Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust 9780813550190

Citation preview

Through Soviet Jewish Eyes

Jewish Cultures of the World Edited by Matti Bunzl, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Jeffrey Shandler, Rutgers University • Published in association with the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life, Rutgers University • advisory board Yoram Bilu, Hebrew University Jonathan Boyarin, University of North Carolina Virginia R. Dominguez, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, New York University Jack Kugelmass, University of Florida Riv-Ellen Prell, University of Minnesota Aron Rodrigue, Stanford University Mark Slobin, Wesleyan University Yael Zerubavel, Rutgers University

Through Soviet Jewish Eyes photography, war, and the holocaust

David Shneer

•

rutgers university press

•

new brunswick, new jersey, and london

“Through Soviet Jewish Eyes” An exhibition co-curated by Dr. David Shneer and Lisa Tamiris Becker, Director, CU Art Museum Premiering September–October 2011 CU Art Museum, University of Colorado at Boulder

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Shneer, David, 1972 – Through Soviet Jewish eyes : photography, war, and the Holocaust / David Shneer. p. cm. — ( Jewish cultures of the world) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978–0–8135–4884–5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Photographers—Soviet Union—History. 2. Photographers—Soviet Union—Biography. 3. Jewish photographers—Soviet Union—History. 4. Jewish photographers—Soviet Union— Biography. 5. Documentary photography—Soviet Union—History. 6. World War, 1939– 1945— Photography. 7. War photography—Europe, Eastern. 8. World War, 1939–1945—Europe, Eastern—Pictorial works. I. Title. TR139.S56 2010 770.947—dc22 2010003037 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2011 by David Shneer All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

•

Contents

•

List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1

Part One • When Photography Was Jewish 1 How a Group of Jews from the Provinces Built Soviet Photojournalism

13

2 Seeing Red: Jewish Photographers, the Rise of the Second Generation, and Soviet Photojournalism of the 1930s

31

3 Soviet Jews on Both Sides of the Camera: The Photographs of Jewish Agricultural Colonies and Birobidzhan

60

Part Two • Soviet Jewish Photographers Confront World War II and the Holocaust 4 “Without the Newspaper, We Are Defenseless!”: Photojournalists and the War

87

5 Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes: Soviet Holocaust Photography

140

6 When Jews Talked to Jews: Wartime Soviet Yiddish Culture and Soviet Photographers’ Jewishness

184

7 From Photojournalism to Icons of War and the Holocaust: Photographs and Photographers after the War

205

Epilogue Soviet Jewish Photographers as War Heroes

Notes Index •v•

237 269

233

•

Illustrations

•

I.1

Khaldei family in 1920

1.1

Sergei Levitsky, Bukharan Jews, late nineteenth century

1.2

Cover of original 1899 Ogonyok magazine

1.3

Moisei Nappelbaum, Vladimir Lenin in Smolny, January 1918

1.4

Cover of Ogonyok, first issue of Soviet edition, 1923

1.5

Arkady Shaykhet, Kiev Rail Station, 1936

2.1

Semyon Fridlyand, Parachutist, 1920s

2.2

Mark Markov-Grinberg, Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1926

2.3

Mark Markov-Grinberg, Nikita Izotov, 1934

2.4

Evgenii Khaldei, Worker in Donbass, 1934

2.5

Emmanuel Evzerikhin, Maxim Gorky, 1936

2.6 Georgii Zelma, Joseph Stalin, probably at the Eighth All-Union Congress of Soviets, December 1936 3.1

Georgii Zelmanovitch, Woman reading local newspaper, mid-1920s

3.2

Georgii Zelmanovitch, Voice of Moscow, 1925

3.3

Georgii Zelmanovitch, Boy reading Pushkin, 1920s

3.4

Semyon Fridlyand, Industrialization, late 1920s, early 1930s

3.5

Unknown, Jewish migrants arrive in Birobidzhan, early 1930s

3.6 Georgii Zelmanovitch, “Leah Feldman’s Garden Brigade,” Ogonyok, June 5, 1934

6 14 18 21 24 28 32 38 47 48 49 51 61 62 63 64 68

3.7

Semyon Fridlyand, “Children’s Colony,” Pravda, September 14, 1934

71 73

3.8

Semyon Fridlyand, “New Type of Jew: Beekeeper, Birobidzhan,” 1934, USSR in Construction, 1935, no. 3–4

74

3.9 Semyon Fridlyand, “New Type of Jew, T. Trochik, Birobidzhan,” 1934, USSR in Construction, 1935, no. 3–4

75

3.10 Unknown, Birobidzhan State Jewish Theater, USSR in Construction, 1935, no. 3–4

76

• vii •

• viii •

Illustrations

3.11 Semyon Fridlyand, “In Birobidzhan, Capital of the Autonomous Region,” 1934, Nashi Dostizheniia (Our Achievements), no. 6, June 1936

78

3.12 Semyon Fridlyand, “This Is How Life in the Taiga Begins,” 1934, Nashi Dostizheniia, no. 6, June 1936

79

3.13 Semyon Fridlyand, “Birofeld Beekeeping,” 1934, Nashi Dostizheniia, no. 6, June 1936

79

3.14 Semyon Fridlyand, “One of Many Violations of Biblical Law. A Pig Farm on the IKOR Jewish Collective Farm,” 1934, Nashi Dostizheniia, no. 6, June 1936 80 3.15 Semyon Fridlyand, “And What Is the ‘Right of Residence’? Children, IKOR Communal Farm, Birobidzhan,” 1934, Nashi Dostizheniia, no. 6, June 1936

80

3.16 Semyon Fridlyand, “The Sixth Day on the Valdheim Collective Farm,” 1934, Nashi Dostizheniia, no. 6, June 1936

81

3.17 Semyon Fridlyand, “The State Farm Stalinfeld, Birobidzhan,” 1934, Nashi Dostizheniia, no. 6, June 1936

82

4.1

Evgenii Khaldei, “Molotov’s Announcement of War,” June 1941

89

4.2

“The Soviet People Have Decided: Destroy the Fascist Bandits,” Ogonyok, no. 18, June 25, 1941

90

4.3

Emmanuel Evzerikhin, “Declaration of War,” June 1941

91

4.4

Semyon Fridlyand, “On the Fronts of the Patriotic War,” Ogonyok, September 1941

97

4.5

“Punishment in Poland. Those Sentenced Are Forced to Dig Their Own Graves,” Ogonyok, June 25, 1941

98

4.6 Evgenii Khaldei, Woman in Murmansk, 1942

100

4.7

Dmitrii Baltermants, “Kerch Resident P. I. Ivanova Found Her Husband,” January 1942

101

4.8

Dmitrii Baltermants, “Residents of Kerch Search for Their Relatives,” Ogonyok, March 2, 1942

102

4.9 Evgenii Khaldei, “Soviets Dig a Grave,” Kerch, 1942

103

4.10 Dmitrii Baltermants and Israel Ozerskii, “Hitlerite Atrocities in Kerch,” Ogonyok, March 2, 1942

104

4.11 Evgenii Khaldei, Residents of Kerch examine TASS Windows, 1942

107

4.12 “We Will Get Revenge,” Ogonyok, August 2, 1942

110

4.13 Arkady Shaykhet, “Battle for Stalingrad,” Ogonyok, November 15, 1942

113

4.14 Semyon Fridlyand, “Fighting near the Don,” Ogonyok, October 4, 1942

115

4.15 Emmanuel Evzerikhin, Stalingrad, 1942

116

4.16 Emmanuel Evzerikhin, Filmmaker, in Stalingrad, 1942

117

4.17 Emmanuel Evzerikhin, Fountain, Stalingrad, 1942

118

4.18 Georgii Zelma, crossing the Volga at Stalingrad, fall 1942

119

4.19 Georgii Zelma, Stalingrad, fall 1942

119

Illustrations

• ix •

4.20 Semyon Fridlyand, “Poltava Is Ours,” Ogonyok, September 30, 1943

126

4.21 Georgii Zelma, “Camera Operator Otilia Reizman,” 1945

129

4.22 Evgenii Khaldei, “Budapest,” 1945

130

4.23 Yakov Riumkin, “Battle for Budapest,” Ogonyok, no. 52, 1944

131

4.24 Sergei Loskutov, “Ruins of Warsaw,” Ogonyok, no. 4, February 1945

132

4.25 Emmanuel Evzerikhin, Warsaw across the Vistula, 1945

133

4.26 Dmitrii Baltermants, “Crossing the Oder,” 1945

135

4.27 Evgenii Khaldei, “Victory over Berlin,” Ogonyok, May 13, 1945

136

4.28 Evgenii Khaldei, Troops hearing Dolmatovskii at the Brandenburg Gate, 1945 137 4.29 Evgenii Khaldei and D. Chernov, “Conquered Berlin,” Ogonyok, May 13, 1945 138 5.1

Boris Tseitlin, “Retribution,” Krasnodar, Ogonyok, August 20, 1943

144

5.2

A. Cheprunov, “Death Camp,” two-page photo spread, Ogonyok, November 20, 1943

150

5.3

Boris Tseitlin, “Majdanek—Death Camp,” Ogonyok, August 31, 1944

155

5.4

Mikhail Trakhman, Boris Tseitlin, “Majdanek Death Camp,” Ogonyok, August 31, 1944

157

5.5

Emmanuel Evzerikhin, Chimneys, Taganrog, 1943

158

5.6 Mikhail Trakhman, “Local Residents Tour Majdanek,” August 1944

159

5.7

Mikhail Trakhman, “Local Visitors at Majdanek,” August 1944

160

5.8

Mikhail Trakhman, “Poles Watching Germans Bearing Witness to Corpses,” August 1944

161

5.9 Mikhail Trakhman, “Empty Landscape of Majdanek,” July–August 1944

163

5.10 Unattributed, Group of Army Political Administration workers along with representatives of the Polish government examine corpses, August –September 1944

172

5.11 Vasily Grossman, “Schematic Drawing of Treblinka”

173

5.12 R. Mazelev, “Osventsim,” Ogonyok, no. 11, March 20, 1945

176

5.13 Unattributed, “Funeral Procession at Auschwitz,” 1945

177

5.14 Unattributed, “Survivors of Auschwitz Participate in Funeral Procession”

178

5.15 Vladimir Yudin, “Survivor Searches for Glasses”

180

6.1

Unattributed, Khaldei family in his hometown of Stalino, 1940

185

6.2

Unattributed, “The Funeral for the Victims of German Fascist Terrorism in Minsk and in the Minsk Region,” Unity, September 21, 1944

198

6.3

P. Makrushenko, “In the Yugoslavian town of Bor,” Unity, December 21, 1944

200

6.4

Evgenii Khaldei, Budapest Ghetto, Unity, March 3, 1945

201

6.5

Evgenii Khaldei, “Jewish Couple,” 1945

202

•x•

Illustrations

7.1

Evgenii Khaldei, “Soviet Photo and Print Journalists at the Reichstag,” May 1945

7.2

Evgenii Khaldei, “Raising the Red Flag over the Reichstag,” May 2, 1945

7.3

Evgenii Khaldei, Women in Berlin, summer 1945

7.4

Evgenii Khaldei, “Goering on Trial,” Nuremberg, 1946

7.5

Unattributed, Roman Karmen, Evgenii Dolmatovskii, and Evgenii Khaldei in front of the Brandenberg Gate, May 1945

7.6 Dmitrii Baltermants, “Dancing Is Politics Too,” 1959 7.7

Georgii Zelma, “Among the ruins of the city,” Battle of Stalingrad (Stalingradskaia bitva), 1972

7.8

Georgii Zelma, “Assault,” Stalingrad, 1942

7.9 Dmitrii Baltermants, “Grief,” 1942, Ogonyok, 1965 7.10 Evgenii Khaldei, Survivors of Budapest Ghetto, 1945

205 206 207 208 216 218 221 222 223 228

•

Acknowledgments

•

This book has been in the making for nearly ten years, and along the way I have had the opportunity to work with and be supported by some amazing people. Thanks to Olga Gershenson; Gregg Drinkwater; and the two anonymous readers, who read the book cover to cover and provided incredible feedback. Olga’s close reading inspired me to think in new ways, and Gregg, my husband, made sure that all arguments flowed well. Since I was new to the field of visual studies and art history, I owe special thanks to Carol Zemel, who helped me think about the visual in a Jewish context, and to Erika Wolf, who shared her wisdom about the field of Soviet photography. I presented work from the book in many different venues and thank each one for pushing me in new directions: Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley; U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; Ohio University; National Yiddish Book Center; Skirball Cultural Center; University of Toronto; University of Texas; University of Denver; University of Southern California; and others. I wanted to make special thanks to the University of Illinois’s Jewish Studies faculty, especially Matti Bunzl, Harriet Murav, Bruce Rosenstock, and Brett Kaplan, who helped me conceptualize and complicate notions of Jewish identity and culture. I received financial support from many foundations and organizations. Thanks to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) for giving me a fellowship to start work on this project and for serving as an ongoing resource. Thanks to the Social Science Research Council, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the Professional Faculty Development Fund at the University of Denver, the Holocaust Education Foundation, the Dalbey Educational Fund, and the Kayden Fund at the University of Colorado. Special thanks to Sharon Muller and Judy Cohen of the USHMM photoarchives and to Vadim Altskan, who gave me access to difficult-to-find material. Thanks to Benton Arnovitz and Michael Gelb for helping turn ideas into great publications. And great thanks to Oren Stier and Stuart Liebman, with whom I worked at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, and who served as my intellectual community while in residence there. • xi •

• xii •

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Joan Neuberger and Valerie Kivelson, who published my first article on Soviet Jewish photographers; to Anna Shternshis and Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, who have read and supported this work all the way through; to Michael Berkowitz, Alexander Ivanov, and Valery Dymshits for opening up an incredible transatlantic dialogue about Jews and photography; and to the following colleagues, who read parts of the work or heard me give talks and made great suggestions that informed the final project: Chana Kronfeld, Steven Miner, Jeremy Dauber, Olga Litvak, Gabriella Safran, Matthew Hoffman, Polina Barskova, Steve Yates, Maya Benton, Vanessa Schwartz, Sarah Bender, Jan Plamper, Caryn Aviv, Sarah Pessin, Eugene Avrutin, Alice Nakhimovsky, Maxim Shrayer, Robby Adler-Peckerar, Zilla Goodman, and Robert Schneider and the anonymous readers at the American Historical Review, who pushed me like no other readers have pushed before . . . in a good way. Thanks to both the University of Denver and the University of Colorado, especially to Jamie Polliard, for supporting my work and for providing an environment that is the envy of everyone else listed in these acknowledgments. Special thanks to my stellar students, who participated in the research for this book: FayeLin Bartram, Katherine Fisher, Paul Lanning, Marissa Jaross, and Michael Lee. At Rutgers University Press, I had the pleasure of working with two extraordinary editors, Beth Kressel and Marlie Wasserman, both of whom molded my manuscript into a beautiful book. And thank you to photographer Nephi Stolper, who helped with photoediting, and Michelle Drinkwater. I had the pleasure of working with great people in Moscow—some scholars, others family members of the photographers featured in this work, who gave me access to materials, told me stories about their families, and were the real backbone of this project: Andrei Baskakov, Valery Stigneev, Maria Zhotikova, Yelena Sitnina, Yuri Evzerikhin, and Nikolai Khalip. Thanks to the archivists at the Russian State Archives for Arts and Literature, for Film and Photography, and for Social and Political Research and to the State Archive of the Russian Federation. I want to give special and dearest thanks to Alexandra Ilf, Anna Khaldei, and Tatiana Baltermants, who plied me with food and drink as we pored over material, but also became friends over the course of the project. In Germany, thanks to Ernst Volland and his outstanding team for allowing me to work in their archives and for inviting me to participate in their projects. In Israel thanks to the staff at the Yad Vashem photo archives. In the United States, thanks to Michael Mattis, for letting me into his home to work on the Baltermants archive, and to Dan Jacobs, for being a visionary gallery director and archivist. Three last personal notes of thanks. First, to Paul and Teresa Harbaugh, who have watched this project bloom from an idea into a book from its first days. Little did I know that two of the most important, and smartest, collectors of Soviet photography lived in my backyard in Denver. Thanks to my father, Jim Shneer, who served as editorial assis-

Acknowledgments

• xiii •

tant on the project and, in retirement from his job as an engineer, has become a master book producer and editor. Final thanks to my husband, to Sasha Drinkwater, and to the entire Shneer clan for making my home life so vibrant and for teaching me that excavating the past is only as good as inspiring the present.

Through Soviet Jewish Eyes

Introduction

In the summer of 2002, with the air heavy and warm from days of heavy rains, I wandered into Moscow’s Union of Art Photographers, one of the few galleries in the city dedicated to photography. Once inside, I noticed that the walls were adorned with some of the best examples of Soviet war photography. Although most of the photographers’ names were unfamiliar to me at the time, I couldn’t help noticing—despite my better instincts as a good liberal American trained to resist emphasizing group identity over individuality— that their names, Avrom Shterenberg, Evgenii Khaldei, Max Alpert, Arkady Shaykhet, were undeniably Jewish. Perhaps because I was in Russia, where identity is so often shaped by perceived group membership (usually structured as mutually exclusive categories: Russian or Chechen or Jewish), I didn’t hesitate to approach the curator to ask whether all these photographers were indeed Jewish. The woman, in her midfifties, cigarette dangling out from her mouth, eyebrows curled in that slightly condescending glance that I—the overly inquisitive professor, and clearly too-young-to-be-who-you-say-youare American—often receive in Moscow, said curtly, “Of course.” That was not the response I was expecting in a country where Jewishness, to this day, is supposed to be an unspoken or hidden feature of a person’s identity, an ethnicity whose name had in the past not dared be spoken. Maybe I was expecting flat denial, perhaps a touch of universalism: “No, our photographers were Soviet, not Jewish,” or “I hadn’t noticed. We focus on art, not on the identity of the photographer.” But a wry, “Of course.” No, I wasn’t expecting that. The curator and I continued our conversation, at which point she told me that she, Maria Zhotikova, was in fact the granddaughter of one of the most famous Soviet ( Jewish; always in parenthesis) photographers, Arkady Shaykhet. She estimated that about 50–60 percent of all wartime Soviet photographers were Jewish. Others, whom I’ve interviewed since the idea for this book on Soviet Jewish photographers was hatched, confirm this number. One year after my first encounter with the works of Soviet Jewish photographers, I found myself at the enormous World War II Memorial Complex in Moscow, at an •1•

•2•

through soviet jewish eyes

exhibition of the works of war photographer Mark Markov-Grinberg. It was the first week of May, probably the most important holiday period in Russia, beginning on May 1, when the revolutionary past is marked, and ending on May 9, Victory in Europe Day, marking the Soviet Union’s military triumph over Nazi Germany. The exhibition had many stunning images of battle, soldiers on break, and women at war. And then I rounded the corner of the vast exhibition hall and was stopped dead in my tracks. From fifty feet away I could see what seemed to be a disembodied hand crawling out of what seemed to be an oven. As I went closer I realized that it was, in fact, the hand of a dead body protruding from a crematorium, photographed by Markov-Grinberg at the May 9 liberation of the concentration camp Stutthof. What possessed this young Soviet Jewish photographer to capture Nazi atrocity in this way, with the hand of a lone Holocaust victim appearing from within a gigantic oven? What possessed the curator to exhibit it? But also, why was Markov-Grinberg taking Holocaust photographs in the first place? Until I began this project, I had been under the impression that the Soviet Union silenced discussion of the Holocaust. As in my encounter with Zhotikova, whose deadpan “Of course they were Jews” I was not expecting, I was taken aback by the Soviet War Memorial’s decision to exhibit Holocaust liberation photography. As it turns out, although Markov-Grinberg’s photograph from Stutthof did not appear on the pages of Pravda or Izvestiia, plenty of Holocaust images did. They started appearing with the outbreak of the Nazi war against the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, several years before any Western journalists were documenting Nazi atrocities. And the first Soviet Holocaust liberation photographs appeared in early January 1942, a full three years before Western journalists began documenting the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald. These early liberation photographs were taken in the southern city of Kerch by Soviet Jewish photojournalists Evgenii Khaldei, Dmitrii Baltermants, and Mark Redkin, photographers who had all been represented in Zhotikova’s exhibition. That initial encounter with Zhotikova led me to archives in five countries on three continents. Some were official state archives in Moscow, Jerusalem, and Washington, D.C., with professional archivists to guide the beleaguered researcher. I found, however, the richest source of archival material in cubbyholes in cramped Soviet apartments, in slick galleries in Berlin and New York, and in family basements across the world. Soviet photographers (and their future collectors) were packrats; they preferred to hang on to their material rather than turn it over to their employers. This may have been a burden on their families, living in tiny communal apartments, but it was a boon for the researcher. Many of these private archives are still in the hands of the photographers’ family members, as was the case for Emmanuel Evzerikhin, Evgenii Khaldei, and Mikhail Trakhman. Often, however, the families had sold material to collectors and dealers, which meant working in basements and attics for days at a time sifting through material in the homes of some of the most impassioned collectors of Soviet photography in the world. Dealers

Introduction

•3•

and galleries have a more commercial bent, and in these cases I sometimes found myself working side by side with a curator ready to mount a show in an exhibition space. The research also led me to conversations with daughters, sons, and widows of the Soviet photographic corps of World War II. I spoke with photojournalists and critics; with dealers and archivists; and once or twice, with the actual photographers, nearly all of whom had passed away by the time I began this project.

Is This a Jewish Story? This book is about Soviet Jewish photographers who documented the building of Soviet society and then its near destruction during World War II and the Holocaust. This is a story about how young, mostly male Jews from modest-sized towns in southern Russia moved to Moscow, the capital of Communism, to build a new mass medium, earn a living, try out a new art form, and become integrated and integral members of a new society. A similar story about Jewish social and cultural history intersecting with the creation of mass culture and social mobility played out in the building of American visual and popular culture of the 1920s through 1950s. There is of course the famous, and almost cliché, story of how immigrant Jews built Hollywood and created, in the words of Neil Gabler, “an empire of their own.”1 Or one can turn to J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler’s exploration of Jews and Jewishness in American broadcasting.2 Scholar Andrea Most argues that musical theater in the United States could not have existed outside the Jewish experience: “Musical theater exists because of the unique historical situation of the Jews who created it.”3 This is obviously not the case for photography, which existed before the period under study here, and afterward as well, once photography was no longer a “Jewish” profession. But I agree with Most that the era of Soviet photojournalism’s heyday from the 1920s to the 1950s and the social reality of Jewish migrants, who left provincial Russia for Moscow in the early Soviet Union, are inextricably bound up with one another. But there is something unsatisfying in simply saying, This is a Jewish story because Jews took the pictures. One wants to ask, Did Jews take different pictures from those of non-Jews? Or put another way, How was the content of Soviet photojournalism affected by the Jewishness of the profession? I think of this as the “Jewish eye” question, in response to curator Max Kozloff, who wrote a well-known article about a particularly Jewish way of seeing that defined some forms of photography.4 As people on the margins, he suggests, Jews see things that others don’t, and they see the downtrodden in ways that those in the “mainstream” cannot see. As photographer William Klein stated in an interview with the New Yorker, “I think there are two kinds of photography—Jewish photography and goyish photography. If you look at modern photography, you find, on the one hand, the Weegees, the Diane Arbuses, the Robert Franks—funky photographs. And then

•4•

through soviet jewish eyes

you have the people who go out in the woods. Ansel Adams, [Edward] Weston. It’s like black and white jazz.”5 Aside from the ethnic triumphalism that the Jewish-eye thesis implies, it simply doesn’t apply to Soviet Jewish photographers working under Stalinism. After all, Soviet Jewish photographers used their cameras to build up and support state power, not undermine it through social critique. These are not New York or London Jewish street photographers who are often held up as exemplars of the Jewish eye. In trying to define a Soviet Jewish photographic eye, one will not find it in social criticism. One will also not generally find the Soviet Jewish photographic eye in images of traditional Jewish subjects such as old men with beards, worn-down shtetls, and scenes of prayer. (The exception to this is the ethnographic impulse to document a dying Jewish world, which exists in Soviet photography into the early 1930s.) This is the “Jewish by content” definition, in which a photograph’s Jewishness is represented by the visually marked Jewish subject. So if the Jewishness of Soviet photography isn’t found in social critique or traditional Jewish content, where does one find the Jewishness of Soviet photojournalism? Soviet Jewish photographers turned their cameras on Jews quite frequently. They did this when they photographed the Soviet intelligentsia, made up of such people as Isaac Babel, Eduard Bagritsky, and Ilya Ilf. They did this when they photographed the great Soviet Jewish experiment in autonomy known as Birobidzhan, which attempted to turn downtrodden shtetl Jews into modern Soviet ( Jewish) farmers. For the purposes of this book, the most important and obvious example of Jews photographing other Jews was when they saw them by the thousands lying dead in burial pits across the scarred landscape of the wartime Soviet Union. Rarely, however, are these photographs obviously marked as Jewish by their content. The question of “what’s Jewish” in these photographs, or for that matter what’s Jewish about these photographers, presumes a reified definition of Jewish identity and a static image of the Jew. Alexander Ivanov, one of the foremost historians of Soviet photography and a specialist in photography of Jewish agricultural colonies, has been asked frequently about how he knows that in photographs of laborers on a Jewish collective farm the laborers are, in fact, Jewish, since “they don’t look Jewish.” (One wants to ask the questioner, Are you looking for big noses and curly hair?) I encountered similar questions when bringing Soviet Jewish wartime material to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, an avid collector of Holocaust photography. The question some archivists kept asking was, How do you know the dead in this massacre photograph are Jews and not just war dead? (In this case, I wanted to ask if we were looking for Nazi Jewish stars as proof of someone’s Jewishness.) What to do in such uncertain circumstances when the answer to the question, or lack of certainty about the answer, would either warrant inclusion in the museum’s collection or not?

Introduction

•5•

No matter how one understands the challenging question of the Jewish eye, it seems absurd to say that someone’s Jewishness did not affect how he or she photographed these and other scenes. Anna Shternshis, historian of Soviet Jewry, goes even further and suggests that Jewishness always affected how these photographers took their pictures. Shternshis interviewed hundreds of Soviet Jews to learn how they conceived of their identities.6 As she wrote in an exchange about Soviet Jewish photographers: For these photographers, seeing things Jewishly despite the assignment they were given was a way they expressed their “not so thin” ethnic identity, especially during the war. Knowing that an actor or a writer [whom they were photographing] was a Jew would stimulate the photographer to think twice about taking that picture (whether to take it because the person is Jewish, or not to take it because the person is Jewish, and might not be interesting to others). Based on my interviews, I can tell you that every person from that generation saw other people through the mark of Jewishness, even if they did not acknowledge it even to themselves. So in the case of photographers, the “Jewish eye” was definitely there. It might be hard to interpret or distinguish, but you (and your reader) can be sure that these people were not simply Soviet citizens of Jewish origin. Yes, they were builders of Communism, but they were also Jewish artists, who simply understood Jewishness differently from the rest of the world’s Jews.7

The story of Soviet Jewish photographers and the establishment of photojournalism is a Jewish story even if these photographers were primarily photographing the building of the Soviet Union without anything particularly “Jewish” appearing in their photography. As Most writes about American popular culture, “The experience of Jewishness does not always manifest itself openly and obviously. The secular Jews who created the musical theater were still affected by their position as Jews in American culture, even when they were no longer creating overtly Jewish characters.”8 So too for Shaykhet, Khaldei, Georgii Zelma, and others in the Soviet Union. In some ways, although they are all from Eastern Europe, their life stories more closely resemble those of their American Jewish counterparts than those of Jews in Eastern Europe. They were acculturated, urban, Russian-speaking members of a polyglot, idealist society, who often changed their names to assert a new identity and now occupied positions of power in a brand-new cultural field. Of all of the photographers in this book, none had the opportunity to craft his identity on his own terms more than Evgenii Khaldei, who became one of the most well known Soviet war photographers worldwide in the 1990s as a result of several important exhibitions and a documentary film about his life. He was also the Soviet war photographer who most self-consciously presented his life story as a Jewish story. Born in 1917 to a traditional Jewish family, Khaldei lived through the trauma of antiJewish pogroms that wreaked havoc on the Ukrainian countryside in 1919–1920.9 His mother and several other family members were killed in one such pogrom, a trauma that

•6•

through soviet jewish eyes

figure I.1. Khaldei family in 1920. Courtesy of Evgenii Khaldei and the Fotosoyuz Agency.

scarred the young Khaldei. He knew some Yiddish but has never mentioned going to synagogue in any of his interviews. A Khaldei family photograph suggests the in-between world in which Khaldei, and many other Soviet Jewish photographers, grew up (Fig. I.1). Young Zhenya (nickname for Evgenii) sits on the lap of papa Khaldei; on the right are siblings and cousins. At the center of focus are photographs of the family’s martyrs, Khaldei’s mother and grandfather, who were killed in the pogroms.10 The grandfather in the bottom portrait dons a kippah, while his father, who still has a long beard, is dressed as a middle-class tradesperson, not a traditional Jewish elder. The presence of the piano on the left and the style of the children’s hair show the encroachment of middle-class Russian values in this Jewish home or in the photographer’s studio. This vision of Russian Jewish life gives context to the photographers who went on to become the documenters of Stalin’s Soviet Union. It also shows how deeply photography—here as portraits of the martyrs pictured in this family photograph—had penetrated the personal lives of Jews everywhere in the empire. In 1997, Khaldei had a large solo exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York and the Jewish Museum in San Francisco, and his daughter, Anna, with whom I have had the opportunity to work, does not resist the category “Jew” when it is applied to her father. In 2008, curators in Berlin mounted the largest solo exhibition of Khaldei’s work ever at

Introduction

•7•

the Martin Gropius Bau—a space with no connection to Jewishness. But the curators made a special effort to frame the catalog and exhibition with the story of Khaldei’s Jewish background. Most of the stories about his life come from Khaldei’s 1990s memory of his wartime photographic activities and must be understood in the context of his crafting a postSoviet self. The majority of these photographers did not have such an opportunity. For some this may have been a blessing. Many photographers in this book, those who were born and came of age after the Russian Revolution of 1917, knew nothing but a Stalinist Soviet Union that glorified the state and celebrated photographers as the documenters of that glory. Emmanuel Evzerikhin’s life story follows that of many of the other Jewish photographers. He was born in Rostov-on-Don, in southern Russia, into a Russianspeaking Jewish family. According to his son Yuri, “the family spoke Yiddish when they didn’t want the kids to understand.” Emmanuel’s father, Noy, attended synagogue regularly and undoubtedly brought young Emmanuel to services. But once he left Rostov, and probably even earlier, Emmanuel stopped going to synagogue.11 In fact in the 1920s, he joined the Communist youth league, the Pioneers, as an inauguration into the world of Soviet society. Evzerikhin was a wartime photographer for the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS), and passed away in 1985, the same year Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and ushered in the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. In a conversation in summer 2004 with Yuri, I asked what would have happened had his father lived to see a postSoviet world for his photography. Would he have become a photographic celebrity beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union? He responded dryly, “It is a good thing my father did not live to see perestroika, glasnost, and the fall of his country. He knew nothing else. It would have killed him.” I heard echoes of this in conversations with the photographers’ family members and read similar stories in articles about other members of the Soviet cultural elite. Evzerikhin’s son was suggesting that many Soviet Jews were invested in the Soviet Union, even if it was permeated with social anti-Semitism. Its downfall would have upended everything many of these photographers believed to be true. For the purposes of this book, I consider a photographer Jewish if his or her Soviet passport—after 1932 passports included a line noting the bearer’s nationality, and being Jewish was considered a nationality—said that he or she was Jewish. This is obviously a crude, externally imposed definition of identity, but it is at least a clear delineator of how such a person would have been treated in the Soviet system. Many people will resist my broad definition of Jew, as Tatiana Baltermants, daughter of Dmitrii Baltermants, did when I first met her. (Over the course of many conversations with Tatiana, she and I have become friends despite our different approaches to this material.) Baltermants was born Dmitrii Stolovitskii, on May 13, 1912, in Warsaw, into an assimilated Jewish family. In 1915, because of World War I, the family moved to Moscow. When Dmitrii was six, his mother

•8•

through soviet jewish eyes

remarried a man with the name Baltermants, a relatively well known Jewish family name in Lithuania and named for the small town of Baltermants. As with most of these photographers, he began working very young, employed at age fourteen in the Izvestiia print house, and left home at sixteen.12 When we started discussing his background, Tatiana declared, “His identity—what a question. He was Soviet. Nothing else. Well, he was also a photojournalist, but he was so totally Soviet. His Jewishness did not matter to him at all.” She then went a step further: “So many of these Jewish organizations want to put him back in the ghetto. I refused all offers from Israeli museums and Jewish museums to exhibit his work. . . . His Jewishness was not an issue for him, and I don’t want it to be an issue for his photographs.” I would like to think that I was not trying to put Baltermants, who served as the photography editor of the most important illustrated magazine in the Soviet Union for more than twenty years, back in the ghetto. Rather, I am trying to understand how his biography and training shaped his work. More helpful perhaps is to acknowledge that the Jewishness of a photojournalist affected his work in both big and small ways, and differently at different times. Perhaps for someone like Baltermants, it did not really affect him. For someone like Khaldei, it obviously did. Then one wants to question how Jewishness affected different people in different ways—from photographers’ family members who sought to downplay its importance; to photographers active in the profession; to Soviet citizens who absorbed his work; to the photographer himself; and to me, the researcher. I present these photographers as artists and journalists, as Soviets and Jews. Hardly ever is the Jewishness of these photojournalists mentioned in their standard biographies, or the role that Jewish social history played in the birth of photojournalism. There are several reasons for this. First, international artistic convention labels artists and photographers by national school. Hence, these are either Russian or Soviet photographers, in the same way that Marc Chagall is a French painter. “Jewish” is not a category in the international art database, despite being a national identity in the Soviet Union and a category of analysis for many researchers and museums. Second, the art world situates them as artists in conversation with other artists, and thus spends more time talking about their aesthetic affiliation—constructivist, socialist realist—than about the social history that created Soviet photojournalism. Finally, until recently in the Soviet Union, the Jewishness of twentieth-century cultural history, let alone the Jewishness of the Soviet revolution, has generally been downplayed, perhaps for fear of stoking anti-Semitic assumptions that Communism was a Jewish conspiracy. The fact of Jews’ presence in the Soviet cultural elite was the ever-present absence, one that everyone knew at the time, but that no one was talking about, something that was patently obvious to the gallery curator I met years ago who helped inspire this project and simultaneously hidden in most biographies of these photographers, aside from Khaldei’s post-Soviet examples. Some scholars actively

Introduction

•9•

erase the Jewishness of Soviet photography. In his book Pioneers of Soviet Photography Grigory Shudakov changed the distinctly Jewish name of the master photoportraitist Moisei (Moyshe or Moses) Nappelbaum to Mikhail, a name I never saw evidence of Nappelbaum himself using in the time I spent working in the Nappelbaum files at the Russian State Archive for Literature and Art. If in 1918, when he took Vladimir Lenin’s portrait, everyone knew the emerging Soviet elite had many Jews among them and many Jews behind the camera, by 1983 when Shudakov’s book came out in English, that fact was the Soviet Union’s dirty secret. As a historian, I describe these people by the labels and categories that they and others were using at the time. Thus, the Jewish-sounding Markov-Grinberg may lose his “Grinberg” at times; Zelma may suddenly become Zelmanovitch when he is publishing under his birth name and in letters from editors. This is part of the story. When I can, I try to rely on the photographers’ conceptions of themselves and do not assume that a twentyeight-year-old Ashkenazi Jewish photographer from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, changed his name from Zelmanovitch to Zelma simply because he was afraid of being recognized and published as a Jew. Lots of artists used pseudonyms, and it was almost a prerequisite for a Jew of the early twentieth century to change his or her name to better mesh with his or her cultural surroundings—whether in the Soviet Union, Palestine, or the United States.

Through Soviet Jewish Eyes In the book I start by looking at how Jews came to be the country’s photographers and how they built the field of Soviet photojournalism. I examine their portraits of Lenin and of the Soviet cultural elite, their photographs of massive factories and tractor drivers, and their images of Jewish pig farmers and beekeepers in the Jewish autonomous region called Birobidzhan. After setting up the world of Soviet photography, I turn to the war. At its core, this book is about how these photographers visually told the story of a war that targeted all of them as Soviet citizens and as members of the “Jewish race.” Through Soviet Jewish Eyes examines how Soviet Jewish photographers, who worked for the most important Soviet media outlets, documented several wartime stories simultaneously—Soviet victory, Nazi atrocity, and Jewish tragedy. I also look at how their work was used to document these diverse stories. The Russian-language Soviet press focused on the stories of victory and atrocity, while the Jewish narrative lurked in the shadows of the national story. It wasn’t absent, but it was not ever present either. At the same time, in the Soviet press published in Yiddish—the language in which Jews spoke to one another in Eastern Europe for more than five hundred years and the language that the Soviet government marked as the Jews’ official language— there were very public discussions about the Holocaust and about Jewish heroism during the war. The book will also look at what happened after the war, when those Soviet

• 10 •

through soviet jewish eyes

professions with a high number of Jews began purging them from their ranks during the anticosmopolitan campaign of 1948–1952.13 In the end, it was Soviet Jews who were some of the most important builders of the profession of Soviet photography, as avant-gardists, state photographers, and photojournalists. Many Soviet Jews created the visual record of the “building of socialism” under Stalin and then, as liberators, documented and bore witness to its violent destruction during the war and the Holocaust.

•

1

•

How a Group of Jews from the Provinces Built Soviet Photojournalism

Shortly after the Russian revolutions of 1917 that tossed out the czars and brought in Communist commissars, the leading Bolshevik, Vladimir Lenin, said that the camera, as much as the gun, was an important weapon the Bolsheviks had at their fingertips to secure the revolution. He recognized the power of images and the modern media to transform people and society and therefore gave photography and film pride of place in Soviet culture. Both film and photography were new artistic and documentary tools in Russia. Although photography had come to czarist Russia in the mid-nineteenth century, photojournalism—the notion of using a camera to document a society for its citizens in a supposedly objective way—was new. Russian photojournalism had its start in 1905, when Karl Bulla, Yakov Shteinberg, Pyotr Otsup, and others used their relatively portable cameras to photograph the first revolution that marked the beginning of the end of the czars. And not coincidentally, many of the early founders of Soviet photojournalism were Jewish. Their tales are not unlike those of the profession’s beginnings in other places. As in the case of Erich Solomon and the rise of “Fleet Street” photojournalism in London, or that of André Friedmann and Gerta Pohorylle—who later transformed themselves into Robert Capa and Gerda Taro during the Spanish Civil War—and the birth of modern war photography, Russian photojournalism and film was hospitable to an entrepreneurial group of young Jews who were drawn to the field, in part because it was free from the antiSemitism and exclusion typical of other, more established professions. Invented in 1839 in Paris, photography appeared in Russia in the 1840s, at nearly the same time as it did in Western Europe. Alexander Grakov and Sergei Levitsky are generally considered the first photographers in Russia. Levitsky’s early portraits were widely celebrated as stellar examples of this new magical process that could replicate reality like no other medium. In 1862 the first photography store opened in St. Petersburg, and two years later, Photographer (Fotograf ), the first Russian photography magazine, began publication.1 But this new art form and spectral means of documenting the world quickly spread as the technology improved and a market for photography developed. Scientists were some of the most avid consumers of photography, since, for the first time, they could photograph • 13 •

• 14 •

when photography was jewish

figure 1.1. Sergei Levitsky, Bukharan Jews, late nineteenth century.

objects and study a frozen image for a long period. Portrait photography was another important form. Although it began as an elite craft, by the late nineteenth century, all kinds of people, from Russian royalty to small-town Jews, were having their pictures taken. There was even a professional magazine for portrait photographers that appeared in 1887, one year before the opening of the first photography exhibition in Russia.2 Of course, photographs of the St. Petersburg elite and the czars’ inner circle were in vogue, but so too were images from Russia’s vast imperial expanses, especially of the ethnic diversity that made up the empire. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Russia’s czars expanded the empire to the south and east. Russian photographers followed these new paths across the country and took photographs of Russian migrants as well as of native peoples in the expanding empire.3 Levitsky’s first experiments with daguerreotype photography were images of the Caucasus, showing that the birth of Russian photography and the expansion of the empire went hand in hand (Fig. 1.1).4 Included among these ethnographic studies from such well-known photographers as Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii were images of Bukharan Jews made in the 1890s.5 Alongside Prokudin-Gorskii was Wulf Jasdoin, a Jewish photographer who photographed the czar and his family and, while he was on an ethnographic expedition, Bukharan Jews.6 The portraitist and Hebrew poet Konstantin Shapiro photographed many of

A Group of Jews from the Provinces

• 15 •

the great Russian cultural figures of the time, among them Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and Anton Chekhov.7 The young Marc Chagall got his start in the visual arts working as a photo retoucher, first for a studio in his hometown of Vitebsk and then in St. Petersburg, after he moved there in 1907.8 Already in the late nineteenth century, we find Jews in the Russian Empire as some of the most important photographers working at the center of power. Photography was a respectable, even fashionable, means of earning a living in 1910s Russia. Working in this field also allowed young Jewish artists from the Pale of Settlement, the western borderlands of the empire in which Jews could live, to stay in the capital, which had residency restrictions in place until 1917. The Jewish writer and ethnographer Sh. Ansky (pseudonym of Shlomo Zanvil Rapaport) brought his young nephew Solomon Yudovin from Vitebsk to St. Petersburg in 1910, in echoes of Chagall. Yudovin was a promising photography student of Yehuda Pen, who had trained Chagall and turned Vitebsk into one of the best training grounds for Jewish artists. Ansky wanted his cousin to come to St. Petersburg to participate in what would become the largest Jewish ethnographic project in history—the 1912–1914 expedition to document and collect the folklore of East European Jews throughout the Pale of Settlement. He would also, of course, support himself on a day-to-day basis working in the photo studios of the capital city. The prevalence of photography studios lining Nevsky Prospekt, the empire’s street of wealth and power, demonstrates the centrality of photography in the advent of Russian modernity and capitalism. And it was here that many czarist-era Jewish photographers got their break. Photography, then, was Yudovin’s entrée into the cultural heights of Russia and into the world of Russian art.9 Why did Jews take to this new medium? Unlike many other forms of art, photography did not have an academy or jury. In fact the question of whether or not photography is an art form at all was central to its historical development. Its relatively low status and lack of officialdom gave aspiring young aesthetically minded Jews an opportunity to create without needing permission from those in power. It was also a new technology and a new medium, one that required entrepreneurialism and risk taking. As the story of early Jewish photographers shows, taking pictures was a means of earning an income and of gaining access to new places at a time when the traditional Jewish economy of Eastern Europe was breaking down. Photography was also a means for Jews to gain access to power without being a part of power. After all, their subjects were only feet away from them. How many people, regardless of their religion, got that close to the czar? For Jews, photography was a means of maintaining memory across long distances. At a time when millions of Jews were migrating sometimes thousands of miles and families were being split up, often permanently, spending hard-earned money on an expensive photograph seemed a good investment. For the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of displaced individuals, photographs often served as their family’s sole link to an Eastern

• 16 •

when photography was jewish

European past. (In the twenty-first century, these same photographs are still often the primary link to a family’s Eastern European past.) In addition, because many Jewish photographers were on the move, they brought their trade to new parts of the world and to the Russian capital. The prevalence of Jewish photographers and of Jewish family photographs in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russia was a sign that some of the traditional Jewish prohibitions on reproducing human images were beginning to wane as Jews in Russia secularized. Historically, Jews have had a fraught relationship with the human image. This ambivalence, and even fear, can be traced to the Second Commandment’s prohibition against the creation of graven images. Medieval manuscripts often substituted animal heads for human ones to resist the temptation of the potentially idolatrous.10 But by the nineteenth century, Jews all over Europe were playing with human representation as they began making art and photography outside the context of Judaism and Jewish ritual. Hermann Biow, for example, a specialist in early daguerreotypes, photographed the German elite in the 1840s and 1850s. And there were several women involved in nineteenthcentury Jewish photography, especially in Austria. Atelier Adele, named for Adele Perlmutter Heilpern, photographed Austrian high society, while Madame d’Ora (Dora Kallmus) opened a studio that photographed the lights of fin-de-siècle Vienna.11 Michael Berkowitz has argued that photography was culturally marked as a Jewish profession. In Berkowitz’s words, “It was commonplace in London from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1950s, to assume that the proprietor and chief photographer in a photo studio might be a Jew. Second, that the Jew was a relatively recent immigrant, either from Central or Western Europe, marked by a distinct foreign accent. And third, that the Jewish photographer could easily be lampooned for his artistic pretensions.”12 With painters such as Maurycy Gottlieb in Poland, sculptors such as Mark Antokolsky, and small-town and high-society photographers, Jews took to representing the human form with a vengeance. In the Russian Empire, Jewish photographers flourished in midsized towns throughout the Pale of Settlement, the area that, in 1835, Czar Nicholas I had officially designated as the only place where any Jew could reside, as opposed to those with privileges (or chutzpah), who lived in the capital cities. The reputations of a few of these photographers spread beyond their local town. Mikhail Greim (1828–1911) opened a photography studio in 1860 in Kamenets-Podolsk, quickly acquiring a wide reputation as a first-rate photographer of ethnographic and historical subjects. Some photographers even functioned as “itinerant photography peddlers, like the book peddlers often fictionalized in 19th century Yiddish literature, as they went from town to town with their camera, paper, and equipment to take pictures in places that had no permanent photography studio.”13 This is how Jews first broke into photography. And as Chagall, Yudovin, and others show, they took their photography business to the capital as Jews began to migrate there in the 1860s.14

A Group of Jews from the Provinces

• 17 •

The Emergence of Photojournalism The well-known publisher and editor Stanislav Propper, a member of the St. Petersburg Jewish elite, began issuing Ogonyok (The Little Flame) in December 1899 as a weekly supplement to his liberal newspaper, Stock Market News (Birzhevye vedomosti), the largest circulating newspaper in imperial Russia.15 Ogonyok became a widely circulating magazine, independent of the newspaper, in 1902, with a print run of more than 120,000, rivaled only by the illustrated monthly Niva (Field).16 These illustrated magazines were a new form of popular entertainment (Fig. 1.2). The publication and circulation of photographs required new technology, the halftone process, which made possible the inexpensive reproduction of photographs in newspapers and magazines and spurred the development of a new kind of photography that would allow people to capture stories for newspapers as they were unfolding: photojournalism.17 Grigory Shudakov, the Soviet-era historian of photography, names Pyotr Otsup, along with Karl Bulla (whom Yuri Sergeev calls the first photo reporter), Yakov Shteinberg, and Aleksandr Savelyev as the first practitioners of Russian photojournalism to emerge in response to Russia’s first twentieth-century war and its first revolution. Otsup (1883–1963) was born in St. Petersburg, in a growing Russified Jewish community in the imperial capital, and apprenticed with the photographer Alexander Elkin.18 But it was not a surprise that the young Otsup became a photographer, since his entire family worked in the world of St. Petersburg photography. His two older brothers, Joseph and Alexander, were among the most important czarist court photographers. With their father, they opened a photo studio on Liteiny Prospekt in the heart of the city.19 Otsup’s first published photograph appeared in 1901; he worked for reputable journals such as Niva and Ogonyok and had his first solo exhibition in St. Petersburg in 1911.20 He once described the physical burden of photography before the invention of the portable camera: “I traveled with giant wooden cameras, and the cassettes were wooden too. Each negative weighed about a pound.”21 With such a load and with the time it took to set up the camera, ready it, and then take the photograph, it is hard to call Otsup a photojournalist, one who captures a fleeting moment that would become “news” in the next day’s paper. In 1904, he was sent to the front of the Russo-Japanese War for the magazine Chronicle of the War with Japan (Illustrirovanaia khronika Russko-Iaponskoi voiny). In 1905, he photographed the 1905 Revolution, which forced Czar Nicholas II to grant limited forms of democratic rule. In this time of turmoil, Otsup earned a reputation as one of the top newspaper photographers in the country.22 With his early experience in war photography, Otsup became a key photographer of World War I and then of the February 1917 Revolution and the abdication of the czar. His 1917 photographs of street demonstrations and Red Army soldiers and sailors are among the most arresting of the Provisional Government period, when all Russia was holding its

• 18 •

when photography was jewish

figure 1.2. Cover of original 1899 Ogonyok magazine.

