Holocaust***Gulag: Repressing, Rescuing, and Regulating Recalcitrant Legacies

3.1 Why Gulag and the Holocaust? Violence, Trauma, and Repression

It is not difficult to list differences that seem to render the histories of the Holocaust and the Gulag incompatible on scholarly grounds. First and foremost, the Holocaust was a genocide, based on an antisemitic ideology that extended to other people deemed unworthy of life. Discrimination of Jews in Nazi Germany was first implemented through professional restrictions, social exclusion, violent harassment, and forced expulsions. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the ideological war moved toward a full-scale annihilation policy against Jews and the mass murder of others (including Roma, Soviet POWs, homosexuals, and political opponents). The Gulag, on the other hand, preceded the Second World War and continued afterwards as a domestic policy against anyone suspected of resisting the Soviet communist state. Its labor camps were designed as reforging (perekovka) and served dual purposes: incapacitating perceived threats and exploiting labor, forcing the zeks (prisoners) to contribute to the building of the Soviet state under brutal conditions in (mostly) remote areas. They were officially called ispravitelno-trudovye lagerya, corrective labor camps. If Nazi ideology differentiated between those deemed worthy of life and those who were not, the Soviet vision emphasized a hopeful communist future for humanity. The Gulag camps were not designed like the German Vernichtungslager (extermination camps); yet, mortality rates were extremely high due to the harsh conditions, forced labor, and lack of resources.

Perhaps it would be more important to hold on to those distinctions rather than looking for similarities among different totalitarian systems, some of which with genocidal intent. To keep them apart has been one way to avoid complications, not only in comparative historical scholarship but also in light of fear of political repercussions. And yet: by focusing on similarities instead of differences, new light can be shed on the long-lasting impact on communities affected by lethal legacies of different forms of totalitarian systems.

In post-Holocaust discourse, topics like the classifications of victim, perpetrator, and bystander as well as the exploration of personal responsibility have gained prominence. In the Soviet context, these issues are murkier. There, anyone could have been branded an “enemy of the people” just as effortlessly as they could have turned into a KGB informant. Such complexity poses challenges when employing terms like victim, perpetrator, bystander, and collaborator, particularly when a person might embody multiple roles simultaneously.

The Soviet camp system was not monolithic. Its complexity encompassed a range of functions and underwent shifts over time. Unlike the Nazi concentration camps, which were primarily detainment sites, the Soviet system included other facets. Among these were deportation sites and forced relocations of individuals. In the Gulag system, spetsposeleniya referred to special “settlements” or “colonies” distinct from typical labor camps. Groups deemed “untrustworthy” by the Soviet regime, including certain ethnic groups and kulaks (peasants considered to be wealthy), were forcibly relocated. While people were required to work, often in logging, mining, or agriculture, they were not confined in traditional labor camps. However, their movement was restricted and the harsh conditions resulted in high mortality rates.

In other words, if we were to compare the intent of Auschwitz (as the largest of the six Nazi extermination camps) with, for example, the infamous Kolyma or the Perm Krai lagers (to name but two), one would quickly end in an impasse. Such incompatible comparisons have been suggested before. A focus on the “sameness” of these two totalitarian regimes could thus turn into polemic-historical arguments, as panelist Björn Krondorfer (Regents’ Professor at Northern Arizona University, Department of Cultural Studies) pointed out in his remarks on the German Historikerstreit in the 1980s in West Germany.^[1] German historians, like Ernst Nolte, had argued that Nazi Germany just imitated what the Soviet Union had already practiced in the 1920s – an unproductive way for bringing the lethal legacies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union into conversation (cf. Krondorfer 2021a).

What is, however, legitimately open for comparison are the structure, anatomy, and set-up of the thousands of Nazi labor camps and the Soviet corrective labor camps, and how these legacies have been remembered and memorialized or, the opposite, buried and repressed. Panelists Nanci Adler (Professor of Memory, History, and Transitional Justice at the University of Amsterdam) and Katya Tolstaya (Professor of Theology and Religion in Post-Trauma Societies at the University of Amsterdam) pointed to the long-lasting effects of dehumanization among Gulag survivors and the active memory work of Memorial in Russia to address these legacies (e.g. Adler 2001).

