity of the majority of the population, and the fact that the partisan movement was disproportionally populated by ethnic Russians. Already during the war, the Soviet criminalization of passivity (directed against the "hubbies" hiding behind women's skirts, as one partisan leader referred to those who claimed to be terrorized by the prospects of Nazi retaliation81 ) assumed a clear ethnic face. Finally, the ferocious clashes with nationalist separatist movements significantly contributed to the hardening of Soviet attitudes toward domestic enemies. But wartime circumstances alone cannot account for the qualitative shift in the Soviet purification drive. Their meaning for and impact on contemporaries could not be detached from the preceding Soviet experience and treated as universal. The endurance and institutionalization of state revenge against those identified as internal enemies set the Soviet Union apart from other European countries and the United States, and points to another explanation. Wartime circumstances were read into the progressing narrative of the revolution, which was itself undergoing change at the time.	34
Reflecting on his wartime experience in Yugoslavia, Milovan Djilas, then a communist partisan leader, rationalized the execution of the leaders of a certain clan, whose members were friendly to the communist partisans, as the failure of some of its members to subject their "primeval clan ties" and loyalties to that of their political organization. The agitated members of the Tadic clan were executed together with royal officers, "not merely for economy but to associate the fate of party enemies with that of outside enemies." This ideological commitment, noted Djilas, allowed for opponents, whoever they were, to be dealt with in summary fashion.82 Djilas would later conceptualize the role of ideology in the practice of violence. "No matter what your ideology may be," said Djilas, "once you believe that you are in the possession of some infallible truth, you become a combatant in a religious war. There is nothing to prevent you from robbing, burning and slaughtering in the name of your truth, for you are doing it with a perfectly clear conscience—indeed the truth in your possession makes it your duty to pursue it with an iron logic and unwavering will . . . [I]deology demands the liquidation of your enemies, real or imagined."83 With the inspiration of revolutionary idealism, neither mass brutality in general nor the killing of individuals in particular was considered regrettable or detrimental. Indeed, while the Soviet practice of violence could be and was triggered by specific circumstances such as military necessity, its logic was anchored in ideology. Violence was applied within a well-defined ideological framework, which earmarked certain groups based on preconceived biases and was incorporated into an all-encompassing drive to purify the socio-national body. Any potential restraint on the exterminatory campaign against the Ukrainian nationalists was neutralized by an appeal to higher loyalties. Brutalities were committed as the ultimate expression of loyalty to the socialist drive and its administrative embodiments: the Communist Party and the Soviet Ukrainian nation.84	35
In this light, the very existence of the Ukrainian nationalists was a violation of the natural order, and hence no mitigating circumstances could be allowed in assessing their crimes. Nor would utilitarian considerations play a role in the fight against them. They would have to be excised from the Soviet Ukrainian body. Soviet intelligence reports reveal that the Soviets were aware of the nationalists' clashes with the Germans.85 Knowledge, however, did not imply recognition. Notably, the reports carefully emphasized that the shift in the nationalists' policy resulted not from a change of heart or convictions but merely from disappointment at their treatment by the Germans. For the Soviets, the very existence of the nationalists was the bone of contention, not their tactics or alliances.	36
The total alienation of the nationalist cause was captured in a colorful passage by Dmitrii Medvedev, a partisan leader-turned-writer. Referring to his own contacts with the nationalist leader "Bul'ba" (Borovets) and his entourage, Medvedev explained the national and linguistic alienation of the latter:	37
The speech of the "hetman" was incomprehensible, a barbarian mixture of Ukrainian and German words. It was a language, as we later realized, broadly used by those Ukrainian nationalists brought up in the pubs of Berlin and in the taverns of Ottawa and Chicago, persons without a passport, without a homeland, subjects of the international black market, rascals, ready to sell themselves to the Gestapo or the Intelligence Service or the Federal Bureau of Investigation or any other bourgeois espionage organization.