A Group of Jews from the Provinces

• 19 •

breath waiting to see who would come to power as World War I continued to rage on Russia’s western borders. In the first days after the Bolshevik takeover in October, Otsup became one of the new Communist government’s photographers. For his own livelihood, this was an especially fortunate turn of events, since many of the prerevolutionary newspapers and journals that had hired him had closed down for both political and economic reasons. In 1918 he took a series of notable portraits of Lenin and other leaders of the Soviet state, including the head of the Cheka (the secret police), Felix Dzerzhinsky.23 During the Russian Civil War he made trips to the front to photograph the First Cavalry and the routing of anti-Soviet troops in Central Asia. Otsup was highly respected for his work at the front and even took on the assignment of photographing the Kronstadt mutiny against Bolshevik power, for which he stood on ice floes in the Gulf of Finland.24 In 1918 he moved to the new capital, Moscow, to sustain himself after the revolution and was put in charge of the photographic studio of the Revolutionary Military Council. He eventually headed the studio of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK), the central body of the new Soviet government, a job he held until 1925. He then became head of the photostudio of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (VTsSPS). Otsup remained in Moscow until his death in 1963, aside from a brief period in the Urals when he was evacuated from the capital during World War II.25 If Otsup was one of the first photojournalists, Moisei (Moyshe) Soimonovitch Nappelbaum (1869–1958) was possibly the most important portraitist in the history of Russian photography. Nappelbaum was born in Minsk and trained with the studio photographer Osip Osipovitch Boretti. The Russian émigré writer and Nappelbaum biographer Ilya Rudiak describes the early days of Nappelbaum’s career: The stuff of “black and white magic” surrounded him from his early childhood. Not far from his small house, which had sunk deeply into the muddy ground, was Boretti’s Photographs, well known to all Minsk. The young boy spent long hours standing before the windows of the shop. Behind the glass and gold-leaf frames were portraits of marvelous women in magnificent dresses with ribbons and bows, portly men in frock coats, angelic little girls in sailor jackets and high-laced boots. Little Moyshe involuntarily looked down at his own cheap shoes and ran off. . . . After Moyshe’s bar mitzvah, the conversation at home turned to the problem of where to apprentice the boy. The choice was among a tailor, a barber, a shoemaker . . . “To the photographer Boretti,” Moyshe insisted. After four years of apprenticing, the diligent youth became a salaried photographer.26

As the images of magnificence behind Boretti’s studio window or on the cover of Ogonyok suggest, czarist-era photography was a means to imagine a class status higher than one’s own. But beneath the romantic image of a young impoverished boy yearning for class advancement is the story of the rise of Jewish photographers. “Black and white magic” was

• 20 •

when photography was jewish

seen not simply as an art form, but also as a profession, a means of liberation and improved social standing for many young Jews. Photography was mobile, and there was no requisite guild or school allowing (or restricting) Jews’ access to it. It was the newest means of visually mediating the world, a task that had been primarily in the realm of the printed word. If Jews had been the “people of the book,” perhaps they were becoming “people of the media.”27 After a sojourn in New York and then returning to Minsk, Nappelbaum moved to St. Petersburg and established himself as one of the leading photo portraitists of the country, taking haunting pictures of the St. Petersburg commercial and political elite illuminated with a single light bulb, a signature feature of his portraits.28 After the 1917 Revolution, he too ended up working with a new elite.

The Birth of Soviet Photojournalism The new regime recognized the role images would play in the political and cultural revolution taking place. Lenin is quoted as saying, “The lens can write history quite well. It’s clearer and more understandable. It’s a history in snapshots. There isn’t a single artist who can come close to touching what a camera can see.”29 In 1918 at the opening of classes at the new Advanced Institute for Photography, Anatoly Lunacharsky, the commissar of enlightenment and Party advocate for new forms of art and technology, said, “Everyone needs photography for his entire life. A child needs it, and needs it throughout his education and when he becomes an adult. . . . We need to put a camera into the hands of the people. If every cultured person carries a watch, so too must he know how to use a pencil and a camera.”30 And in September 1918, the Commissariat of Enlightenment created the All Russian Photo Film Division to organize Soviet photography for the new state.31 Using a camera to document the world was one thing; taking art portraits was another. For the Communist regime, which put the collective before the individual, what role would there be for a portrait photographer? Nappelbaum took photographs of the new political and intellectual elite, made up not of bankers, aristocrats, and merchants, as czarist official portraiture would have been, but of commissars, playwrights, and composers, many of whom were themselves Jewish. It was, therefore, not an accident that the Jew Moyshe Nappelbaum, photographer to St. Petersburg high society, received a message in January 1918 from the First Congress of Soviets, the first meeting of the new Soviet government, asking him to take Vladimir Lenin’s first postrevolutionary portrait. Later in life, Nappelbaum was often asked to recount how he took the Lenin photograph. He reflected on that moment through the lens of Stalin portraiture of the 1930s and 1940s, whose conventions were ritualized and emphasized Stalin’s simultaneous greatness and simplicity.32 Therefore, Nappelbaum said

A Group of Jews from the Provinces

• 21 •

figure 1.3. Moisei Nappelbaum, Vladimir Lenin in Smolny, January 1918. Courtesy of Teresa and Paul Harbaugh.

of Lenin, “There wasn’t anything of the superhuman that I had been expecting. From the first moment what struck me most was his simplicity.”33 Nappelbaum described the afternoon of photographing Lenin as magical, perhaps reminiscent of the time he gazed through the window of Boretti’s studio. Many shots he took of the new leader were dark and blurry; one came out just right. Nappelbaum’s description of taking the photograph tells us quite a bit about how the Soviet Union venerated the leader, which meant that the portrait photographer, in some ways the modern Russian icon painter, had an obligation to imbue an image with holiness. I watched him, stared at his forehead. I stared at his eyes that revealed a sharp, creative mind. He seemed to be shining kindness at me. There was no sense of charity or pity in his face. He had a clear respect for people. He took everyone’s words equally seriously. But how to represent this in a photograph? How can I find the means to transmit the harmonious connection of a sharp mind with a deep simplicity and naturalness, with boundless energy and arresting shrewdness? . . . I decided to photograph Lenin’s head and face close up. In order to capture the line of his broad shoulders, I laid the plate horizontally, and in order to transmit his intelligent, lively, simple, human gaze, I asked Lenin to look directly at the camera. I wasn’t able to bring any kind of lighting with me to the photo shoot, so I was worried about the gray, monotone light of the Petrograd day. And suddenly, the sun burst forth and illuminated Vladimir Ilich and his eyes. In that moment, I took a few shots, and then, just as quickly, the sun was hidden once again.34

Portrait photography doesn’t get any more beatific than that.

• 22 •

when photography was jewish

Like Otsup, who made the transition from czarist to Soviet photographer, Nappelbaum became one of the Soviet Union’s official portrait photographers, taking pictures of, among others, Lenin, Stalin, writer Maxim Gorky, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Lunacharsky, and poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. In spring 1918, Lunacharsky held an exhibition of Nappelbaum’s portraits in the Anichkov Palace on Nevsky Prospekt at which the photographer exhibited the famous image of Lenin.35 The man with the biblical (or perhaps Russian aristocratic) beard quickly became known as the old man of Soviet photography, who despite his long prerevolutionary photographic pedigree, was the one who captured the faces of the Communist Party elite and the state. In fact, Nappelbaum’s portrait of Lenin appeared on the cover of what one historian calls the first issue of the first Soviet illustrated journal in history, Flame (Plamia), an official publication of the Petrograd Soviet.36 These two Russian Jewish photographers, Otsup and Nappelbaum, began the tradition of Jews as the documenters of Russian revolutions. It’s probably not surprising that Jews would be behind the camera photographing Lenin. After all, several political leaders at Lenin’s side were Jews, as were many of the writers, composers, political commissars, and others who were photographed.37 Nappelbaum opened his own studio in Moscow in 1923, on Kuznetsky Most, in the heart of the arts and culture district of the newly bustling but still deeply impoverished capital, where he remained until his death in 1958. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Soviet Russia found itself surrounded by enemies, internal and external, while it simultaneously tried to usher in a revolutionary society. Poverty, famine, and experiments in a socialist economy known as War Communism left Russia economically and socially devastated. Millions of people left the country, including many Jews, many others relocated, and cities emptied. In 1921–1922, the advent of the New Economic Policy (NEP) stabilized the Soviet economy, and the end of war on all fronts brought peace. In the period 1917–1921, with the impoverishment of wartime Russia and closed borders that prevented the import of most photographic material, the field of photography shriveled. In Germany, the magazine Soviet Russia in Pictures (Sowjet Russland im Bild) was launched in 1921 with the goal of popularizing and supporting the fledgling revolution from abroad. In 1924, the magazine spawned Workers’ Illustrated Newspaper (Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung; AIZ), one of the world’s leading photo magazines, showing how the Russian Revolution and the birth of modern photojournalism were intimately connected.38 In 1923 Ogonyok was reestablished; it was dedicated to describing life and the news through the lens of the modern, handheld camera for a mass audience. Along with Soviet Russia in Pictures and AIZ, it was one of the first genuine photojournalism magazines in the world.39 Although it maintained the name of the prerevolutionary periodical, for which Otsup and Nappelbaum had photographed, it looked nothing like its earlier version. Rather than gazing at fabulously dressed upper-class men and women, as the 1899 reader did, the 1923 readers of Ogonyok would aspire to participate in the building of a

A Group of Jews from the Provinces

• 23 •

new socialist society, one that seemed to lack class limitations and that emphasized the leader’s simplicity. Ogonyok would be photography for the Soviet masses (Fig. 1.4). The magazine was founded by Mikhail Koltsov in a friend’s apartment and on a shoestring budget. Koltsov was born Mikhail Fridlyand in Kiev in 1898, one of several brothers and cousins who would become well-known Soviet literati. His family moved to Bialystok and sent young Misha to school, where he ended up studying with Denis Kaufman (who later changed his name to Dziga Vertov), avant-garde director and member of another group of Jewish brothers from the provinces who were key image makers in the 1920s and 1930s.40 Fridlyand fled the battle-torn region around Bialystok in 1914 for Petrograd, where he studied psychology. After a few years, Fridlyand, or “MF,” as he signed his school papers, changed his last name to Koltsov.41 Nappelbaum and Otsup did not change their names when they moved to the capital, but Koltsov was of a new generation of young Jewish male upstarts who quite often changed their names or at the very least, reinvented themselves as Russian intellectuals.42 During the revolution, Koltsov worked with the Bolsheviks, picked up a movie camera, and traveled the country filming the civil war. Between 1918 and 1920, he was in Finland, Vitebsk, and Kiev, before ending up in war-scarred Moscow in 1920. He settled on Strastnoi Bul’var, where several publishing houses were clustered, in hopes of finding work as a new Soviet intellectual. Many starry-eyed Jews from the provinces, especially in southern Russia, moved to Moscow looking for work. It was a privilege of mobility that most Jews, and most Russians for that matter, were experiencing for the first time. It was, however, an ephemeral privilege, since the Soviet Union began requiring residence permits and internal passports in the 1930s, hoping to control the mass movement of millions of people from the countryside to the big cities. Southern Russia had always been a frontier or borderland, rather like the western United States in the nineteenth century. Jews originally migrated to this part of the czarist empire from smaller towns and cities in more traditionally Jewish areas such as western Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, and Poland, looking for economic opportunity.43 And like the American borderlands, it attracted acculturated and entrepreneurial Jews who were willing to live without well-established traditional Jewish communities and career paths. Odessa, the anchor of this boundary-pushing Jewish culture, had enough of these Jews to build new kinds of religious, intellectual, and cultural communities. And as that city’s Jewish communities grew, so too did Jewish culture. The city became the capital of modern Hebrew culture; the birthplace of Yiddish journalism; and along with St. Petersburg, one of the two most important hubs of Russian-language Jewish culture. As Jarrod Tanny has shown, Odessa became so closely associated with Jewishness that its very name came to be a coded signifier for Jew in the later Soviet period.44 So why leave this great Jewish capital, whose Jewishness is still so palpable that calling oneself an Odessan almost instinctively identifies someone as Jewish? Revolution, war,

• 24 •

when photography was jewish

figure 1.4. Cover of Ogonyok, first issue of the Soviet edition, 1923.

A Group of Jews from the Provinces

• 25 •

and famine do terrible things to a community. After the revolution, Ukraine declared its independence, and civil war, marked by anti-Jewish violence, broke out soon afterward. Hundreds of thousands of Jews moved from Odessa and Kiev as well as small cities in Ukraine, Crimea, and southern Russia to the United States, Europe, and large Russian cities, especially Moscow, the capital of the new socialist utopia. The paragons of Odessan Soviet Jewish culture, Isaac Babel, Ilya Ilf, and Eduard Bagritsky, who created images of Odessa that still resonate for readers of Russian literature, wrote more of their Odessan literature from Moscow than from Odessa. Babel and Ilf both moved to the capital in 1923, and Bagritsky did so in 1925. None ever returned.45 The same social history of the Soviet ( Jewish) literary intelligentsia can be seen with Soviet photographers, who, intentionally or otherwise, followed Koltsov’s path to the revolutionary capital, where they all spent the rest of their lives. To illustrate this great migration, the 1897 Russian census counted 5,000 Jews in the city, while the 1926 census counted 130,000, making Moscow one of the most Jewish cities in Europe.46 Having moved to Moscow in 1920, Koltsov had the opportunity to create new forms of work and art, presumably attached to the camera with which he had become familiar during the civil war. He recognized that the ideological desire to build photography was not enough to create the profession of photojournalism, which was made possible with the advent of the portable camera and better developing processes that allowed one to capture life as it was unfolding. The so-called old-timers such as Nappelbaum and Otsup had their prerevolutionary Petrograd connections to help build their photographic careers. The Jews newly arrived from the provinces, more committed to new ideas and aesthetics, needed an institutional infrastructure to support them. In the first years after the revolution, the publishing industry was in a dismal state. Hundreds of newspapers and magazines had closed down during the lean war years. The number of publications plummeted during the wars and did not begin recovering until 1923. The situation for illustrated journals was even worse, since most photographic supplies were imported. As a result, photographic activity, publications, and organizations collapsed in the turmoil following the revolution.47 In 1922, Soviet newspapers were still generally published without illustrations, which were too expensive to produce, took up too many precious column inches, and required the transmission of photographs over long distances. But socioeconomic limitations did not dampen the intense ideological and cultural desire to circulate images. Publishers wanted more visuals, because technology allowed editors to display them, there was an aesthetic desire to vary the visual appearance of publications, and there was an ideological imperative to begin circulating images of a society in the making. In the words of Stalin-era photo historian Grigorii Boltianskii, “The proletariat of the Soviet country and its vanguard—the Communist Party—place[d] new tasks before photography. Photography should take its place in the arsenal of weapons of

• 26 •

when photography was jewish

class struggle—it should become a means of Communist propaganda, one of the weapons of socialist construction.”48 So despite the dire material circumstances, in 1918 there were still several photographic journals appearing in the war-torn capital cities.49 By the end of 1922, more illustrated journals were emerging. In October the State Publishing House (Gosizdat) put out the first edition of the biweekly Echo (Ekho); in January 1923 Izvestiia, the publishing house of the Soviet Central Executive Committee, and publisher of Izvestiia, put out the weekly Red Field (Krasnaia Niva), echoing the prerevolutionary Niva, and a month later, Pravda, the publishing house of the Communist Party, and publisher of Pravda, put out the biweekly Projector (Prozhektor).50 Most important, 1923 was the year in which Koltsov established the modern Ogonyok, the little flame that sparked a revolution in visual culture in the Soviet Union. The previous year, on August 5, Emmanuel Golomb, who had worked on the prerevolutionary Ogonyok and wanted to see it reestablished, petitioned the Political Division of Gosizdat to support Ogonyok’s publication: I request permission to publish a weekly illustrated literary magazine, Ogonyok. The contents of the magazine will include stories, sketches, poems, photographs, drawings, caricatures of contemporary life, and announcements. It will be 16–32 pages. The editor will be M. E. Koltsov and the permanent staff will be made up of: Aleksandr Gai (A. Menshoi), Efim Zozulya, B. Malkin, S. Gorodetsky, M. Pustynin, P. Ashevsky, Boris Pilnyak, M. Gerasimov, S. Obradovich, Aleksandrovsky, Kazin, S. Rodov, and others. Publication of the magazine will take place under the auspices of the Ogonyok publishing house, which is temporarily located at my house (Bolshaia Dmitrovka 17, apt. 57). Signed E. Golomb51

Permission was granted, and on April 1, 1923, the first issue of the magazine appeared. Koltsov was responsible for operations. Efim Davidovitch Zozulya (1891–1941), a longtime socialist Jewish activist and satirist originally from Lodz, Poland, ran the literary-artistic side. This wasn’t Zozulya’s first experience with the illustrated press. In 1918, he served as editor of the Free Magazine ( Svobodnyi zhurnal ).52 The first issue of Ogonyok was laid out in Golomb’s small apartment in downtown Moscow, the “global” headquarters of the Ogonyok publishing house. Golomb, who was in charge of distribution, brought copies directly to city kiosks for sale to eager readers. According to reminiscences from Ogonyok staff they sold out by evening. Something in Ogonyok caught the imagination of Soviet readers. These three Jewish cultural figures, two writers and one filmmaker-photographer, had discovered a formula for reaching the booming urban population: show readers the world around them visually, with articles written in an accessible, readable style. Many have likened Ogonyok to Life magazine. Both magazines moved photography from high culture and the realm of the studio to popular culture and the kitchen table. They both were responsible for making images tell stories, rather than simply illustrating text. Ogonyok and Life created a mass-produced visual culture that circulated in the hundreds of thousands. As Erika Wolf has argued, “While the Soviet press lacked experience

A Group of Jews from the Provinces

• 27 •

with photography and there were few experienced photojournalists, the development of illustrated magazines and newspapers led to the emergence of a new generation of press photographers. The magazine Ogonyok played an especially decisive role in the development of Soviet photojournalism. . . . Published with the motto ‘No material without a photo or drawing,’ Ogonyok quickly built a large mass readership.”53 Koltsov insisted on a popular, easy-to-read periodical, as opposed to the highbrow journals such as LEF (The Left Front of Art) that were becoming popular among the avantgarde in the 1920s. The simultaneous emergence of Ogonyok, as a mass-produced magazine dedicated to Soviet photojournalism, and LEF, which was an outlet for self-defined constructivist artists, writers, and thinkers, led to conflicts among culture makers about the place of art and photography in the Soviet Union for years to come.54 Even the choice of names—one group resurrecting and transforming a prerevolutionary publication while the other choosing a metaphor drawn from the military—suggests radically different approaches to Soviet culture. Although Ogonyok promoted itself as a “mass journal,” geared, not specifically toward the intellectual elite, but toward the general reader, the images included in Ogonyok throughout the 1920s and 1930s represented some of the most modernist, experimental, and avant-garde photojournalism anywhere (Fig. 1.5). Ogonyok projected the Soviet Revolution in all its political and aesthetic glory, and it was a hit. By the end of 1923, circulation was up to forty-two thousand. A year later, it hit two hundred thousand, and by 1925, Ogonyok had a circulation of five hundred thousand, which, given Soviet reading habits of sharing periodicals and general poverty, meant that well more than one million people were reading Ogonyok.55 After its modest first year when he hand delivered the magazine to kiosks, Golomb found a new way to reach readers: “We started distributing the magazine as an insert in local newspapers. By 1929, there were sixty newspapers sending out Ogonyok as an illustrated supplement.56 In 1930, Ogonyok became even more powerful, as the government sought to centralize the publishing industry and transferred several publications to Ogonyok’s publishing house.57 The Jewish loners of prerevolutionary photography, such as Nappelbaum and Otsup, or the art photographers who formed their own organization called the Russian Photographic Society (RFO), could only look on as the new revolutionary generation changed the face of photography. In addition to photojournalists, constructivist photographers, among them Alexander Rodchenko, professor at and dean of the metalwork faculty of the Advanced Arts and Technical Ateliers (VKhUTEMAS), experimented with this new technology that had the power to transform the everyday world.58 Rodchenko, who picked up a camera only in 1924, saw his photography this way: “Photomontage brought me to photography. The first photos marked the return to abstraction; it is virtually objectless. The main task was composition.”59 Ogonyok’s success may also have attracted Rodchenko to photography. Thus, both avant-gardists, who saw photography as an extension of other revolutionary experiments in aesthetics, and photojournalists, for whom

• 28 •

when photography was jewish

figure 1.5. Arkady Shaykhet, Kiev Rail Station, 1936. Courtesy of Arkady Shaykhet and the Fotosoyuz Agency.

A Group of Jews from the Provinces

• 29 •

photography was a means to tell a new story, increasingly distanced themselves from the traditions of prerevolutionary photography. According to one recollection, Nappelbaum only once stepped into the editorial offices of Ogonyok, the nerve center of Soviet photojournalism, although his photo studio on Kuznetsky Most was at most a twenty-minute walk. Ogonyok was popular not only with readers, but also with budding photographers. The magazine quickly garnered a reputation as the first stop for young culturally and visually curious but relatively uneducated, and often Jewish, migrants, who almost all came from southern Russia. Avrom Shmulevitch Shoykhet, the grandfather of the gallery director and curator, Maria Zhotikova, who first sparked my interest in this project, was born in 1898 in Nikolaev, in the Odessa region, and moved to Moscow in 1920. As Mikhail Fridlyand did, when he was in school in revolutionary Petrograd, young Avrom Shmulevitch changed his name, to Arkady Samoilovitch Shaykhet, in an attempt to take on a revolutionary, and less provincially Jewish, persona. (In fact, he ended up changing his provincial Jewish name to something that might be called a Soviet Jewish name, since Arkady Samoilovitch is still recognizably Jewish. Perhaps Eykhel Fainzelberg did a better job transforming himself and masking his Jewishness when he became the satirist Ilya Ilf.) Shaykhet started working as a photo retoucher in a private studio on Ulitsa Sretenka, around the corner from what would become Ogonyok headquarters. In 1923, Koltsov went to an exhibition at the Rembrandt studios, not far from Ogonyok, and saw some photographs taken by Shaykhet, one of their retouchers. He started a conversation with the young photographer (who was the same age as Koltsov) and looked at some of his work, which had been published in The Worker’s Newspaper (Rabochaia Gazeta), another popular Soviet newspaper that employed many Jewish migrants and that was a rival to Ogonyok for hiring the best up-and-coming photographers.60 Koltsov was sold. These two twentyfive-year-olds quickly became the leaders of a cultural phenomenon—the emergence of an institution called Soviet photojournalism. Thus began a trend of budding Jewish photographers, arriving in Moscow from Odessa, Nikolaev, Rostov, and other places in southern Russia with large Jewish populations desperate for work and a sense of community among other Jews and others who left their homes to be part of the revolution and to find a job. A first stop for them was to meet Koltsov and with luck find an internship or work either at Ogonyok or at one of the other publications connected with the magazine. Born in 1898 in Simferopol, Crimea, Max Vladimirovitch Alpert first stepped into a studio when he was twelve years old, and quickly learned the technical craft of photography.61 He moved to Odessa in 1913, taking up photography as a profession. He moved to Moscow in the early 1920s and began photographing for The Worker’s Newspaper. In 1929 he moved to Pravda and became one of the country’s most powerful photographers.62 Elazar Langman, born in 1895 in Odessa, moved to Moscow to study music before finding his way into photography with the avant-garde photography group October

• 30 •

when photography was jewish

(Oktiabr’); Semyon Osipovitch Fridlyand, born in 1905 in Kiev, moved to Moscow in 1925 and immediately started photographing for Ogonyok. It could not have hurt that Mikhail and Semyon were cousins.63 Avrom Shterenberg, born in 1894 in Zhitomir, moved to Moscow in 1919, was drafted, and was demobilized in 1923. He too was part of the Ogonyok family. These photographers’ common biographies go beyond birth date and place of origin. All moved to Moscow after the end of the civil war but before Stalin’s rise to power, in the New Economic Policy (NEP) period. They landed in a poor but exciting Moscow, a place with scarce housing, a battered economy, and persistent food shortages, a massive city, becoming more massive every day, with roaming bands of homeless youth, prostitution, and crime. At the same time, they landed in the capital of an important country making news every day, living under a government that was funding outrageous experiments in culture, literature, publishing, and, yes, photography. None of them would ever live permanently anywhere else but Moscow—their, and many acculturated Jews’, adopted home. This group, which I call the first generation of Soviet photojournalists, did not yet have the trappings of professional photojournalism and had to create those trappings, which included awards, credentials, staff positions, and other evidence of professionalization. It also meant establishing newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses and training a group of people who could take pictures of a society in motion. These urbanized Soviet Jews from the provinces gave birth to Soviet photojournalism.

•

2

•

Seeing Red jewish photographers, the rise of the second generation, and soviet photojournalism of the 1930s

The first generation of Soviet photographers, like other artists, writers, and cultural activists, wrestled with questions of aesthetics, politics, and ideology throughout the 1920s. Was socialist art created by the working classes? Was it simple and accessible to the working classes? Was it meant to throw off the aesthetics of the past and usher in an entirely new visual language? What role would new technology play in the building of a new society? Through the 1920s, modernist trends reigned supreme in magazines such as LEF that had small print runs. Artists, architects, sculptors, and photographers glamorized the construction of a new society using the new language of constructivism, futurism, and other movements that were popular in the rest of Europe. At the same time, with publications such as Ogonyok emerging, photography also functioned as a feature of the mass media that was reaching millions of readers. Thus, a photograph in a newspaper or an illustrated magazine told a simple news story to the average reader through clever montages, close-ups, and unusual angles, as Fridlyand does in an image of a parachutist (Fig. 2.1). Photographing from high above, Fridlyand figures the everyday in a new light. He also brilliantly plays with light and dark and shadows. Most Soviet photographers of the 1920s agreed that photography needed to elevate socialism. The leaders of the Soviet Union recognized from its first years that photography and film were important means of projecting and celebrating their new experiment, both at home and abroad. From its earliest years, Soviet photojournalism diverged from some of the practices of 1920s street photographers in the United States, such as those working in New York’s Lower East Side or Harlem, who often saw their role as social critics, rather than cheerleaders. For some prerevolutionary photographers, the shift from czarist to Soviet photographic culture simply meant replacing one set of iconic leaders with another. Nappelbaum continued taking portraits, but instead of photographing the aristocratic elite, he photographed the new Soviet elite. And in the 1920s, many photographic styles, genres, and ideologies existed simultaneously. One of the most well-known art photographers, Alexander Grinberg, primarily a pictorialist, flourished in the relatively open aesthetic atmosphere of the NEP 1920s. • 31 •

• 32 •

when photography was jewish

figure 2.1. Semyon Fridlyand, Parachutist, 1920s. Courtesy of the Dalbey Photographic Collection at the University of Denver.

Seeing Red

• 33 •

At the same time, our Jewish photographers were building a new profession called Soviet photojournalism, clustered around the figure of Koltsov. His magazine, Ogonyok, had become the most important illustrated journal in the country and had established its own publishing house on Strastnoi Bul’var. In 1926, he launched Soviet Photo (Sovetskoe foto) as a forum for photojournalists across the country. The very title of this periodical showed how these early photojournalists wanted to define themselves as distinctly Soviet and to show that art photographers such as Grinberg were not. In the first issue, the editors laid out their vision of the field of photography: “In the USSR photography is still in the hands of a few. The uncoordinated ‘art photography’ of handicraft professionals, the narrow circles of refined photo artists, the ‘gastronomes’ of photography, the active and lively but quite modest in quantity group of photo-reporters, and the quite large but disorganized and unaided cadres of amateurs—here for the time being is our ‘photographic society.’ ”1 This passage breaks the world of Soviet photography into four groups with implicit class affiliations. As historian Erika Wolf has noted, “The ‘handicraft professionals’ refers to studio and street photographers, who plied photography as a craft trade or cottage industry. These photographers are depicted as the backward remnants of an antiquated economic order. Similarly, art photographers are castigated as decadent bourgeois ‘gastronomes’ of photography, another obsolete group with no future in the new Soviet culture. In contrast, photo-reporters and the ‘cadres of amateurs’ are described in more positive terms with proletarian overtones.”2 The magazine’s subtitle indicated at which group the journal was aimed: “A monthly magazine devoted to questions from amateur photographers and photo-reporters.” It is important to remember that these Soviet Jewish photographers were working in only one branch of Stalin-era photography, emerging photojournalism. There were many others, among them Nappelbaum’s portraits and Grinberg’s pictorialism. Photojournalists and their institutions fell under the category “societal propaganda” photography, which included newspapers and magazines, news sheets posted on factory walls and street corners, some film studios, a children’s commission, Intourist, and several cooperative organizations. There was also so-called mass photography such as photographic work that ended up in an individual’s hands. This would include portraits, individual photographs, photos taken in street-side booths (called pavilions in Russian), and other “private” photography. And last, there was “scientific” photography that was used internally in labs, institutes, and even art studios.3 To differentiate photojournalism from these others and professionalize it, Soviet Photo featured special sections for beginning photographers, photojournalists, and amateur worker photographers. Koltsov established the Association of Moscow Photojournalists to create an institutional infrastructure for this new breed of photographer. Soviet Photo published an essay asking what photography under socialism should be:

• 34 •

when photography was jewish

Questions of photo-reportage in the Soviet Union have been largely or, in fact, entirely not resolved. In recent years, many fresh young forces have joined the ranks of photo-reporters. They do not have any theoretical or practical training. They work haphazardly with the old methods of the grandpa-photographers. Many of the newest principles of photo-reportage are simply unknown or barely known to them. The Association considers as one of its most immediate tasks the fundamental development of productive capacity and technical questions of photo-reportage.4

The “grandpa photographers” were people like Nappelbaum, Grinberg, and Otsup, those who developed their craft in a prerevolutionary photographic world that did not have a profession called photojournalism. As long as photographs were primarily seen only on covers of magazines and buried in newspapers and as long as most photographers did not have any form of professional training beyond apprenticeships, it was hard to see these new forms of photography as art, and therefore as rivals to the traditional forms of art photography, whose aesthetic was pictorial. Exhibitions, something done for painting and sculpture, would raise photojournalism’s status. The institution that housed the 1920s art photographers, the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN), hosted several exhibitions of pictorial art photography.5 The Association of Moscow Photojournalists organized two small exhibitions in 1926, but the real public launching of the profession of Soviet photojournalism took place at the 1928 exhibition Ten Years of Soviet Photography. The event launched the Cultural Revolution in photography, marked the decline of pictorial photography and initiated the careers of many photojournalists. Four hundred photographers participated in this massive exhibition, which included nearly eight thousand photographs. The exhibition was meant to signal the official rise of photography, rather than painting, as a central form of visual art. The critic Leonid VolkovLannit announced, “In this exhibition . . . one sees the features of true Soviet photography as a representational tool of the construction of everyday life.”6 In addition to marginalizing pictorialists, critics tried to highlight sharp differences between the documentary style of an artist-photographer such as Alexander Rodchenko and the more photojournalistic style of photographers like Shaykhet and Semyon Fridlyand.7 Some criticized Rodchenko’s photographs precisely for their detachment from, as Osip Brik put it, the “social demands” of the time.8 Shortly after the exhibition, Rodchenko and Fridlyand engaged in a polemical debate about aesthetics and style on the pages of Soviet Photo.9 The Cultural Revolution (1928–1932) launched a period of sharp divisions in culture and politics, of radical experiments in workers’ culture, and in the elimination of cultural elites from the prerevolutionary era. It also marked the emergence of something called proletarian culture, which radicalized cultural politics and aesthetics. In this period, all culture producers were expected to frame their work politically and ideologically. As photography critics such as the young Soviet (and Jewish) Leonid Mezhericher, editors such

Seeing Red

• 35 •

as Koltsov, and photographers such as Fridlyand suggested, this new revolution signaled a clear shift in ideology, away from “form” toward “content” and away from the highbrow “avant-garde” and toward socially grounded culture. Some have suggested that it marked a shift away from experimental photography toward more realist photography, but the central debate was about the role of politics and ideology in the making of photography. Mezhericher was a head of the photography conglomerate Union Foto (Union Photo), which was modeled and named after the German Union Foto, but whose name was later Russified to Soyuzfoto. He was in charge of its foreign department. He was also on the editorial board of Soviet Photo, making him one of the most powerful people in charge of photography.10 Mezhericher published an article in 1928 denouncing pictorial photography. He argued that photography without ideology, as in Grinberg’s photographs of nude women lounging in a field, was worthless and even dangerous for the development of socialism in the Soviet Union.11 “Quiet melancholy ideas!! How hopeless, how dead and gone do these ideas sound in the metal clang of creative, revolutionary modernity.”12 Mentioned explicitly for silencing were Nikolai Svishchov Paola, one of the most important art photographers of the 1910s; Ida Nappelbaum, daughter of Moisei; and Grinberg. As a result of the new politics, the organizations of these prerevolutionary pictorial photographers, including the Russian Photographic Society (RFO) and GAKhN were closed down.13 Mezhericher also published articles criticizing the so-called formalism of documentary photographers such as Rodchenko, who had become the object of much criticism in the early 1930s.14 Even if Rodchenko, Fridlyand, and others were influenced by constructivism and other popular aesthetic movements, they broke themselves up into two groups—the Octoberists and the Union of Russian Proletarian Photographers. The Octoberists were led by Rodchenko, who maintained the avant-garde polemic against “crude” socially driven art. One shouldn’t think that this meant that the Octoberists were not committed to the building of socialism. After all, Rodchenko notoriously took a commission to photograph and celebrate the rehabilitation of “convicts” through forced labor at the construction site of the White Sea Canal.15 If the Octoberists had their organization, then the proletarian photographers needed theirs, and they formed the Union of Russian Proletarian Photographers (ROPF).16 The Octoberists mounted their exhibitions, and ROPF, in which most of the Soviet Jewish photojournalists found themselves, held theirs, including a well-known one that traveled to London and was opened by George Bernard Shaw.17 To demonstrate how ideology informed photography, ROPF changed the name of the professional magazine Soviet Photo to Proletarian Photo, a name that was in place for only a couple of years. In 1931, leading members of ROPF produced the photo essay “Twenty-four Hours in the Life of the Filippov Family,” as a way of projecting their vision of Soviet photography internally and abroad. The essay was organized by Mezhericher and photographed by a

• 36 •

when photography was jewish

collective overseen by Shaykhet and Alpert and first appeared in the German Workers’ Illustrated Newspaper (AIZ). It depicts the daily life of a worker named Filippov and shows the socialist utopia to be quite pleasant, especially in light of the living standards of other workers enduring the worldwide depression. One photograph, for example, shows Filippov taking a comfortable morning ride on an uncrowded city tram, a scene that would never have taken place, since trams in Moscow, whose population was booming through the 1920s and 1930s, were always packed. The photo essay is often identified as a classic example of the photojournalists’ vision of Soviet photography—laborers living in a socialist utopia that was flourishing while the rest of the world was suffering through the Great Depression. The era of infighting ended in April 1932 with the Central Committee of the Communist Party’s decree on the reconstruction of literary and artistic organizations. The new edict forced a consolidation of competing publications and coordination among photographers and critics of many different aesthetic and political traditions. It also meant the ousting of the young radicals, who led the Cultural Revolution. In photography, the consolidation of 1932 led to the publication, circulation, and exhibition of some of the best, most modernist-inspired photography of the Soviet period. It was a period that brought together once maligned pictorialists with former Octoberists and ROPF members. And in terms of the actual photography, the period brought together realist photo essays, radical montage, iconic portraiture shot from below, and modernist landscape shot from above. It also inaugurated a new aesthetic regime known as socialist realism, a cultural form meant to elevate the construction of Soviet society, glorify labor, and reveal a “real” world to which Soviet reality aspired.

The Second Generation Comes to Stalinist Moscow It was in the period of the Cultural Revolution and then during the rise of socialist realism that the second generation of Jewish photographers moved to Moscow and joined Koltsov, Shaykhet, Alpert, Fridlyand, and others. By describing generations I mean to suggest not stark breaks in time but rather a shift in common experiences shared by some of these photographers. It is these common experiences that shape their aesthetics, and politics, and eventually photography of the war. The second generation missed out on the tumultuous debates about the birth of Soviet photojournalism. Most were very young during the Revolution and civil war, coming of age in the 1930s. They moved to a Stalinist Moscow with a skyline that changed every day and with an already entrenched political and bureaucratic power structure that worked from the center out and from the top down. They knew nothing but Stalinism. Unlike the first generation, the second was born after the 1905 Revolution, most in the heat of war. But like members of the first generation, most were from southern Russia.

Seeing Red

• 37 •

Shmuel Mikhailovitch Gur-Arye (known as Samarii Gurarii; 1916–1997) was born in the city of Kremenchug, Ukraine, moving to Moscow in 1921. His first published photograph, of a parade of workers, appeared in 1934, making him a quintessential example of the second generation of Soviet photojournalists.18 Only Dmitrii Baltermants (1912–1990), from Warsaw, and Mikhail Trakhman (1918–1976), born in Moscow, were outliers in the geography of Soviet Jewish photography. In the provinces there were fewer opportunities to land coveted staff positions at newspapers or illustrated magazines. In fact, most small newspapers did not have staff photographers and relied either on local stringers or on photo wire services such as Fotokhronika TASS. When fifteen-year-old Evgenii Khaldei (1917–1997) decided to take up photography in his hometown of Stalino (formerly Yuzovka) in the Donetsk region, he turned to local newspapers for work. He interned at a photography studio in the area before landing his first job as a freelancer for the Donetsk Division of the Press Photography unit of the Ukrainian Photo-Union in 1932.19 Khaldei developed his skills working for a variety of local papers, then obtained a coveted slot in a training internship with Union Photo in Moscow.20 Emmanuel Evzerikhin (1911–1981) was born in Rostov-on-Don into a Russian-speaking Jewish family who occasionally went to synagogue.21 In the 1920s in a fit of rebellion against his family (and in conformity with young rebels around him), young Em, as he was known, joined the Communist youth league. He had his break at a meeting of the Society for Young Photographers of Rostov, which he chaired. At a banquet, the young photographer ended up sitting next to S. Yevgenov, codirector of Union Photo, who had come from Moscow and was in Rostov as a guest of the society. Yevgenov loved Evzerikhin’s work and invited him to start working for Union Photo. Evzerikhin moved to Moscow in 1932 and worked for Union Photo, and later TASS, for much of his photographic career.22 Mark Markov-Grinberg (1907–2007) had also become an amateur photographer in Rostov. In 1925 he became the photo correspondent for the newspaper Soviet South (Sovetskii Yug) and a freelance correspondent for Ogonyok. Markov-Grinberg’s big break came when Vladimir Mayakovsky, the founder of LEF magazine and one of the most famous culture makers in the country, came to Rostov. Markov-Grinberg tells the story of photographing Mayakovsky: Mayakovsky had come to do a poetry reading. I had a pretty weak camera at the time, an Erneman, 9 x 12. I went to my editor, and he said to photograph Mayakovsky. I went [to meet Mayakovsky] with the editor in chief. I loved him. I went to his hotel, and Mayakovsky came out of the door. He saw two newspaper guys, me with my camera. The room was small and had only one window. What to do [with so little light]? I needed to photograph him. I got upset, but he said, “Let’s photograph.” I sat him down near the window. There was some light on his face. This was the experience of my life. It was 1926, the same year I left for Moscow.23

• 38 •

when photography was jewish

figure 2.2. Mark Markov-Grinberg, Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1926. Courtesy of Teresa and Paul Harbaugh.