The labor camps, in many ways, symbolized the extremes of the Nazi and Soviet regimes. Roundtable 1 raised the question whether these camps genuinely represented the essence of the modern era, given that some theorists have suggested to define the 20th century as the “century of camps.” A fruitful conversation can start with analyzing the various procedures that coerced prisoners into forced labor and the various mechanisms by which they were exploited and humiliated – to the point of extreme dehumanization which, as one participating scholar argued, changed the ontological status of the zeks (to non-humans or someone placed outside of humanity; Tolstaya 2023b). Regarding dehumanization, Tolstaya also pointed to a controversy between the writers and former prisoners: Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. At the core of the controversy was Shalamov’s criticism of Solzhenitsyn, charging that the latter rose-colored the Gulag experience. While Solzhenitsyn believed that suffering in the Gulag could purify and morally strengthen an individual, Shalamov believed that the Gulag was dehumanizing with no redemption. The extreme suffering in the Gulag, according to Shalamov, did not lead to spiritual enlightenment; it did not make people stronger or nobler, it merely broke them.

Another topic for fruitful comparison is the ideological and mind-controlling success of both regimes despite their differences. Both regimes aimed to create strong, exclusive communities: in the case of Nazi Germany, a national community; in the case of the Soviet Union, an international community. Both fostered a sense of belonging and worked diligently to secure an obedient population. This was achieved through various means, including structured activities, new organizations, and indoctrination, all designed to instill specific beliefs from childhood onward. These regimes garnered widespread support, even from those who suffered under them. One speaker focused on instances where people remained committed to the Soviet Union even after enduring significant harm inflicted by that system (Adler 2012).

A supposedly cohesive collective is often defined by those who are excluded from it. The identity of the in-group is thus shaped by contrast to the out-group. Both regimes required adversaries: the creation of enemies has historically been essential for self-definition and for bolstering a sense of community. The camp systems in both states thus came to symbolize the dangers of being stigmatized as an outsider. While conformity was rewarded, the coercive camps served as a source of fear, resulting in societies with significant support for the governing regimes and minimal tolerance for those labeled as outsiders. The identification of enemies was not solely the work of secret police but, in many instances, relied heavily on ordinary citizens reporting on their neighbors. In Nazi Germany, for example, records indicate a heavy reliance on community informants.

While traditional prisons are bound by customary practices and legal constraints, the Nazi concentration camps and the Gulag camps operated in a liminal space, not bound by these restrictions. These camps served both instrumental and expressive purposes. Instrumentally, they incapacitated and exploited real and perceived enemies. While traditional prisons existed in both societies, they were bound by customary practices and legal constraints. The writings and memoirs from individuals who experienced life in these camps frequently depict the camp universe as something entirely distinct from the regular world, not just in a metaphorical sense but firmly rooted in physical and geographical reality. The notion of a “state of exception” by Giorgio Agamben was referenced, describing how emergencies can be legally created to circumvent what was previously protected by law.

Beyond investigating the histories of the Gulag and the Holocaust, memory studies are equally important (roundtables 2, 4, and 5). They can start with questions regarding the prosecution of (state) crimes (roundtable 4) or address the comparative study of monuments and memorial spaces (roundtable 6). Such memorial spaces are often initiated by grassroots organizations, though over time official state organs have asserted control over public commemorations. How did those transitions change the memorial landscape? Other topics include the opening and preservation of archives, or the writing, collection, and publication of personal memories. Here, scholars from different national contexts and different disciplines can learn from each other.

3.2 Rescuing Repressed Histories

Whereas in postwar Germany – the country responsible for the Holocaust – citizens are legally prohibited to deny the Holocaust or to engage publicly in any form of celebratory nostalgia for the Nazi past, expressions of nostalgia are not condemned in post-Gulag Russia at official levels. Those include Stalin nostalgia, Empire nostalgia, or Soviet nostalgia. Though the “aching” for a lost past (the etymological root of nostalgia is nostos [return home] combined with algia [pain]) is in itself simply a mournful expression of loss, those sentiments can easily be manipulated in the political arena and weaponized for advancing particular understandings of the Gulag past.

