Patriots into Traitors: Late Stalinist Prosecutions of Holocaust Survivors in Riga

• In Event: War, Liberation, Repression: Trials as Storytelling in the USSR and Post-Soviet Space

Abstract

The USSR was the first belligerent state to condemn the Nazi targeting of Jewish victims. Of the three Jews who testified at the Trial of the Major War Criminals in Nuremberg, two were introduced by the Soviet prosecution. Yet with the rise of official antisemitism in Stalin’s final years, the same Holocaust survivors whose experiences fueled Soviet ambitions on the international stage found themselves caught in the crosshairs of repressive campaigns at home. In this paper, I examine the efforts of security organs in Riga to portray victims of Hitler’s regime as threats against the Soviet system. Interrogation and trial documents reveal that these strategies ranged from insinuations of ingratitude for liberation by the Red Army to charges of outright collaboration with Nazi occupation authorities. I further trace the treatment of such narratives over the course of resentencing and rehabilitation processes in the postwar decades. In doing so, this paper sheds new light on the extent to which late Stalinist persecution of Jews was due to shifting geopolitical conditions as opposed to antisemitic sentiments that had been part of Soviet society all along.

Author

• Paula Chan, U of Oxford (UK)