For this young provincial, proximity to the greatness that was Mayakovsky in the 1920s caused an epiphany and prompted Mark, age nineteen, to move to the great socialist capital. He went there to study and work as a photo correspondent for union periodicals and for the magazine Transformation (Smena). In 1930 he was invited to join the staff of the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) and traveled widely around the country. Georgii Zelmanovitch (1906–1984) spent his childhood in Central Asia, living through World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, and civil war. He received a high school education and at a young age developed a fascination with the camera. He moved to Moscow in 1921 where he began studying photography working on an old Kodak 9 x 12. He first published his photographs in 1925, and later in the journals USSR in Construction (SSSR na stroike) and Ogonyok and in the newspaper Red Star (Krasnaia Zvezda). He built his career around his roots in Central Asia. He was an assimilated Jew from Uzbekistan, and thus he knew Russian and local languages. This made him an ideal cultural translator. Zelmanovitch moved back and forth between Moscow and Uzbekistan for much of the 1920s and 1930s. He worked for Russfoto in the All-Union Society for Cultural Contact and Friendship with Peoples of Foreign Countries (VOKS) under the leadership of the famous master photo portraitist Avrom Shterenberg.24 If the first generation published its first photographs between 1920 and 1926; the second generation made its photographic debut in the 1930s. They became photographers in the aesthetic and political world of the Cultural Revolution and socialist realism. The second generation blossomed as it prepared for its greatest documentary task to date—

Seeing Red

• 39 •

photographing the war. In fact, the Great Patriotic War of the 1940s, and not the Great Purges of the 1930s, would mark the changing of the photographic guard, bringing about the decline of the 1920s and 1930s masters and celebrating the arrival of the second generation. The second-generation photographers started working for new illustrated magazines that began appearing during the Cultural Revolution. The most notable were a series of journals edited by the writer and de facto cultural commissar Maxim Gorky, especially Our Achievements (Nashi dostizheniia), established in 1929, and what was originally its illustrated supplement, USSR in Construction, which launched in 1930. Published in four languages, USSR in Construction would become a key tool in the Soviet information campaign abroad. It did, however, also have a large domestic readership for its beautifully illustrated issues, each dedicated to a different aspect of a society “in construction.” The magazine, designed by El(iezer) Lissitsky, brought together such famous modernist photographers as Alexander Rodchenko and Boris Ignatovitch with photojournalists Fridlyand, Shaykhet, and others, setting the standard for high-quality photography and printing and propagating the genre of the photo essay as a way of telling stories visually.25 The very title suggested that the journal would reveal the transformation of a backward Russian society into a modern, socialist one. In some ways, the journal served as a healer of a photographic community that had been broken by the vicious debates of the late 1920s. Montage and formalism had been criticized during the Cultural Revolution by those who favored a more ideologically driven photography. But USSR in Construction proved that aesthetics and ideology were not two poles of a spectrum but at their best worked together. Even traditional portrait photographers such as Nappelbaum, and pictorialists such as Alexander Grinberg joined editorial boards and had their work published for a while. The USSR in Construction photographers used montage, close-ups, raking angles, and other standards of 1920s modernism and put them in service of socialist construction. In fact, it was in the 1930s that constructivist aesthetics was at its peak.

The Production, Circulation, and Business of Soviet Photojournalism The transformations in Soviet photography did not happen just because of ideology and politics. Photographers, editors, and publishers had to keep up with photographic technology that changed every year. Most photographers describe their earliest work with a handmade wooden camera. Khaldei describes how he made a camera out of a cardboard box and his dead grandmother’s glasses. He then bought sensitized glass plates and photographed things that didn’t require a shutter, that wouldn’t move. His first picture, at twelve, was of a nearby Russian Orthodox Church that was soon to be blown up during the Cultural Revolution’s anticlerical campaign.26 Emmanuel Evzerikhin took an empty

• 40 •

when photography was jewish

wooden box and “drilled a whole in its inside into which he inserted a piece of convex glass. . . . He put in a plate and was ready to shoot.”27 Then there was a “moment of revelation” when someone gave the photographer a professional camera, usually a heavy, large-format camera, for example, the German Erneman or a Kodak. The biggest change in photojournalism was the invention of the Leica in Germany in 1925. Although it was not the first small-format camera—one with small rolls of 35 mm film instead of large glass plates or large-format negatives—it was the first that did not appear to lose quality when the negative became smaller. In 1933, the Soviet Union began producing its own cheap version of the Leica called the FED (named for Felix E. Dzerzhinsky). It was cheaper than a Leica, but never displaced the Leica as the portable camera of choice among Soviet photojournalists.28 As photographing became more portable, photographers could capture scenes more quickly and place themselves closer to that which they were photographing. Photojournalism as a field took off with the invention of these small cameras. In the late 1930s, the newest wave in technological innovation hit the Moscow photographic community—color photography. Union Photo commissioned Fridlyand and Yakov Khalip to take color photographs of Ukraine, Crimea, and the southern coast of the Caucasus.29 Because of technical difficulties, Soviet Photo wasn’t able to publish any of the expedition’s photographs. Georgii Zelma’s photographs from Georgia, commissioned by the Productive-Creative Masters of Photographic Arts, were among the first color photographs to appear in Soviet Photo.30 It was not until the postwar period, however, that color photography became a staple of Soviet photojournalism. In addition to improvements in technology, which helped the photographer take better pictures, new technologies helped in the dissemination of photography, which was the key to creating photojournalism. The expansion of wire services facilitated the spread of photography to newspapers and journals, big and small. In 1926 the Photo Press agency made the first transmission of photographs from London to New York.31 Soviet photo wires began sending images throughout the country in the early 1930s. As part of Stalin’s political centralization, the vast Soviet empire became more integrated. Thus, in the 1930s, the Stalinist politics of centralization, the technology of image circulation, and an ideology that supported photojournalistic approaches to photography converged. The “bildperedacha,” or photo wire, enabled Moscow-based photographers to have their work circulated nationally and internationally relatively quickly. In 1935, a new photo wire called the FT-5 trumpeted its claim to send images over farther distances than anything in the past.32 In 1936 another new photo wire service connected Moscow with Minsk and transmitted a six-hundred-square-centimeter image in fourteen minutes, slow by later standards but faster than previous technology.33 By 1938, the People’s Commissariat of Communications (Narkomat sviazi) had developed photo transmission centers in Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, Kharkov, Rostov, Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk, Cheliabinsk, Stalino,

Seeing Red

• 41 •

Smolensk, Briansk, and Ordzhonikidze, and had sent a total of 1,520 photographs to eleven points across the Soviet Union.34 Despite the technological improvements, these photographic transmissions did not work well enough to meet the needs of newspapers around the country. Photographs came through the photo wire smudged or with too much contrast, problems that even the best retoucher could not fix. More reliable than the wires were airplanes, another relatively new technology, which were in widespread use by photographers to move themselves and their film throughout the empire.35 Airplanes could bring material from the periphery to Moscow, and printed newspapers from Moscow back to the periphery, but could not get photography to the thousands of regional and local publications desperate for visual material. As we will see in the discussion about the war, access to an airplane meant the difference between getting published and not. The chief photojournalist for Pravda during the war, Viktor Tyomin, describes sending early photographs of war, when the Soviet Union occupied eastern Poland after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939. After taking two hundred pictures on the road from Grodno to Vilna, he needed to get them back to Pravda’s editorial offices in Moscow. Tyomin became friends with the pilots: “The day ended quickly, and I needed to send back the negatives. The airplane was in Minsk. After a few hours, on September 20, I made it by car to the Minsk airfield. At the airfield, after numbering the film, I gave my material to the pilot. A few minutes later the airplane lifted off and after four hours, the first negatives of encounters between Soviet troops and the population of western Belorussia were in Pravda. I sent the text to the editors on the phone.”36 All these technical improvements—airplanes, telephones, and wires—allowed for the development of photojournalism and made Moscow the only real place to be a nationally known photographer, since nationwide mass media originated from there. Finally, the organization and professionalization of photography underwent dramatic change in the Stalinist 1930s. In 1919, the management of photography was placed under the supervision of the Commissariat for Enlightenment, which housed the management of theater, literature, and arts.37 During the civil war, Central Press (Tsentropechat) functioned as a Soviet wire service and eventually developed the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA), led by Boris Malkin, who had participated in the founding of Ogonyok.38 In the mid- to late 1920s, as the Soviet bureaucracy expanded, new agencies dedicated to photography were created. In 1925, the Russian Telegraph Agency organized the Press-Cliché, which supplied regional presses with pictures until it was swallowed up by TASS.39 At the same time, the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS), with the help of Koltsov, created the Union Photo agency in 1926 to distribute Soviet photography abroad.40 In 1931, the two were incorporated along with the photography branches of the State Publishing House (Obedinenie gosudarstvennykh izdatel’stv, OGIZ) and the Magazine and Newspaper Conglomerate (ZhurGazObedinenie), which Koltsov headed, into Union Photo.41 Union Photo in the Soviet

• 42 •

when photography was jewish

Union was the first state organization that centralized the publication and distribution of photography for newspapers, journals, books, and other publications.42 The organization became so powerful that it integrated both vertically and horizontally, producing photo chemicals and paper; in 1934 it took over publication of Soviet Photo.43 It assigned photography, processed it, and then disseminated from fifty to six hundred copies of each selected picture to Soviet newspapers and the foreign press. In addition, in the early 1930s, private photo studios that had lined Nevsky Prospekt in Leningrad and Ulitsa Tverskaya in Moscow were nationalized and brought into Soviet state structures.44 For example, the Bulla photography studio, located in Leningrad at 54 Nevsky Prospekt, continued operating long after the Bulla’s name came off its facade. Through the 1930s, it was at different times the Photographers’ Studio of the Economy and Finance Department of the Presidium of the Leningrad Soviet, the Photographers’ Studio of the Art Department of the Leningrad City Executive Committee, the State Art Photographers’ Studio of the City Department for Culture and Education of the Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Soviet, and the Photographers’ Studio of the Art Works Trust. The studio served as a notable center for Soviet photographers in Leningrad in the 1930s and trained such important war photographers as Rafail Mazelev, who would go on to photograph Leningrad under siege and the liberation of Auschwitz, and Viktor Mel’nik. After World War II, the studio at 54 Nevsky was renamed again as a division of the State Photographic Center of the Leningrad Photo Artist Association.45 The alphabet soup of Soviet bureaucracies only continued to increase. TASS took over Union Photo in the mid-1930s and called it Fotokhronika TASS (later ITAR-TASS), which both produced and distributed many of the most important photographs of the 1930s and 1940s.46 Although most of the first-generation photographers were working for high-quality publications like USSR in Construction and cheap mass-produced illustrated magazines like Ogonyok, some of the most important second-generation Soviet Jewish photographers, among them Mark Markov-Grinberg and Georgii Zelmanovitch, became well-known Moscow photographers working for Union Photo and TASS. Stalin-era photography entailed the structural consolidation of publishing houses, publications, and associations, but also more involvement of the Communist Party in all matters of culture and society. In 1935 the Central Committee of the Communist Party established a photo section to ensure Party leadership over photography. In August 1935, the Organizational Bureau of the Party discussed such issues as membership in photo sections and heard a long report from Union Photo about the various photography projects that had been commissioned by the Main Administration of the Film and Photography Industry (GUKF), part of the Council of People’s Commissariats (Sovnarkom).47 Photographers were now reporting directly to Party authorities on their work. The organization also discussed the creation of institutions of higher education dedicated to

Seeing Red

• 43 •

photography, showing how the process of professionalization continued unabated through the 1930s. And in 1936, the Politburo, the political bureau of the Central Committee, established the All-Union Arts Committee (Komitet po delam iskusstv), which organized campaigns against formalism in the arts.48 One of the committee’s first acts was to reprimand Union Photo for not focusing on its main job—providing the best, most politically informed photography to newspapers and journals and developing the photographic talent to do so.49 After the consolidation of power and the merger of competing groups into overarching unions with Party oversight, a renewed commitment to exhibitions as a means of distributing and highlighting photography surfaced. The period 1935–1936 saw a dramatic increase in the number of photography exhibitions.50 The biggest of these, the November 1937 First All-Union Soviet Photography exhibition, was the last time the many and varied voices in Soviet photography worked together. The steering committee was made up of anyone and everyone with an investment in photography from all aesthetic and political points of view: photographers and critics such as Alexander Gerasimov, Ya. Chuzhin, S. Yevgenov, Leonid Mezhericher, Grigorii Boltianskii, Max Alpert, Alexander Rodchenko, Moisei Nappelbaum, Alexander Khlebnikov, Avrom Shterenberg, and Semyon Fridlyand, as well as representatives from the Political Administration of the Red Army (PURKA), the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (VTsSPS), and the Komsomol Central Committee, editors from Pravda and Izvestiia, Osip Beskin of the Art (Iskusstvo) publishing house, Boris Malkin of the State Art Publishing House (Izogiz), and B. Maiberg from Union Photo.51 With political overseers, editors, publishers, and photographers all sitting around the same table, all the powers that be were in the same room. At the same time, it was a clear indication to the photographers and editors that Party leaders would have oversight over Soviet photography.52 The organizing committee of the 1937 exhibition came up with six categories around which the exhibition would be organized: 1. The paths of the Great October Socialist Revolution, a historical approach. 2. The USSR in the work of the photographic arts: This work must clearly illustrate the Stalin Constitution, depict the fact of the USSR, friendship and brotherhood of the peoples, the glory of socialism in all areas of construction, culture, and life. 3. Portrait photography. 4. Applied Photography: In the first part of this section we demonstrate photography’s application in the areas of political propaganda, art, science, industry, and technology. 5. Amateur photography in the USSR. 6. Photo industry and representation: This section must highlight the achievements and the status of the photographic industry in the USSR in all areas.53

• 44 •

when photography was jewish

Soviet photography had a clear mission—demonstrating the achievements of socialism, elevating the worker to the status of icon, and creating a visual history for the revolution. It also demonstrated that Soviet photography had arrived as a centralized, Party-directed system of representing socialism. It had become what Lenin had envisioned—a weapon to be used in the building of socialism. Whether one saw photography as a form of art, a tool of documentation, or a means of representing and glorifying Soviet society, it was at its core a way for photojournalists to earn a living. In general, a photographer could earn money either as a staff photographer (shtatnyi fotograf ) or as a freelancer (vneshtatnyi fotograf ). The more desirable staff positions awarded regular salaries and were tied to a particular publication or a wire service. These photographers earned extra income on top of their salaries if another publication purchased their photographs, if they won photography competitions, or if the wires picked up their photographs. Freelance photographers usually worked on contract with a variety of publications. The archives are filled with contracts between freelance photographers and editors at publishing houses, which paid the photographer an honorarium for the photographs, more if the photograph had prime placement in the journal or was on the cover, less if the commissioned photograph was not published.54 In many cases, several photographers took pictures of the same scene and competed with one another for the “money” shot. Khaldei, Evzerikhin, and Markov (as Markov-Grinberg was known in the 1930s) were all fortunate to have been recruited to Moscow from their provincial posts. Those who remained in the provinces had a hard time making a living with photography. I. Rumiantsev publicized the financial plight of the provincial photographer on the pages of Soviet Photo. According to Rumiantsev, who worked for Izhevskaia Pravda, the newspaper of the republic Udmurtskaia ASSR, as a staff photographer he earned only 150 rubles.55 The best-paid journalists were paid nearly ten times as much. Rumiantsev’s editors supplied him with equipment and film and had a darkroom for him to develop his material. He was particularly interested in telling readers about a typical exhausting day: My day looks like this: from 9 to 11 a.m., I print and dry the prints of yesterday’s shots (our zincography machine accepts shots only until 11 a.m.). From 11 until the end of the day, I photograph with a half hour break for lunch. After lunch, I develop, dry out negatives, compile images, and print less urgent photographs until 9 p.m., or sometimes until 11 or 1 a.m. On the weekends, I can go out and take more photographs. In 6 1/2 months I had 4 free days.56

If staff photographers earned modest salaries, freelance photographers earned their living through honoraria for published photographs and prizes from exhibitions, which substituted for an open marketplace for photography. For photographers to earn honoraria for their work on an ongoing basis, the question of rights loomed large. In 1935, the Associa-

Seeing Red

• 45 •

tion of Moscow Photojournalists began working out a legal plan on photographic copyright, because existing law did not discuss the specific issues of photography. Questions around rights even ended up in court, such as when photographer Elizaveta Mikulina was ruled innocent by the Moscow City Court of violating an artist’s rights when she photographed a piece of art to use in her own photographic work. The case proved that photographers were not simply reproducing someone else’s art but were producing a new independent artistic work.57 To improve on the ability both to grant rights and to assign responsibility for photographs, in 1937, newspapers were ordered to include the last name of the photographer of a published image, including wire service photographs.58 Photographers were also ordered to keep better notes about the subjects of their photography. Editors required that photographers “properly spell ethnic names” and document a subject’s ethnicity by looking at his or her passport.59 Ethnic identity, noted on the fifth line of the new state passports, was a key means of defining a Soviet citizen under socialism. In the 1930s, it became widespread for the industry to demand more information about a photograph’s context, including the photographer and the subject. Besides publishing photographs to earn income, a photographer could exhibit photography and win competitions or, more rarely, sell exhibition photographs. Union Photo opened a commercial photo gallery in 1936. It was located in the heart of the cultural district of Moscow, on Stoleshnikov Lane, and sold the best works of the top photographers.60 For the amateur who did not have access to darkrooms, institutional cameras, or film, the State Organization for Cultural Procurement (Goskultsnab) opened up a photography store on Gorky Street (formerly Ulitsa Tverskaya) that had darkrooms and onsite advice and training.61

Icons of Labor: Socialist Realist Photography Debates about photography on the pages of Soviet Photo looked radically different in the 1930s from in the 1920s, when Soviet photography was in its infancy. When the second generation arrived in Moscow in the early and mid- 1930s, socialist realism was becoming the dominant cultural form, and photographers debated what it would look like. Socialist realism is often understood as projecting life as it should be under socialism. It depicted an idealized image that hid the grim stories of famine, slave labor, and totalitarian power that also define the era of Stalinism. Alexander Ivanov suggests that socialist realism is defined by “its ability to mask its ideological subjectivity, forcing the viewer to believe that the thing represented is the objective outcome, the actual content of the thing represented.”62 In the words of photo historian Galina Orlova, socialist realist iconography was about the “anthropo-ideological representation of the face of the Soviet people.”63 The Soviet people were happy laborers, peacefully multiethnic, and engaged in the positive building of socialism.

• 46 •

when photography was jewish

However, socialist realism never had a stable aesthetic or ideological definition. The First Congress of Soviet Writers, in 1934, laid down the basic principles of socialist realism. The congress defined it as the single “artistic method” requiring a “true, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development.”64 What this actually looked like was constantly up for debate. As Susan Reid has argued, “Contested between different artistic factions struggling for dominance within the art world, as well as among the Stalinist bureaucracies that patronized and controlled art, Socialist Realism never achieved a stable, concrete ontology.”65 And in photography, the advent of socialist realism coincided with the period of great constructivist images published in USSR in Construction and other journals. It wasn’t until after 1937 that the narrative form of socialist realism pushed out art and documentary photography. And even then, Soviet photographers were still great experimenters in photography, within the ideological and political dictates of socialist realism. The ROPF photographers’ 1931 photo essay “Twenty-four Hours in the Life of the Filippov Family,” discussed earlier, inaugurated a period in which the photo essay became the dominant form of visual storytelling. In 1934, Mark Markov, who worked for wire agencies in Moscow, first for Union Photo and then for Fotokhronika TASS, was commissioned to create a photo essay about a day in the life of a miner, one Nikita Izotov. Later, reflecting on the essay that would become Markov’s most famous, the photographer said that Mezhericher, his photo editor at Union Photo, wanted him to “show a progressive man.” He emphasized the propagandistic goal of the essay by adding that “the Izotov story was meant for foreigners to show that Soviet miners were well off.” With this mission, Markov’s Izotov echoed Shaykhet and Alpert’s Filippov family, who rode sparsely populated trams to work and shopped in stores full of consumer goods. Markov lived for six months with the Izotov family, suggesting an almost ethnographic impulse among photographers to “know” their subjects, who were so different from them. It also reflected a desire to reduce the distance between photographic subject and object by having the photographers learn the craft of those being photographed. Markov recalls: “The first time I went down into the mine the men put me through their baptism: In the elevator cage they ordered the operator to go ‘four bells,’ the speed for lowering freight. I dropped like a stone for 640 meters. They watched my terror, but I passed their test and got into their community.”66 Markov and Izotov—the latter a predecessor of Aleksei Stakhanov, who exceeded his mining quota in 1936, giving birth to a movement of superstar workers called Stakhanovites—took the country by storm. A photograph from the series (see Fig. 2.3) became an iconic image. As Markov later wrote about the making of this new socialist hero: “I saw Nikita Izotov for the first time in summer 1935. He was coming out of the mines covered head to toe in coal dust. . . . I took a portrait of Izotov without even giving him time to clean up.”67 (In fact, Markov remembered incorrectly; the year was 1934.) Gazing into the distance, detached from his context, Izotov became the heroic Soviet

Seeing Red

figure 2.3. Mark Markov-Grinberg, Nikita Izotov, 1934. This photograph appeared on the cover of the French magazine Regards. Courtesy of Teresa and Paul Harbaugh.

• 47 •

• 48 •

when photography was jewish

figure 2.4. Evgenii Khaldei, Worker in Donbass, 1934. Courtesy of Evgenii Khaldei and Fotosoyuz Agency.

worker.68 The photograph appeared in publications throughout the country and abroad as an icon of the Soviet worker thriving under socialism. In 1934 when the image circulated, most of the world was mired in depression-era poverty, so the glorification of labor served as a means of uplift. It also served as propaganda for Stalin’s economic policy, the FiveYear Plan, which put the state, rather than the market, in charge of economic planning. As Izotov articles appeared in Soviet Photo throughout 1934, Markov was heralded for capturing the grit and grime of a miner’s life while depicting Izotov as a dignified figure. However, one critic, F. Frits, complained that although Markov successfully elevated the worker, he failed to pay enough attention to “the Party’s role in the fight to improve the quality of production.”69 Markov’s editors at Union Photo tried to lessen the impact of this “mistake” by “choosing only those photographs that depicted work or social activities” and using only one photograph showing Izotov’s private family life. The published photo essay that circulated throughout Europe had nine of Markov’s fourteen photographs. The full series was printed in the German Workers’ Illustrated Newspaper; three years earlier this periodical had published the Filippov series and was now in exile in Prague following the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany in 1933. The image also appeared on the cover of the Belgian newspaper Tout and the French Regards.

Seeing Red

• 49 •

figure 2.5. Emmanuel Evzerikhin, Maxim Gorky, 1936. Copyright Emmanuel Evzerikhin and Fotosoyuz Agency. Courtesy of Teresa and Paul Harbaugh.

If Izotov launched Markov’s career as a Stalin-era photographer, the photograph that began Evgenii Khaldei’s career with Fotokhronika TASS was also a 1934 portrait of a worker. Khaldei’s photograph shows both the lingering influence of 1920s and 1930s constructivism, with the geometric symmetry of the smokestacks belching aestheticized smoke, and the emergence of socialist realism in the heroic stance of the worker, shot from below, in the foreground. Unlike a similar image from the constructivist 1920s, the worker, and not construction itself, is foregrounded in the photograph. Emmanuel Evzerikhin also took iconic photographs, but he elevated the new Soviet intelligentsia. He was the toast of Moscow in 1938, when the new young hotshots were starting to trump the elder statesmen of photography. Soviet Photo did a three-page article on the young “Em,” talking about his rise through the ranks, first as an amateur photographer, then working for the Rostov regional Komsomol newspaper, Bolshevik Transformation (Bolshevistskaia smena), where he developed his skills as a photojournalist.70 (Mikhail Bernshteyn, another rising young Jewish photographic star for Pravda, had a multipage biography about him published in 1938, showing how the second-generation photographers

• 50 •

when photography was jewish

were thriving in the late 1930s.) After Evzerikhin’s big break with his widely circulated photograph of Maxim Gorky (Fig. 2.5), he was invited to spend six months on the island of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Sea photographing the Soviet “conquest” of the north. Despite Evzerikhin’s rise, the celebratory article about him also reminded readers that he was young and inexperienced, a “creative worker without his own fully developed ‘signature.’ . . . In Evzerikhin’s work one still sees evidence of a student, some insecurity. He hasn’t yet mastered composition.” If the late 1930s was a period of upending hierarchies by elevating youth at the expense of experience, those in control nonetheless reminded the young that they had a lot to learn about photography.71 In addition to photojournalists elevating the individual worker, the portrait photographers Avrom Shterenberg and Moisei Nappelbaum had new interest in their work, which also elevated individuals. Most important, the rise of the iconic individual reached its apotheosis in the photography of Stalin himself.72 Photographs elevating Stalin went back to the early 1920s, when he appeared on the cover of early Soviet illustrated journals such as Prozhektor. But by the mid-1930s, the use of the visual as the primary tool to create a cult around the leader was fully established. From Evzerikhin to Samarii Gurarii, the secondgeneration photographers often built their early careers on an important Stalin photograph.73 These images of Stalin were seen on posters, billboards, and banners throughout the country. In an “age of mechanical reproduction,” to quote the Marxist German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, photographers played a central role in the propagation of power through images.74 A photograph by Georgii Zelma (Fig. 2.6), from a series of the same scene, reveals how photographers envisioned Stalin in the mid-1930s, when visual strategies for edifying Stalin were being developed. At the lower center of the frame is Stalin, wearing a relatively simple peasant coat and in the middle of a speech, applauding someone being mentioned. He is shot from below, the standard angle for socialist realist portraiture, and is looking off into the distance, not at the camera, another convention of photographs of Stalin. Zelma has ensured that Stalin would never look directly at the camera by positioning himself below his lectern. The banner at the left of the image, more visible in other shots of the scene, trumpets the heroism of the proletariat. None of this is unusual for socialist realist portraiture. But Zelma has made this high socialist realist image much more complex than an everyday Stalin portrait. What greets the viewer of the photograph first is not actually Stalin, but the giant, foregrounded lamp, shot in close-up constructivist style. It is so large that Stalin is made to look small in the photograph, a brilliant way of tempering the edifying stance of shooting from below. And perhaps most clever, Zelma captures Stalin making a speech against the backdrop of his own likeness, which looms over him and the hall on the wall behind him, something not visible in other Zelma photographs of this same scene. The photographer adds a touch of irony by forcing the viewer to ask, Who or what is more important, Stalin the person or Stalin the image?

Seeing Red

• 51 •

figure 2.6. Georgii Zelma, Joseph Stalin, probably at the Eighth All-Union Congress of Soviets, December 1936. Courtesy of Teresa and Paul Harbaugh and Michael Mattis.

• 52 •

when photography was jewish

The 1930s also saw the introduction of war photography, something that would become useful when photographers used to spending six months preparing a photo essay would find themselves in the heat of battle during World War II. In September 1935 photographers from all the major publications flew to the outskirts of Kiev to photograph the military exercises of the Red Army.75 In the 1937 All-Union exhibition, critics noted the increase in photographs of the military, giving special mention to Yakov Khalip, who began his photographic career with Soviet Photo in 1928,76 for his arresting photographs of Red Army soldiers for the book 20 Years of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army (RKKA).77 Socialist realism was being tested on the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War, which broke out in July 1936. At the time, Mikhail Koltsov was at the peak of his power as head of both the Zhurgaz publishing conglomerate and the Foreign Bureau of the Writers’ Union.78 He also joined the editorial board of Pravda in 1934. In 1936, Pravda editor Lev Mekhlis sent Koltsov to Spain to report for the newspaper, showing just how important the war was. (According to historian Leonid Maksimenkov, Koltsov was in Spain as a direct emissary of Stalin.)79 He was a leading figure in the leftist group of journalists and photographers, who saw the Spanish Civil War as the first salvo in the battle of the Popular Front against the rise of fascism in Italy, Germany, and now Spain. Koltsov worked with figures who would become central to the newly emerging field of modern war photojournalism, especially Robert Capa (born André Friedmann); his partner, Gerda Taro (born Gerta Pohorylle); and others. Their biographies resemble those of Soviet Jewish photographers, who were building Stalin-era photojournalism in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Friedmann left Hungary in 1931 at age seventeen, after being arrested and essentially deported. He went to Berlin and apprenticed as a darkroom assistant and fledgling photographer at the Dephot photo agency. According to his employer at Dephot, Simon Guttmann, it was Judaism that brought Friedmann to Dephot and thus to photography. Guttman’s interest in esoteric Judaism led to his first meeting with Friedmann at a discussion group conducted by Oskar Goldberg, a Berlin-based Kabbalist and numerologist.80 The Dephot agency had not only many Jews on staff, but also many socialists (sometimes the same people), and Friedmann’s first assignment was to cover Leon Trotsky’s speeches in Copenhagen in November 1932.81 With the rise of Nazi Germany, Friedmann left for Paris to try to make a living as a photojournalist. He and Pohorylle, who managed the young Friedmann’s career, invented a fictitious American photographer, Robert Capa, under whose name Friedmann would publish, and Pohorylle changed her name to Gerda Taro. It didn’t take long for Friedmann to adopt the persona of Capa. Capa and Koltsov appeared in the same edition of the French magazine Regards that had published Markov’s Izotov photographs a few years earlier.82 Capa and Taro knew the Soviet filmmaker Roman Karmen, who filmed the Spanish Civil War. They also spent ´ time with Polish-born Soviet officer Karol Swierczewski, who went by the name General Walter, and his adjutant Alexander Szurek, a member of the Parisian Yiddish Workers’

Seeing Red

• 53 •

Theater.83 And Capa and Taro appeared alongside Soviet photojournalists on the pages of the exiled Illustrated Newspaper (Illustrierte Zeitung; the former AIZ).84 Soviet socialist realism affected leftist photojournalism globally. The Spanish Civil War, then, was a prelude to the big war that Soviet photojournalists would have to document just a few years later. It was also a moment when leftist Jewish intellectuals, many of them displaced by the rise of Nazism, created a community of socialist Jewish culture makers working in the name of revolution. In 1938, as the Spanish Civil War wound down but war with Nazi Germany loomed, journals published more articles about the need for better training in military photography. Soviet Photo ran occasional articles by military men with instructions on how to be good military photographers.85 Viktor Tyomin flew to the Far East to photograph some of the earliest battles in the Soviet Union’s protracted, low-grade war with Japan at Lake Khasan in the summer of 1938.86 Like Markov, Tyomin was a second-generation Jewish photographer born on the Volga, in central Russia; his first job, at age fourteen, was at the local newspaper, Red Tataria (Krasnaia Tataria). With his work in the Far East, Tyomin became the best-known military photographer before the outbreak of World War II. Other photographers would get their first taste of military photography in 1939 with the Battle of Khalkin-Gol in the Far East and later during the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland and the Baltics.87

Does Photography Tell the Truth? The Tension between Documentation and Aestheticization Soviet photojournalism constantly wrestled with the tension between the camera’s ability to capture and to alter reality. In fact, if especially after World War II photojournalists in the West tended to be rhetorically obsessed with an idea of reality that they thought a camera strived to achieve, these photographers did not seem very interested in reality. They were more interested in “truth,” an inherently subjective category that permitted a photographer to alter an image so that it felt more truthful than what the camera had captured. Since photography straddles the boundary between art and documentation, just like the cultural form of socialist realism, photographers, critics, and editors argued over how much license a photographer could take to get the perfect shot. Some argued that a photographer could take complete license, from the composition and staging of a photograph to playing with the developing and printing of the image and using photomontage freely to create unusual final products. All Soviet photographers altered their images, even their news photos, at every step of the production process to make them more aesthetically interesting, visually powerful, and politically and ideologically appropriate. Most famously, photographs of Soviet leaders were sometimes crudely altered as individuals fell out of favor during the height of Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s. Some were

• 54 •

when photography was jewish

removed entirely, others placed closer or farther away from Stalin. Today’s hero could become tomorrow’s enemy, and photographs—those seemingly permanent, documentary records of the past—changed to reflect the new reality.88 In 1990, just before his death, Dmitrii Baltermants addressed this different vision of what photojournalism was supposed to be: In my time I was the leader of staged photography. I made some truly grandiose stagings. . . . Besides ideological requirements—let’s make the Party committee look good—it was also a matter of what we thought, then, a photograph should be. Especially in the press, a photograph had to be “elevated,” people got dressed up to be photographed. . . . So the spirit of photographs from the 1930s to the 1950s is explained not only by the shameless lying of the photographers. Most often, they were observing the rules of the genre. Lying in pure form came later.89

As Baltermants’ comments suggest, Soviet photographers of the 1930s worked within aesthetic and ideological conventions different from those of their counterparts in the West. The boundaries between news journalism and art photography were not nearly as defined as they were becoming by World War II in the West. That said, even in Western photography, the definition of truth in photography was up for debate. Henry Luce famously ordered directors of his March of Time film series to use “fakery in allegiance to the truth.” And Capa and Taro staged battle scenes, photographs of which were published in the Paris paper Ce soir with a caption saying that they showed an attack on the village of La Granuela.90 (There is also some evidence that Capa staged his famous “Fallen Soldier” photograph.)91 Photographers staged scenes, lightened and darkened negatives, cropped images, and added color and shading to make a photograph more compelling or more politically “appropriate” even if it meant altering key “documentary” information. The avant-garde had freely used photo montage in its efforts to revolutionize representation. Some incorporated this tactic into socialist realism. Others thought that this license to make art out of a photograph took away from photography’s ability to replicate the reality of building socialism. Debates over staging (instsenirovka) or re-creating the facts (vosstanovlenie fakta) took place throughout the 1930s. According to some photographers, staging and recreating facts were necessary and important aspects of photography. To others, they smacked of deception. Max Alpert first launched the concept of “re-creating the facts” in a 1931 photo essay in Proletarian Photo called “The Giant and the Builder” (Gigant i stroitel’). The photo essay was about Magnitogorsk, the iconic site of crash industrialization in the Ural Mountains. In his words, “I needed to re-create the details of the first days of the Kalmyks’ arrival at work in Magnitogorsk. It was necessary to put the woman in the same dress that she would have worn at the train station. Only then did I take the picture.” In a later essay, echoing Dziga Vertov’s vision of the Kino-Eye, Alpert emphasized that the advent of socialism brought about technological advancements that allowed cameras to do things the eye

Seeing Red

• 55 •

simply couldn’t: “I consider it a rather conservative standpoint to say that you can only give what you see. It seems to me that at the most massive sites of socialist construction, only the method of reconstructing the facts can show all of our accomplishments.”92 In critical response, other photographers thought that re-creating the facts undermined the unwritten rules of photojournalism. In the debates about staging, the sides did not break down neatly along ideological divisions. The proletarian critic Mezhericher declared that the Alpert photographs were an example of necessary staging; the ROPF photographer and Alpert collaborator Shaykhet expressed grave concerns about staging.93 In a 1938 article in Soviet Photo Nikolai Kolli criticized photographers’ willingness to push the boundaries of staging to the point of absurdity. In writing about a photograph by Georgii Petrusov, Kolli writes, “At first glance the photograph produces a great impression, but a more careful observer immediately notices that the image violates all laws of nature: shadows from the stocks of grain fall not in the direction of the light but off to the side.” Kolli argued that when staging leads to falsification, it has overstepped the boundaries of art.94 “The viewer,” he said, “will not forgive a false transmission of reality,” ironic words considering that socialist realism was built upon the creation of a idealized image of life to which reality strived. One notorious incident in which a photographer pushed staging too far was that of Evzerikhin’s images of the Paris Commune Shoe Factory in January 1939, after Stalin’s implementation of new strict labor discipline laws. Evzerikhin intended to emphasize the discipline of the workers. On January 10, Pravda published two pictures: one showed the timekeeper and shift boss in front of the factory time board, full of filled-out time cards. The second was a general view of the plant. The caption reads: “In the Second Shoe Division of the Footwear Factory ‘Paris Commune (Moscow)’ from January 1–8, there was not a single person late for work. In the photo, the head of the shift S. N. Shashkin and the time card keeper, E. V. Zhilisva, precisely at 7:00 a.m. on January 8 in front of the time board, filled with the workers’ time cards.” The only visual connection between the two photos were clocks in both images showing 7:00 a.m., proving how industrious the factory workers were. As the article exposing the scandal noted, “The question of how a reporter cleverly got two photographs simultaneously of different places in the factory was set aside.” In fact, Evzerikhin had photographed the time board at 1:00 p.m., but had manually turned the clock back before taking the photograph. In other words, as Alpert had, in dressing up his subject so she would look as if she had just arrived, Evzerikhin “recreated facts.” A crafty reader of Pravda noted that in this particular plant’s time board system, at the beginning of work, “no one would have put up their cards.” According to the Soviet Photo article about the incident, for this “deceit, for this kind of work unworthy of a Soviet journalist,” Evzerikhin was fired.95 The critic Y. Portnov took particular offense at the popularity of re-creating the facts, something he thought should be banned from Soviet photojournalism:

• 56 •

when photography was jewish

A Soviet reader believes in the Bolshevik press. The Bolshevik press has always been the bearer of class-defined truth. . . . Lies, slander, deceit, and falsification—these are the weapons of the capitalist press. Even in capitalist bourgeois democracies’ “freedom of the press” means freedom for capitalists to buy newspapers, buy writers, and buy out public opinion. . . . Those who work for the Soviet press are doing important political work—showing the successes of socialism, the power of our motherland, the happy life and moral-political unity of the Soviet people. Socialist realism is the creative working method of the Soviet writer, artist, and photojournalist. It does not tolerate lies. It demands truthful, bright, artistic representations of reality. . . . Photojournalism is a special kind of art. A photograph like other newspaper information must be absolutely precise and absolutely truthful. . . . A reporter must not lie.96

The Evzerikhin incident did not resolve the question of how much license photographers could take to get the best shot. But it did let them know that there were consequences for not knowing. More important, these public debates let individual photographers know that they were not in control of that fine line between staging and lying. Photographers were also not in control of the ideological and political environment in which they worked. Their editors had the difficult task of enforcing new Party directives and political instructions and of assessing the general climate for photography. Although in the 1930s most photographers were not members of the Communist Party, most newspaper and magazine editors were, and they were technically the ones who bore ultimate responsibility for what was published.97 Because of their watchdog role and because many photo editors did not have as much experience in photography as the photographers themselves, relations were often tense. In 1936, Semyon Fridlyand and Mezhericher each wrote separate articles denouncing editors as hacks who did not understand what made for a good photograph. Fridlyand called on editors to take a leadership role in “helping elevate the work of photographers,” rather than simply handing out assignments to them. One could read Fridlyand as asking editors to be more invested in the work of the photographers rather than continuing to operate as simple bureaucrats. But at a time when the Party was taking more control over how socialism was represented visually, Fridlyand was also demanding that the editor take a larger role and thus more responsibility if things went awry politically.98 Mezhericher followed Fridlyand’s critique with a satiric piece written from the point of view of a photo editor who can only read negatives by making control prints, suggesting, in Mezhericher’s opinion, that editors do not know how to work with the actual negatives, the primary material of a photojournalist.99 In the same year, a group of photographers based in Leningrad wrote an open letter, published in Soviet Photo, putting forth their grievances about photo editors. “There are two key moments in the relationship between photojournalists and photo editors—the moment one gets an assignment and the moment when the negatives are received. Do you think photojournalists today are satisfied with either of these relationships? No and No!”100 In terms of the choice of assignments, they went on, “sometimes they give us assignments that we can’t fulfill. And when we don’t turn in photographs, we are accused of being bad journalists. . . . We’ve been sent to factories that aren’t even in Leningrad, to meetings that took place the

Seeing Red

• 57 •

night before, to photograph cars that are still just in the planning stages.” Like Fridlyand, the Leningrad photographers were calling for more guidance and oversight from their editors, not less. “Upon receiving an assignment we want to get not just the topics, not just the name of the section of the monthly editorial plan we are to fulfill, but also want to be charged with how the topic is connected with the main problems of [socialist] construction.”101 In the late 1930s editors demanded more information from their photographers in order to keep better track of who was photographing what. In 1939 Soviet Photo’s editorial board published a notice to photographers explaining that not only did the board want the photographer’s name and address, but it also wanted “(1) name of the camera and lens; (2) kind of plate or film and its speed; (3) time of the photograph (month and hour); (4) color and number of the filter; (5) diaphragm, and (6) exposure.”102 This was, after all, a magazine for professional photographers. From the perspective of Western photographers, the call for more oversight and more regulation might suggest a surrendering of the role of the photojournalist, if one understands a photographer’s primary source of inspiration to be individual creative genius. But by the 1930s, the inspiration for photojournalism came primarily from Party leaders and editors. Moreover, as photojournalism, as a field distinguised from general photography, developed, there was a recognition that the photographer worked in a larger discursive universe than that of the image. His or her work had to fit the needs of the magazine, the stories being published, and the assignment given. Photographers were producers of representations, and did not, at least publicly, necessarily see themselves as the primary source of creativity. At the very least, they did not want to be held politically responsible for images at a time when the country was living through the Great Purges, which decimated the Party and cultural elite. Photographers recognized that as the Party had more control over visual representation, they were more vulnerable to making political and ideological errors. Editors served as gatekeepers and as those responsible for translating current politics into aesthetics for the photographers.