Contentious retelling and remembering are part of the dilemma of coming to terms with lethal legacies in former violent societies. The two presenters at this roundtable (David Simon, Director of Genocide Studies at Yale University; Chad Gibbs, Professor of Jewish Studies and Director of the Center of Holocaust Studies at the College of Charleston) pondered questions regarding what histories might be repressed, which storytellers are silenced, and where the responsibility lies for repressing the past. A third roundtable contributor from Memorial in St. Petersburg was unable to attend; he did not receive a travel visa (and the Zoom connection with Russia did not work). The absence itself illuminated the political interference of international scholarly exchange on the topic of “repressed histories.”

Simon started with raising complicated questions regarding the role of Salonika Jews from Greece who were forced to work in the Sonderkommandos in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Why did the men in those special units of prisoners work in the crematories and gas chambers? Witness accounts of such “compromised” survivors are not always welcome later in transitional societies. They are met with suspicion. Such social dynamics are not limited to post-Holocaust and post-Gulag societies but also emerge in other cases of mass atrocity. In post-genocide Rwanda – the second example Simon introduced – the community-based gacaca courts had to deal with what “compromised witnesses,” leaving the community with “compromised testimonies” that are difficult to integrate into national narratives (see also Simon and Kahn 2023). In one specific incident, the Interahamwe (Rwandan militias) and the Rwandan military had committed a massacre at a hospital in Butare. The later trial involved both local Interahamwe and some doctors from the hospital. Another case related to a Tutsi woman’s testimony. During the trial, the attending crowd unexpectedly accused her of collaborating with the Interahamwe, hinting at the woman’s possible role as a “war wife” or sex slave. Survival during genocidal violence often involves (moral) compromise. Scholarship needs to delve deeper into these gray areas, especially regarding gender-based violence, highlighting the coercive nature of sexual violence and survival that, for a long time, remained unspoken or repressed in the writing of histories or in post-conflict trials.

The same can be said about recounting stories of survival and coercion of Jewish survivors in the so-called “privileged” positions in the camps and ghettos, facing recrimination by the community after the Holocaust. The roundtable conversation shifted to educational settings, museums, and also academic spaces where complicated narratives are often not shared. Since complex stories can be perceived as “intellectually poisonous,” they are approached with caution. While academic discussions might touch upon them, there is a distinction between scholarly inquiry and public history, the latter trying to convey the legacy of traumatic events to a wider community. It is a methodological and theoretical challenge to rescue intricate and complicated narratives. Literature and the digital space should be considered as potential venues for sharing such stories. The digital realm, decentralized and democratic, might offer opportunities to bypass dominant narratives. However, how the digital space can effectively share sensitive and complex stories still requires further exploration.

Similar research is currently done regarding Jewish male survivor testimonies from the death camp of Treblinka, as Gibbs pointed out in his presentation. In their testimonies, some former male prisoners have, for example, insisted that they did not see any Jewish women inmates – though it is known today that there were women in Treblinka as well (Gibbs [in review]). Did these men really not remember? Specifically, Gibbs mentioned the accounts of Abraham Bomba and Eddie Weinstein. Weinstein, for example, documented his personal experiences of Treblinka in 1947, which included straightforward accounts of sexual violence in the camp. However, when he later shared these experiences in interviews, these references were omitted. Did Weinstein and other survivors selectively not recall in order to protect themselves? Or perhaps to protect the honor and livelihood of the women who survived? Was there a desire to repress certain traumatic memories, or, to the contrary, an intent to shield contemporary listeners from the horrors of the past? How should historians and trauma theorists approach these questions?

Certainly, gender dynamics play a role in these narratives and memories. With reference to the sexual violence in Treblinka, the concept of “gender damage” was mentioned, a term that also implies the psychological trauma male prisoners faced due to their inability to protect women. It could have influenced the stories they later chose to share or to omit.