National ostracization was augmented by a touch of class alienation. "Whereas the [Bul'ba] wore a zaporozhtsa [a Ukrainian national shirt], the [others] preferred a European suit, a colorful tie and manicured fingernails, which were considered a sign of special refinement among the bandits," noted Medvedev.86
The nationalists were de-individualized, portrayed as an undifferentiated collective, detached from any specific domestic intimate environment, and often referred to as animals. Killing them was not to involve any sense of guilt.87 Thus members of the Soviet polity should engage in systematic elimination of the "snake-like, slavish dogs of the Nazi hangmen," the "Ukrainian-German fascists" or the "agents of foreign intelligence services," rather than mere "Ukrainian nationalists." Nikita Khrushchev told a plenum of the Central Committee, "They [the Ukrainian nationalists] killed themselves trying to please their master—Hitler, and to get only a small portion of the loot for their doggish service. The German invaders shed the blood of Soviet Ukraine, shot hundreds of thousands of Soviet people—women, the elderly and children. The Ukrainian-German Nationalists assisted and at present [continue to] assist the Germans in these bloody crimes, fulfilling the role of hangmen.88 To make things worse, while the German component of the evil duo was beaten and driven out of the homeland, its Ukrainian counterpart continued the destructive mission. The efforts to sabotage the restoration of the economy were seen as the fulfillment of German instructions. Hence the internal enemy remained foreign even when its foreign ally invader was expelled from Soviet territory. The nationalists' efforts to disassociate themselves from their alliance with the Germans were dismissed by Khrushchev as a play in the face of inevitable defeat.89	38
On the battlefield, therefore, the campaign against the nationalists was deliberately launched as a war without prisoners. Between February 1944 and May 1946, 110,825 nationalists were killed within a territory inhabited by less than 9 million ethnic Ukrainians.90 NKVD reports on individual clashes with nationalist detachments repeatedly failed to mention prisoners taken alive, emphasizing almost total annihilation.91 Deportations reached their climax between 1939 and 1953, when some 570,826 people were deported from Ukraine without permission to return.92 A close look at the deportation figures, however, highlights the exterminatory character of the anti-nationalism campaign in the field. Between February 1944 and January 1946, the NKVD claimed to have detained 110,785 bandits (50,058 were convicted), but only 8,370 people were arrested as members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and 15,959 as active insurgents. The 182,543 nationalists deported from the seven western regions between 1944 and 1952 included family members of OUN or the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and their supporters, non-adults, and families of those killed in clashes. Simply put, most of the actice nationalist guerrillas were killed on the battlefield.93 On the battlefield, "We did not take prisoners as a rule. If we did take prisoners, we shot them after a preliminary interrogation," a commissar of a partisan detachment casually told members of the Commission for the Compilation of the Chronicles of the Great Patriotic War.94	39
Accordingly, the execution of captured nationalist guerrillas became a didactic public spectacle, with party officials presiding over summary trials and hangings in the village square.95 Quite likely, the ritual of hanging, which had already been practiced against convicted collaborators, was intended to add an element of humiliation and terror, since the Soviet Criminal Code spoke only of shooting (rasstrel) as the exceptional measure of punishment for extremely serious crimes.96 Once again, a comparison with other countries is telling. Estimates for the Netherlands were three or four deaths on the occasion of arrests and forty deaths in the internment camps caused by resistance members acting as guards. In the significantly more violent Belgium, there were about forty extra-judicial executions.97 In the USSR, public executions of alleged collaborators with the Germans were something to brag about when party officials recounted their recent experience in the partisans' ranks. The Special Department of the Lenin Mounted Brigade, which operated for a short time in the Vinnytsia region, was reported to have executed, often in public, no fewer than 825 collaborators. If the figures provided by the brigade's leaders are taken at face value, then the number of people executed by a single partisan brigade, not necessarily the largest one and operating within a rather small region in Ukraine, amounted to 13.7 percent of the total number of summary executions before and during the liberation of France, and 233 percent of those in Belgium.98 Finally, violence was exercised primarily for political rather than military reasons. Soviet authorities made extensive use of the Destruction Battalions (istrebitel'nye bataliony)—auxiliary detachments of armed civilians charged with hunting down German and nationalist stragglers—while professing their negligible military value in the pre-1939 Soviet territories. The value of these formations, noted the deputy head of the Ukrainian NKVD, was the radicalization and proliferation of violence among the population at large, a key consideration in the Soviet Manichean worldview.99	40