The Purges Hit the Photography Community The status of Jews in Stalinist Russia as people of the media, positioned at the crossroads of power, meant that they were caught up in the violent upheavals that terrorized the Soviet power structure in 1937–1938. As a social and ethnic group that had been brought into the Soviet system so successfully in the 1920s and 1930s, Jews were also purged at high rates, not necessarily because they were Jews per se, but because Jews were Soviet bureaucrats, Party apparatchiks, and others with power and influence in Soviet culture, including filmmakers, writers, and photographers. Although he was awarded a high honor in 1935 and sat on the jury for photography exhibitions through the first half of the 1930s, Alexander Grinberg was arrested and exiled for the crime of pornography and spent the rest of his career working in small photography

• 58 •

when photography was jewish

jobs and teaching.103 In 1937, Mezhericher, who launched the Cultural Revolution in photography, was accused of being an unreconstructed supporter of the exile Trotsky (also Jewish) and was arrested. Soviet Photo published several articles noting the “enemies” who worked within the photographic apparatus, and in particular mentioned the Fotokhronika Foreign Division that Mezhericher headed, “as a particular nest of state enemies.”104 At a meeting of the Photo Section of the All-Union Arts Committee, the then reigning photo historian Grigorii Boltianskii publicly denounced Mezhericher as a Trotskyite.105 Such moments of exclusion and denunciation marked the demise of Mezhericher. On June 13, 1937, Mezhericher was sentenced to five years in prison and was sent to Kolyma. On February 3, 1938, a troika, one of the executive committees that expedited purge-era executions, sentenced him to death, and he was shot on February 7.106 As for Koltsov, he had spent the duration of the Purges in Spain covering the Spanish Civil War for Pravda. In August 1938 Kliment Voroshilov, commissar of defense, found one of Koltsov’s articles about the war objectionable, pulled it, and asked Stalin what he thought. Stalin responded to the article by issuing an order to “deal with Koltsov.”107 Koltsov was recalled from Spain near the end of the civil war. He gave a talk at a writers’ club in Moscow on December 12, 1938. As his colleague Alexander Avdeenko recalls, “The next day I was at the Pravda offices and learned that Koltsov had been arrested [in the middle of the night].”108 After Koltsov’s arrest, others in the Pravda circle began denouncing him as a spy. In one particularly ugly example, A. Magid (who published under the name Samoilov, presumably with the belief that Samoilov sounded less provincial and Jewish than Magid) wrote a letter to the Communist Party leadership supporting the accusations against Koltsov, pointing to Koltsov’s personal life as proof of his lack of patriotism: “He had three wives and all of them were foreigners. First he brought a German from Berlin to be his wife, then a Spaniard, and after that someone else.”109 Publications that had been under Kolstov’s control went through a shake-up. The publishing conglomerate Zhurgaz was closed down, and Ogonyok found new editorial leadership under Evgenii Petrov, of the famous satirical pair Ilf and Petrov, who wrote such classics as the The Twelve Chairs. Koltsov was shot in prison on February 2, 1940.110 Koltsov and Mezhericher were purged to the most violent extent of the word. It is not coincidental that among all the photographers discussed so far, Koltsov and Mezhericher were the two in the highest positions of state and Party power. (Both also happened to be Jewish.) Other photographers were caught up in the Purges, although not killed. Shaykhet lost his job and the ability to publish with the main outlets of Stalin-era photography—Soviet Photo and USSR in Construction. By the end of the year, the newspaper The Illustrated News had hired him; during the war he worked for the illustrated military newspaper Front Newspaper (Frontovaia gazeta).111 Evzerikhin lost his job at Fotokhronika TASS, presumably because of the Paris Commune factory incident. According to his son Yuri, however, he was fired because of Ev-

Seeing Red

• 59 •

zerikhin’s family associations during the Purges. His relative Konstantin Kalinovsky, an important boss in a factory, was arrested as an enemy of the people. He had been a privileged member of the Soviet bureaucracy with a whole floor of a building for him and his family, including Evzerikhin. Because Evzerikhin was in the Komsomol, the Communist youth movement, the Central Committee questioned him about why he did not turn in Kalinovsky, an “enemy of the people” under whose roof he was living. Threatened with potential arrest, Evzerikhin fled Moscow for Leningrad until the heat died down and he could return to the capital. He only managed to pick up work with Fotokhronika TASS a few years later, just before the outbreak of World War II.112 As the Purges came to a close in 1938–1939, having decimated the leadership in all areas of Soviet society, the rest of Europe was moving closer to war, especially with the failure of the Popular Front and the Republicans in Spain. Fascism in general and Germany in particular had loomed large in the Soviet consciousness since the rise of Hitler in 1933, leading to what historian Jan Plamper has called “Swastikophobia” in Soviet culture, a paranoid fear of anything possibly resembling a swastika and of anyone connected to things German.113 Spy mania, fear of “enemies of the people,” and Swastikophobia laid the ground for the war that lay ahead. But such fears did not blind the Stalinist leadership to opportunities for Realpolitik. When Germany obtained “permission” from Britain and France, at the 1938 Munich Conference, to invade Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union read the writing on the wall—war was coming. In August 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the MolotovRibbentrop Pact, a nonaggression pact that divided up Eastern Europe between the two expansionist empires. In September 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union invaded the countries that they had respectively been awarded in the pact. Our photographers’ first taste of photographing wartime Eastern Europe came in late 1939 and in 1940 when the Soviet Union “liberated” territory from Poland, Romania, and the Baltics. The violent takeover of these territories and the deportations of hundreds of thousands to gulags was not photographed widely. On the contrary, Soviet photographers working in the newly occupied territories showed smiling people “freed” from authoritarian tyranny. A few years later, in 1941, Soviet Jewish photographers would find themselves on the frontlines of the most violent war in history and took pictures of atrocities and brutality, this time with the blessing and support of the Soviet state apparatus. They would come back to many of the same places in Ukraine, Poland, the Baltics, and Romania as the first liberators photographing Nazi atrocities. Few of the faces in the liberation photography of 1944 and 1945 were those from 1939 and 1940. The residents of these borderlands and the photographers taking their pictures had their worlds turned upside down in the crucible of war that shaped the careers of all these photographers.

•

3

•

Soviet Jews on Both Sides of the Camera the photographs of jewish agricultural colonies and birobidzhan

From the first days following the Bolshevik Revolution, Soviet leaders invested significant resources not only in documenting the diversity of the Soviet empire, but also in supporting the cultural and national development of the Soviet Union’s many ethnic minorities. As part of its revolutionary ethos, the state launched a campaign to show how socialism had overcome czarist-era ethnic and racial antagonism. Political leaders as well as anthropologists, ethnographers, writers, cultural activists, and photographers were at the forefront of the campaign to elevate ethnic minorities and to show how the Soviet Union’s system was a superior form of state and empire building than that of “capitalist” imperialism. In the Soviet socialist empire, each ethnic minority needed to have its own language, culture, and territory supported by the new socialist state.1 At the same time, like all empires, the Soviet Union also assumed a cultural hierarchy, one that generally placed those in the Soviet “east” on the bottom of the scale and most in need of cultural, political, and ideological development.

Photographing Diversity Visually representing the Soviet empire was a central task for 1920s and 1930s Soviet photographers. Their editors gave them assignments intended to project an image of the diversity of the socialist empire and simultaneously to show how the Soviet Union was modernizing the “backward” parts of the country. Georgii Zelmanovitch was an important photographer of the Soviet empire, having begun his career by photographing his birthplace, Uzbekistan. A photograph of a woman reading the local socialist press to her male neighbors shows Soviet modernization at its best (Fig. 3.1). First, she is reading a Soviet newspaper in their native language. The paper is printed in Latin characters—this is during the height of the 1920s Latinization campaign, in which Soviet linguists created Latin alphabets for previously nonliterate cultures in the Soviet empire.2 (There were even attempts to Latinize Yiddish.) The gender relationships portrayed in the image also demonstrate a radical new order. The woman is the one in control of information, as she • 60 •

Soviet Jews on Both Sides of the Camera

• 61 •

figure 3.1. Georgii Zelmanovitch, Woman reading local newspaper, mid-1920s. Courtesy of Teresa and Paul Harbaugh and Michael Mattis.

reads to the men, and perhaps most obviously, this is a picture of men and women socializing in public, something rarely seen in images of Muslim Central Asia. Most other Zelmanovitch photographs from Uzbekistan in the mid-1920s show women in burkas and nearly always in sex-segregated scenes.3 Another early Zelmanovitch photograph (Fig. 3.2), shows the male version of Soviet modernization, as the two locals listen to one of the first broadcasts of the Voice of Moscow. Zelmanovitch emphasizes the tension between Soviet notions of tradition, represented in the men’s clothing, and modernity, as the man on the left listens to the radio. In perhaps the most arresting Zelmanovitch photograph suggesting the reach of the socialist empire, he has captured a young Central Asian boy in a rural location (Fig. 3.3). He wears a traditional head covering and in the background is a temporary living structure in a desolate landscape. At first glance, the image suggests a nomadic life, the seeming opposite of building socialism. But Zelmanovitch ruptures this reading of the photograph as an example of Orientalist naturalism: the boy holds in his hand a collection of poetry by none other than the nineteenth-century Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. Not only does the book prove that the boy is educated, but also that he is steeped in the highest of high cultures. And true to the language and cultural policies of the time, the boy is reading not in the original Russian, but in a translation into his native, local language.

• 62 •

when photography was jewish

figure 3.2. Georgii Zelmanovitch, Voice of Moscow, 1925. Courtesy of Teresa and Paul Harbaugh and Michael Mattis.

Soviet Jews on Both Sides of the Camera

• 63 •

figure 3.3. Georgii Zelmanovitch, Boy reading Pushkin, 1920s. Courtesy of Teresa and Paul Harbaugh and Michael Mattis.

Photographers of the socialist empire were on assignment from the Arctic to the Black Sea, from the Pacific to the western borderlands with Finland. Some built their careers out of this kind of photography. Zelmanovitch spent much of the 1930s on the road. In 1936, he was commissioned by the military newspaper Red Star to photograph the modernization of Turkmenistan. His letters to his wife, Zina, express a mixture of excitement at the prospect of being given such important photographic assignments, and sorrow at being separated from her for such long periods of time. In interviews, the family members of photographers recall with sadness how these long assignments meant that fathers were gone for much of their children’s childhoods. At once mundane and illuminating, Zelmanovitch’s letters and the words of his colleagues’ children show that behind the imagery of the Soviet empire stood humble photographers longing for their families back in the metropole, Moscow.4 A few photographers did not have to travel far to photograph the empire. Among them was Max Penson (1893–1959). Originally from Belorussia, Penson moved to Uzbekistan, where he remained, becoming one of the most prominent photographers in Central Asia.5 His modernist work documented the development of the so-called backward parts

• 64 •

when photography was jewish

figure 3.4. Semyon Fridlyand, Industrialization, late 1920s, early 1930s. Courtesy of the Dalbey Photographic Collection at the University of Denver.

of Central Asia. As did other documentary photographers, he highlighted both the exoticism of Uzbeks and their modernization. Penson photographed Muslim women lifting their veils as an act of women’s liberation through socialism. Both he and Zelmanovitch pictured Uzbek women donning workers’ clothes, in place of the veil, and reading Communist newspapers.6 Although the subjects in much of this Soviet empire photography may look different in terms of skin color, dress, and culture, they were portrayed as part of the “brotherhood of nations” that defined Soviet policy toward the country’s ethnic diversity. Soviet photo historian Sergei Morozov holds Penson up as an exemplar of how photographers were supposed to highlight the new Soviet person and, more specifically, the new Soviet ethnic person: “From the surface, there is a fixation on exotic subjects, but the photographer now approaches the display of people as owners of a new life, re-fashioners of the country.”7 In a concluding remark, Morozov heaped praise on Penson: “From his photographs one could put together a great book on the realization of Leninist nationalities policies.”

Jews in the Soviet Empire Those Leninist policies that celebrated and modernized diverse ethnic cultures also applied to Jews, who were marked as a distinct ethnicity (or nationality, in Soviet speak) with Yiddish as their official language.8 With the goal of creating a modern Soviet Jew-

Soviet Jews on Both Sides of the Camera

• 65 •

ish nation and of assimilating Jews into the socialist empire, the Soviet Union made antiSemitism illegal and was the only country in the world to have state-sponsored Yiddishlanguage publishing houses, writers’ groups, courts, city councils, and schools. The Jews, however, were lacking two important things that other ethnicities and nationalities had— a proper proletarian socioeconomic structure and their own territory. Like Muslims in Uzbekistan, Jews had to be modernized. Jews’ odd socioeconomic profile, which confounded Soviet theorists, had challenged socialist thinkers, both Jewish and not, for decades. Ber Borochov, a leading theoretician of socialist Zionism, the ideology that conquered the early Zionist movement and laid the foundation of Jewish settlement in Palestine, addressed Jews’ inverse-pyramid social structure, with its few proletarians and many small traders, craftworkers, and moneylenders. The rise of an industrial economy, and then World War I and the civil war, upended the traditional economy of Jews that had existed under the Russian Empire. Trains and factories took the place of peddlers and craftworkers, and World War I and the civil war devastated the borderlands area that Jews had called home for centuries. Ideologically, the new socialist government, like its Zionist counterpart in Palestine, saw that Jews’ anomalous social structure needed a complete makeover.9 The postwar poverty that plagued Jewish communities in the former Pale of Settlement prompted Jews to move to cities ranging from Lodz, Kharkov, and Moscow to New York, Paris, and London and into more “productive” forms of labor. Jews took up industrial work but also agricultural labor; the desire to remake Jews on the land gave birth to the Zionist kibbutz movement and the Soviet Jewish agricultural colony movement. The move toward productive labor in agriculture therefore demanded a shift in location, from small market towns (shtetls) to a series of state-sponsored agricultural colonies. This relocation provided a solution to the second problem of Soviet Jewish existence— lack of territory. As a counter to Zionism, which tried to solve these two Jewish problems by settling Jews on the land in Palestine, Soviet Jewish activists, with the support of the Communist Party and the Soviet state, created agricultural colonies and administrative districts and encouraged Soviet, and world, Jewry to relocate.10 These efforts to remake Jews echoed the larger project of building a Soviet empire that celebrated ethnic difference while it simultaneously demanded social and ideological assimilation. As part of this campaign, the organizations that sponsored and oversaw the Soviet Jewish agricultural colony movement commissioned photographers to document the death of the old forms of Jewish economic life.11 The photography of the “old Jew” in these campaigns, often commissioned by foreign organizations such as the Society for Trades and Agricultural Labor (ORT), was often used to garner financial support among Western Jews and frequently pictured hunger, privation, and epidemics. Over the course of the 1920s and into the following decade, the visual language used to depict Soviet Jewry would shift from poverty to production; from shtetl to agricultural colony; or in the words

• 66 •

when photography was jewish

of several articles that appeared in Soviet publications from the 1920s, “from the store counter to the plow.”12 Commissioning urban Jewish photographers to photograph “eastern Jews,” those symbols of traditional authentic eastern European Jewish culture in the minds of many acculturated Jews, was not a project unique to the Soviet Union. Starting in the early twentieth century, as traditional Jewish life in Eastern Europe underwent dramatic social and cultural changes, Jews often photographed other Jews ethnographically. As described by Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, such photographs were made “in the 11th hour, tied to extreme anxieties about loss and carried out with a preservationist instinct.”13 The nineteen-yearold artist and photographer Solomon Yudovin accompanied his uncle, the Russian populist, Jewish ethnographer, and playwright S. Ansky, on his famous 1912–1914 ethnographic expedition that was sponsored by the Ginzburg family of St. Petersburg. Yudovin’s more than two thousand photographs documented traditional Jews throughout the Pale of Settlement through the lenses of ethnography and art photography.14 Yudovin often took pictures of elderly men, at times stylizing his photos to look like paintings or graphic works. As Alexander Ivanov has suggested about Yudovin’s ethno-art photography, “Featuring dignity and wisdom, these faces of bearded ‘biblical’ elders, immersed in spaces transpierced by fantastic chiaroscuro, make one involuntarily recall the works of old masters, especially Rembrandt.”15 Ansky also believed that folkloric materials collected during ethnographic expeditions, including the photographs, would serve Jewish writers, composers, and artists as a “source of inspiration,” allowing them to “quit wandering as feeble shadows among other peoples’ creative works.”16 The Warsaw-based Jewish photographer Alter Kacyzne took pictures of eastern European Jewry with this ethnographic impulse in the 1920s for the American Yiddish newspaper Forward (Forverts).17 These were photographs of vanishing Jewish communities, like those of the Jewish photographer Roman Vishniac, who photographed Polish Jewry from 1935 through 1938 on special assignment from the Joint Distribution Committee. As Carol Zemel has argued in discussing Vishniac’s photographs of Polish Jewry, “By presenting [Eastern European Jews] and their world emblematically as a site of misery and orthodox spirituality, Vishniac’s images reiterate a familiar trope: the Jew as exotic eternal sufferer.”18 It is true that Vishniac’s photographs were used as part of a fund-raising campaign to garner support among American Jews for Polish Jewry in the late 1930s, similar to the campaign to support poor Soviet Jews in the 1920s. At the same time, Vishniac and Kacyzne were operating in the ethnographic tradition of documenting Jewish daily life as a means of elevating the common people and providing authentic material to the Jewish intelligentsia. Urban Soviet Jewish photographers operated in a less nostalgic, more ideologically forward-thinking universe than Vishniac and Kacyzne. In a Soviet universe in which a new society was emerging from the old, a trope of Jewish suffering would not have made

Soviet Jews on Both Sides of the Camera

• 67 •

sense. Instead, in the 1920s, Soviet Jewish photographers emphasized transformation of the old and, by the 1930s, portrayed the new Soviet Jew. The work of professional Soviet Jewish photojournalists shows that urban Eastern European and Russian Jews did not always photograph other Jews from the standpoint of loss or nostalgia. Their work in the leading Soviet magazines looks more like Zionist photography of the 1930s, showing European Jews taming so-called empty land or building cities ex nihilo than it does the more ethnographic European Jewish photography of the same period.19 As momentum for the Jewish agricultural colony movement grew, so too did efforts to publicize the remaking of Soviet Jews. The project was one of the most widely propagandized in the country, with photographs, songs, lotteries, and films mobilized in the effort.20 Mikhail Koltsov, the founder of Ogonyok, and his colleague Abram Bragin wrote The Fate of the Jewish Masses in the Soviet Union, which argued for the settling of Jews on agricultural land in northern Crimea.21 In 1926, Abram Room made a documentary film, Jews on the Land, with a screenplay by the prominent Soviet culture makers Vladimir Mayakovsky and Viktor Shklovsky. Mayakovsky served on the board of the Moscow branch of the Society for Jewish Agricultural Toilers (OZET), the state organization set up to oversee the movement, along with the Jewish theater and film actor Solomon Mikhoels.22 In March 1928 the Central Executive Committee designated Birobidzhan, a piece of land along the politically sensitive Manchurian border, as the largest Jewish agricultural colony in the country, in the hope that it would become an official Soviet Jewish region. Populating the area with Jewish farmers made political sense. First, unlike in the case of the continued settlement of Jews in Crimea, which was generating opposition from local Crimean Tatars and Russians, the Central Executive Committee expected little uproar from Birobidzhan’s current residents, ethnic Korean rice farmers and Cossacks. Further, the Jewish population of this border region could serve as a buffer against Japanese imperial expansion in the region. The state shifted its resources and propaganda energies from the small Jewish agricultural colonies to what some hoped would become the homeland for the new Soviet Jew, with Yiddish one of its official languages, and a global socialist alternative to the Zionist enterprise in Palestine. A photograph of Jewish migrants arriving in Birobidzhan in the early 1930s suggests that those coming to the future Jewish Autonomous Region were not necessarily impoverished shtetl residents becoming socialist Jewish peasants (Fig. 3.5). For contemporary viewers, the image is jarring for the presence of the cattle car transporting Jews to the east. Seen through the lens of Holocaust imagery, the photograph cannot but seem uncanny here in early 1930s Birobidzhan. And a cattle car is still a cattle car, suggesting that even if Birobidzhan was the state’s great attempt to normalize the status of Soviet Jews, the conditions under which the migrants were transported and lived were anything but glamorous. But unlike the Jews moved by Holocaust cattle cars, who would have experienced fear of the unknown, these travelers are well dressed and pose contentedly for the camera.

• 68 •

when photography was jewish

figure 3.5. Unknown, Jewish migrants arrive in Birobidzhan, early 1930s.

The woman on the far left appears to have done her hair and put on jewelry, heightening the contrast between the means of transport and the class status of many of these migrants. They appear to be more middle class than poor, and more acculturated than traditional Jews. As Mikhail Kalinin, chairman of the Central Executive Committee and a leading supporter of Birobidzhan, put it in 1934, “I believe that in ten years, Birobidzhan will become the most important, if not the only, repository of Jewish socialist national culture. Moscow, for example, cannot be a protector of national uniqueness. . . . It pulverizes all nationalities into a giant metropolitan collective, just like in New York. . . . What has remained Jewish about the Jewish worker who has lived in Moscow for ten years? Almost nothing.”23 Although Jews never moved there en masse, the Soviet media treated Birobidzhan as the savior of Soviet Jewry and Yiddish culture. For the most part, urbanized Soviet Jewish photographers in Moscow were members of Kalinin’s “pulverized metropolitan collective.” In fact, they wanted to be part of the giant metropolitan collective, not part of a rural Jewish outpost. After all, these were small-town boys (and very occasionally girls) leaving their homes to re-create themselves as urban, cosmopolitan citizens taking on a new visual idiom.24 Many grew up in households on the cusp of modernity, in homes where both Russian and Yiddish were spoken, where grandpa went to synagogue and occasionally the grandkids, too. These photographers were invested in modernity, using their cameras to depict their integration into Soviet society, rather than in being part of the experiment to remake Soviet Jews.

Soviet Jews on Both Sides of the Camera

• 69 •

They were, nonetheless, central characters in the unfolding drama of a Soviet Jewish revolution. After all, they were the main photographers for all the key publications in the Soviet Union, which were publishing essays on the new Jew and Birobidzhan. Moreover, judging by who participated in the campaigns to publicize Birobidzhan, it is clear that Jewish photographers, filmmakers, and writers were singled out to document this Soviet Jewish project. They photographed not only other members of the “pulverized metropolitan collective,” those Jews who desperately wanted to integrate culturally and linguistically as they did, but also Jews who savored the Russian Revolution as a Jewish event, who saw it as overturning history to create the paradigm of a Yiddish-speaking, tractordriving, socialist-minded Jew.

Soviet Jewish Photographers Picture the New Soviet Jew The Soviet Yiddish press also visually documented the establishment of the Jewish agricultural colony movement. The central Yiddish newspaper, Der Emes (The Truth; pravda in Russian), published a visual essay on Jewish agricultural colonies in August 1925.25 Although the images depicted poverty, as one might have expected just one year into the agricultural experiment, they rarely show downtrodden shtetl Jews. In fact, the essay opens with a photograph titled “On the Way from the Shtetl” that shows a family of Jewish migrants in a wagon. The images also did not shy away from portraying these “soon to be new” Jews phenotypically as Jews, echoing ethnographic photographs that emphasized racial and ethnic difference within the emerging Soviet empire. The cover of this issue of Der Emes was a sketch of a male Jewish farmer with an unusually large nose, closecropped beard, and darker features, clearly signifying a Jew. In 1927, the Society for Jewish Agricultural Toilers established its own illustrated magazine, the Tribune of Soviet Jewish Social Movements (Tribuna), to document and celebrate the making of the new Soviet Jew on the land.26 Semyon Fridlyand, Max Alpert, Roman Karmen, and Abram Shterenberg all published work there.27 The magazine also had its own professional photographers. Photographs of Birobidzhan and other Jewish agricultural colonies by three in particular, P. Ganin, L. Gershkovitch, and Kh. Grinberg, appeared regularly.28 This management of the new Jew’s image was so vital that the Tribune established its own training programs in Birobidzhan.29 Photography of the new Jew was not relegated to the pages of Soviet Jewish publications, whether in Yiddish with Der Emes or in Russian with the Tribune. As early as 1923, a reader of Koltsov’s Ogonyok encountered a visual essay showing Jews moving from shops and synagogues to agricultural colonies.30 In 1930, Arkady Shaykhet published a photo essay called “Children of Jewish Agricultural Colonies,” which appeared in Soviet Photo.31 In 1932, Ogonyok commissioned Georgii Zelmanovitch to photograph the building of the Soviet Far East, including Birobidzhan.32 Photographing the Far East was intended

• 70 •

when photography was jewish

to show off Soviet modernization as well as demonstrate progressive ethnic relations in the land of socialism. Images of women learning to read and of camels from the desert appearing from nowhere and parading by factories demonstrated both goals of the Soviet state. But how did Birobidzhan fit into this narrative, both ideologically and visually? After all, the idea of Birobidzhan called on “backward” shtetl Jews from Europe and Russia and from around the world to resettle a part of the Far East sparsely populated by Koreans, Russians, and other rarely named local groups. Were these Jews to be figured as colonizers doing the modernizing of others? Or were they traveling east to transform themselves from old Jews into new Soviet builders of socialism? Ogonyok took two years to publish a two-page photo essay with text by the Soviet Jewish writer Viktor Fink. It appeared on June 5, 1934, immediately after Birobidzhan became the Jewish Autonomous Region.33 Zelmanovitch’s two Birobidzhan photographs contrast widely with the article. Fink describes the building of turbines, the expansion of collective farms, and the general industrialization and agricultural development of this distant region of the Soviet empire. Zelmanovitch’s photographs celebrate the people carrying out the building, echoing what photographers had been doing from the 1931 Filippov essay to Markov-Grinberg’s 1934 Izotov series. The first photograph, “Leveling Streets in Birobidzhan,” shows two anonymous men working a primitive machine on a newly built street. The driver’s pose resembles several famous photographs of workers involved in industrial work. Zelmanovitch’s street leveler mounts the machine and wrestles with the wheel to power the leveler. The image of the hypermasculine worker was common in the context of modernist, constructivist aesthetics, which glorified the male worker’s body. But unlike modernist close-ups of the human body that treated it like a machine, Zelmanovitch backs up to reveal the distinctly underdeveloped conditions in which the leveler driver works. Lonely log houses, a workers’ brigade tramping down the street in the left of the photograph— all these contextualizing details could have been left out had Zelmanovitch closed in on the worker or if the editor had cropped the image. As a Soviet photojournalist photographing the future Soviet Jewish homeland, Zelmanovitch was trapped between two competing stories. On the one hand, the photos were supposed to attract people to Birobidzhan as the government was attempting to increase migration to the region in order to modernize it. Zelmanovitch’s images needed to appeal to the reader, as did most socialist realist photography. At the same time, he was showing how Jews could “tame the taiga,” overcoming harsh conditions as a means of selftransformation similar to Zionism’s concurrent ideology. In this way, his work resembles that from the 1920s that showed the harsh living conditions of the emerging agricultural colonies. In the second photograph, Zelmanovitch personalizes the experience of Birobidzhan and highlights its Jewishness (Fig. 3.6). “Leah Feldman’s Garden Brigade of the Valdheim

Soviet Jews on Both Sides of the Camera

• 71 •

figure 3.6. Georgii Zelmanovitch, “Leah Feldman’s Garden Brigade,” Ogonyok, June 5, 1934.

Collective Farm” shows smiling women and children preparing for work with their hoes. Unlike the more ambiguous photo of the levelers, this image reflects the emerging aesthetic of socialist realism that celebrated and sanitized labor. The subjects are not dirty or sweaty, and their smiles are awfully broad for people headed to work.34 The first photograph was about the power of male labor and the tension between struggle and celebration. This photograph shows women’s and children’s contributions to building Birobidzhan and explicitly marks the workers as Jewish by naming the brigade leader “Feldman” (“man of the field,” in Yiddish) and the collective farm “Valdheim” (“home in the forest”). Zelmanovitch’s Birobidzhan photography was unlike his other work in the Far East and Central Asia, which highlighted positive ethnic relations and imperial uplift.35 In those images, his charge was to show that although Central Asian ethnic groups looked racially different from those in European Russia, they were still part of the same socialist, modernizing experiment. In Birobidzhan, however, Zelmanovitch photographed European Jews, in others words the white “colonists” taming the land, not the “natives” long settled on it. And what about our photographer? How did he imagine his subjects—Jewish farmers and laborers in the Far East? This was an assignment unlike any he had taken or any that

• 72 •

when photography was jewish

the first generation of Soviet Jewish photographers had encountered. Photographing European Jewish pioneers in the Soviet Far East required a different vision. Zelmanovitch showed Jews as imperial subjects, conquering new territory in the Soviet Far East, and also as colonial objects, needing to be remade as modern citizens living in a new ideological universe. The assignment helped to crystallize Zelmanovitch’s transformation from “Tashkent Jew” into “Soviet Muscovite photographer.” This was to be the last time his photographs in Ogonyok were published under the name Zelmanovitch.36 After 1934, he changed his nom-de-camera to Georgii Zelma, dropping the presumably too Jewish or too parochial “novitch.” His son, Timur, related in a 1997 interview that in 1931 Maxim Gorky, the unofficial commissar of Soviet literature who was close to many Jewish intellectuals, told Zelmanovitch that good Soviet Jewish photographers needed to take new, less Jewish (that is, provincial) names. But since he had published under the name Zelmanovitch from 1931 to 1934, in other words for three years after Gorky’s mythic conversation with the young photographer, it seems more likely that it was the experience of publishing his Birobidzhan photographs, in which he rendered visible the Jewishness of the Soviet experiment, that led to his refashioning.

Semyon Fridlyand in Birobidzhan Ogonyok’s modest coverage of Birobidzhan was just the beginning. In 1934, the Union of Documentary Film (Soyuzkinokhronika) produced Birobidzhan, a film celebrating the establishment of the Jewish Autonomous Region ( JAR). As with other projects on Birobidzhan, the team that made the film was a Who’s Who of Soviet Jewish culture makers, from the Yiddish poet Perets Markish, who produced the intertitles, to Leyb Pulver, who worked with the State Jewish Theater in Moscow and created the music. The film was shot by Mikhail Glider and directed by Mikhail Slutsky.37 Two years later, a Russian-language feature film about Birobidzhan, Seekers of Happiness, starred the by then famous Solomon Mikhoels and was seen by thousands, both domestically and abroad.38 Pravda covered the official establishment of the JAR in Birobidzhan in 1934. In September, the newspaper ran an article and a photograph of a mining expedition in Sutary, a remote region of the JAR. Semyon Fridlyand is credited with writing the article and taking the photograph as a special correspondent.39 On December 19, 1934, the newspaper ran two articles on Birobidzhan as well as another Fridlyand photograph of a kindergarten in the newly developing city that served as the capital of the region (Fig. 3.7).40 In the 1935 Exhibition of the Works of the Masters of Soviet Photographic Arts, among Fridlyand’s exhibited photographs was one of Birobidzhan, “New Type of Jew: Beekeeper” (Fig. 3.8), bringing his photography of Jews photographing Jews to the wider photographic and artistic public.41

Soviet Jews on Both Sides of the Camera

• 73 •

figure 3.7. Semyon Fridlyand, “Children’s Colony,” Pravda, September 14, 1934. Courtesy of the Dalbey Photographic Collection at the University of Denver.

• 74 •

when photography was jewish

figure 3.8. Semyon Fridlyand, “New Type of Jew: Beekeeper, Birobidzhan,” USSR in Construction, 1935, no. 3 –4. Photo taken in 1934. Courtesy of the Dalbey Photographic Collection at the University of Denver.

Illustrated journals trumpeted the establishment of Birobidzhan. In these publications, photography served a more vital function than in newspapers, with their poor print quality. USSR in Construction did a major layout on Birobidzhan in its March–April 1935 edition, which included many photographs by Fridlyand, along with images by Mikhail Glider, who made the 1934 documentary.42 The multipage layout celebrated Birobidzhan as a place to create the new Jew in a land flowing with milk and honey. The English-language edition of USSR in Construction pointed out that “Jewish settlers came from the western and southwestern districts of the Soviet Union, from America, Germany, Argentina, and other countries to the deserted and impenetrable Siberian forests, to build up a new life entirely different from the life of the old miserable Jewish townlets. They put up their first dwellings—tents—in the forest. Building work began.” The captions echoed the trope of the ingathering of the exiles, a popular slogan among Zionist ideologues. The photo essay placed these new pioneers in a reworked biblical landscape of tents in the wilderness as these new Jews re-created their identities, just as their biblical ancestors had. Rebuilding the self, rather than modernizing the “natives,” became the explicit theme of the second photo layout in the magazine. It visually highlighted the different “types” of

Soviet Jews on Both Sides of the Camera

• 75 •

figure 3.9. Semyon Fridlyand, “New Type of Jew, T. Trochik, Birobidzhan,” USSR in Construction, 1935, no. 3 –4. Photo taken in 1934. Courtesy of the Dalbey Photographic Collection at the University of Denver.

Jews: “You will not find the shrinking, downtrodden Jews of the ghettos in Birobidzhan. The people of Birobidzhan—they are Comrade Gelen, the best mower of the Waldheim collective farm; Comrade Lazar Ugodnikov, beekeeper of the Birofeld collective farm; Comrade Serel, manager of the Stalinfeld collective farm; Joseph Abramski, the best herdsman of the Ikor collective farm.” Like the idea of the “ingathering of the exiles,” the idea of “negating the diaspora,” in the form of destroying the ghetto Jew in favor of the new muscular Jew, was a central component of Zionist ideology. As the iconography of Birobidzhan shows, Soviet Jewish photographers visualized the new Jew as a male laborer, out in nature, lacking in traditional markers of Jewish culture. Of the ten new Jewish types—from the beekeeper to the pig farmer, whose faces cover a three-page spread in the magazine—all ten are male, echoing Zionism’s emphasis on the masculinity of the new Jew, in contrast to the perceived weakness and femininity of the old one. In addition, nearly all the subjects stare off into the distance, into the heroic future, a visual idiom that would come to define socialist realist portraiture, especially that of its leaders.43 In fact, according to USSR in Construction and Fridlyand, the only place to find the old types of Jews in Birobidzhan was on stage, where the new Jew acts like the old one—

• 76 •

when photography was jewish

figure 3.10. Unknown, Birobidzhan State Jewish Theater, USSR in Construction, 1935, no. 3 –4.

and where representations of the old Jew were caricatured beyond recognition.44 The irony could not have been lost that Soviet Jews now had to dress up to play the “ghetto Jew.” Photographs of actual “old” Jews, of traditional Jews with beards (they were almost always figured as male) more or less disappeared from the visual record of Soviet Jewry. They appear only as fiction, acted out on the stages of official Soviet Jewish theaters.45 Whether intentionally or not, Fridlyand’s photographs mirrored those coming out of Palestine, at a time when the old Jews were becoming a remnant of the past that could be found only on the stage and screen. Maxim Gorky’s illustrated literary journal Our Achievements (Nashi dostizheniia) published two long pieces about Birobidzhan. The first appeared in 1934 with an excerpt from the Yiddish writer David Bergelson’s book, Birobidzhan, accompanied by several photographs.46 Then in 1936, David Khait produced a longer essay about Birobidzhan.47 Khait writes about the ubiquity of the Yiddish language in the JAR and portrays the struggle of “old Jews,” such as the “ritual slaughterer [shoykhet] from Berdichev,” to become new Birobidzhan Soviet Jews. Accompanying the article were more of Fridlyand’s photographs, including the image of children that had appeared in Pravda a year earlier (see Fig. 3.7). Fridlyand and the magazine portrayed a Birobidzhan of dancing families, smiling chil-

Soviet Jews on Both Sides of the Camera

• 77 •

dren, and societies in motion. They also directly engage the question of what the new Soviet Jew was supposed to look like. Our Achievements published nearly a dozen photographs with Khait’s article, most taken by Fridlyand.48 The series echoes the biblical narrative of creation. It begins on the first “day” of creation with a photograph of an empty landscape in which the new Soviet Jews, like their Zionist counterparts in Palestine, will create their future. From this opening emptiness, the essay describes, both textually and visually, how over the course of the metaphoric week Jews conquered the land. The next image, the first attributed to Fridlyand, is titled “Settlers,” and shows a family arriving in the junglelike landscape by horse and carriage. Fridlyand shot into the sun, masking the faces of the family. They stand for “the Jewish settler” rather than any particular family making the journey, and in this case, the journey is to the small town and rural areas, not away from them. (Without the caption explaining how the people are settling, one could also read the image more traditionally as a Jewish family departing a place, heading away from the photographer into the setting sun.) Fridlyand played with the motif of the Jewish wagon driver, the balegole, one that is well known in classic Yiddish literature, but that in this case indicates arrival in the new land, not departure from the old. In another image, Fridlyand depicts a developing city, with cars, streets, power lines, and construction (Fig. 3.11). A closer look, however, reveals that the streets are not paved, that the sidewalks are in fact boards protecting people from the mud that lurks beneath their work boots, and that women are hauling buckets of milk or water from one place to another. But the three photographs—emptiness, settlers, developing city—show Jews building a new future out of nothing, a common trope of socialist realism. The captions of the photographs then walk the reader through the steps by which Birobidzhan moved from nothingness, as shown in “This Is How the Taiga Begins” (Fig. 3.12) with human beings conquering nature, into a land flowing with milk and honey (Fig. 3.13), both metaphorically and literally now echoing the biblical story of redemption. The most shocking of Fridlyand’s photographs is one depicting Jewish pig farmers, a seeming oxymoron, which was precisely the point (Fig. 3.14). Both Fridlyand and the editors heightened the photograph’s iconoclasm. Fridlyand foregrounds the huge hogs, which obscure the farmers and the settlement. The editors made explicit the way the new Jew broke with Jewish tradition, going as far as breeding the most taboo animal in Jewish culture.49 With the region under construction, the essay turned to the population of Birobidzhan. The first image shows an old man who has moved to Birobidzhan from the former Pale of Settlement and become a beekeeper. In the caption he explains to the reader in no uncertain terms why he moved: “There were pogroms, there was the Pale of Settlement, we were restricted on where we could live.” Through the captions, the editors framed Birobidzhan photography in a new socialist history of Russian Jewry, one that

• 78 •

when photography was jewish

figure 3.11. Semyon Fridlyand, “In Birobidzhan, Capital of the Autonomous Region,” Nashi Dostizheniia (Our Achievements), no. 6, June 1936. Photo taken in 1934. Courtesy of the Dalbey Photographic Collection at the University of Denver.

moves from anti-Jewish violence under the czars to liberation under the Soviets. By having an “old Jew” doing “new Jew things,” the editors and Fridlyand showed that Soviet Jewry was on a path, the right path, toward modernization. Readers of the 1935 USSR in Construction would remember the beekeeper, who appeared in the series of new Jewish types as Comrade Lazar Ugodnikov, the beekeeper of the Birofeld collective farm. After the old man, the editors published a photograph by Fridlyand of three children that had appeared in Pravda (Fig. 3.15). Here it is captioned, “And what is the ‘right of residence’? Children, IKOR Communal Farm, Birobidzhan.” The rhetorical question is a reference to czarist-era laws, referenced by the beekeeper in the preceding picture, that restricted Jews’ right of residence to the Pale of Settlement. The caption writer suggests that Birobidzhan, as represented in the smiling children’s faces shot from below, was the Soviet response to the limitations on Jews’ rights that had been imposed by the czar. And more important, these children, whose faces contrast starkly with the wizened face of the beekeeper on the facing page, ask a question as referenced in the caption, whose answer any Jew over the age of twenty would know. Soviet Jewish children presumably had no direct memory of life before the revolution, nor did they need such memory to be good Soviet Jews.

Soviet Jews on Both Sides of the Camera

• 79 •

figure 3.12. Semyon Fridlyand, “This Is How Life in the Taiga Begins,” Nashi Dostizheniia no. 6, June 1936. Photo taken in 1934. Courtesy of the Dalbey Photographic Collection at the University of Denver.

figure 3.13. Semyon Fridlyand, “Birofeld Beekeeping,” Nashi Dostizheniia, no. 6, June 1936. Photo taken in 1934. Courtesy of the Dalbey Photographic Collection at the University of Denver.

• 80 •

when photography was jewish

figure 3.14. Semyon Fridlyand, “One of Many Violations of Biblical Law. A Pig Farm on the IKOR Jewish Collective Farm,” Nashi Dostizheniia, no. 6, June 1936. Photo taken in 1934. Courtesy of the Dalbey Photographic Collection at the University of Denver.

figure 3.15. Semyon Fridlyand, “And What Is the ‘Right of Residence’? Children, IKOR Communal Farm, Birobidzhan,” Nashi Dostizheniia, no. 6, June 1936. Photo taken in 1934. Courtesy of the Dalbey Photographic Collection at the University of Denver.

Soviet Jews on Both Sides of the Camera

• 81 •

figure 3.16. Semyon Fridlyand, “The Sixth Day on the Valdheim Collective Farm,” Nashi Dostizheniia, no. 6, June 1936. Photo taken in 1934. Courtesy of the Dalbey Photographic Collection at the University of Denver.

Finally, as the “week” of creation nears a close, the editors and Fridlyand show joyous Jews celebrating their achievements (Fig. 3.16). The photograph depicts Jews folk dancing following their labor. Fridlyand’s original caption, “Day of Rest” (“den’ otdykha”), which he had written on the back of the print that he sent to the editors, echoed the biblical creation story. At the same time, he used the very specific Russian word otdykh, which means both “rest” and “leisure” and connoted what Soviet society granted to workers after a hard work week—state-sponsored leisure activities.50 However, instead of Fridlyand’s double entendre that integrated the Jewish and Soviet narratives of Birobidzhan, the caption writer emphasized the rereading of the Jewish biblical narrative and titled it “The Sixth Day on the Valdheim Collective Farm.” In the Bible, on the sixth day God creates humans and makes them masters of the land. In the Soviet retelling, it is the new Jew who tamed the land and the animals on it. Perhaps, however, in an editing error (or because the photo editor did not know his or her Bible very well), this should have been labeled the “seventh day,” when God rested and Birobidzhan Jews danced in celebration as they saw that their creation was good. On the metaphoric seventh day, Fridlyand surveyed the work of the new Jews from above. The editors published an aerial photograph, “The State Farm Stalinfeld,

• 82 •

when photography was jewish

figure 3.17. Semyon Fridlyand, “The State Farm Stalinfeld, Birobidzhan,” Nashi Dostizheniia, no. 6, June 1936. Photo taken in 1934. Courtesy of the Dalbey Photographic Collection at the University of Denver.