The roundtable discussion focused on sexual violence. A participant referenced a 2014 talk by Dagmar Herzog at a conference on “Gender in the Holocaust,” where she had pointed out that male scholars did not take the topic seriously until the 1990s. It took the horrifying incidents of sexual violence in Rwanda and Bosnia for attention to shift to gender in Holocaust studies and to start integrating the experiences of women that did not seem to fit the narratives established by male Holocaust survivors. To underscore the complexities of historical narration with regard to sensitive topics like gender, Yitzhak Arad’s seminal work Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka (Arad 1987) was mentioned. Arad, a survivor of the Holocaust, later became a brigadier general in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and subsequently headed Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Center, for an extended period. Despite having access to testimonies and sources, Arad chose to omit certain parts, indicating them by using ellipses in his book. These omissions from original sources are significant because they concern the treatment and experiences of women in Treblinka. Do historians have a responsibility to “moderate” the content of survivor stories? Arad decided to exclude certain graphic and sensitive details. What kind of power and responsibility do historians hold in shaping narratives and influencing collective memory?

These questions underscore the complexities inherent in documenting and narrating historical events, especially those from highly charged histories such as the Holocaust and the Gulag (see also Krondorfer 2021b). We might not necessarily want to judge a historian’s choice, such as Arad’s decision to omit certain details about Treblinka, but it is pivotal to understand the historical and social contexts that drive narrative choices. Arad wrote his book in the 1980s when many survivors and witnesses were still alive. He might have omitted specific details to protect the identities and dignity of women who had endured particular humiliations and violence during the Holocaust. Otherwise, their traumas could have been exposed to the public, potentially subjecting them to further pain or societal judgment.

Sexuality in the Gulag is another underexplored topic. While a writer like Varlam Shalamov (e.g. 2018) articulated that extreme dehumanization eradicated all desires, including sexual desire, there are stories, in less severe physical conditions that describe intensified sexual longings among the camp population. This heightened desire could have signified a deep longing for warmth and human connection, especially in the harsh Gulag environment. A roundtable participant referenced various narratives about lesbian relations and a heightened sense of sexuality within the Gulag system. The topic of intimacy and same-sex relationships, especially in extreme conditions like the Gulag and Nazi concentration camps, requires further investigations about the multifaceted nature of human relationships and desires within oppressive environments, including the intersections of intimacy, power, violence, and coercion (e.g. Bell 2015). Referencing Yael Feldman’s work (e.g. 1992), one can read expressions of intimacy as attempts to survive in highly dehumanizing environments. Even in the direst of conditions, individuals strove to exercise agency and to find moments of resilience and humanity by forming intimate relationships. These moments underscore the indomitable human spirit and the innate desire for human connections.

Sexuality, coercion, power dynamics, and a quest for human validation intersected in the Gulag system, but the use of sex as a tool of power is not limited to the Gulag and needs to be studied comprehensively as a broader theme in the history of the Soviet Union, including the NKVD. This includes shifting away from male frameworks when portraying and constructing violence. Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War (2017) serves as an excellent example of women’s experiences during the Second World War in the Soviet Union. Many women did not openly discuss their roles and experiences in the war, not just because of trauma but also because of the social stigma associated with rape or intimate relationships on the front lines. Women who experienced sexualized violence and, subsequently, social marginalization encountered significant barriers when speaking out, especially from state representatives.

Using Shalamov’s narratives as an example, a participant underscored the shifting perceptions of female characters in the Gulag. Perceived initially as prostitutes (as the only conceivable role for a woman in the Gulag), subsequent narratives by Shalamov presented the same woman also in the role of secretary and medical sister. This instance highlights the changing narratives about women’s experiences and roles in the camps. Generally, however, there were many reasons that dissuaded women from discussing their experiences, ranging from sexual coercion and favors to unwanted pregnancies, including abortions, which were illegal. Terminating a pregnancy could lead to incarceration in the Gulag. Societal pressures and stigmatization meant that only a small fraction of incidents of sexual violence made it into official records (referred to as the “light field”). In contrast, a vast majority (“dark field”) remained undocumented because of the numerous disincentives to share such stories. Over time, the reluctance to discuss these traumatic experiences resulted in a significant gap in historical records and in understanding the full extent of the challenges faced by women in coercive environment such as the camps.