As summary executions of presumed collaborators proliferated in the initial stage of liberation, the returning Soviet powers moved quickly to curtail them. Immediately upon liberation, Red Army officers were said to prosecute, and in some cases execute, partisans who exacted arbitrary revenge after the liberation.100 Random retributions, which often bordered on anarchy, were not merely a threat to state authority; for the latter, revenge was not necessarily the main motivation. The exercise of retribution only by Soviet authorities integrated it into the overall purification drive, which by now engulfed every layer of the polity. The return of the regime as the sole arbiter and executor of revenge meant that the purge would be conducted along lines that could hardly be imagined in a random, popularly initiated purge. Extra-judicial justice operated as a cathartic moment, after which exhaustion, the desire to forget the imperfect past, and the impulse to reinstate a certain equilibrium would combine to extinguish the flames of arbitrary acts. This, however, was not to happen. The transfer of the prosecution of alleged wartime collaborators and bystanders to the jurisdiction of the NKVD Military Tribunals signaled that purges would become a permanent component in the political and social life of the liberated regions.	41
The irreversibility of any form of collaboration was further underlined by the absolute denial of political or social rehabilitation, even given the dire need for experienced personnel, a policy that set the Soviet Union further apart from other European countries that had been occupied by the Germans. In France, the willingness of large segments of the population to accept certain acts of collaboration as legitimate, albeit undesirable, acts of survival was taken by the authorities as a mandate for mass amnesty. In the Soviet Union, by contrast, the presence of similar sentiments worked to solidify the regime's resolve to excise collaborators, regardless of circumstances and the need for their services. And unlike France, there was no political or social redemption for people known to have served under the occupation authorities.101 There, noted Soviet commentators, the replenishment of the state and military apparatus with former Vichyites amounted to a conscious blurring of the distinction between victims and victimizers.102 Nor could the stain of collaboration be removed by postwar performance. Soviet authorities continued to exact revenge on those suspected of collaboration down to the bottom of the social ladder. Professional and bureaucratic skills counted for nothing even in the face of severe shortages. Time and again, successful rural experts and kolkhozniki were denied governmental awards based on their spotty wartime records.103 Tellingly, crimes appeared as a biological trait when the definition of irredeemable sins was extended to include blood relatives of collaborators. Scores of individuals were denied awards merely for being related to people who served as policemen or in the Vlasov army.104 Sons, after all, could be responsible for their fathers.	42
Along with the revival of capital punishment for political crimes, the irredeemability of the Ukrainian nationalists was codified on April 6, 1950, by order of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. This directive replaced shorter deportation terms for those exiled from Ukraine between 1944 and 1949 with permanent exile (navechno), most notably the 182,543 members and supporters of the OUN-UPA and their families. By 1950, Ukrainian nationalists appeared beyond hope, and their exclusion from the Ukrainian body national was meant to be permanent. Accordingly, families of both arrested and slain nationalist activists were deported. The death of the latter was not necessarily redemptive.105	43
Purification continued relentlessly. As European legislators were feverishly passing amnesty laws for convicted wartime collaborators, in the Soviet Union the search for and prosecution of alleged collaborators intensified. Between September 20 and October 10, 1947, alone, 326 people were arrested in the eastern regions of Ukraine on charges of collaboration with the German occupation authorities, making them the single largest group of the 668 people charged with "anti-Soviet activity."106 The 1955 amnesty decree of wartime collaborators excluded those convicted of murder and torture of Soviet citizens, a rather fatal exception. Whereas by 1958 in France, all those convicted of participating in the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane, the single largest wartime massacre of a non-Jewish population, were released from prison, the Soviet regime continued to prosecute and execute similar cases well into the 1980s. As late as December 1984, military tribunals sentenced to death individuals guilty of killing Soviet POWs, activists, Jews, and communist partisans.107	44
Nor did the post-Stalin amnesty signal rehabilitation. Individuals associated with nationalist forces in Ukraine were released from the camps in early 1954, but it was only in mid-1991, with the looming demise of the Soviet system, that they were granted complete rehabilitation, on the grounds that "their hands were not stained with blood."108 The same logic was applied to the national arena, where the decaying regime mobilized all its resources in a vain effort to block the rehabilitation of OUN-UPA in western Ukraine. Damning information from the KGB archives about UPA atrocities was circulated in press conferences and published in the popular press. Graphic data on massacres of peaceful citizens, ethnic Poles, and Soviet activists, and the close collaboration with the Nazis, were used to underline the essence of the nationalist movement as alien to the national body.109 In response to pleas by the L'viv regional party committee secretary, the Central Committee in Moscow addressed the issue in a specific decree. The Central Committee went out of its way to prevent the "justification of the crimes of the OUN bands under the guise of criticism of Stalinism." To counter the rehabilitation efforts by a variety of opposition groups in western Ukraine, it ordered the release of archival documentaries on the nationalist atrocities during and after the war, arranged for young people to meet victims of the nationalists, and organized a scholarly conference on the "anti-people" deeds of the OUN-UPA. With the approach of the fiftieth anniversary of the Great Patriotic War, the treacherous nationalists were to be exposed. As long as the Myth of the War was the pillar of the polity's legitimacy, the excision of the nationalist cause was non-negotiable.	45