Birobidzhan,” taken as if from God’s point of view (Fig. 3.17). The photographer included a support line on the airplane, captured in the lower right, showing the viewers both the massive construction below and the modern machine, not God, that elevated Fridlyand and allowed him to get the shot. Soviet critics loved aerial photographs, noting the impressive panoramic shots that “demonstrated how the photographers have captured the work it takes to build the five year plan.”51 There are only eleven prints in Fridlyand’s file in the Our Achievements archives, each an exemplary image of the socialist realist aesthetics that were dominant in the mid-1930s. But his archive contains more than fifty negatives of collective farms, people, construction sites, and schools.52 In one series of unpublished images, Fridlyand photographed the local Korean population. As part of the Soviet campaign to show how different ethnic groups coexisted peacefully in the socialist country, Fridlyand photographed portraits of local Koreans and also cooperative Jewish-Korean interactions. One such photograph, “Pioneer Friendship: Jewish, Russian, and Korean Pioneers, 1936,” appears in the Society for Jewish Agricultural Toilers archive. It shows a boy and three girls lined up with their arms around one another’s shoulders. Each is wearing a Pioneer uniform, demonstrating

Soviet Jews on Both Sides of the Camera

• 83 •

their socialist unity, but the children’s faces (and the caption) remind the reader that they represent different ethnicities.53 In addition to photographs showing ethnic unity, Fridlyand’s unpublished photographs from Birobidzhan highlight his 1920s training as a modernist photographer. In fact, many of his unpublished photographs resist the purely heroic stance of socialist realism in his photograph of the three children. In photographing a children’s camp on a collective farm, he positioned himself high above to show the masses of children engaging in leisure activity and framed them in beautiful geometry. USSR in Construction published a much wider range of Fridlyand’s photographs, from those showing ethnic diversity to those showing off his modernist aesthetic. But for the purposes of the Our Achievements article, Fridlyand and his editors chose to publish the more heroic socialist realist images. They also told different stories. If USSR in Construction emphasized the shift from the waning of the old Jew to the making of the new, Our Achievements relied on a biblical narrative to secularize Jewish history. Fridlyand was the same photographer, but his editors selected different photographs and captioned them in two different, but equally important, stories about how Jews were becoming Soviets. Zelmanovitch’s and Fridlyand’s photo essays of Birobidzhan, which focus on the faces of those building the region, created the visual representation of the new Soviet Jew. The essays also showed off one of the essential projects of Stalinism—overcoming ethnic antagonisms and creating a collectivity of peoples, an endeavor in which Soviet Jewish photographers were deeply invested. Zelmanovitch’s and Fridlyand’s lives and work demonstrate that the new Soviet Jew lived at the farthest reaches of the emerging Soviet empire and yet sat at the center of power in propagating images of that empire. They were colonizer and colonized, the same and different, all at the same time.54

•

4

•

“ Without the Newspaper, We Are Defenseless!” photojournalists and the war

Having spent most of the 1930s photographing the development of Stalinism, Soviet photojournalists had little experience photographing war and the violent destruction of society. Several had covered battles against Japanese forces, who had occupied Manchuria in the late 1930s. In Europe, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed in secret in August 1939, staved off a German invasion of the Soviet Union and allowed the country access to territory in Eastern Europe. Several photographers took pictures of the Soviet takeover of these parts of Eastern Europe, in particular western Ukraine and eastern Poland, after the Soviet Union annexed these territories in late 1939. But given the secretive nature of the treaty, the Soviet press did not publish images of warfare, including the devastating battles against Finland. Instead, the photography published in 1939 from places like Rovno (formerly in Poland) and the Baltics tended to be in a socialist realist mode and framed as “liberating” territory from oppressive authoritarian regimes rather than representing the heat of battle.1 Viktor Tyomin, Pravda’s most experienced military photographer, was assigned by the newspaper in September 1939 to photograph the Red Army’s “liberation” of western Belorussia. Between 1939 and 1941 Georgii Zelma worked in the newly conquered western Ukraine and Belorussia, and in 1941 he was sent to Kishinev. His first photograph of the war with Germany and its allies was taken in Moldavia on the southern front on June 23, 1941, a day after the Soviet Union entered the war.2 Evgenii Khaldei photographed the newly occupied (or liberated) cities of Bialystok and Kovno (Kaunas), which Soviet troops entered in summer 1940. As Khaldei wrote in his diary about photographing Kovno, “I entered this clean, beautiful city of the Lithuanian state.”3 This was not war photography. In fact, the task of photographing liberated Eastern Europe fit the training of Soviet photographers, who knew very well how to elevate the everyday worker, beautify labor, and glorify Stalin and the Soviet state. The war with Nazi Germany and its allies would prove a new kind of challenge for Soviet photojournalists. On June 22, 1941, Khaldei was walking down a Moscow street toward his office, just off Red Square. War with Germany had broken out and foreign minister Viacheslav • 87 •

• 88 •

world war ii and the holocaust

Molotov was to make an announcement at noon. According to stories Khaldei has told about that day, he found himself down the street from the offices of his employer, TASS, on Nikol’skaya Street (known then as October 25th Street) when war was announced. The attack that provoked this announcement had started in the middle of the night; Molotov spoke at high noon on the longest day of the year. The clothes of the Muscovites listening to the announcement as Khaldei photographed them suggest that Moscow was not hot that day (Fig. 4.1).4 In 2004, in response to this image of that defining moment in Soviet history, a Russian art critic claimed that despite the horrible announcement, “these faces do not show fear. These are faces showing fortitude, concentration, and preparation for any challenge.”5 Despite the stoic rhetoric of the Russian critic, echoing the socialist realist discourse of the 1930s and 1940s, a closer look at Khaldei’s famous photograph does not show a collective of Soviet citizens hearing devastating news with fortitude. Rather, Khaldei shows how the war touched each person, as individuals with their own stories, differently. Some of the subjects—the woman and man in the foreground—look up at the loudspeaker blaring Molotov’s voice. The man holds a cigarette, suggesting that he was in the middle of a stroll, perhaps on his way to the dining hall for lunch, when the news began. The woman uncomfortably shoves her hands in her pockets as she stares upward, expressing anything but fortitude. As our gaze moves across the crowd, we see the range of emotions that Khaldei captured, intentionally or accidentally. Each of the women near the curb each expresses something different. Behind the woman staring upward, we see another woman looking into the street, frowning. Next to her, another woman gazes into the distance, pensively contemplating the news she is hearing. And last, a woman is breaking down. Her hand pressed against her mouth, her eyes downcast, she holds back tears. The street stretches off into the distance, until it meets a tower that leads into Red Square, the seat of power. As a photojournalist trained in the Stalinist 1930s, Khaldei well understood the task of photojournalism. In the face of the devastating news that Germany had broken the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, photojournalists would have been trained to depict, as the critic quoted above suggested, the strength of the Soviet population under Stalin’s leadership. Khaldei’s photograph, however, was far too ambiguous and emotional for such purposes. Ogonek, rather than depicting emotional responses to the outbreak of war, published a two-page spread on the mass meetings that were called during Molotov’s announcement. The lead photo is captioned “Workers of the Moscow Silk Fabric Factory Red Rose unanimously declare: Put all resources behind the defense of the motherland.” Both the image and its caption reflect a triumphant spirit in the face of war. Below, a photograph by Boris Fishman shows workers at another factory who have gathered to express their hatred for Hitlerites. These images were very different from that of Khaldei, whose photo was not published on the pages of the central press in June 1941 (Fig. 4.2).

Photojournalists and the War

• 89 •

figure 4.1. Evgenii Khaldei, “Molotov’s Announcement of War,” June 1941. Courtesy of Evgenii Khaldei and the Fotosoyuz Agency.

• 90 •

world war ii and the holocaust

Like those photographers published in Ogonyok, Emmanuel Evzerikhin photographed a crowd from above. Although his picture wasn’t published in this edition of the magazine, Evzerikhin did work briefly for Ogonyok, before being recruited by TASS.6 Evzerikhin’s photo suggests that this gathering was organized, that someone at a factory had instructed workers to gather at twelve o’clock noon for an important announcement. Evzerikhin did not try to capture individual facial expressions. One sees no crying people; the members of the crowd appear stoic in the face of the terrible news they are given (Fig. 4.3). These photographs suggest the range of ways Soviet photojournalists reflected the war—responding to Party and state needs for propaganda, while taking liberties to shape individual images based on the photographer’s particular desires. The system for producing photography during the war was little changed from the Stalinist 1930s except that the Party took a more direct role in shaping subject matter. And the Party itself—represented by the commissars who oversaw military officers as well as the Soviet propaganda machine—took a much more direct role in shaping the visual record of the war than had been the case during the 1930s. A similar streamlining of cultural regulation occurred in the wartime film industry, indicating that the Party believed that visual media were vital to the war effort.7 The day after the war broke out, Lev Mekhlis, head of the Main Polit-

figure 4.2. “The Soviet People Have Decided: Destroy the Fascist Bandits,” Ogonyok, no. 18, June 25, 1941.

Photojournalists and the War

• 91 •

figure 4.3. Emmanuel Evzerikhin, “Declaration of War,” June 1941. Courtesy of Emmanuel Evzerikhin and the Fotosoyuz Agency.

ical Administration of the Red Army, which oversaw all propaganda efforts, reminded the press of its important military duty: “The main tasks of the press in battle must be to develop heroism, bravery, military art, and selflessly carry out the commander’s orders.”8 Editors were burdened with the responsibility of translating political directives into instructions for photographers. At the same time, certain kinds of cultural regulation were relaxed during the war. Film historian Denise Youngblood, echoing the feelings of many photographers reflecting back, refers to the war period as a “small oasis of freedom” in which artists, photographers, filmmakers, and others had more license. Although photographers were told in general terms what to photograph, they were not necessarily told how to photograph. Khaldei and Evzerikhin were both asked to photograph the declaration of war; each produced radically different, and equally powerful, images.

The System of Wartime Journalism During the war, photographers worked for all kinds of publications. Ogonyok continued to be the most widely read illustrated magazine and maintained its relatively large base of staff photographers. Semyon Fridlyand, who had been working for the periodical since 1925, was named Ogonyok’s special war correspondent, and his photographs appeared

• 92 •

world war ii and the holocaust

widely in the magazine throughout the war. At the beginning of the war, the well-known writer Evgenii Petrov edited the journal. After his death in a plane crash in 1942, Isaak Yerukhimovitch, who wrote under the name Yermashev, was acting editor until 1943.9 Later in the war, Aleksei Surkov took over as editor. Most Soviet readers, however, did not have the luxury of reading an illustrated magazine, and they encountered poor-quality photographs in the newspapers they read on a daily or weekly basis. Pravda and Izvestiia competed to hire the best photo and print journalists, as they had during the 1930s. But the hot publication to work for was the army’s leading newspaper, Red Star (Krasnaia Zvezda), which paid good salaries and recruited some of the top writers and photographers during the war. TASS continued to employ many important photographers, among them Khaldei and Evzerikhin. In addition to periodicals, the Central Committee established the Soviet Information Bureau, or Sovinformburo, in June 1941. It was the central shaper and distributor of warrelated information. Its daily reports were the primary sources for journalists, both Soviet and foreign. For most of the war, the information agency was headed by Alexander Shcherbakov and shortly after the war by Solomon Lozovsky. Millions were glued to their radios as prominent Sovinformburo anchor Yuri Levitan began his broadcast with the familiar “This is the Soviet Information Bureau.” The bureau reached out to audiences in many ways, from articles in international newspapers featuring heroic Soviet battles against the Nazis to German-language leaflets dispensed en masse from above onto German troops. The agency had its own journalists and photographers, who took pictures that were transmitted widely to domestic and foreign news agencies, as were those, for example, of Mikhail Trakhman, who was hired by Sovinformburo to photograph partisans operating behind enemy lines.10 At the very top of the hierarchy was the political overlord of wartime photography, the Main Political Administration for the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army (Glavnoe upravlenie raboche-krestianskoi krasnoi armii), which oversaw all newspapers produced during the war. It had its own monthly illustrated magazine, Front Illustration (Frontovaia illiustratsiia), which hired Arkady Shaykhet, who at forty-three held a senior position in Soviet photography, as its lead photojournalist.11 As was the case during the civil war, World War II meant significant material and technical challenges for photojournalists and the newspapers and magazines that published their work. Film, chemicals, and cameras were in desperately short supply. This meant that a photographer had to make every shot count. For newspapers and magazines, wartime conditions meant limited paper supplies, personnel called up for duty, and print houses left in ruins after German bombing raids. In the western regions all extant print supplies were confiscated by the occupying Germans. Some publications evacuated to the interior, to Kuibyshev (contemporary Samara), Tashkent, and other areas to continue publication in relative peace. Those who remained in Moscow after the mid-October 1941

Photojournalists and the War

• 93 •

evacuation of all nonessential personnel suffered material hardship. The large-circulation Evening Moscow (Vechernaia Moskva) had only seven people working after the October evacuation. The entire industry suffered. In 1940, there were 8,800 newspapers published, with a total print run of 38 million. In 1942, there were only 4,561, with a print run of 18 million. Of the thirty-eight central newspapers, only eighteen remained. Only the military press grew during the war.12 Newspapers shrank in size with shortages of paper and ink. Pravda shrank from six columns to four, and republic-wide and regional newspapers went from four to two columns. Magazines suffered even more than newspapers. In the words of historian L. D. Dergacheva, “publishing at all was a matter of determination.”13 Despite the harsh wartime conditions, the Party devoted significant resources to newspaper and magazine publications in an effort to shape the kind of information that was trickling down to readers in the country and abroad. Efforts to produce the printed word and image reached almost heroic proportions. The magazine Star (Zvezda) operated regularly during the siege of Leningrad under regular cannon fire. On November 6, 1941, a German bomb destroyed the offices of In Defense of the Motherland (Na strazhe rodiny), killing all but one of the newspaper’s staff of fourteen. Nonetheless, the remaining employee put out the next day’s edition.14 During the war, the line dividing civilian and military newspapers was blurred, as information on the war became the essential source material for all papers. Pravda, for example, began publishing Sovinformburo bulletins on June 26, 1941, placing them in a prime location. Newspapers produced by and for the military became much more important to the media campaign during the war.15 Despite the militarization of the civilian press, there was a distinction, as military newspapers were structured differently from civilian ones. In late 1941, the staff of military newspapers was restructured with each position at the newspaper given a military rank. These newspapers had divisions for “front life” and for “propaganda and Party life/ Komsomol life”; and since the wires were crucial sources of general information, the wire division was headed by a senior political advisor. The lowly photojournalist occupied the same position as the writers for each division, quartermaster second rank, not very high up on the military totem pole.16 Although most of our photographers worked for the central newspapers and magazines based in Moscow or in the evacuation center of Kuibyshev, the Party believed in creating smaller newspapers geared toward a diverse Soviet reading audience. During the war, that meant creating special newspapers for those serving on the front. It also meant producing these newspapers in dozens of languages, reflecting the diverse ethnic background of the Soviet army. The number of “front,” “army,” and “divisional” newspapers grew throughout the war as paper supplies stabilized and as printing became more regular.17 In addition, partisans operating behind enemy lines produced newspapers, and they

• 94 •

world war ii and the holocaust

did so in more than a dozen languages, including Yiddish. In fact, the partisans saw newspapers as central to their ability to succeed and tell their story. A total of 385 underground or partisan newspapers were published during the war, with the largest concentration produced in Belorussia.18 Some important Soviet Jewish photographers were dropped behind enemy lines to document the partisan movement. Mikhail Trakhman and Yakov Davidzon were among the most widely published partisan photographers. Davidzon was behind enemy lines in Ukraine and had his work published in Soviet Ukraine. As a special photographer for Sovinformburo, Trakhman’s work appeared widely in both the domestic and the foreign press. The archives of Sovfoto in New York, which served as the American distributor of wartime Soviet photography, are full of Trakhman’s work. His most famous images are those of partisans, whom he depicted maintaining daily life behind enemy lines, sabotaging the enemy’s forward advance, and occasionally engaging in seemingly staged battle with the Germans. In the summer of 1942, he began dropping behind enemy lines to photograph partisan life in Ukraine, Belorussia, Leningrad, Pskov, and Novgorod as a Sovinformburo reporter. The 1943 book Partisan War in the Leningrad Region was illustrated with his photos. There were three ways to produce a newspaper at the front. The smaller divisional newspaper print shop had a machine called an “Amerikanka,” an electric generator, and a complete set of type that weighed almost nine hundred pounds. It was all carted around in a single car. The shop could produce two thousand copies in five to six hours. The equipment of the larger army newspaper print shops was carted around in two cars. In one was the printing plant, with a large printing machine whose output was fifteen hundred imprints an hour; the other car held the type, weighing in at more than thirteen hundred pounds. The army print shop produced ten thousand copies of two-column newspapers in six to eight hours. And finally, the largest “front” newspapers were produced by a fully functioning print house. It took four vehicles, each with a typesetting unit, a stereotype unit, a print unit with a small rotary press, and a “power plant.” The editorial boards of all the newspapers had their own zincograph for reproducing photographs.19 Because of these improved and portable printing methods, many newspapers and magazines circulated at the front. For example, among troops on the First Belorussian Front, the largest-circulation newspaper was the front’s own Red Army, which came out in Russian, Tatar, Uzbek, and Kazakh. Of Moscow-based publications, Pravda had the largest circulation, with Red Star coming in a close second. Komsomolskaya Pravda, Izvestiia, and other papers had much smaller circulations.20 Illustrated magazines such as Ogonyok also circulated on the front, so soldiers had access to the images Soviet photojournalists were taking. Those reporting for this system of newspapers, whether with pen, typewriter, or camera, had to travel thousands of miles during the war to get the best story. For photographers, it was imperative to be physically at the scene. After all, print journalists could use telephones, read reports, and interview people to write a story, all from the safety of the

Photojournalists and the War

• 95 •

rear. Photographers charged with documenting particular battles were obliged to be at the scene (or had to stage great photographs). Khaldei was in Moscow at the beginning of the war then was sent to the far north to work with the Arctic Fleet. He was then sent south to the Black Sea Fleet, where he spent two years. The final year of the war, he accompanied the Third Ukrainian Army on its path of liberation through Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria, and Germany. Georgii Zelma was even less settled than Khaldei, and his correspondence with his wife shows that he only stopped off at home to see his family on a couple of occasions during the war.21 Evzerikhin’s son, Yuri, longed for his father, whom he also rarely saw during the war. The paths of father and son crossed rarely while the Evzerikhin family was in evacuation in Chimkent, Kazakhstan. Yuri noted, “He came back only once from the front, after Stalingrad. He did also come back once in July 1942 just before he went to Stalingrad. He sent his material on planes pretty often [so we heard from him periodically through letters]. He came to Moscow a few times, but only for a day to bring his material to the office and then he set off again.”22 And of course, the photographers longed for home—Moscow—when they were sent to the four corners of the country. Their letters and diaries are filled with yearning for the city as much as for their families. Although they were used to traveling on assignment during the 1930s, in wartime, photojournalists traveled more than they ever had and under conditions that no one had ever experienced. Several photojournalists were killed trying to get from here to there. The Warsaw-born Jewish photographer Mikhail Prekhner was killed in Tallinn, Estonia, during a bombing raid on August 28, 1941. In his diary Khaldei describes several near misses during his stint in the north in the late summer and fall of 1941.23 And we hear of further deaths of photographers in pleas from editors to hire new staff. The wartime editor of Pravda, P. N. Pospelov, put in repeated requests to the Central Committee for additional print and photojournalists following human losses. In one particularly dire note from 1944 to Georgy Malenkov, who at the time was head of the Central Committee’s Agitation and Propaganda Department, Pospelov wrote: “Recently several of our military correspondents have been wounded or killed. Those killed are Kalashnikov, Lidov, Strunnikov, and Yerokhin; those injured, Ganichev and Goldman, and Kuznetsov is stricken with typhus. Others are on medical leave. Given how fast the front is moving we are in need of at least 2–3 journalists in order to fill out our staff.”24 Nothing was simple during the four years of war, and these Soviet Jewish photographers were lucky to have survived at all, something that 25–30 million Soviet citizens could not claim.

Photographing Early Losses and Nazi Atrocities The summer and fall of 1941 did not go well for the Soviet army as the German Wehrmacht pushed ever deeper into Russian territory. Khaldei describes the first bombing campaign

• 96 •

world war ii and the holocaust

of Moscow, on July 22, as inspiring utter terror in the capital’s population: “Everyone awaited the announcer today like never before. He announced ‘airplanes have broken through and dropped bombs. . . . There are casualties and fires have broken out.’ Who would have thought that there would be casualties of bombing raids in Moscow? Maybe we thought people would be killed from bombs in Minsk, Kiev, and Sevastopol. . . . Everyone will remember this day.”25 On October 15, 1941, panic broke out as the German army reached the outskirts of Moscow, which was put under selective evacuation orders.26 What could photographers do in such an environment when the entire country was collapsing before their very eyes? What kind of visual narrative could they possibly create to put a positive spin on the unfolding disaster? In these dire times, nearly every issue of Ogonyok had an opening page dedicated to Soviet heroes. This made sense if the press’s goal was, as Mekhlis had commanded, to show off Soviet heroism. But nearly every edition also revealed the violence of German occupation by picturing Nazi atrocities. In fact, through the war, the Main Political Administration of the Red Army reminded editors of the need to publish stories and photographs of Nazi atrocities.27 This dual narrative strategy of celebrating Soviet heroism and publicizing Nazi atrocities visually defined the war for the Soviet population. In a series of Fridlyand’s photographs called “On the Fronts of the Patriotic War” (Fig. 4.4), the editors showed off the radical differences between the two combatants. The top left shows off a large mortar that, as the caption tells us, shot “dozens of fascist planes out of the sky.” And “not a single piece of military equipment has been lost on the Soviet side,” a claim that historians today know was simply not true, but that readers at the time presumably interpreted as a sign of hope. Showing off Soviet military technology emphasized to readers far from the front that the Soviet army had the war under control, even though as of early fall 1941, almost everyone in the country knew that the army did not. Next to the Soviet mortar lies a captured German tank, an example of a “trophy,” a common visual trope. Since captured German soldiers were few and far between, captured German equipment was as close as a Russian reader would get to the enemy. Beneath the artillery, the photo layout pictured the heroic Soviet soldier whose image would grace nearly every publication of the illustrated journal through the war. He looks off into the distance, as was common in socialist realist portraiture. Below him are soldiers looking at posters and cartoons that had been produced by the propaganda arm of the army. Such posters, cartoons, and other images mocking the enemy were ubiquitous during the war, and many of them were produced by Fridlyand’s cousin, Boris Yefimov, the country’s most well-known cartoonist. The photograph that stands out from all the others is the fourth one, showing the utter ruin of a small village in Belorussia. The caption of this early photograph documenting Nazi atrocities through the eyes of a liberator reads: “Burned and ruined houses,

Photojournalists and the War

• 97 •

figure 4.4. Semyon Fridlyand, “On the Fronts of the Patriotic War,” Ogonyok, September 1941.

• 98 •

world war ii and the holocaust

a dead street—these are the images of one Belorussian village in which the Hitlerite bandits reigned for a short time.” This series shows the way photographers tried to represent a nearly unrepresentable war. They photographed Soviet triumph, on an individual, collective, and military level and could easily use the tools of socialist realism to do so. At the same time, they pictured the evils of the enemy, both through their actions and deeds and by showing caricatures and posters. Both in print and photojournalism, the Soviet press made Nazi atrocities a primary means of representing the German war against the Soviet Union to Soviet readers.28 How they would represent unprecedented violence against their own population, however, was a visual story not published widely before. The aesthetics of Nazi atrocity photography was constantly evolving during the war. Ogonyok published its first Nazi atrocity photo on June 25, 1941, its first edition following the invasion, and a gruesome image it was (Fig. 4.5).29 The photograph, labeled a trophy photo, was most probably taken by a German soldier who carried a camera with

figure 4.5. “Punishment in Poland. Those Sentenced Are Forced to Dig Their Own Graves,” Ogonyok, June 25, 1941.

Photojournalists and the War

• 99 •

him on the frontlines to document his work for family and friends back home. If we think about the time frame of publication, it is clear that the Soviet press or at least the political administration of the press was keeping archives of images of Nazi atrocities during the period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Such images of Nazi atrocities in Poland had been circulating in the British and American press since early in the war. The British Illustrated London News published a gruesome full-page layout of a Nazi execution of Poles in March 1941.30 This makes sense, since Britain and Germany were at war. But the Soviet Union was also collecting these trophy photographs or other images smuggled out of occupied Poland. Otherwise, there would have been no time between June 22 and June 25 to kill a German who happened to be keeping a photograph of massacres from Poland while he was in the Soviet Union. The political administration, then, was already preparing its case against Nazi Germany even before war broke out. Using trophy photos to document the enemy’s barbarism was not unfamiliar to Soviet photo editors. In January 1939, Pravda published a series of Japanese atrocity photographs that were, like the Nazi pictures, trophy images, taken by the Japanese themselves. Pravda editors chose to publish graphic images of mass murder with Japanese soldiers looking on. The Soviet reading audience, then, had recent experience digesting violent images of war and of the enemy’s brutality before the German invasion. One particular picture of Japanese atrocities eerily foreshadowed the images that would be published in 1941 of Einsatzgruppen troops, special forces that came in after the German army to conduct mass murders of Jews and others in large burial pits. In German trophy photos of Einsatzgruppen murder campaigns, German soldiers frequently looked on.31 Throughout 1941, nearly all photographs of Nazi atrocities were taken by photographers working for the Germans or by German soldiers themselves. Not infrequently, after a German soldier was killed in battle, Soviet troops would find the body and retrieve the camera documenting the atrocities. It was then delivered to the relevant Soviet authorities, in this case the political commissar of the unit. These perpetrator images, those taken by the Germans and their accomplices, coming out of Poland, shaped the Soviet understanding of the Nazi extermination campaign from its first days. Soviet photographers did not witness scenes of Nazi destruction with their own eyes until late 1941, when the Red Army began retaking cities near Moscow that had been under Nazi occupation for a brief time. Most of what Soviet photographers saw were scenes of corpses in the streets, public hangings, looting, and burning, such as the firebombing of the northern port of Murmansk (Fig. 4.6)—in other words, Nazi atrocities that had everything to do with total war but little to do with the specific Nazi war against the Jews.32 It was in the context of bearing witness to Nazi atrocities to rile up the population’s anger that the Main Political Administration ordered all newspapers to put into the masthead of Communist newspapers the phrase “Death to the German Occupiers” (“Smert’ nemetskim okkupantam”).33 But no Soviet photographer had witnessed the

• 100 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 4.6. Evgenii Khaldei, Woman in Murmansk, 1942. Courtesy of Evgenii Khaldei and the Fotosoyuz Agency.

gruesome scenes of the mass murder of Jews that were going on throughout occupied Soviet Union in 1941.

The First Holocaust Liberation Photographs: Soviet Jewish Photographers at Kerch In January 1942, seven months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Dmitrii Baltermants flew over the Black Sea and descended into the region around the newly liberated city of Kerch. Baltermants had gained experience photographing the heat of battle and the brutality of war at the front just kilometers from the western edge of Moscow in the fall of 1941, but this new assignment in the south would reveal something new about the enemy.34 The German army had occupied Kerch, a small peninsula that juts into the Sea of Azov in southern Russia, in mid-November 1941, but held it for only six weeks. In the first week of December, the Gestapo, the German secret police, registered seventy-five hundred Jews who remained in the city after the arrival of German forces. It then ordered Kerch’s Jews to Sennaya Square, from which they were taken to an antitank ditch on the outskirts of town and shot.35 On December 31, the city was one of the first areas with a significant prewar Jewish population to be liberated from Nazi occupation, which meant that it was one of the first places where Soviet soldiers, journalists, and

Photojournalists and the War

• 101 •

photographers saw with their own eyes the effects of Nazi occupation and the war against European Jewry.36 Baltermants’s plane landed at an airfield on the outskirts of town near a place called Bagerov Trench (Bagerovsky Rov). The photographer saw older women and families wandering around crying, searching for something. And then, amid the wailing, Baltermants saw dozens of corpses littering the bleak, frozen wintertime landscape. “Were they [the bodies of ] Red Army soldiers or prisoners of war?” he asked himself. “The clothing on the corpses suggested that they were civilians, brought out to this field and shot en masse.” As his colleague Lev Borodulin recalled many years later, “Now, we know exactly whose corpses those were, but in that distant January 1942, one had to guess: were these Red Army soldiers or prisoners; how did all of these relatives get here, if they were Communists, how come there were so many, and if they were Communist Youth, how come there were so many small children?”37 On that frozen field near Kerch, Baltermants and the other photojournalists, including Khaldei, who were assigned to Kerch became the first liberators to photograph the mass murder of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen on Soviet soil. Baltermants knew that he was not just photographing for tomorrow’s newspaper but was bearing witness to something important, and he used two rolls of precious film to photograph the scene before him. After delays caused by the exigencies of transporting film across long distances during wartime, two months later, several of his photographs were published in Ogonyok.38

figure 4.7. Dmitrii Baltermants, “Kerch Resident P. I. Ivanova Found Her Husband, Who Was Tortured by the Fascist Executioners,” January 1942, four versions scanned from maquette of Baltermants’s unpublished “That’s How It Was” (“Tak eto bylo”). Courtesy of Michael Mattis. The Ogonyok editors chose to publish the last one. Ogonyok, March 2, 1942.

• 102 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 4.8. Dmitrii Baltermants, “Residents of Kerch Search for Their Relatives. In the photo: V. S. Tereshchenko digs under bodies for her husband.” Ogonyok, March 2, 1942. Courtesy of Michael Mattis.

Khaldei had been sent south after his tour of duty with the Northern Fleet and was also among those to bear witness to the Nazi atrocity in Kerch. “The trench was two kilometers long,” opens the section of his diary about the discovery at Bagerov Trench. Khaldei refers to the victims as “the 7,000 women, children, and elderly,” omitting the word Jew. Khaldei interviewed townspeople about the Germans’ six-week occupation of the city. One story particularly moved him. One evening, the neighbors told me what happened. In this courtyard in which we were standing lived a twenty-year-old girl who was Jewish by ethnicity [po natsional’nalnosti evreika], and as they claimed, she was quite beautiful. A German officer wanted her, but after finding out that she was Jewish, he stopped seeing her. A few days later, they took her away with the other 7,000. When she stood there in front of the soldiers who were shooting her group, she saw the officer and threw herself at his feet begging for mercy. She stood up, was silent, and began walking on. The officer went up to her, hugged her and shot her in the head.

Besides interviewing townspeople, he went directly to the trench to speak to witnesses.39 We know, then, that at the time Khaldei understood that these were Jewish bodies and that Nazi atrocities targeted Jews in a distinctive manner. But both his diary and the framing of the pictures in the press elided the Jewishness of the event. Although Baltermants and Khaldei were among the first photographers at the scene, the first Kerch photographs to appear in the press were by another Jewish photographer

Photojournalists and the War

• 103 •

working for TASS, Mark Redkin, whose photos appeared in Ogonyok on February 4, 1942.40 The magazine published a landscape of bodies strewn along an antitank ditch at the center of the composition. Two Soviet soldiers standing on the right investigate the scene as the white of the sky and the white of the snow in the ditch blend together at the top left. The photo beneath the landscape image shows a close-up of the dead, in this case a mother surrounded by dead children. At the time, no one could have imagined a more horrible image, especially one taken by Soviet photographers, as opposed to German trophy photographs. The caption beneath the photographs suggests how Redkin and the Ogonyok editors placed the photographs into an evolving narrative of the war and of Nazi atrocities: “Hitler ordered his bandits to annihilate the peaceful Soviet population. Wherever the Germans found themselves, they murdered thousands of women and children. The bodies of the murdered were dumped in a pit (see above photograph). Among the murdered were many women and children (see lower photograph). The Hitlerite thugs showed no one any mercy.” The caption writers obscured the perpetrators of the crimes. In one sentence it is followers of Hitler; in another, Germans. And no mention is made of the fact that most of the dead women and children so grotesquely splashed on the pages of the magazine were Jewish.41

figure 4.9. Evgenii Khaldei, “Soviets Dig a Grave,” Kerch, 1942. Courtesy of Evgenii Khaldei and the Fotosoyuz Agency.

• 104 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 4.10. Dmitrii Baltermants and Israel Ozerskii, “Hitlerite Atrocities in Kerch,” Ogonyok, March 2, 1942. P. I. Ivanova appears on the left page, lower right corner.

One month later, Ogonyok followed up its earlier Kerch photographs with a two-page layout of photographs by Baltermants and Israel Ozerskii (Fig. 4.10), and an article by the journalist Yakov Antselovitch. The paragraph introducing the photo: “These photographs were taken at a moment after the German occupiers drove [the people] out to this place. 7,500 residents from the very elderly to breast-feeding babies were shot from just a single city. They were killed in cold blood in a premeditated fashion. They were killed indiscriminately—Russians and Tatars, Ukrainians and Jews. The Hitlerites have indiscriminately murdered the Soviet population in many other cities, villages, and the countryside.” It is clear from the caption that by the 1940s, Soviet citizens, including victims of Nazi atrocities, were categorized first and foremost by ethnicity. We have seen that this move toward seeing Soviet citizens in terms of ethnicity more than of class, as one might expect in a socialist country, had already taken hold in the late 1930s as photographers were ordered to document the ethnicity of the subjects of their work. And Jews were clearly included among Soviet ethnicities. So if he had been properly carrying out those original orders, Baltermants would have known the ethnic identity of those bearing witness to the crime and the victims in his photographs. Many years after the war, Baltermants claimed

Photojournalists and the War

• 105 •

to have understood that the German occupiers did not, as the caption states, kill Kerch residents “indiscriminately.” He recognized that Jews and other politically suspect people were targeted for murder at Kerch: “In fall 1941 the Germans drove 7,000 residents—partisans, Communists, and Jews—to the trench. They drove out whole families—women, the elderly, children. They drove all of them to an antitank ditch and shot them.”42 In the newspapers published during the war, writers, photographers, and editors suggested that this was a massacre of Jews in other ways. The picture of the woman wailing over a pile of corpses, the first photograph in the montage, is captioned, “Residents of Kerch Search for Their Relatives. In the photo: V. S. Tereshchenko digs under bodies for her husband. On the right: the body of 67-year-old I. Kh. Kogan.” (See Fig. 4.8 for closeup.) By juxtaposing the two photographs, the editors suggest that the Jewish Kogan (Russian for Cohen) is, in fact, the husband for whom the very Ukrainian-sounding Tereshchenko was searching. Although this couple reflected the idealized Soviet multiethnic family, the fact could not have been lost on the Soviet reader that after the Nazis left town, the Ukrainian Tereshchenko was alive, and the Jewish Kogan was dead. Finally, the Ogonyok editor back in Moscow and Antselovitch hint at the Jewishness of the story when Antselovitch says that according to orders from Berlin, the first to be shot were “Soviet citizens of one particular ethnicity.” In an effort to universalize Nazi atrocities, Soviet editors rarely labeled the victims of Nazi atrocities explicitly as Jews or included Jews in lists of peoples who were targeted. And although some readers might not have understood the allusion, many, Jews among them, would have understood exactly which ethnicity the writer was speaking about. After all, Nazi anti-Semitism was no secret in the Soviet Union. In November 1936, Pravda reported on a speech by Viacheslav Molotov on the occasion of the new Soviet constitution. Condemning fascism for its anti-Semitism, Molotov cited a previously unpublicized comment by Joseph Stalin that “anti-Semitism, like any form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.” Molotov added that “brotherly feelings for the Jewish people” would “define our attitudes toward anti-Semites and anti-Semitic atrocities wherever they occur.” The Soviet press covered Kristallnacht, the pogrom that took place throughout Germany on November 9, 1938, referring to “a massacre of a defenseless Jewish population.” And that same year, two Jewish filmmakers released Professor Mamlock, a major Soviet film depicting the persecution of Jews in Germany.43 For the two years in which the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was in effect, anti-Nazi propaganda disappeared from the pages of the press, and then returned with a vengeance with the outbreak of war. Whether or not people remember these late 1930s discussions of Nazi anti-Semitism, according to Zvi Gitelman’s study of Soviet Jewish war veterans, “Most said they knew about [atrocities against Jews] from newspapers and lectures at the front.”44 And as historian Karel Berkhoff has convincingly shown, the Soviet leadership behind the scenes and the general Soviet public knew about the Nazi war against the Jews

• 106 •

world war ii and the holocaust

from the summer of 1941.45 Izvestiia published an extensive article about the August 24, 1941, meeting in Gorky Park at which leading Soviet Jewish intellectuals called for more global intervention in a war that was targeting Jews.46 An open letter to the Jews of the world raised alarm: “If in the enslaved countries, bloody fascism introduced its ‘new order’ by means of the knife and gallows, and with the assistance of fire and violence, with regard to the Jewish people, bloody fascism has planned . . . the total and unconditional destruction of the Jews by all means at the fascist butchers’ disposal.”47 On November 19, 1941, discussing the massacre of Kiev’s Jewish community at Babi Yar, Izvestiia reported that “in Kiev, the Germans executed 52,000 Jews—men, women, and children.” Pravda referred ten days later to “the Jewish pogrom” in Kiev that killed 52,000.48 Thus, any reader of the mainstream Russian-language Soviet press understood that the Nazis were after Jews. As for the use of phrases like “peaceful Soviet citizens” rather than “Jews,” Berkhoff argues that it was not until January 1942 that Stalin began a broader initiative to strip Nazi Germany’s Jewish victims of their Jewishness. More important, this initiative was applied very inconsistently throughout the war.49 Nonetheless, for editors, who were on the frontlines of the information war, making the photograph solely about Jewish suffering, as opposed to national Soviet suffering, ran the risk of having the general readership not see themselves in the photograph. The word Soviet was pan-ethnic and served as a unifying rhetorical device. Baltermants took the photographs for his Ogonyok spread on January 2, 1942 (see Fig. 4.10); however, the images and essay were not published until March. Photographs traveled long distances between photographer and editor, and sometimes they didn’t make it to their destination. Only a few of Baltermants’s Kerch photographs were published in Soviet newspapers or magazines at the time of the event. But photographs also circulated in other ways during the war. They appeared in foreign newspapers, such as the British Picture Post, which published a series of Baltermants’s Kerch photographs in June 1942.50 And they ended up in U.S. government files for the Office of Emergency Management, which collected all kind of defense-related information including, among other things, Soviet photographs of Nazi atrocities.51 Immediately after the city’s liberation, Kerch administrators put up posters giving visually graphic evidence of what the Nazis had done, in case it was not obvious to the city’s traumatized residents. The posters were intended to shock and encourage their viewers to fight harder to prevent the German army from reconquering the city, which it would unfortunately do several months later. The posters were produced by TASS Windows (Okna TASS), a highly successful propaganda operation that put out images demonizing the enemy. TASS Windows used easily recognizable figures from the world of illustrations and cartoons. One collection of images was titled “Death to the German Occupiers” and displayed a series of twenty photographs by Baltermants taken at the killing fields on the outskirts of town. “7000 murdered, and they didn’t spare old people,

Photojournalists and the War

• 107 •

figure 4.11. Evgenii Khaldei, Residents of Kerch examine TASS Windows, 1942. Courtesy of Evgenii Khaldei and the Fotosoyuz Agency.

women, or children,” the banner proclaimed. The new number of dead—seven thousand—would become the accepted figure for the Kerch killings, even though the first account had put the number at seventy-five hundred. Although Ogonyok published only a small selection of his photographs, TASS Windows republished much of Baltermants’s visual testimony of the Kerch massacres.52 Immediately after its liberation, Kerch became the symbolic reference point for Nazi atrocities, the place at which Soviet witnesses saw with their own eyes and their own cameras that the rumors, innuendo, and even the published trophy photographs were true. Ilya Selvinskii’s poem, “I Saw This” (“Ia eto videl”) appeared in Red Star not long after photographs of Kerch began appearing in February 1942.53 (According to the scholar Maxim Shrayer, Selvinskii also refers to the Jewishness of the sites’ witnesses. As Selvinskii writes, “Right away we headed there. The writer Romm / the photographer / I and the critic Goffenshefer.” (The unnamed photographer would obviously be Jewish as well.)54 Selvinskii opens by thematizing the act of seeing in the poem: “It’s possible to ignore gossip, / or to distrust newspaper stories, / but I saw it with my own eyes. / Get it? I myself.” It is ironic that Selvinskii recognizes that reports of Nazi atrocities that had been published widely in the Soviet press were potentially too fantastic to believe, leading readers to “distrust newspaper stories.” But in January 1942, Selvinskii shows that the Soviets now had

• 108 •

world war ii and the holocaust

the power of the eyewitness—himself, the poet—and of the liberators’ cameras. Like Baltermants, Selvinskii questions who these victims in the pits really are: “Who are these people? Combatants? Maybe a few. / Maybe they’re partisans? No. / Look there lies lopeared Kolka—/ just 11 years old.” And Selvinskii also includes the story of a Jewish girl, “who was with a child. Like in a dream.” The poem ends, “A trench . . . why don’t I tell a poem about it? / 7,000 corpses. / Semites. . . . Slavs . . . / Yes! But it’s impossible with words. / With gunfire! Only with gunfire!”55 In his 1943 book Russia at War, Ilya Ehrenburg, a Soviet Jewish journalist and wellknown wartime Soviet writer, wrote about the German atrocities at Kerch: “[The Germans] came to Russia drunk with the blood of Poles, Frenchmen, and Serbs, with the blood of old people, girls, and infants in arms. And death came with them to our country. I don’t mean the death of soldiers, for no war is without its victims. I refer to the gallows from which the bodies of Russian girls are dangling, and the terrible pit near Kerch in which the children of Russians, Tatars, and Jews are buried. . . . The memory of what we have experienced cannot be wiped out.”56 These images, poems, and articles figured Kerch as the symbolic site of Nazi atrocities until 1943, when Babi Yar, the mass killing site in Kiev, would come to overshadow what had been discovered before.

From Bad to Worse The year 1942 was as bad, if not worse, than 1941 for the Red Army. German troops pushed deeper into the Soviet Union on the southern flank and maintained their siege of Leningrad, which starved the city into near submission. German troops had been repelled from the capital, but were stationed not far to the west of the city. Although the United States finally entered the war on the side of the Allies in December 1941, it would be more than two years before the elusive “second front” opened in Europe. Khaldei spent most of 1942 in the Black Sea region photographing naval battles, the attempted defense of cities in Georgia and the Caucasus, and areas in Crimea that were under Nazi attack. His diary from that year tells of the day-to-day tragedies to which he bore witness such as the time he was on leave from his ship to photograph the Black Sea city of Tuapse. While he was in the city on assignment, the Luftwaffe carried out a bombing raid on the port. Surviving the raid, Khaldei returned to the ship on which he had been living and discovered that a bomb had ripped a hole through it, killing many of the people “with whom I had been sitting watching a film just two nights ago.”57 In a February 1942 entry, Khaldei talks about several of his journalist/photographer friends and the fate that had befallen each of them: “Grisha Nilov died while in transit near Sevastopol, Vadim Seniavskii is lying in a hospital without a left eye; Natan is buried in a mound. Just two weeks ago in Moscow all four of us were sitting and talking about our upcoming travels, and now only two of us will return to Moscow.”58 In late 1942, Emmanuel Evzerikhin

Photojournalists and the War

• 109 •

frequently wrote to his editor back in Moscow about the difficulty of developing his film, let alone getting it to Moscow. In one case, he was stuck on one side of the Volga in Stalingrad, while his developing equipment was on the other.59 In a letter dated September 28, he complained to his editor, “It’s become much more difficult to work now, especially when trying to sleep at night in the trenches on the frontline. We have no warm clothing against the cold.” He worried frequently about money; about how his developed film would get to Moscow; and occasionally in his most poignant moments, about whether he would survive the war at all. By summer 1942, it seemed that some editors of the major press had grown tired of assaulting their readers with images of Nazi atrocities. Although the occasional trophy photo continued to appear, the number of sites of Nazi brutality being liberated dropped. So stories and images dedicated to the story of Nazi atrocities decreased. The Main Political Administration noticed this and was none too pleased that at the most dire time for the Soviet Union during the war, the press was not reminding the public of the nature of the enemy. In July 1942, it issued a directive to the heads of political administrations on each front reminding them of the centrality of Nazi atrocities to the Soviet story of the war: Recently you have practically stopped focusing on materials showing the enemy’s atrocities on prisoners of war and injured soldiers, and on the Soviet population in the temporarily occupied regions. This is simply unacceptable right now when we need, more strongly than earlier, to raise the hatred of each Red Army person and of the whole population to the enemy. I propose that you: 1. Carefully collect material and focus on all facts, showing evidence of atrocities of the enemy to prisoners and injured Red Army soldiers, commanders and political workers and to the population. 2. Regularly send to the Agitprop division of the Main Political Administration: a. Photographs of those tortured by the enemy or other victims, whether soldiers or civilians, photographs of cities, cultural institutions, historical sites, and hospitals destroyed or burned down by the occupiers. Each photograph must include a corresponding caption. b. Acts and documentation of the enemy’s atrocities, testimony from victims, evidence of atrocities, theft. All of these documents should include signatures of the victims or those giving testimonies and should be approved by local Party and Soviet organizations or political organizations. c. All photographs, letters, diaries, or other documents discovered on enemy officers or soldiers that testify to their atrocities, attacks, or robbery of the occupiers. In addition to this material, it’s necessary to send comments of Red Army fighters about the facts of German atrocities, about the need for revenge for those Red Army soldiers and peaceful citizens tortured by the Germans. This material develops hatred toward the enemy and prepares our citizens for the merciless vengeance for the suffering of our people.60

• 110 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 4.12. “We Will Get Revenge,” Ogonyok, August 2, 1942.