Primo Levi’s concept of the “gray zone,” referring to morally ambiguous areas, can be useful when considering the complexities women survivors faced (Levi 1989). This includes, for example, the treatment of women accused of “horizontal collaboration” in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War in southern France, referring to women accused of having had relationships with German soldiers and officials during the Nazi occupation. The term itself implies shame and moral judgment. Women were subjected to public humiliation and degradation, a process meant to mark them and set them apart in the community. This pertains also to the maltreatment of German women by Red Army soldiers. These women narratives exist in a murky area, revealing the complexities of human behavior and societal norms during wartime.

Compromised testimonies – combined with what some scholars have described as “archival silence” – leave researchers, scholars, and communities in a conundrum when trying to come to terms with a complex past. The “archival silence” associated with Holocaust trials, as it relates to sexual violence, led to omissions and exclusions in Holocaust narratives, especially those written or published before the 1960s. By the time survivors began sharing their stories, an established narrative framework excluded topics like sexual violence. In the case of post-Soviet history, the archival silence and, worse, the forceful dissolution and confiscation of archives, are part of what memory activists of the Gulag have to reckon with. To counter such silencing, we can turn to the clandestine samizdat literature during Soviet times (e.g. Alexeeva 1985) or to local and regional initiatives that painstakingly build up Gulag archives outside of governmental control.

Literature can help in “rescuing repressed memories,” though it can also follow normative expectations or misrepresent events. While many testimonies originally written in Yiddish were franker about certain topics, translated versions mediated some of the horrors through editorial decisions, as in the case of Elie Wiesel’s seminal work Night. His initial draft in Yiddish spanned 400 pages, appealing directly to fellow Jews about the horrors of the Holocaust; but it was the edited, shortened, and tamed French version that became widely known and eventually translated into many languages. A more recent example is Takis Würger’s novel Stella (2021; German original, 2019), based on a true story of a Jewish woman forced by the Gestapo to identify hidden Jews. A bestseller in Germany, the novel was also criticized for being clichéd and trite.

To conclude: It is important to underscore the dynamics about who gets to tell a story, how it is told, and the societal structures and expectations that shape narratives of traumatic and lethal violence. Scholars are responsible also for presenting nuanced and compromised narratives to broader audiences.

3.3 Camps and Crimes: Totalitarian Regimes

The panelists in this roundtable did not insinuate similarities between the Soviet corrective labor camps and the Nazi annihilation camps. Rather, they discussed comparable mechanisms by which the two regimes’ forced labor camps operated. Alexander Alvarez (Professor in the Department of Criminology/Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University), Gintare Malinauskaitė (Research Fellow at the Lithuanian Institute of History) and Edward Westermann (Regents’ Professor of History at Texas A&M University-San Antonio) emphasized that both systems needed enemies for their internal self-definition to determine who in Nazi Germany counted as Aryan German and in the Soviet Union as a reliable Soviet citizen. Both totalitarian systems enforced those definitions by relying on informants in every corner of society. To further control the population, punishment camps were needed, and once the camps were established, they metastasized. Eventually, ordinary people became compromised as accomplices or ended up being incarcerated themselves – or both (see Alvarez 2009).

Even though not designed as killing zones, the brutal conditions in labor camps led to massive death by attrition. Survival often depended on luck or on taking advantage of the internal hierarchies by which the camps were run. Many of these camps operated in what can be described as “zones of exception,” where strict and yet arbitrary rules fostered practices of extreme humiliation, degradation, and dehumanization (cf. Toker 2019). In both Gulag and Nazi labor camps, regular criminals joined the prison population, frequently faring better than other inmates because they knew how to turn the camp hierarchies of privilege and corruption to their advantage and how eventually to master these hierarchies.

At the same time, the camps were not lawless zones. They had their own set of rules and regulations, sometimes designed to give an appearance of justice or an illusion of the rule of law. The camps operated under a unique moral compass, distinct from the outside world. In this regard it is useful to compare the roles of camp guards. How did they become perpetrators? Westermann (2021) introduced a case-study of alcohol abuse among guards celebrating at a casino in Sobibor to make a point about the male comradery among perpetrators.

