How Does Jewish Identity Relate to Modern-Day Ukrainian Identity? Beyond the Refrain of “Do not Divide the Dead”: Othering the Jews as a Technology of Power in the Soviet Union

In an interview following the premiere of his award-winning film Babi Yar. Context at the Cannes Film Festival in July 2021, the renowned Belarus-born Ukrainian-German film director Sergei Loznitsa objected to the host’s referring to mass killing of Jews on the outskirts of Nazi-occupied Kyiv in late September 1941 as “a Ukrainian tragedy”.^[1] Instead, Loznitsa maintained that the massacre was solely a Jewish tragedy that occurred on the territory of the former Soviet Union.

The distinction between “ours” and “theirs” – when the suffering of Kyiv’s Jewish population is regarded as something beyond and outside of the Ukrainian experience of the Second World War – is undoubtedly a Soviet legacy. And, although the roots of anti-Semitism go well into the imperial period, I argue, othering the Jews as a technology of power was a Soviet invention that dates back to the Soviet ethnic policies of the 1920s.

The failure to commemorate the extermination of Jews on Soviet soil was motivated by the wartime (and immediate post-war) myth of “Do Not Divide the Dead”, that is all nationalities had suffered equally under Hitler. At the same time, from its inception, the Soviet regime operated based on ethnic and class segregation of its entire population, with certain social groups perceived as less loyal, hence hostile to the entire Soviet project. Jews, perhaps, became the most prominent example of such ethnic othering. Although during the early 1920s, the Soviet authorities aspired to create a Soviet Jewish (Yiddish) culture,^[2] after the war Jews would be disproportionally discriminated, and their everyday life – including access to jobs and higher education – constrained by the inherent state anti-Semitism.

The Ukrainian literary scholar and intellectual Ivan Dziuba has argued that the deep divide between Jews and Ukrainians, which would eventually result in erasing Jewish voices from the Ukrainian historical and cultural narratives and memory, was the result of Stalin’s anti-cosmopolitan campaign, which began late 1948.^[3] Even prior to that, Soviet propaganda continuously presented Jews, who came to occupy structural positions ill-fitted for the post-NEP Soviet state, as hostile to the Soviet cause and seeking to undermine the system from within.^[4]

The image of Jews as “others” also defined the reaction of the local population to the massacre in September 1941. While undoubtedly there were those who tried to help, denouncing Jews was commonplace and, as Karel Berkhoff has demonstrated, Kyivans of various ethnicities showed no regret for what was still widely regarded as a mass deportation of the city Jews to Palestine.^[5] In addition, while the jeers and insults hurled towards the Jews on the streets of Podil in those days can be symptomatic of pronounced popular anti-Semitism, the fact that so many Ukrainians simply remained indifferent to the fate of their Jewish neighbours invites other interpretations.

The most obvious explanation is the deeply ingrained fear that anyone stepping in or going against the Nazi directives could easily become their next victim. In the end, the people on Ukraine’s territories, who had survived the tragedies of the 1930s – the man-made famine of 1932–33, and the sweeping purges of the late 1930s, had learned the hard way that nobody was protected from the acts and wishes of tyrannical rule. At the same time, those gruelling experiences instilled a certain apathy in people, preoccupied primarily with the struggle for survival and the well-being of their families.

Yet there is another, less obvious reason why so many Ukrainians and Russians in Ukraine (as elsewhere in the Soviet Union) did not consider it their duty to help and assist the Jews during the Nazi occupation and beyond. They simply did not see them as part of their own community, and hence considered their suffering as something distant.^[6]

For me, as a historian of interwar Ukraine, the root for this social dissociation lies in the process of enforced national categorisation and self-identification implemented since the early 1920s as part of the Soviet nationalities (read: ethnic) policies of korenizatsiia (“indigenization”).

Throughout the 1920s, the Soviet authorities employed an accelerated state-sponsored policy of ethnic identification and promotion of national languages. Aimed primarily at rooting the Soviet regime in non-Russian peripheries, this policy came to split mixed and ethnically ambiguous communities of the former imperial periphery along ethnic lines. Guided by political (electoral legitimacy) and economic (growth of productivity) concerns, this policy precipitated important changes to schooling, higher education, access to the public sphere, and cultural production and distribution. From the mid-1920s onwards, the provision of public services people received – at least on paper – depended on their ethnic backgrounds; be it medical care, judicial protection, literacy courses, or political representation. In theory, this ethnic distinction was determined by self-declared ethnic affiliation. Hence, when the first Soviet census in 1926 took place, the respondents were expected to declare their ethnic belonging, with census takers allowed to intervene only when the respondent had problems understanding the question – replacing narodnost’ [ethnicity] with native language, religion, grazhdanstvo (citizenship in the pre-revolutionary sense), or residence in a particular locality.^[7]

In practice, however, the decision to split mixed communities along ethnic lines would come from the centre seeking to fulfill their administrative needs and economic necessities. During local elections to village soviets – also organised along ethnic lines – villagers in the Polish–Soviet borderlands opposed separation, lamenting that “it has never happened before that Poles and Ukrainians were split apart”.^[8] The dissection of local communities went further still. People in close-knit communities, whose local vernaculars blended, and traditions and everyday customs merged, were segregated by means of education: children were sent to different schools, while uneducated adults went through crash literacy courses in their ascribed mother tongues.^[9]

While it is not always easy to assess how this policy of top-down ethnicization, which lasted until the mid-1930s, effected perceptions, it is clear that the decade of state-promoted ethnic identification broke up communities and personal ties. In Soviet citizens it instilled the notion that one’s nationality were not of any other community’s concern. This attitude can already be seen during Stalin’s ethnic terror, which took the form of numerous national operations against what were called “western national minorities” (mainly Poles and Germans in the context of Soviet Ukraine), or the ethnic deportations during the Second World War (Crimean Tatars).^[10]

The legacy of this ethnic exclusion continues to shape the way we deal with Ukraine’s past. For instance, the famine of 1932–33, which affected communities regardless of their ethnic affiliation, has come to be represented as a solely Ukrainian tragedy, while the fate of Ukraine’s minorities – some 20 percent of the total population – remains neglected and understudied. Similarly, the Nazi atrocities in Babyn Yar have come to be seen as an exclusively Jewish affair, eclipsing the fates of thousands of Sinti and Roma, some Ukrainians, disabled and patients of psychiatric hospitals, as well as other “superfluous” groups who perished in this mass burial ground.^[11] Perhaps, this view on Babyn Yar as a Jewish tragedy is the reason why the state of Ukraine has not managed until now to build a national museum, a place to commemorate the various Nazi victims in Ukraine.

While nationalist historians excel in competitive victimhood,^[12] we fail to see that the process of removal of even a single element – an ethnic or cultural community in our case – destroys the whole social mosaic, transforming it into an entirely new place.^[13] Kyiv, as so many other Eastern European cities, will never be the same without its thriving Jewish community exterminated on September 29–30, 1941. Similarly, Soviet population politics have transformed former Russia’s multi-ethnic, multilingual and multi-confessional periphery into, using Kate Brown’s words: “a largely Ukrainian heartland”.^[14] At the same time, Soviet memory politics – whose methods were to a certain degree copied in Ukraine since independence – erases those minorities’ voices from Ukraine’s cultural landscape; and even tends to reject their role in Ukraine’s history all together – as the above-mentioned interview with Loznitsa demonstrates.