Photojournalists and the War

• 111 •

Since photographs, which were seen as documentary evidence of crimes, were so central to wartime propaganda, photojournalists were mobilized as part of the vengeance campaign. The directive interpreted Nazi atrocities differently from the way they were understood at the beginning of the war. If in late 1941 and early 1942, newspapers and photographs expressed a sense of shock at the depth of Nazi violence, by summer 1942, the newspapers and magazines were calling for vengeance against an enemy that had no sense of rules of engagement. In addition, Soviet photographers had the more practical problem of not having new discoveries of Nazi atrocities to photograph, since the front was still moving from west to east, not vice versa. Perpetrator photographs, which appeared throughout 1942, made a big return in late summer after the Main Political Administration directive and after Stalin’s “Not a Step Backward” order was announced. Fearing total collapse of the country, on July 28, 1942, Stalin issued an order that called for no further retreat from Soviet territory, under punishment of being shot. This fear of death on either side of the front undoubtedly forced Soviet soldiers to fight suicidal missions. Such a commitment demanded a new round of Nazi atrocity photographs, since these reminded Soviet readers that the Nazis not only were committing atrocities against the Soviet population, but also enjoyed their acts of violence. The press introduced new concepts of memory and vengeance in headlines that were intended to terrorize the population and rile up its anger. The words “We will not forget” (My ne zabudem) and “We will get revenge” (Otomstim) were often paired with images of Nazi atrocities, as in the cover of Ogonyok from August 1942 (Fig. 4.12). The headlines demanded, “Don’t forget what the Germans are doing. This is your fate if you allow them to advance. Therefore, do not take another step backward, and get revenge for these crimes.”

Stalingrad and Emmanuel Evzerikhin’s Wartime Photojournalism By late summer 1942, when the months-long battle for the great city on the Volga began, the Soviet Union was in a dismal state. Large swaths of the country were occupied, oil-rich territory in the Caucasus was under threat of occupation, the rest of Europe was hopelessly crushed under German occupation, and most Jews in those occupied areas were being rounded up and murdered as the extermination camps in Poland became operational.61 In the context of mobilizing the country to stave off defeat, the media machine was tightened. On August 13, 1942, the Central Committee issued a resolution about print and photojournalists working for central newspapers and for TASS. The Central Committee feared that “too many reporters do not have enough experience with the military and are revealing secrets.” Because of this, the committee resolved to limit the number of special reporters on the front. The right to have special correspondents was granted only to Pravda, Red Star, Red Fleet, Komsomolskaya Pravda, and Stalinist Hawk, the newspaper of the air force. In addition, Sovinformburo, TASS, and the All-Union Radio Committee

• 112 •

world war ii and the holocaust

were permitted to have their own special correspondents. The resolution was adamant: “Regional and republic newspapers can have their correspondents on the front only if there is military action taking place in their given region or territory.” Finally, all special correspondents had to have a military rank.62 The same resolution once again reminded editors and journalists to pay particular attention to collecting and publishing material “about the atrocities and plunders of the Germans on occupied territory.”63 By limiting the number of reporters, the Party hoped to control information; moreover, journalists were subjected to “quality control,” through training, censorship, and other forms of regulation. Writers attended seminars on military issues, and editors circulated lists of approved subjects that writers and photojournalists were expected to follow. Photojournalists felt the effects of these new restrictions. Khaldei ran into political trouble because of them. His work with the Black Sea Fleet had been so good that the twenty-six-year-old was promoted to a higher rank. Such honors, however, did not protect him from nearly being fired in the summer of 1943. He had become accustomed to sending his work to the central censors in Moscow and, only occasionally, getting approval from the local military censor who worked with the Black Sea Fleet. For his failing to get military censor approval on several photographs he took in 1943, the head of TASS nearly pulled Khaldei from his assignment. Only a petition from the head of the photo division of the agency to its headquarters kept him with the Black Sea Fleet.64 As for Dmitrii Baltermants, who had several important photographs of the defense of Moscow published in late 1941 and of the discovery of Kerch in 1942, major publications widely reproduced his work through the first half of 1942. However, for failing to properly caption a photograph, he was sent to a punishment battalion (shtrafbat), and for much of the rest of the war he worked for a minor front newspaper. Only in 1947 did he regain his earlier status, after he was rehired by Ogonyok.65 Despite the more restrictive political climate, for several photographers the battle for Stalingrad proved to be an opportunity to boost their careers as military photographers. Arkady Shaykhet, a prominent figure through the late 1920s and first half of the 1930s, had not been as central to the war effort. That the forty-four-year-old originator of Soviet photojournalism was still among the country’s leading photographers is attested to by a photo essay published in November 1942 (Fig. 4.13). The opening image is a panoramic view of Stalingrad from across the Volga River, the city smoldering in ruins. The battle for the city, which lay on the left bank of the river, was waged building by building; many photographers were based on the right bank, rather than in the city itself. Shaykhet, who worked for the Main Political Administration’s periodical Front Illustration, must have made the dangerous river crossing to get his series of images, since the four other photographs capture soldiers in the heat of battle. Usually, in socialist realist style, Soviet soldiers were glorified through close-ups of their faces shot from below, but Shaykhet’s soldiers are often shot from behind or from the side. Through

Photojournalists and the War

figure 4.13. Arkady Shaykhet, “Battle for Stalingrad,” Ogonyok, November 15, 1942.

• 113 •

• 114 •

world war ii and the holocaust

Shaykhet’s lens, and those of others working in this period, soldiers were not turned into icons. They were shown simply doing their job. Other photographers clearly staged wartime photographs to elevate the status of the soldier. In one example, an image by Fridlyand was supposedly taken in the heat of battle, but the images of this scene in Fridlyand’s archive show that he set up this picture on the front (Fig. 4.14). Brave soldiers fire on the enemy in the background, while a communications officer is on the phone in the foreground, maintaining a connection with the authorities. For reasons that are not clear, Fridlyand did not seem to have photographed actual fighting in Stalingrad, as did several of his colleagues, including Shaykhet.66 Most photojournalists worked for TASS. Wire service correspondents such as Khaldei and Evzerikhin were embedded photographers and received instructions from their editors in Moscow. The head of the TASS photo division, P. Serebriannikov, corresponded constantly with his photojournalists on the front. His several-month-long exchange with Evzerikhin during the battle at Stalingrad offers a view of the relationship between editor and frontline photographer. Serebriannikov was responsible for ensuring that TASS photographers received the latest regulations and directives from the Main Political Administration. These told photographers what subjects were in demand, what the hierarchy of censorship organizations was, how often photojournalists were expected to send in material, and other issues that shaped the day-to-day life of a frontline photographer. The dialogue between editor and photographer continued long after a journalist began sending in photographs of a particular battle. Evzerikhin and Serebriannikov communicated almost exclusively by writing and sending packages to one another. When Evzerikhin wanted to get his negatives of the latest battle in Stalingrad back to Moscow, he sent them with military pilots flying supplies and mail between the front and Moscow. Sometimes not all his material made it in a timely manner.67 These delays and the less likely but more devastating potential of a military plane being shot down or crashing prompted Serebriannikov to let Evzerikhin and other photographers know how much material arrived. The relationship between editor and photographer was not equal. Serebriannikov, back in Moscow, could help Evzerikhin place his photographs in the best publications, which would earn the young photographer better royalties to support his family back home. He could also help him take better photographs so Evzerikhin could compete with other Stalingrad photographers. He warned Evzerikhin: “Don’t be tempted into setting up photographs. And pay special attention to panorama shots. Show all different kinds of troops.”68 With this comment, Serebriannikov discouraged Evzerikhin from employing the common Soviet photojournalistic convention of setting up scenes to make a picture more meaningful and more aesthetically interesting. The exchanges in this private correspondence between editor and photographer reflected the public debates from the 1930s about “staging” and “re-creating the facts,” that once got Evzerikhin in trouble.

Photojournalists and the War

• 115 •

figure 4.14. Semyon Fridlyand, “Fighting near the Don,” Ogonyok, October 4, 1942. Courtesy of the Dalbey Photographic Collection at the University of Denver.

• 116 •

world war ii and the holocaust

A photograph of Stalingrad burning shows little indication of staging, although there are signs that Evzerikhin darkened the rising smoke for effect (Fig. 4.15). The image was probably a response to Serebriannikov’s request for panoramic shots of the city. From the angle, it appears that Evzerikhin took the photograph while making the dangerous crossing of the Volga either on his way to the flames of battle on the left bank or returning from them.69 This photograph reveals an outcome of the complicated relationship between individual creative inspiration and editorial direction that defined Soviet wartime photojournalism. In one letter, Serebriannikov recognized that the bland language of the most current subject list he had sent to his photographers would not necessarily inspire creative greatness. He encouraged Evzerikhin to photograph more boldly. “I’ve sent you a new list of desired subjects. Try to add in the heroic spirit, the stoicism, and the bravery of our Red Army.”70 Once Evzerikhin crossed the river, he grew closer to the action. Nonetheless, unlike the photographs by Zelma and Shaykhet, most of his do not show the heat of battle. Evzerikhin was more interested in the aftermath of violence. Evzerikhin shows not only the violence of war, but how the Soviets documented it (Fig. 4.16). Facing a building from which flames are raging, and on the corner of which is a clock frozen in time, a lone filmmaker shoots the scene. His free hand is raised to block out excess light from the flames and to protect himself and his camera from the ash and smoldering embers that fall on the street where he

figure 4.15. Emmanuel Evzerikhin, Stalingrad, 1942. Courtesy of Emmanuel Evzerikhin and the Fotosoyuz Agency.

Photojournalists and the War

• 117 •

figure 4.16. Emmanuel Evzerikhin, Filmmaker, in Stalingrad, 1942. Courtesy of Emmanuel Evzerikhin and the Fotosoyuz Agency.

stands. Such statements on war might have pleased Evzerikhin’s eye, but they were not central to the subject list that his editor had sent him. Evzerikhin was reprimanded by his editor precisely for photographs like the one above—meaningful and symbolic, but neither heroically elevating Soviet citizens, nor usefully documenting Nazi crimes. One of Evzerikhin’s most famous images, again a symbolic statement on the nature of war, is a grim scene of a fountain at the center of Stalingrad (Fig. 4.17). The subject of this classic image of children dancing the khorovod, a circle dance common in Russia, once might have projected innocence and normal life in the center of Stalingrad. The children’s fountain stood in the square just in front of Stalingrad’s main train station, greeting arriving visitors with its message of an exuberant future. Evzerikhin’s photograph turned that image of innocence upside down and turned the fountain into a commentary on war. In the background is a city now in flames and littered with rubble, devastated by months of bombing. The city square, once bustling with pedestrians, is empty, save a lone person, blurred and off to the right, who kneels at the fountain. What dominates the center of the frame are “children” engaging in leisure time activity, but it seems that the only children who have survived the war are made of concrete and placed around a fountain. In Evzerikhin’s apocalyptic vision, life as we know it has ended. He sent this moving photograph, which nevertheless had little propaganda value, to his editors.

• 118 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 4.17. Emmanuel Evzerikhin, Fountain, Stalingrad, 1942. Courtesy of Emmanuel Evzerikhin and the Fotosoyuz Agency.

Meanwhile, Evzerikhin’s colleagues (or competitors) at Stalingrad were approaching the battle as Lev Mekhlis and Serebriannikov might have wanted—through the lens of heroism. Zelma made a name for himself as a military photographer at Stalingrad. After photographing the failed defense of Odessa in 1941, he was sent to the far north on the Rybachi Peninsula and then to the central front in Voronezh. In August 1942, he was assigned to General Chuikov’s Sixty-second Army, which would go on to defeat the German General Paulus at Stalingrad in February 1943. He remained in Stalingrad for nearly the entire battle with a brief stint back in Moscow in late fall 1942. To stay on top of the competition between photographers, he set up his own darkroom and photo lab on the Soviet side of the Volga River in the village of Burkovskii so he could be the first photographer to send developed film of the battle back to Moscow. Although he worked for Izvestiia, many of his photos were published in Front Illustration.71 If Evzerikhin and Shaykhet shot panoramas of Stalingrad, Zelma photographed what the dangerous crossing of the Volga looked and felt like. As shells explode around him, Zelma’s camera captures the city off to the right of the frame (Fig. 4.18). A Zelma photograph from Stalingrad (Fig. 4.19) shows a more heroic vision of the battle than that offered by Evzerikhin. This beautifully composed image of a tank plowing through snow in the city demonstrates Soviet power. Images of tanks became popular with Stalingrad and reappeared regularly throughout the rest of the war. Symbols of

Photojournalists and the War

• 119 •

figure 4.18. Georgii Zelma, Crossing the Volga at Stalingrad, fall 1942. Courtesy of Teresa and Paul Harbaugh and Michael Mattis.

Soviet might, they were always driving forward into the edge of the frame. Similarly, Zelma’s famous photograph of soldiers charging up Mamayev Hill (see chapter 7) in the center of Stalingrad is an icon of heroism. Zelma isn’t close enough to capture the faces of the soldiers, and instead shows them to be the Soviet military “everyman” charging the hill with guns at the ready (see Fig. 7.8). What most strikes the viewer, however, is the utter destruction in which they are fighting. What were once busy streets and overcrowded residential buildings are now piles of rubble and teetering walls of concrete. This Zelma photograph circulated widely and became one of the most familiar representations of

figure 4.19. Georgii Zelma, Stalingrad, fall 1942. Courtesy of Teresa and Paul Harbaugh and Michael Mattis.

• 120 •

world war ii and the holocaust

Stalingrad. As we will see in the last chapter, this iconic image of heroism in the face of adversity masked the sheer brutality of the battle. With such powerful images of heroism as Zelma’s circulating, it is perhaps not surprising that Evzerikhin’s editor was less than pleased with his photographer’s output. Sometimes, Serebriannikov directly criticized Evzerikhin’s work, reminding him that there were other photographers at Stalingrad with whom he was competing. In October 1942, two months after the battle began, Evzerikhin received this reprimand from his boss: For more than a month the heroic defenders of Stalingrad have bravely and stoically held off all attacks of the bestial Hitlerite forces. However, the photo agency Fotokhronika TASS has not received a single shot from a single photojournalist about the defense of the city itself. By the way, a whole series of newspaper photographers, such as Comrades Tyomin and Troshkin [working for Pravda], have produced a series of impressive and historical photographs of Stalingrad itself. The photo agency is not at all pleased with this situation. We’re interested in scenes of street battles, important people, residents of Stalingrad— defenders of their hometown, and other themes.72

Fortunately, Evzerikhin’s work picked up, and his output improved. Eventually, Serebriannikov promoted him to the rank of “senior correspondent” as a result of his Stalingrad work.73 By November, the once critical editor was complimentary: “Comrade Evzerikhin! I am communicating about the results of your work in the month of October. Based on the number of negatives received and the quality of the work, you occupy one of the first places among front correspondents. In October we received 86 negatives: 22 of them were sent onto the wires [dany tirazhami], 4 were serialized [po klishe], 29 put into the queue for selection by publications [na otbor] and 11 to the archive [fototek].”74 Photographers like Evzerikhin had more of their work circulating to more places around the country through faster wire services. During the battle of Stalingrad, TASS began sending more photographs to regional newspapers to better connect the periphery to the center. To facilitate this, photographers were asked to provide more information that might be useful to regional and republic newspapers that might not be of particular interest to a central newspaper like Pravda or Izvestiia. “In the text that accompanies your photographs, mention where the people you note are from and what kind of work they do (we need the city, district, and region). Specifically, for newspapers from Yakutia, look out for Yakuts in the ranks.”75 The request for more regional information was not simply to record more names, but having the information connected regions distant from the frontlines to the war by pointing out that their hometown or ethnic group was fighting on the front too. Near the end of the battle, in January 1943, Serebriannikov turned up the heat on Evzerikhin, complaining again that his photographs were becoming repetitive. But he also began requesting more “documents about German atrocities,” clearly a sign that, as the

Photojournalists and the War

• 121 •

tide of war was turning in favor of the Soviets, the photographers would be actively involved in supplying documentary material of Nazi war crimes.76 As Serebriannikov’s correspondence with Evzerikhin shows, although the conditions under which photojournalists worked changed radically during the war, what remained constant was a hierarchical and at times tense relationship with editors. Editors were the link between Party power and journalists in the field, which gave them responsibility for the material that appeared in the newspapers. Red Star’s editor, David Ortenberg, was one of the most well known newspaper figures during the war and wrote extensively about the life of a wartime editor. He talked about how Party orders were translated into journalistic policy and how different journalists projected the war to the Soviet population. It is clear from his notebook that he, like all editors, had his favorite photographers. He had two: Mikhail Bernshteyn and Viktor Tyomin, Jewish photographers who worked for Red Star, Pravda, and other publications.77 Ortenberg’s praise of these photojournalists in his diary is rare in often rancorous editor-photographer relations.78 Unlike Tyomin, Bernshteyn, Markov-Grinberg, Baltermants, and others who worked for a particular publication, Evzerikhin and Khaldei, as photographers for a wire service, could not envision their audience. Their photographs could appear in leading Communist Party newspapers, such as Pravda, or in regional agricultural newspapers. It could also end up abroad, since one of TASS’s most important roles was sending photographic material about the eastern front to the foreign press. In October 1942, the head of TASS, Yakov Khavinson, reminded his correspondents, both those on the front and those in the rear, that TASS was supplying the foreign press with photographs. Khavinson even offered additional pay to photographers whose images were purchased by the foreign press.79 Photographers had little control over where their pictures were published, but hoped that any publication would pay for rights to publish their wartime photography. Of course for photojournalists, who might snap a whole roll of photographs at a given scene, most photographs were never printed, let alone published, and ended up in the archive. Since he worked for a wire service, Evzerikhin was more widely published than many other wartime correspondents, and some of his photos appeared in the foreign press, almost always unattributed. His images also appeared in the regional, the republic, and the Soviet press in other languages, and occasionally, he was published in a central newspaper such as Izvestiia or Evening Moscow (Vechernaia Moskva), always a coup, since these newspapers had their own staff photographers.80

1943 : A Turning Point for Soviet Jewish Photographers As the front finally started moving from east to west, a new round of political directives, consolidations, and rules came down from the higher-ups. In March 1943, all TASS

• 122 •

world war ii and the holocaust

photojournalists received instructions, which were valid for three months, from Serebriannikov telling them to take pictures of (1) the support given to families of soldiers on the front, (2) help given to the people of recently liberated areas, (3) general military training (at least among the male population), (4) deputies of the Supreme Soviet, as well as the best producers in factories, on collective farms, etc., (5) food and other gifts given to soldiers on the front in honor of May 1, (6) hospitals and the care of the injured, (7) care for permanently injured veterans, (8) visits by famous people to the front.81

The list shows how the changing fortunes of the Soviet army would be reflected in photography. There were needs for photographs of “liberation,” the reestablishment of factories and kolkhozes, and other signs of life, as opposed to constant reminders of the Nazi death machine. In May 1943, the Central Committee resolved to increase Party oversight of front newspapers, and in July, the Main Political Administration called for greater oversight of all newspapers. In mid-July, the administration held an army conference for all front and army newspaper editors.82 The Party’s screws were tightening. Given the new mood, the Soviet state asserted a patriotic nationalism that resurrected classic symbols of the Russian nation. In May 1943 the internationalist Comintern—the organization that had been Moscow’s network of Communist Parties around the world— was dissolved as a gesture of nonaggression to the Soviet Union’s international allies. Although it was meant to lessen the Allies’ suspicions, it also signaled a more nationally focused, as opposed to ideologically driven, war effort. The “Internationale”—the musical symbol of international revolution—was ditched in favor of the more nationalistic hymn of the Soviet Union, which was officially adopted in 1944. Stalin also reestablished the Russian Orthodox Church’s patriarchate in 1943.83 This shift from seeing the Soviet Union as a Communist beacon of socialism and a brotherhood of peoples to seeing the country as the Russian motherland under attack from German invaders had consequences for Soviet Jewish photographers. After all, these were Jews who had built their lives and careers in a “land that knew no distinctions,” in a country in which Jews had become such an integral part of the urban educated elite that, as Yuri Slezkine argued, “in 1932, Jewish and Russian were virtually interchangeable.”84 Gennady Kostyrchenko, perhaps the most important scholar writing about anti-Semitism in the Stalinist period, suggests that the midpoint of the war marked a major turning point for Jewish life in the Soviet Union.85 Given this shift away from internationalism toward nationalism, it is no surprise that the Soviet photographic corps and the entire journalistic network, a heavily Jewish profession before the war, would come under suspicion. Already in May 1942, Ilya Ehrenburg wrote curtly in a private notebook of “anti-Semitism among party bureaucrats.”86 There was talk among Party members that Jews were too prominent.87 The Bolshoi Theater, considered a nest of Jews, was purged of its Jewish staff in 1942–1943, and Izvestiia’s editor-

Photojournalists and the War

• 123 •

in-chief, L. Ia. Rovinskii, was dismissed from his position in November 1944 for his “irresponsible relationship to the editing of the newspaper.”88 Among military correspondents, the most visible attack on Jews was the August 1943 firing of Red Star editor David Ortenberg. His diary from 1943 ends sarcastically on August 24: “And further on, the way west, toward the Dnepr. However, I participated in the crossing of the Dnepr not as an editor,” since he had been relieved of these duties. His afterword begins, “On the last day of July 1943 I signed the last column of Red Star for the last time. What happened?”89 Konstantin Simonov, a prominent Red Star correspondent, writes rather nonchalantly about Ortenberg’s firing: “Unexpectedly, especially for us military correspondents, the editor was replaced.” Ortenberg was “reassigned” to the front and General Nikolai Talensky became editor of Red Star. At the time, no one spoke openly about the reasons for Ortenberg’s dismissal, but later in his memoir, Ortenberg suggests that everyone understood what was going on. He recalled a conversation with Shcherbakov, secretary of the Central Committee, head of the Main Political Administration, deputy commissar of defense, and head of Sovinformburo, just months before his firing: Aleksandr Sergeyevitch called me in and said exactly the following: ‘ You have a lot of Jews on the editorial board. . . . You need to reduce it.’ These words of the secretary of the Central Committee shocked me. I was literally numb. And then I answered, ‘It’s already done . . . ’ ‘What is?’ he asked. ‘I already slashed [the number of Jews] . . . Special correspondents Lapin, Khatsrevich, Rosenfeld, Shuer, Vilkomir, Slutsky, Ish, Bernshtein. They were all killed on the front, and they’re all Jews. I can only slash by one more . . . myself.’ I turned around and left.90

In his memoirs, Ortenberg accuses Stalin of creeping anti-Semitism and notes earlier incidents from the 1930s that revealed Stalin’s true relationship to Jews. He recounts how, in 1936, when he was a journalist for Pravda, he was asked to mask his Jewish last name, Ortenberg, and he became Vadimov. He says that in the 1930s lots of “-bergs” and “-manns” disappeared from the pages of the press and were replaced with “-ovs.”91 But these come from his memoirs, not from the moment of his firing, so it is unclear how the journalistic community responded to the Jewish downsizings of 1943. Ortenberg was the most visible Jew in the Soviet journalistic corps to be downsized out of a job. Ehrenberg too noted a change in environment in 1943. That year, Shcherbakov asked him to write a message to American Jews about Nazi atrocities and the need for total victory over the Third Reich. According to Ehrenburg, one of Shcherbakov’s assistants, Kondakov, rejected the original draft on the grounds that “there was no need to mention the exploits of the Jews in the Red Army.”92 In this climate of scrutinizing the ethnic identity of Soviet editors, it is not surprising that the Party investigated who was editing the military newspapers. In December 1943, several months after the new Party directives and a wave of firings of Jewish journalists,

• 124 •

world war ii and the holocaust

the Party conducted a survey of editors of all front, regional, and army newspapers. There were eighteen front newspaper editors.93 All editors had to be members of the Party, and fifteen of the eighteen had joined the Party before 1930, showing that the editorial leadership of military newspapers had not been destroyed by the Purges of 1937–1938. Most had higher education; all had some military education and had served in the military. The editors were young, with fourteen of the eighteen under forty years of age. The survey also tracked the ethnic background of military newspaper editors. Of the eighteen editors, eleven were Russian, four were Jewish, two were Ukrainian, and one was “other.”94 Even in 1946, a survey of the Izvestiia staff showed that of 184 people, 144 were Russian, 27 were Jewish, 5 were Ukrainian, and 8 were of other nationalities. These numbers suggest that although editors such as Ortenberg and Rovinskii were driven from their jobs in the early purge of Jews from the Soviet media, in the postwar period Jews were still present at all levels of the Soviet media.95

The Ambivalence of Liberation Although photographs of Nazi atrocities made a regular appearance on the pages of the Soviet press, especially after Stalingrad, the celebration and glorification of the Soviet war effort was even more important. Serebriannikov’s subject lists always favored photographs showing how the rear was supporting the frontlines, how soldiers were celebrating victory with one another, how nurses took care of the wounded, and how the country was rebuilding agriculture and industry after the mass destruction of German occupation.96 Photographs boasting of the Soviet war effort began the day the war broke out; as the front moved from east to west, they appeared more often and with ever more bravado. Ogonyok’s covers often featured the Soviet military demonstrating its might. Tank warfare made front-page news after the Battle of Kursk, at the time the largest tank battle in history. Moments of liberation, when a city switched from control by the Nazis or their allies to the Soviets, were marked by the raising of the Soviet flag over the reconquered city. Photographs of these events were often juxtaposed with images of Soviet soldiers removing symbols of German occupation from a city’s buildings and streets. Photographs of Soviet heroism dominated the pages of the press in the last years of the war. But images of Nazi atrocities never left the Soviet media. If in 1942 Soviet photojournalists did everything they could to glorify the struggling Soviet army and demonize the Germans, late 1943 and 1944 were characterized by what could be called the ambivalence of liberation. Liberation has generally been figured as an unambiguously positive moment when the German army was driven out of a city or town and the Soviet army installed. More recent scholarship has done much to complicate that image by showing how some locals actually preferred German to Soviet rule, and how the Soviets dealt with

Photojournalists and the War

• 125 •

presumed German collaborators on the ground.97 It is not surprising that an archival examination of the process of liberation reveals more than unmitigated joy. More interesting is that official Soviet photojournalists and their publications also reflected an ambivalent understanding of liberation, of a moment in time when a particular place went from bad rule to good, from violence to peace, from past to future. Although the first liberation photographs began appearing in early 1942 at Kerch, Volokolamsk, and elsewhere, it was not until the post-Stalingrad period that the Soviet press was dominated by liberation stories and photographs. The series documenting liberation by Fridlyand intimates the complicated nature of liberation as it was presented to the Soviet reading audience (Fig. 4.20). It is true that we do not have images of the dark side of liberation—accused collaborators being shot, fights that took place between those who had stayed in occupied villages and returnees who had been evacuated before the Germans arrived, deportations of suspected collaborators, and anti-Jewish violence that broke out in Kiev and other areas. These stories were usually told in the many accounts of eyewitnesses and generally restricted to archives. Fridlyand’s photographs depict a story of liberation as one of triumph, but tempered with images of the violence and destruction that had defined the German occupation. Liberation photo essays had a formulaic feel—the raising of a red flag, soldiers welcomed by happy residents of the town, and an exchange of gifts. But liberation photo essays also depicted the evidence of Nazi atrocities that greeted the liberators of every town in the Soviet Union. These reminders and remainders of Nazi occupation appeared everywhere in the Soviet press. The caption of Fridlyand’s photo layout reads: Poltava is ours! An ancient Russian city, a city of our people’s military glory, Poltava has been liberated from the German occupiers. The final days of the Hitlerites’ presence in Poltava were marked by the bloody revelry of fascist savages. The destruction and waste of historic buildings, cultural memorials, industry, residential buildings, and the corpses of those bestially murdered, those of women and children burned alive call out for merciless revenge on the German-fascist villains.

The caption suggests an ambiguous liberation, one full of sadness, destruction, and a horrible accounting of loss. Fridlyand’s published photographs of Poltava reveal that liberation was anything but triumphal. The top photograph in the central circle shows soldiers on horseback entering the city with people on the side of the street. Why are glorious Soviet soldiers not streaming through the city on the most modern of tanks or in cars, but rather slowly meandering through the streets on horseback? Moreover, there is little interaction between the liberators and the liberated. The bottom half of the central circle shows what the greeting looks like in its most stylized manner. A first glance shows a happy scene of local Poltavans giving the liberating soldiers flowers to celebrate their arrival. The children in the foreground suggest a future for the city that might have been in doubt in the previous two years of German occupation.

• 126 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 4.20. Semyon Fridlyand, “Poltava Is Ours,” Ogonyok, September 30, 1943.

Photojournalists and the War

• 127 •

But there is no joy in Poltava. The women and children, who made up the bulk of the civilian population in liberated towns, are not smiling. The only one suggesting joy is the woman with the kerchief on her head, whose mouth gently curls in a subtle smile. The woman to her left on the edge of the photograph bows her head in tears, hands clenched, as she takes in the gravity of the moment. Liberation means the end of German occupation, but it also means a moment of accounting of what took place—when friends turned on friends, when the Jewish population of the town was marched to the outskirts and murdered, when local Ukrainians were pitted against Russians and others and, as the last picture shows, how Germans massacred locals. An ambivalent liberation indeed. If the liberation of Poltava and many other cities was pictured ambiguously, the discovery of mass burial sites and concentration camps was not in any way ambiguous. A photo essay from the village of Leonovo appeared on April 10, 1943, made up of photographs by the famous modernist photographer Boris Ignatovitch. In this case, liberation and Nazi occupation were pictured quite graphically. The story accompanying Ignatovitch’s photographs, “The Tragedy of the Village of Leonovo,” describes from eyewitness accounts how the occupying forces murdered most of the town’s residents. The use of eyewitness testimony dominated liberation stories from 1943 onward. Alongside the stories from eyewitness accounts were pictures taken by Soviet photographers. The arrangement of Ignatovitch’s photographs suggests the totality of destruction. On the top right, there are remnants of the village, a littered landscape of burned-out houses and empty fields. Below, the editor introduces the theme of mass murder with an image of two kolkhoz workers and a nursing child. The visual echo with the iconic Pietà is unmistakable as the dead women hold a child, sacrificed by the Nazis for the salvation of socialism. If the visual nod to the Pietà wasn’t enough to suggest a Christian reading, the article frames this liberation story explicitly as one of Christian salvation: “The Germans gathered more than 250 people, most of them elderly, women, and children, and drove them to Borshovyi Liady, a small field a few kilometers from the village. Under the Golgotha of drunken soldiers, under the barking of wolflike dogs, descended in chains, a convoy of the condemned, they went along their sorrowful path,” just as Christ walked his Via Dolorosa. The use of Christian iconography as a way of understanding the unfolding atrocities of the Holocaust was not unique to the Soviet Union, although it may seem more out of place in the land of secular socialism. Carol Zemel has argued that American liberation photography relied on references to the Crucifixion and Resurrection to create a symbolic language of redeemed death that was comprehensible to an American viewing audience. In discussing Lee Friedlander’s photographs of the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau, Zemel writes, “The pictures of the dead in Buchenwald and Dachau are more than documents, as the Crucifixion is more than an event on Golgotha Hill. . . . A pictorial language in which the image of a dying man on a cross is a site of spiritual uplift

• 128 •

world war ii and the holocaust

may readily annex these images of the dead and near-dead as icons of suffering and martyrdom.”98 The final image in our visual narrative of liberation is of the remnants of the murdered, proof that the bodies of victims still lay in the haunted landscape of Leonovo and of the many other villages and cities scarred by Nazi violence. In the Soviet press, liberation was a moment of reflection, a time to make meaning out of mass murder. It was also a time to foment revenge among the Soviet population. Nearly all the articles accompanying these liberation photographs call for vengeance, but they almost always refer to what the reader is seeing, to the act of bearing witness, as justification for revenge, exhorting: Look at these photographs, comrade soldiers of the Red Army. Vengeance, merciless vengeance on the Hitlerite bandits and child murderers! The call to look at the photographs suggests that the words of eyewitnesses would not emotionally affect the Soviet reader. Photographs documenting Nazi crimes would. Photographers, then, played an integral role in this process of both making meaning and proving to the world what the Nazis had done in the Soviet Union. They were also the key drivers of Soviet vengeance, since it was the photographers’ “eyewitness testimony” that drove the population on.

Budapest and Warsaw The Soviet army crossed the old Soviet border in the summer of 1944. As the Nazi war effort collapsed, the Soviets took city after city across Eastern Europe. Minsk was recaptured July 3, Brest Litovsk on July 28, Bucharest on August 19. Estonia was liberated (or reoccupied) in September (Estonia was independent in the interwar period until the first Soviet occupation of 1940), and in October, Belgrade fell to Soviet forces with the help of Tito. The battle for Budapest and Warsaw began in the fall and would last into January 1945 as German troops were reinforced to hold these important cities. The liberation of Warsaw on January 17 and of Budapest on January 20, 1945, signaled the near total collapse of the German occupation of Eastern Europe. For Soviet Jewish photographers, these were received as momentous victories; they had seen their country nearly decimated by German forces. Now, for the first time, they stood on European soil that the Soviet Union had never held. Khaldei photographed the liberation of Sofia and Belgrade, and became one of the preeminent photographers of liberation working for the Soviet press in Eastern Europe. Many other photographers took pictures of the battle and liberation of Budapest, including Zelma, and Yakov Riumkin. Regarded as a supreme battle photographer after his successful photographs of Stalingrad, Zelma was given the risky task of following the Red Army into Budapest. The documentary filmmaker Aleksei Lebedev accompanied him on the battle-scarred streets of the Hungarian capital. Lebedev later recalled how the two avoided being killed, and how, despite the violence that surrounded them, Zelma’s camera continued clicking. “Photojour-

Photojournalists and the War

• 129 •

nalist Georgii Zelma and I went to the place where the truce bearers were killed. We traveled through the Hungarian capital’s outskirts. . . . We traveled in a lightweight wagon with a truce bearer, Captain Mikolsh Shteinmets, along with his translator, L. Kuznetsov, and the driver, Filimonenko, to give our enemies an ultimatum. We saw a big white flag affixed to a truck. We stopped, pulled out a megaphone, and announced in Hungarian and German that the truce bearers had arrived. Violating all the laws of war, the fascists began firing at our car with a machine gun and a direct hit from their weapons destroyed the car and killed Captain Shteinmets and the driver and injured the translator. Zelma and I ran toward the place where the other truce bearers had been killed. Zelma took several photographs and changed lenses, while under fire.”98 The archival record of the liberation of Budapest shows how destructive the battle for this key city was.99 Zelma managed to capture the destruction of the bitterly cold streets as well as the act of documentation that was so important to the Soviet war effort in general and Soviet liberation in particular. Zelma photographed two filmmakers, including Otilia Reizman, one of the women who filmed at the front, pictured below (Fig. 4.21). Evgenii Khaldei too produced dozens of photographs of the horrific destruction of Budapest, with its collapsed bridges, bombed-out buildings, and dead and wounded lying in the middle of the streets (Fig. 4.22).100

figure 4.21. Georgii Zelma, “Camera Operator Otilia Reizman,” 1945. Courtesy of Teresa and Paul Harbaugh and Michael Mattis.

• 130 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 4.22. Evgenii Khaldei, “Budapest,” 1945. Courtesy of Evgenii Khaldei and the Fotosoyuz Agency.

The published record of the battle for Budapest, however, reflects a more sanitized vision of war and liberation. In a photo essay by Yakov Riumkin, Soviet intelligence officers gather information (Fig. 4.23). In another published photograph by Zelma, Soviet soldiers are preparing to fire artillery. All appear calm, considering that they are in the heat of battle and, possibly, the line of fire. Zelma’s battle pastoral aestheticizes the war to the point of making it beautiful. The calm of the images also masks the ambivalence of a liberation that brought out violent reprisals of Soviet troops against the local population. According to Julius Hay, a Communist intellectual, “It was impossible to spend a day or even an hour in Budapest without hearing of brutalities committed by Russian soldiers.”101 If the visual representation of Budapest was ambiguous in its beauty, that of Warsaw spared the reader nothing. Here, the editors and photographers showed an ambivalent liberation. Although the Soviet press never questioned the good that came from liberation, ambivalent feelings arose when people saw what happened under German occupation and tried to interpret what the destruction meant. For some, it meant revenge; for others, sorrow and loss. And by early 1945, it meant that the end of the war was on the horizon and the Soviet Union had to start thinking about its postwar future and that of the countries it now occupied. Sergei Loskutov’s “Ruins of Warsaw,” displays the varieties of destruction wreaked upon the city. Warsaw had suffered a particularly brutal fate. It was one of the first major

Photojournalists and the War

figure 4.23. Yakov Riumkin, “Battle for Budapest,” Ogonyok, no. 52, 1944.

• 131 •

• 132 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 4.24. Sergei Loskutov, “Ruins of Warsaw,” Ogonyok, no. 4, February 1945.

Photojournalists and the War

• 133 •

figure 4.25. Emmanuel Evzerikhin, Warsaw across the Vistula, 1945. Courtesy of Emmanuel Evzerikhin and the Fotosoyuz Agency.

cities occupied by the Germans, in 1939, and was one of the last liberated. It figured greatly in the Nazi racial hierarchy because of its large Jewish population, whose members by the time of liberation were nearly all murdered. It was the site of one of the first large uprisings against German occupation—the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in April 1943—and of the last, from August to December 1944. Liberation revealed that the city of grand boulevards and wide squares had been turned into rubble by German bombardment. In the top two photographs, Loskutov depicts two central squares of the city in ruins and, below them, an entire city block that had been entirely flattened. Below on the left, the reader sees a pedestal denuded of its statue of Nicolaus Copernicus. According to the caption, the Germans had carted away the sculpture of the famous Polish astronomer as a spoil of war (Fig. 4.24). The photographs are of landscapes, rather than of bodies, and emphasize the rebuilding that liberation inaugurated. Like Loskutov, Evzerikhin focused on the physical destruction of landscapes and the toppling of symbolic statues, echoing the panoramas of Stalingrad from across a river (Fig. 4.25). But in neither Loskutov’s nor Evzerikhin’s photo essay is the reader faced with the bodies that had littered images of liberation through much of 1943 and 1944. As the Red Army approached Germany and the end of the war neared, the Soviet press shifted some of its attention away from violence against people. The accompanying articles moved away from calls for vengeance and murder towards notions of the upcoming occupation and rehabilitation of Germany.

Soviet Jews in Berlin The end of the war on German soil posed vexing questions for photographers. On the one hand, the Soviet press had been calling for vengeance against Germany since the first days of the war. After Stalingrad, the liberation of territories that had been under German

• 134 •

world war ii and the holocaust

occupation became the most common framework for understanding the war. But how could the Soviet media make sense of the Soviet entry into Germany? Liberation would be a hard conceptual sell, since other places were being liberated from German occupation. It would be difficult to imagine liberating Germany from itself. In fact, however, this is how the war was figured in its last months. Through 1944, liberation and revenge were often spoken about in the same sentence, but in April 1945, Ehrenburg, the foremost promulgator of the vengeance narrative, was reprimanded on the pages of the Soviet press for his anti-German diatribes, which failed to differentiate between “good” and “bad” Germans.102 The press had to show such a differentiation and shift the language of perpetration from “Germans” to “Hitlerites” and “fascists,” suggesting an ideological rather than national enemy. At the same time, Soviet Jewish writers were fostering a particularly Jewish literature of catastrophe and mourning in the most popular Russian literary journals. At the October 13, 1944, meeting of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee’s literary commission, Ilya Ehrenburg told those assembled, individuals who were collecting evidence about the Holocaust on Soviet soil, that some of their work was being published in Russian journals. Ehrenburg had heard that “the journal October had published something by [Avrom] Sutskever, and that Banner should be publishing an article by Grossman.”103 He also said that the monthly Banner (Znamia) had already published the story of a woman who survived the Nazi mass murder of Jews at a tractor factory in Kharkov.104 If we move from documentary prose to poetry, Maxim Shrayer has argued that Ehrenburg’s short lyric “Babi Yar,” which appeared in January 1945 in the leading monthly magazine New World (Novyi mir), served as a benchmark for other Soviet Jewish poets. In the poem “Death Camp,” published in Banner in October 1945, Pavel Antokolsky (1896–1978) evoked the biblical story of Jacob and his sons in the context of the Shoah. Lev Ozerov (1914–1996) published his longer poem “Babi Yar” in the April–May 1946 issue of the monthly October (Oktiabr’ ). Thus although there was a shift away from anti-German vengeance, there was an increase in the number of Russian Jewish works on the Holocaust that were published at the end of the war in the most important Russian literary journals.105 Despite the shift in media representation, Russians on the ground, including photographers, heeded Ehrenburg’s call for vengeance. After crossing onto German soil, Khaldei describes how he set a German house on fire out of anger and photographed it as Soviet soldiers trampled a Nazi flag in the middle of the street.106 Norman Naimark has shown that vengeance was one of the dominant features of the Red Army’s occupation of Germany in its first few months, with rampant murder, rape, and pillaging.107 Images of Germany, glimpsed through Soviet cameras for the first time since the war began, were surprisingly mundane. There was no attempt to paint Germans as evil, no published photographs of Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, and other liberated camps in Germany, although several archives contain such photographs. Unlike the Americans,

Photojournalists and the War

• 135 •

figure 4.26. Dmitrii Baltermants, “Crossing the Oder,” 1945. Courtesy of Michael Mattis.

who witnessed the effects of Nazi atrocities only after entering Germany in 1945, Soviet photographers had been taking pictures of atrocities since the first year of the war. By 1945, the emphasis had shifted to heroic Soviet tanks rolling through the German cities. Calls for revenge, which still rose occasionally, were directed against “Hitlerites,” not “Germans,” showing how the language of the enemy had changed. Baltermants took a heroic photograph of the Soviet army fording the Oder River (Fig. 4.26). The image echoes Joe Rosenthal’s “Old Glory Goes Up on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima,” the iconic American photograph of the victory over Japan. Baltermants’s photograph elevates the Soviets without demonizing the Germans. As he did with many of his photographs, Baltermants added thick plumes of smoke, infusing drama into an otherwise somewhat banal image. Berlin was the real and symbolic capital of Nazism. Within the city’s landscape were places of key military strategic importance that the Soviet army targeted—Hitler’s bunker, the chancery, and Luftwaffe headquarters. But photographers aimed their sights differently, looking away from the real sources of Nazi power toward those with symbolic significance. There were several dozen photographers on the streets of Berlin in the last week of April and first week of May. More than anyone else, Khaldei made his photographic reputation in Berlin. He shot the raising of the red flag over several significant buildings. Beginning in the south, he photographed the red flag over Tempelhof Airport. As the Red Army moved north, he photographed the flag over the Brandenburg Gate, one of the most visually iconic symbols of Berlin, but not one that had particular connection to Nazi power.