In stark contrast to the Nazi annihilation policy of Jews, the Soviet state sent into the Gulag people who had killed Jews. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s and independent nations like Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland emerged, each country had to come to terms with their own past, the topic of Malinauskaitė’s contribution. It led to the rewriting of national histories and, at times, to the granting of a broad amnesty for citizens who, as Soviet subjects decades ago, had been imprisoned in the Gulag. Post-Soviet Lithuania, for example, decided that Lithuanians who had been Gulag prisoners were declared “not guilty,” thus annulling the former accusations by the Soviet regime (Malinauskaitė 2019). This included controversial cases when, for example, perpetrators who had persecuted Jews were rehabilitated. Rehabilitating former Gulag prisoners for the sake of national cohesion in the new nation states included those who had been imprisoned for collaborating with Nazi Germany or for murdering Jews during the German occupation. Those charges were rendered void in the 1990s, thus turning former Gulag prisoners, some of whom had been accomplices of the Nazi regime, into victims of the Soviet Union. This is one example of when and how the Holocaust and Gulag legacies overlap and intersect.

The concept of the “manufacture of acquiescence and acceptance” was particularly helpful in understanding the developments in post-Soviet countries. This concept implies that societies might actively cultivate a particular narrative and moral understanding of history that might become widely accepted or passively agreed upon. While those standardized explanations can justify and legitimate certain actions, over time – and influence by external factors, including critical scholarship and active memory work – these normative standards can change.

International law and mechanisms of transitional justice can play a pivotal role in shifting standards. They can serve as tools for a different “normative education” that guide societies in re-evaluating their past actions and beliefs. Prevailing value systems can change, pushing societies away from nationalist-serving narratives toward more universally accepted moral understanding. “Moral memory” is another useful concept. It revolves around the collective memory of societies, particularly concerning ethical and moral judgments. It can raise questions how a country remembers its own role in war, genocide, and domestic terror, and re-evaluate and transform a national consensus.

3.4 Redress after Unprecedented Crimes

While the labor camps forced unwanted populations and enemies of the state into submission, this roundtable suggested a distinction: Nazi Germany aimed at silencing its opponents, the Soviet Union wanted its citizens to conform. The expected “performative conformity” of the Soviet subject might explain why some former prisoners – despite years of maltreatment in the Gulag system – held on to their fundamental trust and belief in the Soviet state long after their release from the Gulag. This may have led to what Johannes Dyck (Research Fellow at the Museum of Russian-German Cultural History in Detmold, Germany) called the phenomenon of “delayed redress.” In contrast, it was easier for victims of Nazi crimes to break with the imposed silence after the victory of the Allied forces and to speak out publicly against Nazism and Hitler’s dictatorship. Generally, one might say, whereas crimes related to the Holocaust and the Second World War were prosecuted, the injustices of the Gulag were not acknowledged through legal processes in post-Soviet Russia. Those differences may have had an impact on cultural memory and memorialization processes (see also Himka and Michlic 2013).

The three panelists in this roundtable focused on different aspects regarding “redress”: (1) Dyck reported on how religious prisoners of the Gulag, particularly members of the Free Church, tried to reintegrate into civilian life after their release by reclaiming their humanity (despite the dehumanizing conditions they had survived); (2) Wolfgang Schneider (Research Assistant in the Department of History at Heidelberg University) explained how the Soviet Union went about conducting trials against Nazi collaborators after the war, including ghetto functionaries (an estimated 500,000 people were charged with collaboration); and (3) Ilya Kukulin (Research Fellow at the Center for Russian Culture at Amherst College) argued that “forced confessions” and “public apologies” in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia have left people severely traumatized. Observing cultural shifts in post-Soviet Russia, Kukulin suggested that performative conformity can be imposed without relying on formal legal proceedings (Kukulin 2017, 2018; also Weiss-Wendt and Adler 2021; Adler 2012). All that is needed is to morally and politically pressure people into publicly apologizing, which, he argued, constitutes a form of symbolic humiliation. As regards the coercive means of forced public apologies (rather than an enforced silence), he drew a line from Stalinist Soviet Union to Putin’s Russia today.