It comes as no surprise that the totalization of Soviet practices in the quest for purity brought to the fore the inherent tension between the biological and the sociological categorization of the enemy within, and consequently the inevitable comparison to Nazi Germany, the other totalitarian enterprise. Nowhere else was this issue exposed more clearly than in the Soviet policy toward its Jewish minority. In the wake of the war and the trauma of the Holocaust, conducted extensively on Soviet soil with the implicit and often explicit approval of the local populace, as well as a wave of popular and official anti-Semitism that swept the immediate postwar era, ordinary Jewish citizens and activists began to ponder the unthinkable: was there a logical affinity between the two ideologies? Already in the summer of 1944, a group of disgruntled, demobilized Jewish servicemen protested in a letter to Stalin that the Ukrainian Communist Party had "a lot in common with the course that originated earlier from the chancery of Goebbels, whose worthy transmitters turned out in the Central Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of Ukraine."110 This point was also laid out bluntly by Vasilii Grossman in his epic Life and Fate, which he started writing at this time. Grossman chose none other than the triumphant moment and site of Stalingrad to underline the common ethos of the Nazi and Soviet enterprises:	46
Suddenly, probably because of the war, he began to doubt whether there really was such a gulf between the legitimate Soviet question about social origin and the bloody, fateful question of nationality as posed by the Germans . . . To me, a distinction based on social origin seems legitimate and moral. One thing I am certain of: it's terrible to kill someone simply because he's a Jew. They're people like any others—good, bad, gifted, stupid, stolid, cheerful, kind, sensitive, greedy . . . Hitler says none of that matters—all that matters is that they're Jewish. And I protest with my whole being. But then we have the same principle: what matters is whether or not you're the son of an aristocrat, the son of a merchant, the son of a kulak; and whether you're good-natured, wicked, gifted, kind, stupid, happy, is neither here nor there. And we're not talking about the merchants, priests and aristocrats themselves—but about their children and grandchildren. Does noble blood run in one's veins like Jewishness? Is one a priest or a merchant by heredity?111
Indeed, in the wake of the war, Soviet public representations increasingly identified Jews as inherently resistant to Soviet acculturation and, even more threateningly, as an undifferentiated entity. As early as December 1941, during a conversation with a visiting Polish delegation, Stalin found time to reflect on the martial qualities of the warring sides. The Slavs, observed the Soviet leader, are "the finest and bravest of all airmen. They react very quickly, for they are a young race which hasn't yet been worn out . . . The Germans are strong, but the Slavs will defeat them." Jews, on the other hand, were repeatedly referred to as "poor and rotten soldiers."112
A core message of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign in the late 1940s was that the Jew remained a Jew, an eternal alien to the body national, no matter what the circumstances. As such, he had to be stripped of the false layers within which he deceptively wrapped himself. In early 1949, the Soviet press violated one of the taboos of Bolshevik revolutionary culture when it started disclosing pseudonyms. The birth names of assimilated Jewish figures in the arts were regularly attached to their assumed ones. And so the literary critic Ilia Isaakovich Stebun learned, along with the readers of the republic's main newspaper, that at the end of the day, after honorable service at the front and a career of writing in the Ukrainian language, he was still Katsenelson. Similarly, the poet Lazar Samilovich Sanov found out that his own work in the Ukrainian language and service as a war correspondent did not change the fact that he was still Smulson, just as Zhadanov was still Livshits and Gan remained Kagan.113	47
