Making Sense of War

by Amir Weiner

Release Date: 15 December, 2000

Edition: Hardcover

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An important uneven work.

More than one in eight Soviets died during the second world war. That this was an incredibly traumatic event has been apparent to all for decades. But what did this experience mean to the post-war Soviet Union in terms of its ideology, its guiding principles and its ultimate fate? In this book Amir Weiner argues that most historians have paid little attention to this question. Concentrating on the Vinnytsia region in the Ukraine, Weiner argues that the war was key to a new burst of Communist fanaticism, that it appeared as a vindicating Armageddon. It reinforced the Soviet's excisionary policies, its totalitarian quest for purity, its increasing belief that its enemies were irredeemable. In the first part he looks at how the Soviets emphasized military service in the post-war party and purged it of the passive and the non-combatant. In the second party Weiner emphasizes the Soviet obsession with purity by looking at first the campaign against Ukrainian nationalists, then the Jews. In the final part he discusses the failure of the Ukrainian Nationalists to convince their compatriots to follow them, and how in the postwar period the idea of a "Soviet Ukraine" got general acceptance.

The result is an important, uneven, book. The best part of the book is the third part in which Weiner discusses the failure of Ukrainian nationalists and the internalization and triumph among Eastern Ukrainians of a Soviet Ukraine nationalism. The pages on Ukrainian Integral Nationalism are grimly amusing as nationalist intellectuals appear wildly out of their depth demanding ethnic cleansing and permanent strife against Russians, Jews, and Poles. (In May and June 1943 several thousand Poles were murdered in the Rivne region alone. The Poles soon responded in kind.) Also interesting is the disillusion of the nationalists as Eastern Ukrainians did not come up to their expectations. Ukrainians in the pre-1939 Soviet Union did not share the nationalist's hatred for Russians, did not define themselves as Ukrainians oppressed by Russians, became increasingly less and less religious, and notwithstanding the horrors of the famine in 1932-1933 were not even unequivocally opposed to collective farms. (The Nationalists ended up arguing that what should be done with the collective should be left to the peasants.) There follows a nuanced account of the Holocaust in the Ukraine, which shows the spectrum from assistance to anti-Semitism in a context of merciless terror. This leads to the final chapter in which Weiner discusses how Ukrainians internalized Soviet ideology in the context of a Soviet Ukraine nation. Trying to discuss Soviet popular opinion as opposed to Soviet government propaganda about that opinion is not easy. Weiner's account is not perfect, but it is fruitful. There is a discussion of the iconography of the liberated Ukraine. There is a less successful attempt to discuss popular reaction to the Doctor's Plot from a sample of 40 letters to Pravda. But there is also the surprisingly glum accounts from nationalist intellectuals, and there are interesting samples from emigres (in one sample 83% of former collective farm workers supported state control of heavy industry.)

One problem is Weiner's emphasis on ideology. His approach meets the marriage of more traditional anti-Communists such as Martin Malia, and the more post-modern approaches of Stephen Kotkin, with his debt to Foucault. Weiner is intrigued with the concept of "the gardening state" (the term is Zygmaunt Bauman's) and he plans to publish a collection of essays on this topic. The totalitarian and proto-totalitarian regime is called the gardening state because it treats its racial, class and political opponents like weeds. Weiner and Bauman treats this as an expression of modernity and the Enlightenment. Here one has reservations. That modernity has a dark side one cannot deny, but one can trace ethnic cleansing back to the last gasps of the Tsarist and Ottoman empires. Alexander II was responsible for the massacre of perhaps hundreds of thousands of conquered tribesmen in the 1860s. And what about slavery? American slavery was far more successful in eradicating its victim's religious beliefs than Stalin, yet slavery was both pre-and post Enlightenment, crucially influenced by the Liberal Enlightenment of Jefferson and the authoritarian Burkeanism of Calhoun.

Another problem is that Weiner's emphasis on ideological purity papers awkwardly over the many actual ambiguities he so skillfully relates. At one point he argues that Soviet ideology had even fewer inhibitions than Himmler did in his infamous Posen speech, though in fact one can find all sorts of reservations in private Soviet debates. (See the recent biography of Romanian communist Anna Pauker for her reservations about collectivization for example. And there is of course the Secret Speech.) Perhaps the key weakness of this approach can be found in the chapter on anti-Semitism. Weiner notes the ambiguities, the fact that the Soviets publicized Nazi atrocities against Jews, that Jews received their fair share of decorations, that they were not specifically purged from the party in the immediate post-war period, and that the Soviet Union took a militant stand against eugenics and other biological paradigms. He also notes the well known facts of increasing post-war anti-Semitism: the refusal to specifically refer to Jewish suffering, the Doctor's Plot, the widespread and quite false belief that the Jews had spent the war safely behind line, the talk of deporting the Jews to Siberia. What he does not explain is why this occurred. Is it popular anti-Semitism, Stalin's personal prejudices, spite of the upwardly mobile towards the literate and urban minority in their midst? Weiner does not really explain this ambiguity and emphasis on ideological purity only hides the problem. (He also does not discuss the extent to which Soviet Jews internalized Stalinist ideology.) Still Weiner's approach is an improvement on the us vs. them approach of earlier studies of totalitarianism. The comparative insights of the gardening state, eugenics, and ethnic cleansing really are helpful and should be complemented nicely by Terry Martin's upcoming An Affirmative Action Empire.