Post-Soviet society has not systematically processed the past. Instead, it developed a model of adaptation to the new conditions, according to Dyck. Questions regarding the concept of moral redress remain: do symbolic acts of offering redress suffice, or does its effectiveness depend on the recipient’s acceptance? The unique environment of the Free Churches in the Soviet Union facilitated redress for those who returned from the Gulag. Dyck introduced “delayed redress” as a form of adaptation in terms of preparedness to endure hardships, suggesting that during Soviet times the church provided the most effective platform for redress compared to other societal venues or mechanisms. He presented a nuanced view of societal adjustments and resilience demonstrated by religious communities in Russian society.

Schneider’s account of Soviet trials against Nazi collaborators provided a deeper understanding of the complex nature of transitional justice trials in the Soviet context, particularly in relation to the Holocaust (see Schneider 2019). These trials were primarily non-public; no audience was allowed in the court. Even if local communities were not directly involved, they knew about the trials through word of mouth. Though there were occasional reports, generally the press did not report about the trials of Jewish council members and ghetto policemen. Hence, the majority of the 500,000 people involved in these trials remained under the radar of public attention. Interestingly, in a period when the specific persecution of Jews could not be discussed openly in the Soviet context, the postwar trials opened a space for witnesses to address the Holocaust. While public discourse shifted towards ideological clichés about peaceful Soviet citizens, in these trials, the Holocaust was recognized as the persecution of Jews.

While the Soviet regime was preparing a trial regarding the Jewish Anti-Fascist committee for, among other things, Jewish nationalism, trials were held simultaneously against Jewish Council members. Survivors and witnesses could speak about the Holocaust without repercussions. In some instances, people informed on former Jewish Council members and ghetto policemen because of their negative experiences with them. The roundtable conversation eventually focused on the nature of justice dispensed through the trials in the Soviet Union. Schneider acknowledged variable definitions of “transitional justice” (such as distinctions between “prerogative state” and “normative state”) in order to better understand how dictatorships and authoritarian regimes handle transitional justice.

Both state-sanctioned trials and community-driven justice mechanisms offer unique perspectives and outcomes in the pursuit of justice (see also Malinauskaitė 2024). While survivors could find a forum within state trials, especially the Soviet trials, their engagement was limited and constrained. Community-driven trials, on the other hand, like the Jewish Honor Courts originating “from below,” served as a counter model to state-sanctioned trials (see also Jokusch and Finder 2015). Jewish Honor Courts contrasted starkly with state trials given their localized and intimate nature. Similar trials against former kapos in Israel (1950s–1970s) closely aligned with the community-driven model of postwar Jewish Honor Courts.

In sum, this roundtable focused on the importance of understanding the concept of redress, not just on an individual level but also in the context of communal empowerment and agency.

3.5 Memory and (Religious) Ethics after Atrocities

Following a thread already articulated in the previous roundtable about religious persecution, Nadezhda Beliakova (Fellow at Gerda Henkel Foundation at the University of Bielefeld) suggested that former religious Gulag prisoners were able to interpret their suffering as martyrdom (see also Beliakova and Martin 2024). Rather than seeing themselves as merely victims, the religious reframing of their experience as martyrdom returned agency to the former prisoners. Martyrdom also provided an explanatory model, promoted by the Russian Orthodox Church, that was understood and embraced by a larger post-Soviet audience. Similar fascination with martyrdom can be found in the historical trajectory of evangelical Christian groups in the Soviet Union in the period after the Second World War.

Though martyrdom has a place in Judaism, among Jewish survivors of the Holocaust it is far less relevant as a religious interpretive model than among Christians. Perhaps not accidentally, Timothy Langille (Religious Studies Faculty, Arizona State University), who works on connecting memory studies with biblical studies (Langille 2017, 2022) pointed to the role of satire among some Jewish survivors in Displaced Person Camps after the war. In some instances, survivors employed the tradition of the Purim Spiel, a theatrical play during a biblical holiday which commemorates Jews being rescued from the villain Haman, who had plans to massacre them. Instead of portraying Haman, some survivors dressed up, in a carnivalesque reversal, as Hitler to mock him and celebrate their survival. Such a “carnivalesque” (Bakhtin) way of dealing with trauma can, perhaps, be compared to the Soviet culture’s reliance on anecdotes about party leaders. Satire can be read as a crucial grassroots approach for coping with collective trauma. If coerced public apologies are a state’s tool for enforcing conformity, satire can be a tool of revenge, resistance, and re-empowerment for individuals and persecuted communities. In the context martyrdom, satire and forgiveness – read as religious responses – can transform the impact of traumatic memories and align them with a different value system.