When the anti-Semitic campaign was reaching its climax in early 1953, the alleged Jewish resistance to Soviet acculturation called for uncompromising methods by the authorities. While exposing an accused Jewish embezzler in the small town of Zhmerynka who, needless to say, had managed to avoid the front during the Great Patriotic War ("he fell ill precisely at the end of June 1941"), the satirical magazine Krokodil posed a rhetorical question: "To tell you the truth, we became tired of reading your decisions scattered there: 'to reprimand, to point out, to suggest,' etc. Doesn't it seem to you, comrades, that you overestimate the educational significance of these resolutions of yours? And, anyway, who are you trying to reeducate? With such touching forbearance, too?"114 The Jew, simply put, proved to be the anomaly in the Marxist premise of the primacy of nurture over nature. He was immune to reeducation. In early 1953, with the recent executions of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee leadership, the unfolding Doctors' Plot, and rumors about the inevitable mass deportation of Jews dominating the day, the recommendation to transfer the case to the regional prosecutor (an office famed for meting out swift and harsh punishments) sent the unequivocal message that there was only one way to deal with such types.115 As the living antithesis to the core Soviet myths of hard and honest socialist labor and the martyrdom of the recent war, the Jew was beyond redemption. His nature was immune even to the powerful acculturation of nearly four decades of Soviet life.116	48
Uncovering the real Jew, however, was not confined to the Stalin era. Several years later, it was the turn of the de-Stalinizing Khrushchev to warn other communists against false hopes of acculturating the Jew. While attending a session of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party, Khrushchev urged the Poles to correct the "abnormal composition of the leading cadres" as the Soviets successfully had done. Staring hard at the chairman of the meeting, Roman Zambrowski, who was born Zukerman, Khrushchev exclaimed: "Yes, you have many leaders with names ending in 'ski,' but an Abramovich remains an Abramovich. And you have too many Abramoviches in your leading cadres."117 Sometime later, while reflecting on the evident failure of the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan to establish itself as a national homeland for Soviet Jewry, Khrushchev concluded that it was the result of historical conditions. Yet his description of the sociological was practically biological. "They [the Jews] do not like collective work, group discipline. They have always preferred to be dispersed. They are individualists," Khrushchev told Le figaro in an interview in March 1958. Finally, in the crudest officially ordained anti-Semitic publication to emerge from the Soviet system, Trohym Kychko's Iudaizm bez prikras, Nazi-like vocabulary and illustrations drove home the message of alienation of everything distinctively Jewish from the tradition of progressive humanity in general, the Soviet family in particular, and even more specifically, from the Ukrainian nation. Portrayed as speculators and hostile to manual labor, collaborators with the Nazis, and murderers of Symon Petliura, Jews were entirely excluded from the October Revolution, the Great Patriotic War, and Ukrainian aspirations for independence—all subjects of core myths within the Soviet milieu.118	49
But this complete exclusion concealed a crucial difference between the Nazi and Soviet enterprises. The class-based Soviet theory and practices of structuring society seemed to present an ominous obstacle to the application of uniform social targeting. Classes, strata, and layers were neither faceless nor homogeneous. Rather, they were variegated and arranged in a hierarchical order based on the services their members had rendered to the communist drive. Responsibility and accountability were assessed on the individual's merit, even though this principle was often compromised in the course of exercising the structuring acts. Maxim Gorky was not off the mark when he stated in his celebratory volume of the construction of the White Sea Canal that "the dictatorship of the proletariat has once more earned the right to declare: 'I do not fight to kill as does the bourgeoisie: I fight to resurrect toiling humanity to a new life. I kill only when it is not possible to eradicate the ancient habit of feeding on human flesh and blood.'"119 Moreover, individuals maintained the right to appeal and often did so successfully.120 No one could articulate this principle better than Stalin, and for good reason. In a series of speeches delivered as the Terror approached its climax, Stalin explained its guidelines. Concluding his remarks to the plenary session of the Central Committee on March 5, 1937, Stalin warned the delegates not to confuse sworn and irredeemable enemies with those who recanted and redeemed themselves when they joined forces with the Bolsheviks in the anti-Trotskyite campaign or those "who, at one point happened to be walking along the street where this or that Trotskyite happened to be walking, too." "In this question, as in all other questions, an individual, differentiated approach is required. We must not treat all alike," concluded Stalin.121 Three months later in a speech before the Military Council of the Defense Ministry on June 2, 1937, in the wake of the liquidation of the military leadership, Stalin reflected on the tension arising from the Soviet search for the enemy within. Reminding his audience of Lenin's noble and Friedrich Engels's bourgeois origins on the one hand, and of the proletarian origins of Leonid Serebriakov and Iakov Livshits (former Central Committee Secretary and Deputy People's Commissar of Communications, respectively) who turned out to be bad apples on the other, Stalin concluded:	50