The Holocaust and Gulag are differently remembered and integrated into national identities. While the Holocaust serves as a defining element for Jewish identity, whether viewed as a secular or religious event, the Gulag does not define Russian identity in the same manner. It remains a repressed memory (see also Tolstoj 2023; Tolstaya 2014).

Stephen Batalden (Professor Emeritus of History and former Director of the Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies at Arizona State University) addressed the tensions between an ethics of individual morality and the realism of state politics. Given his own expertise in Russian religious culture (Batalden 2013), he reminded the symposium of the critical work of Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, especially his book Moral Man and Immoral Society, first published in 1932. Though Niebuhr had been politically active in social causes and had become, as a result of the First World War, a pacifist, critics of this particular book lamented its anti-liberal and anti-pacifist leanings. Identifying now as a “Christian realist,” Niebuhr warned in this 1932 work against the rise of fascism, which would render pacifism irrelevant. We may have to revisit a religious-based, ethical realism to understand and counter the rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe and elsewhere.

3.6 Representing Recalcitrant Legacies

Repressive, lethal, and genocidal legacies resist easy interpretation; they also resist simple representation, be it through art, memorials, or personal narratives. While Gulag and Holocaust survivors learned to live with dread and the ghosts of the past, a haunting lingers in societies and communities affected by those lethal histories. If ghosts are a manifestation of an unresolved past, they continue to haunt societies. How do we live with such haunting? How do we present that which pushes against the limits of representation?

The panelists of the concluding roundtable addressed aspects of traumatizing histories that are uncooperative since they complicate the retelling on individual and communal levels. Oren Stier (Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Program at Florida International University) suggested that artists today tend to be evocative in their renditions of history (see Stier 2015). Their intention is less to reproduce facts and more to challenge expectations, such as the work of German artists Gunter Demnig with his Stolpersteine project^[2] or Renate Stih and Frieder Schnock’s “double-think” installation in a former Jewish quarter in Berlin, Places of Remembrance - Memorial in the Bavarian Quarter.

Zuzanna Bogumil (Cultural Anthropologist at the Institute of Archeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences) raised a number of questions regarding the complexity of memory work among Gulag survivors and their families in the post-Soviet era. Relationships with the dead seem to be more important than a detailed reconstruction of history. The emphasis on searching for the dead, identifying burial sites, creating religious markers, and dealing with recalcitrant memory spaces, signals a prevalence of memory over history (Bogumil 2018).

While current memorial spaces and museums are designed to provide access points for individuals so as not to be overwhelmed by the immensity of lethal histories, there is no guarantee that collective amnesia or misappropriations can be prevented through education. Memorial activities ideally resist lethal legacies; however, they can also mislead to celebrate those histories or turn them into revisionist narratives that sanction new state repression. Bringing difficult histories into the present – ostensibly to learn from, and about them – does not guarantee ethical engagement. Rather, access points to history can also lead to the reenactment of lethal and hateful ideologies, such as the 2017 Unite the Right march of American white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, who appropriated history by proudly displaying Nazi symbols and absurdly chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”

If not in the streets like in Charlottesville, the battle of coming to terms with recalcitrant legacies can also take place within families. Can ambiguities, silences, and distortions in compromised family histories be brought back into intelligible speech? Julija Sukys (Professor of English at the University of Texas) talked about how researching and writing critically about one’s family can peel away layers of family lore and hagiography to reveal a more somber assessment of individual involvement in the Holocaust or the Gulag (Sukys 2017). Sukys exemplified this through her own research into her family’s Lithuanian roots. To approach the long lasting and resonant lethal legacies of the Holocaust and the Gulag through critical family biographical approaches – especially in areas where these two legacies are overlapping – engendered a lively conversation in this final roundtable.