Not every person of a given class is capable of doing harm. Individual people among the nobles and the bourgeoisie worked for the working class and not badly. Out of a stratum such as the lawyers came many revolutionaries. Marx was the son of a lawyer, not a son of a batrak [agricultural laborer] or of a worker. Among these strata can always be found people who can serve the cause of the working class, no worse, [but] rather better, than pure-blooded proletarians. That is why the general standard, that this is not a batrak's son, is an outdated one, not applicable to individual people. This is not a Marxist approach . . . This, I would say, is a biological approach, not a Marxist. We consider Marxism not a biological science, but a sociological science. Hence this general standard is absolutely correct with regard to estates, groups, strata, [but] it is not applicable to every individual who is not of proletarian or peasant origins.122
Indeed, the Soviets persistently rejected the primacy of the biological over the sociological. The principle of human heredity and its potential practices, whether exterminatory euthanasia or constructive eugenics, were officially repudiated in the Soviet Union from the early 1930s on. What is more, the Soviet Union was practically alone among the major countries in the 1930s in its rejection of euthanasia or sterilization of the mentally retarded, a practice that was embraced, often enthusiastically, on both sides of the Atlantic. In such an atmosphere, Nobel Prize–winning doctor Alexis Carrel could call on modern societies to do away with the mentally retarded and criminals who cost a fortune to maintain in asylums and prisons. "Why do we preserve these useless and harmful beings? Why should society not dispose of the criminals and the insane in a more economical manner?" asked Carrel. The worst criminals (including the insane and people who misled the public in important matters), he concluded, "should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases . . . Modern society should not hesitate to organize itself with reference to the normal individual. Philosophical systems and sentimental prejudices must give way before such a necessity."123 In Nazi Germany, as several scholars have recently reminded us, euthanasia was a key element in ideology and practice, and the forerunner of the persecution of the Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals, in sharp contrast to the Soviet purification drive, which at no point was anchored in genocidal ideology.124 Without it, the operation of industrialized killing—the aspect that set the Holocaust apart from other genocides—was inconceivable.125
The same logic applied to eugenics, the constructive twin of euthanasia. In his 1935 Out of the Night: A Biologist's View of the Future, Hermann Muller, the chief advocate of eugenics in the Soviet Union, argued that with artificial insemination technology, "in the course of a paltry century or two . . . it would be possible for the majority of the population to become of the innate quality of such men as Lenin, Newton, Leonardo, Pasteur, Beethoven, Omar Khayyam, Pushkin, Sun Yat Sen, Marx . . . or even to possess their varied faculties combined . . . which would offset the American prospects of a maximum number of Billy Sundays, Valentinos, Jack Dempseys, Babe Ruths, even Al Capones."126 But when Muller forwarded a copy of his book to Stalin in May 1936 and assured him that "it is quite possible, by means of the technique of artificial insemination which has been developed in this country, to use for such purposes the reproductive material of the most transcendently superior individuals, of the one in 50,000, or one in 100,000, since this technique makes possible a multiplication of more than 50,000 times," he practically sealed his fate and the fate of eugenics in the Soviet Union for the next three decades. Stalin read the book, and although he did not respond in writing or verbally until June 1937, his actions spoke for themselves. Muller escaped the Soviet Union by the skin of his teeth, but his cohort was shot to a man. The Institute of Medical Genetics was disbanded, and the era of Lysenkoism and its doctrine of acquired characteristics was ushered in. In the long process of constructing a socialist society, acculturation prevailed over biology as the means of both the expansion and purification of the polity.	51
And indeed, there was not, nor could there be, a highly placed Jew such as Lazar Kaganovich in the Nazi leadership; nearly half a million Jews could neither serve in the Wehrmacht nor become members of the National Socialist Party. It did not matter if they had excelled in the ranks of the German army in the Great War. There was one Jew, and he could not be Nazified. The Jew was an enemy not because of a role he played or a position he represented. He was evil incarnate, irredeemable, and unreconstructed, and as such, had to be exterminated. The basis on which the extermination of the Jewish "lice" took place was neither that of religion nor law but the racial biopolitics of genetic heredity.127 That was not the case in the Soviet Union. True, enacting the motto "sons are not responsible for their fathers" proved difficult. Just two years after Stalin's famous dictum, NKVD and party investigators were busily plunging into the records of members of the Communist Party, resurrecting from oblivion the original sin of the wrong social origin to destroy scores of true believers and their families. In the wake of the Terror, it appeared as if the stain of bad social origin was unremovable and incurable. It took the war to realize and institutionalize Stalin's dictum in Soviet political life. Nevertheless, even at the height of the officially endorsed anti-Semitic campaign, there were hundreds of thousands of Jews in the ranks of the party, the army, and scores of other political institutions. Restrictions on the number of Jews in state institutions (numerus clausus) could and did coexist side by side with Jewish high officers, Heroes of the Soviet Union, and party activists.128 The Nazi antithesis was still a powerful deterrent, especiall