• 136 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 4.27. Evgenii Khaldei, “Victory Flag over Berlin,” Ogonyok, May 13, 1945. Courtesy of Voller Ernst Agency.

Photojournalists and the War

• 137 •

His most important photograph of the war, and of his entire career, however, was that of the raising of the red flag over the Reichstag (see chapter 7 for more on this photograph).108 Much has been written about this picture, which was modeled on and served the same function in the Soviet Union as that of Joe Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima photograph in the United States. And like Rosenthal’s photo, the subject of articles, books, and even a Hollywood movie, Khaldei’s photograph has been the subject of controversy.109 For all its significance later as an icon of Soviet victory, it was not the first photograph of the red flag over the Reichstag that was published in the Soviet press. Several photographers took pictures of the raising of a red flag over the Reichstag. Viktor Tyomin, for example, took a picture of the flag over the Reichstag in late April; it was published in Pravda on May 3, 1945, with the flag enlarged for dramatic effect.110 In one of his most powerful photos, Khaldei majestically captured what Soviet occupation meant—the reading of contemporary poetry—as the Jewish poet Evgenii Dolmatovskii entertained Soviet troops at the Brandenburg Gate (Fig. 4.28). Khaldei clearly contrasts Soviet occupation, which brings poetry to Germany, with German and fascist occupation, which brought the death of people and culture to the Soviet Union. A photo essay of Berlin (Fig. 4.29), published a few days after the Germans capitulated, shows how far the idea of liberation had traveled since the first discovery of Nazi atrocities in late 1941 and early 1942. First and perhaps most noteworthy is that the language of liberation has disappeared. Berlin was not liberated. Not even the Soviet media could make sense of that. Here, Berlin is conquered. The essay shows the Soviet flag proudly waving over Berlin, perched on the Brandenburg Gate. Beneath it are two photographs of tanks, and to the right are images of Soviet soldiers “in the last days of battle,”

figure 4.28. Evgenii Khaldei, Troops hearing Dolmatovskii at the Brandenburg Gate, 1945. Courtesy of Evgenii Khaldei and the Fotosoyuz Agency.

• 138 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 4.29. Evgenii Khaldei and D. Chernov, “Conquered Berlin,” Ogonyok, May 13, 1945.

according to the caption. Two sets of images are missing. There are no dead bodies or Nazi atrocity photographs here. Unlike American images coming out of Germany in April 1945, which showed the moral revulsion of American troops as they discovered such places as Dachau and Buchenwald, Soviet images are firmly focused on conquest and victory, no longer on ambivalent liberation. Second, there are no images here of happy encounters with the liberated locals. Those would come in summer 1945, but in May, photographers and their editors still found it difficult to picture Germans as liberated people. For many of the second-generation photographers, such as Khaldei and Baltermants, the war proved to be their moment of triumph in Soviet photography. The names of members of the first generation, Shaykhet, Alpert, and others, faded from the pages of the Soviet press to be replaced by those who came of age in the Stalinist 1930s. The latter’s war photography reflects a diversity of aesthetic styles, with some photographers better able to capture the heat of battle, while others were more successful with slower-paced, staged images. In the end, these Soviet Jewish photographers were charged with visually telling the story of the war to the Soviet reading audience. They and their editors responded to the ever changing directives of the political authorities overseeing the media, but within the parameters of those directives, photographers had the power to shape their images.

Photojournalists and the War

• 139 •

Some focused on the home front; others took pictures of tanks literally driving over them. They each photographed Soviet victory and Nazi atrocities. They began with crowds of people listening in shock to Molotov’s announcement of war, and ended with the raising of red flags in cities and towns over thousands of miles of liberated territory. Most important, these Jewish photographers, many with just a few years of experience behind them, raised and photographed their own red flags over the capital of Nazism in Berlin, expressing their own personal and national victory.

•

5

•

Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes soviet holocaust photography

Early in the war, operating under the assumption that they would win, the Allied powers began discussing how to deal with the Nazis’ war crimes against Europe. In June 1942, with pressure coming from interest groups and occupied nations that the Allies make formal declarations about potential punishment, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt began talking about a unified war crimes commission that would investigate and prosecute the Nazis. In January 1944, the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC) held its first meeting.1 Although it participated as a full member in the UNWCC, which led to the Nuremberg Trials after the war, the Soviet Union also established its own approach to Nazi war crimes. Unlike the American or British publics, who had little sense of the degree of violence that accompanied the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe, the Soviet public had been bearing witness to Nazi atrocities from the first days of the war. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Soviet government enacted martial law, which was described as “the avenging sword of Soviet justice.”2 In this context of law as a tool for vengeance, Soviet representatives began discussing how to respond to the unprecedented nature of violence the Nazis were inflicting upon the Soviet Union. Georgii Aleksandrov, who headed the Agitation and Propaganda Division of the Central Committee; Viacheslav Molotov, the foreign minister, who had been publicizing Nazi atrocities to the West since late 1941; and Alexander Shcherbakov, head of the Political Administration of the Red Army, discussed among themselves the establishment of an emergency commission charged with investigating and prosecuting war crimes. The goal of such a commission was overtly political—to find material to use in war crimes trials and in foreign propaganda campaigns to better illustrate the nature of the enemy to a seemingly naive West.3 Aleksandrov took extra care to place the establishment of this commission within a longer history of Russia’s prosecution of war crimes. In a letter to Molotov and Shcherbakov from August 1942, he talked about the czarist government’s attempts to prosecute the crimes of the German army against Russia during World War I. “Our expe• 140 •

Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes

• 141 •

rience of battles from the first world war and the civil war in the Soviet Union showed how important it was to begin keeping track of and accounting for atrocities. The Russian army only created a ‘special commission to study the breaking of the laws and customs of war’ in April 1915, giving the work a haphazard feel. It only managed to register random facts about German army atrocities.”4 Aleksandrov saw a similar haphazard process of gathering, documenting, and dealing with war crimes developing throughout the Soviet Union during 1942. “During the fatherland war from 1941 to 1942, a series of organizations has taken upon itself the task of collecting materials about the crimes of the German army. This work is being taken up by local executive committees, planning committees, the Ministry of Health, the Union of Architects, the Commission for the History of the Patriotic War, the Institute for the History of Material Culture, the Historical Museum, and other organizations. There is no unifying plan and we will not be able to effectively use the results of this work in propaganda now or after the war.”5 The team spent the fall organizing such a commission, and on November 2, 1942, Pravda announced the establishment of the “Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of Atrocities Committed by the German-Fascist Invaders and Their Accomplices,” with political leaders, writers, a historian, and others serving as the steering committee.6 As we saw in chapter 4, in the public coverage of Nazi atrocities, everything changed with the victory at Stalingrad in early 1943. It was after that victory and during the long but consistent push westward that these Extraordinary Commissions began working intensely. According to historian Marina Sorokina, they also worked more intensively in 1943 after the discovery of the mass execution of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest, which the Soviets blamed on the Nazis to deny their own responsibility.7 These commissions investigated crimes that took place in each and every city that the Red Army liberated, although Sorokina and Niels Bo Poulsen argue that the primary purpose of the Extraordinary Commissions was not to discover the truth of the crimes, but to deflect attention from the Soviet Union’s own war crimes and to publicize Nazi atrocities as part of the Soviet propaganda campaign.8 In most liberated cities, the investigators found pits, ravines, or trenches on the outskirts of town where the mass murders took place and the victims were haphazardly buried. Although the name of Kiev’s Babi Yar became famous worldwide as the icon of the Nazi war against the Soviet Union after the city’s liberation on November 6, 1943, every town in Ukraine had its ravine (yar), pit (yama), or trench (rov) on its outskirts, to which the Nazis took the Jews to be shot.9 Ilya Ehrenburg wrote poignantly about the scarred Soviet landscape: “I used to live in cities, / And happily lived among the living, / Now on empty vacant lands / I must dig up the graves. / Now every ravine is a sign / And every ravine is now my home.”10 The Extraordinary Commission teams were composed of military leaders, forensic experts, doctors, journalists, photographers, and interviewers who gathered testimony from survivors. Following their research the team members often wrote a report stating

• 142 •

world war ii and the holocaust

their findings typically including photographs taken at the investigation site. The findings were used in trials that took place in the Soviet Union beginning in 1943 and were occasionally published in the Soviet press.11 Clearly, the Soviet government, and even the average Soviet reader, understood the violent, exterminationist nature of the enemy. Recall that from the first days of the war, all major Soviet press outlets published images of Nazi atrocities in the form of trophy photographs taken by the perpetrators. And not too long after the beginning of the war, under the auspices of the Extraordinary Commission, once Soviet photographers could see for themselves evidence of Nazi atrocities, forensic photography would emerge as a powerful means of visualizing and framing Nazi atrocities. This forensic photographic work, among the earliest Holocaust liberation photography anywhere in the world, was published in newspapers, sent around the globe to document the evils of the enemy, and used as evidence in war crimes trials. The journalistic desire of photographers such as Dmitrii Baltermants and Evgenii Khaldei to tell a compelling story about the enemy and the forensic need to document evidence of a crime defined Soviet Holocaust photography during the war. The first major war crimes trial of World War II took place in July 1943 in the southern city of Krasnodar and was covered extensively by the Soviet press. The press, already familiar with discussions of wartime violence, was filled with descriptions of mass shootings, of vans that gassed dozens of people locked inside at a time, and other atrocities associated with the occupying forces. Although the internal Extraordinary Commission reports from 1943 noted the Jewish targets of the atrocities, public coverage of the trials, in both the Russian press and the English translations of trial records, referred to the victims as “peaceful Soviet citizens.”12 The December 1943 trial in Kharkov provided even more vivid descriptions of atrocities, especially since the massacres at Kharkov were on a scale that dwarfed what the public saw in Krasnodar. A number of the country’s eminent journalists, including Ilya Ehrenburg, for Red Star, and David Zaslavsky, for Pravda, covered the event.13 In his diary, Zaslavsky described the testimony and the manner in which journalists were shown the killing sites during the trial: We looked at the places where all the Jews of Kharkov lived and then, in December– January 1941–1942, were brutally exterminated. It’s a set of barracks behind a tractor factory and the Dobritsky Yar. The barracks were obviously burned down before the Germans left. Everything is half destroyed. . . . Here in December the Germans drove all the Jews of Kharkov. They had gathered them in one place in the city and drove them through the whole city. A thick column moved slowly the whole day until 6 p.m., when the Germans stopped the movement. In the worst of chills, the Jews spent the night in snow and frost, and by morning those that could move moved, and those that were already frozen corpses stayed. It was 8 kilometers to the barracks. The Germans destroyed the barracks, making it clear that they didn’t intend for Jews to live there as in a ghetto. It was a way station to death. There was no running water, so for the first few

Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes

• 143 •

days, the Jews would run across the street to the factory to get water. Then the Germans banned this, so they only had snow to collect. . . . There was no furniture in the barracks. [When we toured the site] there were still children’s toys lying on the floors of the barracks.14

In his private writing, Zaslavsky made the story of Kharkov a Jewish one, even if published articles about the event universalized the victims of the massacres. Later in his diary, he discussed the debates about the number of Jews killed in Kharkov, suggesting that the Tolstoy Commission, the Extraordinary Commission investigating Kharkov, headed by the writer Aleksei Tolstoy, exaggerated the number of Jewish dead.15 Photographs from the report about Krasnodar were published in the newspaper and presented at the trial. A photo essay by Boris Tsetlin did not shy away from brutality (Fig. 5.1). The photograph at the top of the page shows “corpses of those Soviet citizens tortured by the German bandits. The corpses were exhumed from an antitank ditch on the land of a state farm not far from Krasnodar.” The photograph highlights some of the common tropes of Soviet Holocaust liberation photographs—large expanses of space filled with dead bodies and investigators at the scene. Beneath the panoramic shot are photographs of dead children, again highlighting the evil nature of the enemy and simultaneously humanizing the victims. Finally, the editor included a photograph of the city’s Gestapo headquarters and of a man giving testimony to the Extraordinary Commission. With photo layouts like this from Krasnodar and graphic descriptions from Kharkov, the Soviet press widely publicized images of Nazi mass murder and began shaping what would become common tropes in Soviet Holocaust photography: excavations, investigations, corpses, and those doing the investigating.

Ravines of Death: From Eastern Ukraine to Babi Yar Mark Redkin’s and Dmitrii Baltermants’s published photographs of Kerch, the first Soviet Holocaust liberation photographs published in the Soviet press, helped launch what might be called a new genre of photography, the Nazi atrocity photo essay. Like the photo essay from Krasnodar (see Fig. 5.1), they generally included a ravine, ditch, field, or pit and anonymous bodies with researchers investigating, followed by a close-up of innocent women and children. The photo essay had been a popular means of visually telling a story in the early 1930s, and it came back under radically different guises in the mid-1940s. Unlike the socialist realist photo essays of the 1930s, with their narratives of daily life, socialist construction, and happy workers, such as that depicting the miner Nikita Izotov (see chapter 2) or the Jewish autonomous region in Birobidzhan (see chapter 3), the essays of the 1940s told stories of death. A series from Artemovsk, in eastern Ukraine, taken sometime shortly after the area’s liberation on September 5, 1943, is a good example of the macabre visual essay.16 The Extraordinary Commission researching Artemovsk submitted its report on September 14,

• 144 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 5.1. Boris Tseitlin, “Retribution,” Krasnodar, Ogonyok, August 20, 1943.

Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes

• 145 •

1943, just nine days after liberation, attesting to the speed with which the researchers and photographers did their work. The Nazi atrocity visual essay generally began with a “general view” (obshchii vid). The general-view photograph is, in many ways, the most frightening. Resembling Baltermants’s photograph showing women wailing over a sea of bodies littering the frozen landscape near Kerch (see Fig. 7.9), the Artemovsk general-view photograph shows not wailing women but researchers wandering through the Chasov Ravine. In both photographs, the scene and evidence of the crime are being witnessed—by family members in one, by researchers in the other. As Carol Zemel has written about American liberation photography, “Nowhere is the Nazi reduction of persons to despised matter more visible [than in images of tumbled heaps of corpses piled in the camps]. In some, the disturbing presence of the bodies is alleviated by the view of Allied soldiers—merging the viewer with the rescuer once again, and providing some sense of closure, some end to the tale.”17 Unlike photojournalism, whose purpose was to tell a visual story to a broad reading audience, the job of the commission photographer, whose work was not attributed, was to document a crime for a more restricted audience. Closure, then, was not necessarily the goal of these photographs. Instead, the photographer captured the act of bearing witness to the crimes. In the Artemovsk photograph the ravine is wide and deep. The photographer is situated on slightly elevated ground, perhaps on the opposite side of the ravine, perhaps on a small mound within the ravine. From the image, the viewer sees that these ravines were huge expanses in which to dump the bodies and hide the crimes. In the foreground are three women searching amid the bodies; it is not clear if they are investigators or are personally connected to the people murdered in the town. The photographer has composed the photograph around a long row of bodies that occupy the center and stretch off into the distance. As we move farther into the background we see other people searching amid the bodies and many people clustered together on the far bank of the ravine. This general view shows the extent of murder in one small town in a small region of Ukraine, giving the viewer a sense of the magnitude of the tragedy pictured in the photograph. The captions of the next few photographs in the Extraordinary Commission files suggest what the photographer was trying to document: Second photograph: A row of children Third photograph: Mother with two children who have been shot Fourth photograph: Excavations These captions, which describe more than interpret the images, let the viewer fill in the gaps. The first photograph, “A row of children,” leaves it up to the viewer to determine whose children, how old they were, and how they ended up in the ravine. The caption of the third photograph leaves open the question of whether the mother too was shot. The photograph is not clear enough to let the viewer know the answer. Finally, “Excavations”

• 146 •

world war ii and the holocaust

(“Raskopki”) is the least descriptive and most haunting title of all. To conduct its investigation the Extraordinary Commission exhumed bodies from the ravines, trenches, and pits that dotted the blackened countryside of Ukraine to determine what had happened. Investigators counted bodies, checked clothing, and examined bullet wounds to determine how people were killed and when. The word excavations, taken from archeology rather than forensic medicine, shows how seemingly detached the Extraordinary Commission researchers and photographers were from the nature of the crimes they were researching. But we should remember that by the time these photographs in Artemovsk were taken, the Extraordinary Commission photographers had been taking photographs like “General View,” “Mother with Two Children Who Have Been Shot,” and “Excavations” for six months and found these sites in nearly every liberated city and town. Like forensic researchers who study murder scenes day in and day out, these photographers captioned their photographs in a hauntingly dry manner. The opening page of the Artemovsk report retells the Nazi genocide in the town, focusing on the murder of prisoners of war. The report describes the vast ravine, the tunnels “filled with bodies” a few kilometers to the east, and what the researchers found in the ravine: Thanks to the particularly good local conditions (exceptionally dry air, low and consistent temperature, porous ground of the caves) many of the bodies were mummified and many of them were exceptionally well preserved. The clothing on all bodies was winter wear, heavy coats and other outerwear, heads and ears were covered. Most of the bodies were marked with white bands on the left arm of the coat with Stars of David sewn or drawn on. On several of the bodies there was bright, colorful clothing, such as is normally worn by Gypsies.18

The report doesn’t name what kinds of victims these are, but makes obvious the identity of the dead by the clothing that they wore, most notably the iconic Star of David or colorful “Gypsy” clothing. The reports are dryly descriptive, but in their descriptions reveal the particularity of Nazi atrocities. The Extraordinary Commission archives at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the State Archive of the Russian Federation also contain a Nazi atrocity photo essay from Sumy, another eastern Ukrainian town, liberated in September 1943, with a relatively modest Jewish population. Russian Holocaust historian Ilya Altman estimates that one thousand Jews were killed in the Sumy region.19 The series opens with a general view showing the burial pit near Sumy with witnesses in attendance. There are several closeups of corpses as well as a photograph of discarded objects of Jewish daily life.20 In Konotop, Starobelsk, and Voroshilovgrad (Lugansk), also in eastern Ukraine and liberated in September 1943, the Extraordinary Commission photographers took photographs with investigators clearly posing for the camera. These would probably have been the same photographers who were in Artemovsk, liberated one day earlier. The Konotop and Voroshilovgrad files contain the standard general-view photographs overlooking the

Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes

• 147 •

ravine in which Konotop’s “peaceful citizens” were murdered. And then, below that in the files, the photographers have taken a picture showing a group of researchers and townspeople posing for the camera. Shockingly, they are standing virtually on top of the pile of bodies at the bottom of the ravine. The photograph has at least twenty living people in it, and probably another twenty bodies strewn in front of the crowd. In the center of the photograph is what seems to be a young boy, perhaps a soldier in his teens, but not older than that, wearing a worker’s cap. One finds similar pictures in all the Extraordinary Commission files. If I hadn’t found this photograph in the commission files, I might have thought it was taken by Nazi soldiers, who gained voyeuristic pleasure from posing before their crimes, smiling and sometimes sending the photographs back to their families in Germany. In a photograph from Konotop, one even finds something that one wouldn’t find in perpetrator photographs—an image of a woman, holding a child, posing over a pile of dead bodies. That was an innovation of Soviet liberation photographers that not even perpetrator photographers could have conceived of.21 As it turns out, nearly all the local files of the Extraordinary Commission contain a photograph with researchers posing over the bodies, and some include local townspeople, even children. These images show the primarily Russian and Ukrainian survivors or bystanders of towns in eastern Ukraine bearing witness to dead Jews killed by Germans and their accomplices. One final series of photographs in the Extraordinary Commission files shows the town of Starobelsk reburying the bodies of the town’s Jews. The report was relatively early in the liberation process, April 13, 1943, because Starobelsk was in far eastern Ukraine in the Lugansk region. This series of twelve photographs shows the gathering of coffins and then a funeral procession of about one hundred people gathering around a staff crowned by the five-pointed Soviet star as a band plays. In Starobelsk, the Red Star substituted for the cross as the symbol of eternity in burial ceremonies. Coffins are arrayed in front of the crowd, which again includes children, and the bodies are interred in an open pit.22 The role of documenting both what the Nazis did—mass killing—and what the Soviets do, respectfully bury the dead, was central to the commission’s propaganda mission of documenting German evil and highlighting Soviet “enlightened values.”23 The summer of 1943 was one of bittersweet victories as the Red Army pushed the Wehrmacht toward the west and as each liberated town and city revealed new depths of Nazi atrocities. These liberations became only more gruesome as the Red Army moved west, because, among other reasons, the Jewish population of Ukraine increased the farther west one got. If one thousand dead Jews were discovered in towns such as Sumy and Artemovsk, in a city like Kiev, more than one hundred thousand dead Jews and others would be found. The gradual liberation of Ukraine could be a source of trauma for journalists, both writers and photographers, since many were Jewish and many wrote

• 148 •

world war ii and the holocaust

about or photographed the towns of their childhood, from which they had moved to Moscow. As early as fall 1941, Evgenii Khaldei wrote in his diary about what he knew was the impending tragedy of his hometown of Stalino: Informburo announced: our forces continue to retreat to new positions from Bialystok, Kaunas, Lvov, Kiev, Dnepropetrovsk, Mariupol, Odessa, and Nikolaev. Battle is raging in the area of Makeyevsk, just 12 kilometers from Stalino where my father, sister, and my relatives are. Where are they and why are they silent? Did they flee? I just don’t know. A few days later, the announcer modestly and quietly announced that our troops have abandoned Stalino. I just cannot calm down. . . . It’s impossible for me to imagine that Germans are roaming the streets of my hometown, Stalino.24

Khaldei had last been in Stalino in fall 1940, just one year before he wrote these thoughts in his diary. He fondly recalled strolling the streets of his childhood and visiting the cemetery on the outskirts of town where his mother was buried. His grandmother, who cared for him after the death of his mother in the pogroms of 1918, died in February 1941. In January 1942, on a short return trip to Moscow after having photographed the mass murder of Jews at Kerch, Khaldei received a letter from his sister. As it turned out, she, her husband, and their child had fled Stalino before the Nazis arrived in 1941. However, as he curtly notes in his diary, “we lost our father and other sisters.”25 Two years later, Khaldei went to Stalino and described the visit as a major trauma, noting that most of his family was killed in the ravine near the town. In later interviews, he claimed that the experience changed the way he saw his role as a photojournalist; he saw his camera as much as a tool of revenge as of documentation.26 Journalist Vasily Grossman was even more traumatized by the course of events of 1943. From the climactic victory at Stalingrad in February 1943, Grossman followed the troops through Ukrainian town after town, most notably his hometown of Berdichev. In the end he could only mourn a “Ukraine without Jews,” as one of his more famous articles, published first in the Yiddish newspaper Unity (Eynikayt), was titled.27 After the failed German offensive at Kursk, the Soviets drove west and on November 5–6, 1943, liberated Kiev. Dozens of sources have described the massive destruction of the city under Nazi occupation, including sabotage attempts by partisans in the city. Soviet photographers and journalists found utter destruction of the city that was once the ancient capital of Russia. All newspapers covered the liberation of Kiev with great triumph, but also with utter disgust as, once again, writers and photographers bore witness to Nazi atrocities that had been reported by the Soviet press two years earlier. It was here, on the outskirts of the city, that Babi Yar was discovered, the pit that held the remains of more than one hundred thousand people and quickly surpassed places like Kerch, Kharkov, and Krasnodar as the most significant symbolic site of Nazi atrocities. The massacres at Babi Yar were the largest and most violent that photographers, journalists, and Extraordinary Commission researchers had seen. Ehrenburg wrote about

Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes

• 149 •

Babi Yar shortly after the event and collected eyewitness testimony for what would become the Black Book, a project to document Nazi mass murder of Jews on Soviet soil. On the pages of Red Star, the journalists Alexander Avdeenko and P. Olender wrote pained descriptions of their own impressions of Kiev and Babi Yar.28 Arkady Shaykhet photographed the liberation of Kiev for the Illustrated Newspaper. As for the internal Extraordinary Commission report from Kiev, on December 25, 1943, Nikolai Shvernik, who headed the commission, asked the leader of Agitprop, Georgii Aleksandrov, to approve the commission’s draft report. It came back six weeks later with editorial comments replacing the word “Jews” with “citizens” (grazhdane). Kiev and Babi Yar were considered so important that for three more weeks other high-ranking officials such as Nikita Khrushchev were involved in the report’s final draft.29 The approved version read, “On 29 September 1941, the Hitlerite bandits chased thousands of peaceful Soviet citizens to the corner of Mel’nyk and Doktorivs’ka Streets. They brought them to Babi Yar, took away all their valuables, and then shot them.”30 By the time the Extraordinary Commission began making its internal reports public, Jews were being excised from the official printed record. The photographic record of the journalists preserved in the Ukrainian State Photo, Film, and Sound Archives in Ukraine and the Yad Vashem Archives in Israel shows the vast ravine into which about a hundred thousand bodies were dumped. Babi Yar became the biggest and most lasting symbol of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, overshadowing the discovery of the six main extermination camps, which were located on Polish soil. As the largest burial pit, ravine, and trench, Babi Yar, more than Auschwitz, Majdanek, or other concentration camps came to symbolize the Soviet experience of Nazi atrocities.

Discovering the Camps On November 20, 1943, Ogonyok published photographs from a small Nazi camp for Soviet prisoners of war called Khorol’ in the Poltava region (Fig. 5.2). It was the first use of the term death camp in an Ogonyok headline. The photographic essay followed some of the common tropes from Soviet Nazi atrocity liberation photography—a large open pit, investigators sifting through remains of people. But the photographs of barracks, bones, and graffiti suggested something new to the reader. The presence of a camp suggested that the Nazis established permanent sites in which to commit their atrocities, not just ravines on the outskirts of town in which to dump bodies. The notion of a death camp as opposed to a ravine, pit, or trench pushed the visual narrative of death in a new direction, one that would prepare the population for the future discoveries of the camps on Polish soil. On July 3, 1944, Ehrenburg was on the outskirts of Minsk, Belorussia, at a place called Bolshoi Trostinets, just one kilometer north of Maly Trostinets, one of the Nazis’ concentration camps, at which an estimated sixty-five thousand were killed. Ehrenburg

• 150 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 5.2. A. Cheprunov, “Death Camp,” a two-page photo spread in Ogonyok, November 20, 1943. The article is an excerpt from a report by Dr. L. Orlovsky.

reported on Trostinets to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee on July 24, 1944, and described the place as hell: During the offensive on the Germans, I found myself in Bolshoi Trostinets. There were people from collective farms lying on the ground, killed by the Germans. The last Jews were killed, but they did not have time to burn them, so hundreds of corpses were lying there in stacks, like wood, and were recognizable. Among them there were women and children. There were huge piles of human remains dug out for burning. Lately the Germans were burning previously buried people. This became their “after-work” when the notion of retreat became possible. All this left a horrible, extraordinary impression. A great number of skulls, numbered in thousands, was piled in the field. On the opposite side there were corpses, neatly stacked but not burned. I wrote in Red Star that here I finally saw an element of fairness that I blessed in my heart. The Germans tried to escape the offensive right at this spot. It was pure chance. They rushed to Mogilev Road near Trostinets. I saw our soldiers that passed by, and I heard what they were saying— not one German was left alive. Following the picture of horrible crimes, 3 hours later, I traveled along the Mogilev Road on a hot day and saw the retribution. The road was piled with German corpses; it was impossible to breathe.31

Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes

• 151 •

In the year that had passed since the Krasnodar trials, the commissions and their photographers had become used to the task of documenting sites of Nazi atrocities. The Extraordinary Commission files for Maly Trostinets contain about eighteen photographs, all unattributed. The first two in the series deliver the sense of foreboding that the photographer-witness wants to create for the viewer, taking a bit more poetic license than the photographers had at the early liberation sites in Ukraine. The first is a close-up of a warning sign at the edge of the camp, which reads in German and Russian: “Entrance into the Camp Is Forbidden. We Will Shoot without Warning,” a more direct form of address than the more iconic and ironic “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Will Set You Free) that greeted prisoners at Auschwitz I. In the background on the left, there are investigators picking through rubble. The sign is foregrounded against a flat gray sky.32 There is no general-view photograph, since these camps were not ravines that one could gaze down upon. Instead, the photo essay is structured around the photographer’s own experience of traversing the camp’s grounds. In the second photograph the photographer has backed up placing the disturbing sign in the middle of the composition with a vast landscape of death and wasteland framing it. Although not on the scale of the six extermination camps in Poland, Maly Trostinets functioned as a concentration/death camp for Jews in the Minsk region and for those transported to the region from other parts of Europe. The Germans razed the site on June 30, just three days before liberation by the Red Army. As the series progresses, the photographer moves the viewer closer to the horror. Photographs 3 through 7 are labeled “Corpses of Soviet citizens burned by the Germans in a barn near Maly Trostinets.” The grainy images (not reproduced here because of their extremely low quality) focus on the corpses. At this point, the only witnesses in the scene are Soviet investigators and, of course, the photographer himself.33 The seventh photograph gets close enough so the viewer can clearly see a field of skulls. Until now, the witness/liberators have been blurred visions on the dead landscape. But by moving closer, the photographer gives identity to the living people in the picture—the investigators from the commission. Photographs nine and ten get close up to them, two soldiers in the front off to the right, and then four other members of the investigation team—scientists and forensic specialists—inspecting the crematorium at Maly Trostinets. The viewer, then, was bearing witness to those bearing witness and was documenting those documenting the crimes. It was this photograph, the close-up of the investigators, that made it out of the realm of the Extraordinary Commission reports and appeared in the Soviet press.34 The final image in the first collection of photographs, titled “Personal possessions of Soviet citizens shot by the Germans,” is the only photograph without people, either living or dead. It is a testament to the dead, as belongings lie strewn in the foreground with the haunting forest surrounding Trostinets in the background.

• 152 •

world war ii and the holocaust

In a second set of six photographs, among the pictures of investigators inspecting exhumed corpses is a more playful image showing the front entrance to “Wehrdorf Kl. Trostinets” (Military Village Maly Trostinets). The photograph is a stark contrast to the rest in the archive. The entrance to the village is a large gate draped in garlands with a sign welcoming visitors to the German village of Klein (Maly) Trostinets. According to one witness’s testimony taken by the Extraordinary Commission, local residents knew that “the German commandant, who carried out the shooting and burning, lived in the village of Maly Trostinets.”35 The contrast with the non-German Trostinets, a bleak landscape littered with corpses, is clear: four well-dressed people stand at the gate, two staring straight at the camera and two looking at the woman on the far right. They appear to be in Russian clothing; the woman’s head is covered and she wears traditional Russian boots. The houses, off to the side and difficult to see, seem quaint, hinting at the presumed normalcy of this place during Nazi occupation.36 Trostinets was liberated in early July 1944, just weeks before the first extermination camp—Majdanek—was liberated and extensively documented both by the Extraordinary Commission and in the Soviet and international press. Two of the commission’s Trostinets photographs appeared in Izvestiia and Red Star, but not until September, after the publication of Majdanek photographs.37 The photographers at Trostinets still relied on the visual tropes of the killing sites—the pits, forests, and ravines that scarred the Soviet countryside. The photographers did not yet know how to photograph these new forms of Nazi atrocity, concentration and extermination camps. Nonetheless even before Majdanek, the photography from Trostinets pushed photographers toward new visual idioms—the vast piles of belongings, crematoria, and very specific places of killing, marked as such by the Nazis.

Majdanek and the Concentration Camp Photo Essay In the 1970s, Vassily I. Chuikov, the Soviet commander at Stalingrad and later commander of the Third Ukrainian Front, described his response to seeing the first Nazi extermination camp liberated by the Allies: A death camp. No, not a camp. A death factory outfitted with the latest equipment for mass murder in a fiendishly organized way. I am omitting the details of the horrifying procedure, for these are described in many documentary accounts. But I must confess that after I had heard the full story and saw photographs taken by our officers, I refused to go there. I just could not. Millions of human beings brutally murdered and burned in furnaces. Millions! Men, women, children—no one was spared. The Nazis hitched inmates on hooks, clubbed them to death, poisoned them with gas.38

Fortunately for Chuikov, it was the Third Belorussian Army led by Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, and not Chuikov’s Third Ukrainian Army, that discovered the camp. Operation Bagration, the Red Army’s great offensive against the Wehrmacht, was

Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes

• 153 •

launched on June 23, 1944. On July 21, the army’s right flank crossed the Bug River in its advance through Poland toward the frontiers of Germany. They stood on the threshold of one of the most significant discoveries of the war. Within three days, Rokossovsky’s units entered Lublin and overran the first German extermination camp located on Polish territory, Majdanek.39 Heinrich Himmler had designated Majdanek as a camp for Soviet prisoners of war soon after the German armies overwhelmed Russian defenses in 1941. By 1944, however, the complex within view of the city of Lublin had expanded to accommodate new functions, including large-scale processing of stolen property, most of it from murdered Jews, as well as the extermination by gas and shooting of Jews, Russian soldiers, and Poles. At its peak, the camp covered approximately 675 acres and encompassed six sections with twenty-four barracks in each. Between twenty-five thousand and forty-five thousand prisoners had been confined at any one time within its electrified barbed-wire fences. Compared to other extermination camps, the atrocities at Majdanek were more universal. According to Israel Gutman, extant lists of prisoner transports reveal that one hundred thousand were Poles, eighty thousand were Jews, fifty thousand were Soviets, and twenty thousand were of other national origins, making Majdanek by far the “least Jewish” of any extermination camp. The State Museum at Majdanek, however, puts the number of dead at Majdanek at about eighty thousand, sixty thousand of whom were Jews, making Majdanek a much more Jewish place than initially presumed.40 Majdanek was mentioned in passing at least once in the Soviet press before its liberation: “In the concentration camp in Majdanik, at least 200 people die every day,” reported A. Aleksandrov in Trud in January 1944, adding that “the prisoners are killed in gas chambers.”41 When the Red Army overran Majdanek, however, they found sections 3, 4, and 5 entirely abandoned because the Germans, knowing the precariousness of their situation, had undertaken a massive evacuation of inmates during the late spring of 1944. Only 480 detainees, mostly weak Soviet prisoners of war and a few Poles, remained to greet their liberators.42 When imagining extermination camps, most people think of two sites: Auschwitz, with its iconic gate reading, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” which has become the stand-in for the Holocaust experience writ large, and Dachau and Buchenwald, with piles of bodies and emaciated survivors, whom American journalists photographed extensively in April 1945.43 Moreover, most people in the West imagine the camps through the literary representations written by survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau, because most survivors of the Holocaust found themselves in Auschwitz at one point in their tragic narratives. In the Soviet Union, however, the first visual images of extermination camps came not from Auschwitz or Dachau, but from Majdanek. Since the Red Army, and specifically the political divisions of each front, had been documenting Nazi atrocities haphazardly since 1942, and as part of the Extraordinary

• 154 •

world war ii and the holocaust

Commissions, since 1943, there were procedures in place to document the new discoveries of Nazi crimes. In this case, however, nothing like Majdanek had ever been seen before. In the few days after its liberation, members of the Extraordinary Commission were documenting crimes, bearing witness to atrocities, collecting material for wartime propaganda, on occasion saving lives, and telling stories that would continue to rally the home front towards this war effort that seemed to be nearing an end.44 It is significant that the major Soviet press outlets covered Majdanek three weeks after the camp’s liberation. In that time, the Extraordinary Commission carried out its investigation by interviewing survivors, filming the crime scenes, and documenting everything in sight. What was published, then, on August 12 in all the major Soviet press outlets was not “news” as a Western audience might understand it, the unfolding of events as the journalist was seeing them unfold. Rather, the discussion of Majdanek and the images accompanying it were an encapsulation of a well-researched and well-documented event that had taken place over three years. Among the many people sent to document Majdanek was the Red Star journalist Vasily Grossman, who, probably because of increasing state-sponsored anti-Semitism, was immediately reassigned and replaced by Konstantin Simonov. Simonov wrote the first widely published account of a Nazi death camp.45 Both Simonov and Pravda’s reporter, the writer Boris Gorbatov (who was Jewish), were trained as fiction writers, not journalists, and their first-person depictions of Majdanek reflected this.46 Evgenii Kriger (also Jewish), special correspondent for Izvestiia, opened his August 12 article, “German Factory of Death Near Lublin,” thus: “There is an ancient castle in Lublin that stands on a hill opposite the city gates. Inside the castle was a German prison. In the courtyard, in the chambers and corridors it was difficult to breath. On the last day of their reign in Lublin, the Germans killed their prisoners here. The stairs against the walls dripped with blood.” This is much more than strict journalistic reporting, as the narrator occupies the position of a storyteller, who was there to smell the stench of death. Kriger already had experience covering Nazi atrocities, having written about the November 1943 liberation of Kiev and the discovery of Babi Yar. He therefore knew how to make liberation stories not just descriptive, but gripping.47 Simonov’s articles went into great, and quite graphic, detail about the Nazi crimes committed at Majdanek and became the unofficial source of information about the camp before the Extraordinary Commission issued its report one month later in September. Simonov also explicitly mentioned the Jewish aspect of the story. Simonov and Gorbatov’s articles circulated widely in front and central newspapers; Simonov’s were published internationally in English translation.48 One of the things that distinguished the visual record of Majdanek from those of the dozens of other sites of atrocities was the fact that the Soviet press, and on occasion the foreign press, published an extensive photographic record. Each major press outlet as well as the Extraordinary Commissions had photographers at Majdanek. The well-known

Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes

figure 5.3. Boris Tseitlin, “Majdanek—Death Camp,” Ogonyok, August 31, 1944.

• 155 •

• 156 •

world war ii and the holocaust

photographer and cameraman Boris Tseitlin (again Jewish), who had photographed Krasnodar, took pictures for Ogonyok, some of which were published in the August 31, 1944, edition. He accompanied three of his photographs of empty landscapes and canisters of poison gas with a haunting description of what he saw: “In front of us lay a field of cabbage, rich and luxuriant. What could be more innocent? No one could imagine that the cabbage abundantly growing on dozens of surrounding acres was nourished with the blood and ashes of the tortured and dead.”49 While Tseitlin produced images for Ogonyok, Yakov Riumkin photographed Majdanek for Pravda and Oleg Knorring did so for Red Star; Viktor Tyomin had several photos published abroad in Life and the Illustrated London News.50 Several other photographers, including Georgii Zelma, working for Izvestiia, have Majdanek photos in their archives, and one other, Mikhail Trakhman, has a whole series of hauntingly beautiful landscapes of the camp. One layout published in Ogonyok includes photographs from Trakhman and Tseitlin (Fig. 5.4). Therefore, at Majdanek the documentary nature of the Extraordinary Commission photographs met the more aesthetically interesting and compelling photographs that had graced the pages of the Soviet press since June 23, 1941. Unlike in Artemovsk or Sumy, where the anonymous commission photographer did not seem to have (or more likely take) license to produce artistic photographs, at Majdanek all the most important photojournalists were vying for the “best” photographs of the camp. Nazi atrocities moved from the realm of forensic photography to that of Soviet photojournalism. Samarii Gurarii had been photographing Nazi atrocities in Belorussia and eastern Poland throughout 1944 for Izvestiia. It was Majdanek, however, that made his name. His photographs adorned Izvestiia when the newspaper broke the story about the camp on August 12, 1944, shortly after Simonov’s long reports began appearing in the Soviet and Western press. The August 12 layout in Izvestiia appeared on page 1. The photographs are a triptych of those objects or scenes that would eventually become emblematic of Nazi atrocities—piles of shoes, gas canisters, and corpses. They were clearly arranged for a Soviet audience that had become accustomed to seeing photographs of Nazi atrocities. Although he was a highly acclaimed photojournalist, Gurarii relied on the Extraordinary Commission’s established genre of Soviet Holocaust photography with excavated dead bodies, investigators posing with evidence, and the remnants of the dead. The only thing that distinguishes this photograph is the large number of people witnessing the exhumation of bodies. But Gurarii’s Izvestiia triptych forced viewers to see things they had probably never seen before: a bizarre photograph of canisters, for example, one of the few photographs in the visual narrative of Nazi atrocities that begged explanation. A reader would need to turn to the article accompanying the photographs to learn that these somber men holding canisters were in fact holding in their hands the tools that killed people. It was not a gun or a knife, something easily recognizable as a weapon used to kill. It was a canister of

Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes

• 157 •

figure 5.4. Mikhail Trakhman, Boris Tseitlin, “Majdanek Death Camp,” Ogonyok, August 31, 1944.

gas, in fact, a disinfectant used to kill lice, that in the case of Majdanek (and the other extermination camps that the Red Army and its photographers would soon uncover) was instead used to murder hundreds of thousands of people, most of them Jews. These canisters would have been the most difficult photographs to stand alone in 1944, because they had no meaning independent of the text explaining what they were. The third published Gurarii photograph, of a warehouse overflowing with empty shoes, has more meaning built into the image. The image of the field of shoes became the most important disembodied image representing Majdanek—the absence of thousands of people who once stood in thousands of pairs of shoes. This new iconography broke with the images that Soviet readers had come to associate with Nazi atrocities—burial sites, burned villages, and corpses. One image that remained an integral part of Nazi atrocity iconography was the chimney. Chimneys had become iconic images of Nazi war crimes in the Soviet press from the earliest days of the war. Recall, for example, Khaldei’s haunting photographs of a lone woman wandering the lunar landscape of Murmansk marked only by chimneys (see Fig. 4.6). The retreating German army burned village after village to the ground to leave nothing for Soviet forces. In a place in which most houses were made of wood, the only physical remnants of the fires were brick chimneys and the occasional weeping survivor, as in an Evzerikhin photograph of the city of Taganrog (Fig. 5.5). But with the discovery of

• 158 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 5.5. Emmanuel Evzerikhin, Chimneys, Taganrog, 1943. Courtesy of Emmanuel Evzerikhin and the Fotosoyuz Agency.

Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes

• 159 •

Majdanek, the chimney and its attendant oven (pech’ in Russian), the life-affirming hearth of every peasant home, was placed in an entirely new light. Riumkin’s photograph published in Pravda showed the industrial ovens the Nazis built to incinerate bodies. Although readers had seen corpses, investigators, and general landscapes of death, they had not yet been exposed to the industrial nature of killing and the new means of dealing with the dead. Chimneys appeared in the images from Majdanek, but instead of serving as reminders of life, as inanimate survivors and mute witnesses of Nazi atrocities, at Majdanek they were perpetrators of violence, the place where bodies went up in smoke. Remnants of bodies, which had been the domain primarily of the Extraordinary Commission investigators and their photographers, were also put on broad public display. One image shows local Poles from Lublin, a large city that is visible just beyond the barbed wire fence of Majdanek (Fig. 5.6). They are out for the day touring the extermination camp. Perhaps they are searching for dead relatives or mourning their local losses. Maybe they came as part of a Soviet campaign to have the local townspeople bear witness to atrocities that took place in their backyards. Unlike American photos in Germany that have locals witnessing atrocities as a form of punishment, Soviet liberation photographs show Polish witnesses in mourning. These photographs allowed the Poles (and all readers of Izvestiia) to see Poland as a place of mourning and loss, as a victim of atrocities, unlike Germany, which was a place that perpetrated violence and deserved retribution and punishment.

figure 5.6. Mikhail Trakhman, “Local Residents Tour Majdanek,” August 1944. Courtesy of Teresa and Paul Harbaugh.

• 160 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 5.7. Mikhail Trakhman, “Local Visitors at Majdanek,” August 1944. Copyright Ukrainian State Film, Sound, and Photo Archives. Image courtesy of Yad Vashem Archives.

Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes

• 161 •

At Majdanek, the genre of photographing the Soviet liberators with Jewish, Polish, and other victims was taken to a new extreme. In a photograph by Trakhman taken on the same day as the panorama, we see in the foreground a pile of human skulls, labeled “10,” presumably the tenth item that the Extraordinary Commission had marked and labeled as evidence. Just beyond the skulls are skeletons. But the point of the photograph is not the victims’ bones. The subject is the Lublin residents standing and staring blankly at the pile of bones. The women are dressed modestly, mostly in black, although one woman who occupies more than her share of the visual field is dressed in white and appears to be standing on the bones. To the left is a young girl, maybe ten years old, dressed in her Sunday best, having even put on a simple gold bracelet for the occasion—an outing to a concentration camp. The faces are somber, but not that somber. It does not seem as if anyone has recently shed tears at this site. In the background, we see the city of Lublin, which fades off into the distance and shadows of other townspeople who were visiting Majdanek on the day the photograph was taken.51 In perhaps the most arresting image, Trakhman photographed townspeople bearing witness to the excavation of a mass grave, a similar image to one that appeared in the Ogonyok layout. Unlike other images, such as the ones by Gurarii, which clearly operated in the forensic genre that puts the dead bodies at the center of the image, Trakhman has put an unfolding drama among the living on display. By doing so, he breaks new ground in Soviet Holocaust photography (Fig. 5.8).

figure 5.8. Mikhail Trakhman, “Poles Watching Germans Bearing Witness to Corpses,” August 1944. Copyright Ukrainian State Film, Sound, and Photo Archives. Image courtesy of Yad Vashem Archives.

• 162 •

world war ii and the holocaust

The sky is flat, gray, and empty. The only things breaking up the gray expanse are two brick chimneys off to the right, jutting up into the sky, one looking over the crowds, the other tiny and off in the distance. Like Gurarii’s, the photograph is centered on the burial pit. But that is not what captures the eye. The trench rips the photograph in two. On the left, the townspeople of Lublin line the edge of the trench, but most of them do not look at the pit. What are they bearing witness to if not the murdered before them? If one follows their gaze, one can see that they are looking across the pit to the right side of the frame, where German prisoners of war are being paraded by. German soldiers were brought to Majdanek, as in this picture, to bear witness to their crimes. As Alexander Werth, a BBC correspondent based in Moscow, reported, “A crowd of German prisoners had been taken through the camp. Around stood crowds of Polish women and children, and they screamed at the Germans, and there was a half-insane old Jew who bellowed frantically in a husky voice: ‘Kindermörder, Kindermörder!’ and the Germans went through the camp, at first at an ordinary pace, and then faster and faster, till they ran in a frantic panicky stampede, and they were green with terror, and their hands shook and their teeth chattered.”52 In a contrast to Werth’s description, the photographer has brilliantly figured the residents as ambiguous characters in this dramatic encounter—as victims mourning the dead but also as passive bystanders, who simply watch the Germans, just as they might have watched what was happening at Majdanek from their homes in Lublin during the war. Although the photographers may have depicted Poles at Majdanek ambiguously, their presence, and the absence of Jews, rendered Majdanek a non-Jewish place, aside of course from the many Jews documenting its liberation. Majdanek was rendered so “not Jewish” that photographs of the funeral procession for the victims, with crowds lining the streets and rows of coffins being led to the burial ground, reveal that rather than following behind a Soviet star on a staff, as in Starobelsk, the Polish, mostly Catholic, crowd is led by crosses.53 More important, however, than what Trakhman and other Soviet photojournalists photographed is what they did not picture, as in another image by Trakhman (Fig. 5.9). As writer and critic Luc Sante describes in his study of urban police photography from the turn of the twentieth century, “The uninhabited pictures are pregnant with implication. . . . And there are incidental factors that . . . may or may not be germane to the deed associated with the site: shadows, stains, footprints in the snow. The stains may be blood, the footprints may be those of the escaped murderer, or they may not be. . . . Empty photographs have no reason to be except to show that which cannot be shown,” in this case, the mass murder of Jews and others in Trakhman’s still landscape.54 Trakhman captured the uncovering of crematoria, the industrial means the Nazis used to ensure that nothing remained of their victims or their crimes. Not coincidentally, the crematoria were also those instruments of disposal that were as un-Jewish as one could imagine, since Jews traditionally bury their dead and clearly mark the place of burial. If the excavation photos at

Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes

• 163 •

figure 5.9. Mikhail Trakhman, “Empty Landscape of Majdanek,” July–August 1944. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

least showed bodies in the ground, photos of ashes and crematoria show nothing but elimination, of bodies and of the crimes.55 They depict emptiness. The more common ravine photographs, like the ones from Babi Yar, left everything to the imagination. The goal of such photographs was to document a crime scene, and in crime scene photography, a photographer conjures what was once in the scene, not simply what one sees in the photograph at the moment it was taken. Sante suggests that police photographs show “only that something happened, and that the occurrence left behind a body, a relic or a site. Their function, therefore, must have been literally as souvenirs, memory aids, records for records’ sake.”56 Janina Struk argues that the photographs of Majdanek were less compelling liberation images than those later taken by American and British photographers at Dachau and Buchenwald: “In comparison to the emotive images of human suffering which would be used to represent the camps liberated by the Western allies, those which were released to represent Majdanek showed the industrial scale of the camp . . . [and] the kind of detailed photographic evidence that police photographers might take in the course of a criminal investigation.” Time and Life correspondent Richard Lauterbach, one of the few foreign correspondents to have visited Majdanek, wrote that he was largely unaffected by seeing the gas chambers and open graves.57 Seeing Soviet liberation photography as crime photography helps explain why images from the Soviet Union feel less compelling than material coming from American liberation photographers. Struk is correct in pointing out Soviet photographers’ interest in how the killing occurred. The Ogonyok photographs of Majdanek give an overview of the

• 164 •

world war ii and the holocaust

Soviet Nazi atrocity visual essay, based in the photographic genre that had been developed by the Extraordinary Commissions. There are photographs of sites of mass killing— chimneys; crematoria; and at the top right, the room where victims undressed (see Fig. 5.4). We then move to remnants of the actual bodies—skulls and bones from incompletely incinerated corpses. As we move from left to right, we see the remnants of the victims— passports and personal photographs, the warehouse of shoes.58 In very few Soviet liberation photographs do we ever see close-ups of human faces. One is more likely to see a close-up of the dead, than of the living survivors. But here we reach the limits of seeing these images forensically, especially as liberation photography moved from the realm of the Extraordinary Commissions to photojournalism that appeared in newspapers. If each image in an Extraordinary Commission photograph documented a specific crime, as liberation photography moved into the newspapers, it became part of an evolving narrative, a story of Nazi atrocities against Jews, Soviets, and humanity in general. In this way, such images transcend police photography and function as memorial devices, art, and photojournalism, as much as they document the absence that viewers of these photographs had to fill with their imagination.

Majdanek in the United States Although by August 1944 Soviet readers were used to images of Nazi mass murder, the discovery of Majdanek caused shock waves throughout the Soviet Union. Ilya Ehrenburg increased his anti-German vitriol until a front-page article in Pravda in 1945 called on him to stop making such ideological “mistakes.”59 Soviet and Polish soldiers were brought to the site on a “hate pilgrimage” to show them the nature of the enemy, whose territory they were about to invade.60 And Soviet newspapers and wire services were transmitting photographs of the Nazi death factory throughout the country and around the world. Despite the journalistic accounts of the camp and despite the photographs of canisters, bones, and corpses, the anticipated outcry against Majdanek in the West did not materialize. Coverage outside the Soviet Union was muted at best, a change from earlier in the war when British newspapers especially used Soviet photography to create momentum for the slow-going war effort.61 Werth, who had described the macabre scene of the insane old Jew, was continually frustrated by his editor’s unwillingness to run his stories of horror and atrocities coming out of the territories that had been newly liberated by the Red Army: “When I sent the BBC a detailed report on Majdanek in August 1944, they refused to use it; they thought it was a Russian propaganda stunt, and it was not until the discovery in the west of Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen that they were convinced that Majdanek and Auschwitz were also genuine.”62 The New York Herald Tribune said of the Majdanek story: “Maybe we should wait for further corroboration of the horror story that comes from Lublin. Even on top of all we

Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes

• 165 •

have been taught of the maniacal Nazi ruthlessness, this example sounds inconceivable.”63 Several American papers ran an account of Majdanek by the Soviet Jewish filmmaker Roman Karmen, which had been translated and sent along the wires. The Daily Worker, the newspaper of the American Communist Party, ran the story in full on August 14 with no editorial comment.64 The Los Angeles Times ran Karmen’s story on August 13 while distancing itself from the grim account. It prefaced the article with an editorial comment about limited journalistic access to the site: “The only war correspondents permitted to accompany the Russian army except for occasional conducted tours of the front are Russian. One of the Russian correspondents has written the following special dispatch on the German crematory at Lublin.”65 Los Angeles Times warned its readers that the material it was publishing might be “propaganda.” The New York Times did not print Soviet press reports such as Konstantin Simonov’s long account about the camp that came out August 10–12. Instead the Times Moscow correspondent, Ralph Parker, wrote about the coverage of Majdanek in the Soviet press as his way of distancing himself, or of being a very careful journalist, from this unbelievable event. His August 11 story, “Soviet Writer Tells Horror of Lublin Camp,” based on Simonov’s account, was not a story about Majdanek per se, but about the way Simonov wrote about it.66 Parker did, however, name Jews as the primary victims at Majdanek, more prominently than had Simonov. The first major story by an American journalist was that by W. Lawrence, which introduced the name Majdanek to his reading audience. The Red Army brought foreign reporters to the site on August 25, a month after liberation, and Lawrence’s story, which was syndicated throughout the country, ran on the Times’ first page on August 30.67 Echoing Karmen, Lawrence wrote, “I have never seen a more abominable sight than Maidan near Lublin.” He opened his lead column story with “I have just seen the most terrible place on the face of the earth.” Both writers made the act of visually bearing witness— writing “I have seen”—the frame through which the reader understood the story of Majdanek. Ironically, despite the call to see and bear witness, no major, mainstream English-language daily paper in the United States ran a single photograph of Majdanek, a far cry from the two-page photo layouts that appeared in all the major Soviet dailies. There was a clear distrust on the part of the British and American press in the ability of Soviet journalists and photographers to “tell the truth,” at least according to American journalistic expectations. This is probably not surprising. After all, Soviet photojournalists had a very different understanding of the role of the photographer and a different relationship to truth and reality. Soviet photographers did not seem to reexamine these issues in light of the war and the new uses of photography. Photographers were now not just elevating socialism, but also documenting the enemy’s crimes. Thus, the war would seem to demand a greater need to meet international standards of photojournalism, of truth telling, of representing reality. In fact, as Polina Barskova has shown, in a place in which

• 166 •

world war ii and the holocaust

reality became too horrible, one began to fashion a reality that one wanted to see. For example, during the siege of Leningrad, artists who worked for city theaters were asked by the city government to create artificial ruins of bridges, which were laid out on the Neva River in the middle of the night so that German pilots would think they had successfully bombed their targets.68 Perhaps, then, wartime in the Soviet Union—with its vast burial pits and villages and towns literally wiped from the map—only made the relationship between representation and reality more complicated. For the foreign press, however, if one did not believe that photographs documented some kind of external, objective reality, one could not use them as evidence. And so it seems that most American press outlets shunned photographs of the camps. The British Illustrated London News framed a dozen Majdanek photographs slightly differently, with an ethical disclaimer: “In view of the fact that the enormity of the crimes perpetrated by the Germans is so wicked that our readers, to whom such behavior is unbelievable, may think the reports of such crimes exaggerated or due to propaganda, we consider it necessary to present them, by means of the accompanying photographs, with irrefutable proof of the organized murder of between 600,000 and 1,000,000 helpless persons at Majdanek Camp.”69 The only leading American publication to provide visual documentation of the camps was Life magazine, whose story on Majdanek ran on August 30, the same day Lawrence’s story appeared in the New York Times. The unattributed photographs were Soviet images taken from the wires. They document several events related to the liberation of Majdanek that took place before foreign journalists were allowed into the area—most notably, the August 6 funeral for the victims of Majdanek. The Life photo essay was titled, unusually, “Lublin Funeral: Russians Honor Jews Whom Nazis Gassed and Cremated in Mass.” The title and accompanying essay both squarely named the liberator, victim, and perpetrators and turned the reader’s attention away from the killing, in other words, away from the crime scene, and toward the memorialization process. It is also odd that the story names Russians, rather than Poles, as the group in mourning. As important was the clear naming of the victims, Jews, something unusual for both the Soviet and American press, which had been reporting the story of Nazi atrocities through each country’s own national narrative.70 Life obtained its Majdanek photographs from Sovfoto, a New York–based Soviet photographic distributor that had a virtual monopoly on Soviet wartime photographs in the United States.71 Sovfoto did not generally attribute the photographs that it circulated on the wires, but the Sovfoto archives show that the Majdanek photographs were taken by, among others, Viktor Tyomin and Samarii Gurarii.72 The six photographs Life chose to publish were divided into two narratives. The first two depict the funeral that took place at Lublin Castle on August 6, a standard feature of the Nazi atrocity visual essay. The bottom four images are the reminders of destruction at Majdanek, including the obligatory

Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes

• 167 •

image of people bearing witness to a mass grave. By relying on Sovfoto images, Life ended up publishing its own Soviet liberation photo essay. The other place Americans could see photographs from Majdanek was the Yiddish press. The newspaper The Day (Der Tog) published photo essays of Majdanek on August 14 and August 17, 1944, scooping the English-language papers by two weeks.73 Like Life, Tog got its material from the Soviet wires, probably from Sovfoto, and therefore also ended up publishing a Soviet liberation photo essay with images of gas canisters, wailing women, and people observing a trench of corpses. Perhaps surprisingly, the captions of the photographs in the Yiddish press never mention that the victims were Jewish. They are referred to as “people” or “men, women, and children,” which of course they were.

How Jewish Documenters De-Judaized Majdanek Most journalists and photographers who pictured and wrote about Majdanek figured it as a place of Nazi atrocity and universal, not Jewish, tragedy. Life was exceptional in this regard. In addition to Jewish photojournalists, such as Gurarii, Trakhman, Tyomin, and Zelma, and Jewish print journalists, such as Gorbatov, Tseitlin, Kriger, and Grossman, Jewish filmmakers were on the scene just after liberation, and these documentarians created what film scholar Stuart Liebman calls the first Holocaust film in history, Majdanek: Cemetery of Europe. This work, writes Liebman, “has the dubious distinction . . . of being the first film to develop visual and narrational strategies to dramatize the unprecedented story of German brutality in a camp as opposed to the more commonplace war crimes such as mass shootings of civilians and POWs that the Soviets had documented from the outset of the war.”74 The film took two months to produce and did not tell a Jewish story, even though it was made almost exclusively by Polish and Soviet Jews. Alexander Ford, a well-known Polish Jewish filmmaker who was born in Lodz and ⁄ became head of Czo lówka Polish Military Film Unit, had the task of directing film operations at Majdanek. His collaborators were several veteran cameramen, including Stanislaw Wohl and the brothers Adolf and Wladyslaw Forbert, all Jews and Communists who had been members of Ford’s politically progressive avant-garde film group, Start, during the 1930s.75 The Polish film industry collapsed under Nazi occupation and did not revive until April 1943, in Moscow. Poles who evacuated from Poland at the beginning of the war were mobilized as part of the Kosciuszko Division, which had a Polish army film unit.76 The filming of Majdanek took place under the auspices of this unit. In addition to the Polish military film unit, the Central Studio for Documentary Film in Moscow participated in the making of the film. Roman Karmen, probably the most well-known Soviet documentarian during World War II, who was also Jewish, was involved in this project, and the production of the film most likely took place back in Moscow under the Central Studio’s supervision.

• 168 •

world war ii and the holocaust

The filmmakers had to develop, according to Liebman, “an iconography, a set of characteristic metonymies that quickly came to define visual representations of the camp. For example, the electrified barbed-wire fences, filmed to highlight their articulation in layers, communicated the sinister obstacles placed between an inmate and freedom. . . . Lowangle shots of the mountains of mismatched shoes . . . set precedents for the way such stores would later be filmed by the Russians at Auschwitz and other camps.”77 In addition to a different iconography, the politics of this film were different from those of previous attempts to document and publicize Nazi atrocities. There was a need for this film, the first to depict Nazi atrocities for a Polish viewing audience, to place Polish and general human suffering, as opposed to Soviet suffering, at the center of the narrative. The documentary includes footage of the exhumations, the funeral, and interviews with survivors, nearly all of whom place Majdanek in a universal, rather than Jewish or Soviet, context. There is one film interview with a Jewish survivor that was included in Irmgard von zur Muehlen’s version of the film. That interview did not make the cut in the Polish-Soviet-Jewish version of the film.78 The last sequence in the film of the Majdanek funeral demonstrates most obviously the appeal to the Polish viewers who were the first to see the film. First, the funeral is Catholic. It has images of nuns and the revered icon the Black Madonna of Czestochowa. This isn’t in and of itself surprising, since Christian iconography became commonplace in documentary films and in some still photography commemorating Nazi atrocities.79 The soundtrack includes the Polish hymn “Rota,” which contains stinging anti-German lines and fit well with the general anti-German (as opposed to antifascist, anti-Nazi, or antiHitler) tenor of Soviet journalism in 1944. It is sung by a Red Army military choir recruited and recorded by Ford and Jerzy Bossak in Moscow.80 The film first played in late November 1944 in the Apollo and Baltyk movie houses in Lublin, capital of the newly liberated Polish Republic. The launch of the film coincided with the major war crimes trial of six “Hitlerites” accused of murder and other atrocities against the Polish population.81 On December 3, TASS reported, “Today in Majdanek the sentence of the special Polish court in the trial of five Hitlerites—who were sentenced to the death penalty by hanging for atrocities carried out at the Majdanek death camp—was carried out. On the square where the punishment took place more than 20,000 people gathered. From among the rows of those gathered, curses came directed at the Hitlerite beasts, ‘Give them what they need’ and ‘Death to the fascist criminals.’ ” 82 Nearly all those responsible for creating the story of Majdanek were professional photojournalists, writers, and filmmakers. Many were relatively assimilated Soviet Jews who told a universal story of atrocity and tragedy. This happened for at least three reasons. The one most commonly assumed is that a directive from the Central Committee told journalists, filmmakers, and others to tone down the Jewishness of the war. No one has yet found such a directive. Rather, Karel Berkhoff and others have found consistent editing

Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes

• 169 •

out of the word Jew and of Jewishness from both public and internal sources on Nazi atrocities. Marina Sorokina shows that the erasure of particular Jewish victimhood from the Extraordinary Commissions work happened subtly and consistently. Gennady Kostyrchenko’s work on Stalin’s anti-Semitism has clearly shown that there were internal memoranda aiming to push Jews out of the Soviet public sphere. This manifested itself most obviously in changing politics toward Soviet Jews in 1942–1943, as people such as Red Star editor David Ortenberg were removed from their positions.83 In an environment in which some Jewish editors, writers, and others were being marginalized in Soviet society, it is not surprising that photojournalists and editors would downplay the Jewishness of Nazi atrocities. Zvi Gitelman has also argued that the Soviet Union had a harder time recognizing a particular Jewish tragedy during the war precisely because Nazi atrocities and mass destruction took place extensively in the Nazi-occupied Soviet Union.84 Two million murdered Jews were easily absorbed into the estimated 27 million Soviet citizens killed. In the American context too, the press understood that rendering the war “too Jewish” might have larger consequences for mobilizing the population. Historian Peter Novick noted of the American media, “When downplaying Jewish victimhood was conscious and deliberate, the purposes were hardly vicious: to emphasize that the Nazis were the enemy of all mankind, in order both to broaden support for the anti-Nazi struggle and to combat the charge that World War II was a war fought for the Jews.”85 Second, as Liebman points out, as the first major site of Nazi atrocities on Polish soil discovered by the Allies, Majdanek needed to be figured differently from the previous atrocity sites on Soviet soil. It needed to be both universalized and made Polish if it was going to be used to justify the Soviet-installed Polish government. Finally, like their American Jewish counterparts, some Soviet Jews might have wanted to figure Nazi atrocities against Jews as a universal problem. Many Soviet Jews were more interested in seeing themselves as part of a larger collective, even in times of great suffering. They wanted to understand themselves as part of the Soviet Union and the Soviet people, rather than as they had always been seen by others—as Jews. During the war, they had the most invested in the universal project of the Soviet Union, even if it involved downplaying Nazi crimes against Jews. According to Gitelman’s study of Soviet Jewish war veterans, although most of them understand the contemporary importance of the Holocaust to Jewish identity, when they were asked about its role during the war, Gitelman found that “they did not fight in the war as Jews but as Soviet citizens.”86 Although Soviet Jewish veterans clearly understood the war to be a war against Jews, they simultaneously resisted seeing it only as a Jewish war. Those shooting with cameras were no different from those with guns. They had an investment in saying that Majdanek was a universal human tragedy, precisely because Jews were the primary victims. The story of the New York Times coverage of the Holocaust suggests that Jews in the two great modern assimilating societies of the twentieth century—the United States and

• 170 •

world war ii and the holocaust

the Soviet Union—desired to be part of a larger collective. From New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger to Washington bureau chief Arthur Krock, Jews charged with telling the American national narrative of the war resisted highlighting the Jewish side of Nazi atrocities.87 Such stories about Jews using the war as a crucible for universalism continue into the present. In 2004, at the annual meeting of the Four Chaplains Memorial Foundation, the chair of the board, Barry Sax, told the story of the chaplain Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn, who in 1945 was invited to conduct an interfaith funeral service for the dead at Iwo Jima.88 Gittelsohn encountered problems because the Protestant and Catholic chaplains decided that a Jewish chaplain could not lead an ecumenical service. In the end, the representatives of the three religious traditions conducted their own ceremonies. Gittelsohn’s eulogy from Iwo Jima became famous nationwide. Here lie men who loved America because their ancestors generations ago helped in her founding and other men who loved her with equal passion because they themselves or their own fathers escaped from oppression to her blessed shores. Here lie officers and men, Negroes and Whites, rich men and poor, together. Here are Protestants, Catholics, and Jews together. Here no man prefers another because of his faith or despises him because of his color. Here there are no quotas of how many from each group are admitted or allowed. Among these men there is no discrimination. No prejudices. No hatred. Theirs is the highest and purest democracy.

Gittelsohn clearly emphasized a universal American story and downplayed the fact that Jews were sacrificing their lives at higher rates than their non-Jewish American counterparts.89 As he recounted Gittelsohn’s story, Sax’s voice rose in anger, “Why divide the dead? Jew, Christian, Muslim, they were all Americans.”90 In an American context, the question “Why divide the dead?” reflected Jews’ own yearning for the universal, to not be divided from others, to be considered American citizens like everyone else. Ironically, in the Soviet context, the phrase Do not divide the dead has usually been invoked to describe Stalin’s postwar silencing of the attempt to document and commemorate the Holocaust on Soviet soil. But perhaps both are true. Like many American Jews who were using the war experience to finally make themselves into Americans, some Soviet Jews were doing the same.

Documenting the Other Camps In July 1944, at almost the same time as the discovery of Majdanek, Soviet troops liber⁄ · ec, and Treblinka, the three main Operation ated the nearly empty sites of Sobibor, Be lz ⁄ · ec were not well documented, Reynhard camps. The liberation of Sobibor and Be lz ⁄ · ec in June 1943, because there was very little to document. The Nazis had closed down Be lz exhumed and burned the bodies, and destroyed everything as they pulled out. Treblinka,

Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes

• 171 •

which also had few remnants of the death operations, was only moderately covered in the press. In early August 1944, before the huge news splash about Majdanek, when the Red Army reached the old German state border, Ilya Ehrenburg published an article in Pravda ⁄ · ec and letting his readers know of the “death factories” and gas wagons near Minsk, in Be lz in Sobibor. He continued, “Trains with Jews arrived from France, Holland, Belgium. Large numbers of non-Jews,” he added, “had also been shot and gassed.”91 In addition, Komsomol’skaya Pravda published several reports on Sobibor in September.92 The Extraordinary Commission investigated Treblinka and put out its report on August 23–24, 1944, at the same moment that foreign journalists were getting their first eyewitness accounts of Majdanek. The Treblinka report opens with the phrase “The extermination camp in Treblinka, in which hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered.”93 This was one of the clearest articulations that this camp, unlike Majdanek, was not for Jews as well as Russians, Serbs, and others, but was a site at which Germans killed Jews almost exclusively. In early September, Vasily Grossman, who had been at Majdanek, traveled one hundred miles north and documented Treblinka shortly after it was liberated, interviewing survivors for the Black Book.94 Grossman was explicit in describing the identity of those killed. He writes in his notebooks, “On April 27, 1942, they shot Jews and those Russians who were with them there through marriage (70 people).”95 The Treblinka Extraordinary Commission learned about the camp from testimony of thirteen Jewish survivors who fled during the armed uprising at the camp on August 2, 1943. The Soviet investigators also used documents collected from various sources about train transports. As with the Majdanek report, which minimized but at least mentioned the Jewishness of the camps, in the official Treblinka report, it says that at least when Treblinka was a labor camp in 1941, “there were—in addition to Poles—Jews, Gypsies, Czechs, and others.” Treblinka was not prominently reported on either in the Soviet Union or abroad. The ⁄ · ec at all, and the only menmajor American newspapers did not mention Sobibor or Be lz tion of Treblinka was a very early secondhand report of a Polish announcement coming out of London with the description “2,000,000 Murders by Nazis Charged [at Treblinka, Poland].”96 Because Majdanek overshadowed the liberation of Treblinka as a news story, the photographic record was minimally published and was also not very well preserved. The few photographs of Treblinka in the Yad Vashem archives in Jerusalem show a lunar scene devoid of the barracks, gas chambers, and other remnants of mass killing that marked the site of Majdanek.97 Grossman’s files at the Russian State Archive for Literature and Art in Moscow contain more than thirty photographs that he collected and hoped to publish in the Black Book. Several of these photographs come from Treblinka.98 Grossman’s Treblinka photographs have the visual resonance and documentary drive of the Extraordinary Commission photographs. One shows the investigators at work; because they are on Polish soil, the committee is labeled as “joint Soviet-Polish.” There are photographs with horrible images of corpses of the individuals who were shot in July

• 172 •

world war ii and the holocaust

1944 as the Germans withdrew from the camp. And there was the requisite general view of Treblinka with barbed wire, showing how generic and virtually indistinguishable these sites were. One photograph depicts the visual narrative of investigation. Present are medical professionals in white coats, military personnel in uniform, political administrators in civilian clothes, and a man in the center of the frame holding a bag. Another photograph from these Treblinka files shows investigators in the foreground and, off to the side, a lone woman in a skirt covering her nose and mouth as the team looks at several corpses (Fig. 5.10). In addition to photographs in Grossman’s files, there are Treblinka photographs by lesser-known photojournalists such as A. Obshchev, R. Kekalo, and the better-known Tyomin, who were all at the remnants of the camp in mid-September.99 A single photograph was published in Ogonyok on February 28, 1945, nearly six months after the camp’s discovery, and was placed in the bottom right quadrant. The photograph depicts a field of chimneys in the dull landscape, but little else in the way of moving imagery or documentary evidence.100 For Grossman, Treblinka proved to be his great opportunity to write about Nazi extermination camps, since, although he didn’t know it at the time, his Black Book project would not be published in the Soviet Union.101 His field notebooks include short vignettes about survivors, German prisoners, and Ukrainian collaborators whom he inter-

figure 5.10. Unattributed, Group of Army Political Administration workers along with representatives of the Polish government examine corpses, August–September 1944.

Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes

• 173 •

figure 5.11. Vasily Grossman, “Schematic Drawing of Treblinka,” including his rather damning evidence of widespread collaboration that sixty Ukrainians and forty SS officers worked at the transport area. Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

viewed, including one who bragged that he himself “had killed several hundred Jews.”102 Grossman’s impressions of the camp, as he recorded them in his notebook, verge on the poetic, as when he described a barrack full of human remains: . . . women’s boots in the courtyard, clothes in the barracks, hair in the barracks103

Grossman also included occasional schematic sketches of the camp’s layout, presumably to remind himself later about the geography of mass murder (Fig. 5.11).104 The simple lines of his childlike drawings show a journalist’s attempt to visualize the landscape his witnesses described to him, a scene the camera simply could not capture, since it no longer existed. From his interviews and notes, Grossman wrote a long essay titled Treblinka Hell (Treblinskii ad ), which was published in the journal Banner (Znamia) in November 1944 and then quickly translated into Yiddish as Treblinker genem and into English as The Treblinka

• 174 •

world war ii and the holocaust

Hell.105 This longer, written-for-publication version of Grossman’s impressions shows how the public narrative of Nazi atrocities was subtly different from that expressed in Grossman’s private notebooks. First, in comparing his notebooks with his manuscript version of Treblinka Hell, it is clear that there is less talk about Jews in the book than in his notebooks, but Jews are not absent from it either. He states near the opening of the published version that “there were two camps in Treblinka: Labor Camp No. 1, where prisoners of various nationalities, but especially Poles, worked, and the Jewish camp, Camp Two.” More significantly, unlike his notebook, which clearly shows the degree of collaboration of sixty Ukrainians (at the very least) working on the transport, Treblinka Hell understates collaboration. In one case, his original manuscript states that “700 people in the course of five weeks worked on the building of a new death combine.” In the published version he changed the word “people” to “prisoners.” By changing “people,” which could imply any freely motivated collaborator, to “prisoner,” which implied being forced into collaboration, Grossman downplayed the possibility that the Ukrainians working on the transport volunteered to be there. He made small changes in attributing guilt by changing “Germans” in his manuscript to “SS officers” in the published version. Perhaps the biggest change in his text as it went from manuscript to published form was the elimination of any of Grossman’s drawings that he included in the original. His publishers decided that they had to go. Treblinka, along with ⁄ · ec, were discovered and then hidden by the shadow of Majdanek. Only Sobibor and Be lz Treblinka, through its chronicler Grossman, became news at all, and even then, the story and photographs about the camp appeared months after its discovery.

Auschwitz and the Emergence of the Survivor Despite the extensive coverage of Majdanek, most people do not think of its July 1944 liberation as the paradigm-setting event of the Holocaust. It did not become an icon or the symbol of the Holocaust like Auschwitz. The Red Army liberated Auschwitz, known as Osventsim in Russian and O´swi¸ecim in Polish, much later than the other five extermination camps, on January 27, 1945. Its liberation did not make major news at the time, though in 2005, the United Nations selected that date as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It was Auschwitz, and not Majdanek, that became the icon of the Holocaust in much of the world. Geographer Andrew Charlesworth argues that the postwar Stalinist government of Poland consciously chose to make Auschwitz, and not Majdanek, the international icon of Nazi atrocities after the war. He suggests that Majdanek was deemed to be too connected to Polish losses and too close to Polish territory that the Soviet Union annexed at the end of the war. Perhaps most important, Auschwitz “faced west” metaphorically to the new potential threat of postwar fascism, rather than east like Majdanek, near Lublin, which pointed toward the Soviet Union.106

Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes

• 175 •

There were only brief reports in the Soviet press about Auschwitz.107 In October 1944, Izvestiia published a TASS report describing Auschwitz from the standpoint of some prisoners who had escaped.108 On February 2, 1945, Pravda published a short report from Boris Polevoi about Auschwitz that did not mention Jews, and the New York Times published only a one-hundred-word story about the Russian coverage, the same form of distancing that the American press used with Majdanek.109 Pravda did not publish a full story about the camp until May 1945, just as the war was ending. Ogonyok finally broke the general silence on March 20, with a full-page layout of photographs and a brief explanatory caption. The text reads: The name of the Polish city Osventsim has already been connected to the most horrible atrocities of the Hitlerite occupiers for a long time. This grandiose death machine stretched out for dozens of square kilometers. Here these German monsters tortured millions of people—Russians, Poles, Jews, French, Czechs, and Yugoslavs. . . . In their attempt to maximize the efficiency and productivity of the death machine, the Germans mechanized all weapons of mass destruction of the prisoners: they built gas chambers, used electric conveyors and shaft furnaces to incinerate the corpses in their so-called ovens. The entire area of the camp was literally covered with human blood and fertilized with human ash. In the photograph, on top: a general view of one of the sections of the camp—Birkenau. Here there were four gigantic complexes in which hundreds of thousands of prisoners were exterminated with Zyklon gas. In the lower pictures: Soviet military doctor examines this engineer from Vienna, Rudolf Sherm, who was driven to this hopeless state. [Lower caption] In the upper picture: 15-year-old Ivan Dudnik from the Orlov region, who went insane in the camp. On the left, corpses of tortured prisoners whom the Hitlerites did not manage to incinerate; in the foreground, corpse of a child who died from starvation in the camp.

Since the Soviet press had not publicized Auschwitz upon its liberation in January, it is not clear how the name “Osventsim” had already become “connected to atrocities,” as the caption suggests. The TASS photographer Rafail Mazelev, to whom the photographs are attributed, had spent much of the war photographing besieged Leningrad.110 He gained experience photographing Nazi atrocities in his coverage of the liberation of the Klooga concentration camp in Estonia in September 1944, an event that Life magazine also covered.111 In addition to Mazelev, Mark Redkin, who was one of the Kerch photographers, and Vladimir Yudin photographed Auschwitz. All three were Jewish.112 Yudin was a battlehardened photojournalist who had experienced more than his share of Nazi atrocities. He photographed the liberation of Vinnitsa and Berdichev, two Ukrainian cities with very large Jewish populations and each with its own massive burial site near town.113 These photographers were on site shortly after the liberation of Auschwitz, but the Soviet press did not give that camp the column inches that it had given to Majdanek six months earlier.

• 176 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 5.12. R. Mazelev, “Osventsim,” Ogonyok, no. 11, March 20, 1945.

Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes

• 177 •

figure 5.13. Unattributed, “Funeral Procession at Auschwitz,” 1945. Copyright Ukrainian State Film, Sound, and Photo Archives. Image courtesy of Yad Vashem Archives.

Times were different, and the politics of Nazi atrocities had shifted. With Soviet soldiers nearing the German border, a less hate-driven campaign was in order. By fall 1944, Nazi atrocities took a back seat to the rebuilding of Soviet society. Despite Auschwitz’s enormity—the largest camp in size, the most number killed, the most number of survivors—it did not capture the media’s attention. The photographic record at Auschwitz, therefore, lies primarily in archives, not on the pages of the press. But the published and archival record shows that although editors were not publicizing the enormity of the camp, photographers were photographing it, and the images of Auschwitz were profoundly different from those of Majdanek. One does find the formulaic images of barracks, barbed wire, and corpses, but there are also extensive pictures of the Catholic funeral at Auschwitz. A still from a documentary film shot in the dead of winter shows townspeople carrying coffins that hold bodies exhumed from mass graves to be placed in a proper burial site (Fig. 5.13). The townspeople, a few Soviet officials, and local clerics were part of a Catholic funeral ceremony.114 Most important, the photographic narrative of Auschwitz included something that the ravines, burial pits, and even Majdanek did not—survivors. Unlike the other extermination camps, upon whose liberation the Red Army discovered a few dozen survivors if any at all, at Auschwitz there were an estimated seven thousand survivors.115 Among

• 178 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 5.14. Unattributed, “Survivors of Auschwitz Participate in Funeral Procession.” Copyright Ukrainian State Film, Sound, and Photo Archives. Image courtesy of Yad Vashem Archives.

those walking the frozen streets from the exhumation area to the burial site in the funeral procession were ex-prisoners in striped clothing (Fig. 5.14).116 As for the published record, Mazelev’s photographs of Auschwitz that were published in Ogonyok are profoundly different from those of Gurarii’s Majdanek layout in Izvestiia. First, the pictures of destruction at Auschwitz show dozens of barracks that could have housed army soldiers as easily as Holocaust victims. The gray sky merges with the snowcovered grounds of the camp. There is nothing marking this as a place of death. Mazelev’s Auschwitz had neither a chimney nor an oven, so a newspaper reader would have had a harder time filling in the murderous narrative (see Fig. 5.12). Into this narrative void step the survivors of Auschwitz, the first survivors—as opposed to witnesses, bystanders, mourners, and others who were still alive after Nazi occupation— in the photos to be published in the central Soviet press. In the first picture published in Ogonyok, a medical examiner is working with a Viennese engineer whose emaciated body looks as if it is about to fall apart. Medical examiners were a common theme in Soviet Nazi atrocity photographs, but they were never examining the living, always only the dead. Even the photograph of dead children is profoundly different from the images of lifeless corpses that Soviet readers had come to expect. Here, the child’s face is clearly visible, the reader even detecting a possible smile on his face. Mazelev gave both the survivors and the victims an identity, something that the Extraordinary Commission

Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes

• 179 •

photographers did not. The only other well-known Nazi atrocity photographs to give clear identities to the victims were those from Kerch that had been published more than three years earlier. A haunting image by Yudin of a survivor at Auschwitz brings together several motifs of Soviet Holocaust photography (Fig. 5.15). At its most basic level, the viewer sees the enormity of the crime, as represented by the massive pile of glasses stolen from Auschwitz’s victims. Like the warehouse of shoes that became a symbolic stand-in for the thousands killed at Majdanek, the massive pile of glasses at Auschwitz serves an iconic function. Although Yudin placed the glasses at the center of the frame, he has included the presence of a survivor looking through the glasses. This is quite different from the photographs of the warehouse of shoes at Majdanek, which almost always included investigators, not survivors. And this is where Yudin’s brilliant photograph returns us to the theme of ambivalent liberation. While one might expect liberation to be a moment of joy, made up of embraces, gratitude, and jubilation, Yudin depicts the banality of liberation, the desperate need of a survivor to see again. If all Auschwitz victims had their glasses confiscated, camp prisoners would have been seeing the world as a blur until the moment of death or liberation. Yudin reminds us that seeing clearly was one of the first things a survivor wanted to be able to do. Yudin is also making a metastatement about the need to see, to bear witness, in the immediate aftermath of liberation, and here it is the survivor, not the investigator, who will be able to bear witness clearly. The late appearance of the survivor into Soviet Holocaust photography suggests that the figure of the survivor posed particular challenges for the Soviet understanding of the war and Nazi atrocities. For more than two years, Nazi atrocities had been figured as the total destruction of the local occupied population, of “peaceful Soviet citizens.” Few of the articles that accompanied Soviet Holocaust photography asked how bystanders in the photographs managed to remain alive after Nazi occupation. Had Soviet newspapers consistently figured victims as Jews, then one could have easily explained that those left alive were simply not Jewish. Since the published record more often framed Nazi atrocities as crimes against peaceful Soviet citizens, a reader could be forgiven for asking how some people survived the occupation. The question of complicity was always lurking in the background of the Soviet war narrative, but rarely came to the foreground. We have seen that liberation was an ambivalent process, at once triumphant in the ending of Nazi occupation and revelatory of what the Nazis did during the occupation. Liberation was also a time of reckoning, and in many towns, local war crimes tribunals conducted investigations and ordered executions of suspected collaborators. Others were deported to gulags. The Extraordinary Commissions took testimony of many different kinds of people, but one could never be sure who was on trial in such encounters—the person being interviewed, who had to say something to justify his or her survival, or the fascist enemy. Moreover, by shifting the language of

• 180 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 5.15. Vladimir Yudin, “Survivor Searches for Glasses.” Courtesy of Teresa and Paul Harbaugh.

Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes

• 181 •

perpetration from “Germans,” a clearly defined national category, to “fascists,” a flexible ideologically defined one, Soviet Holocaust discourse opened up space for including nonGermans into the category of perpetrator. If this did not happen very publicly on the pages of the newspapers, it was certainly happening in war crimes tribunals. Thus, the presence of survivors would have posed additional challenges for readers trying to make sense of the war. How did someone survive Nazi occupation? And, more important, who counts as a survivor, worthy of sympathy, and who a bystander, or worse, a collaborator, worthy of retribution, when “peaceful Soviet citizens” were lying in mass burial pits? It is only once the military and its photographers cross into Polish territory that survivors—almost always clearly marked by their striped prisoners garb or their emaciated bodies—appear in Soviet Holocaust photography. By spring 1945 photographs of Nazi atrocities were disappearing from the Russianlanguage press. The Red Army was about to move from liberating territories occupied by the Nazis to occupying Germany itself, and a new idiom was needed. Izvestiia ran a photo layout of Auschwitz photographs, including survivors, on May 8, 1945, when it published the Extraordinary Commission’s report on the camp.117 The last photograph Ogonyok published of the extermination camps appeared on June 17, 1945, after Germany had capitulated and just before the Soviet Union’s huge victory parade in Red Square that took place on June 24. In the photo layout, the upper left is dominated by the soon to become iconic gates, on which were written, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” leading to Auschwitz I. Most Jewish victims of Auschwitz never went through these gates. In fact, by making the iconic symbol of the camp the gates to Auschwitz I, and not the train entrance to Birkenau, where most Auschwitz victims were killed, the Soviet press universalized and de-Judaized the camp as part of Soviet war memory. Through the fall of 1945 there were occasional photographs of Nazi atrocities, usually accompanying stories about war crimes. But such images were now used for postwar purposes of memory making and war crimes prosecuting.

Comparing Liberation Photography Holocaust liberation photography was disappearing from the Soviet press just as it was making its great appearance in the Western press. The British and American reading audiences finally saw Nazi atrocities through their own photographers’ lenses in April–May 1945, when Allied forces liberated the camps in Germany and Austria. Unlike Soviet readers, the American and British reading audience had neither the first hand experience nor the early visual record of Nazi atrocities. It took the publication of gruesome photographs of Dachau, Nordhausen, and Buchenwald in major American and British news outlets to convince people who had not seen atrocities first hand that these events actually took place. Why did images of Dachau have so much more impact than Soviet photographs from Majdanek?

• 182 •

world war ii and the holocaust

Zemel suggests that Soviet photographers might not have been as invested in the human narrative or in creating iconic human images of the Holocaust. She argues that Western photographers, such as Margaret Bourke-White and Lee Friedlander, took photographs that lent themselves to becoming icons of the Holocaust, images that were detached from their historical and spatial context.118 But if one examines American and Soviet photographers’ work from the immediate prewar period, one finds, as Leah Ben-David Val has shown, distinct similarities—in the drive for socially oriented photography and the elevation of the downtrodden to iconic status.119 It is too simple to say that Soviet photographers were either not interested in compelling photography or had their work censored. Two things distinguished American and British liberation photography from Soviet liberation photography: the perspective of the photographers and the difference between the camps themselves. American and British photographers, many of whom were also Jewish, had a different relationship to the act of liberation. If Soviet Jewish photographers were operating as documenters of crimes that took place on Soviet soil, American and British photographers operated as representers of tragic narratives that revealed the enemy’s barbarism thousands of miles away. They used their cameras to tell emotional stories at the end of the war and approached these scenes out of a sense of shock and emotional revulsion. American and British liberation photographers had little professional or personal experience with Nazi atrocities, unlike their Soviet Jewish counterparts, who had been photographing Nazi atrocities for three years. A lack of experience with the subject matter meant the photographs had to serve a different purpose, especially photographs projecting Nazi atrocities to naive Western audiences. In May 1945, the British Daily Express organized an exhibition called “Seeing Is Believing” to show Western liberation photographs of the camps. Reactions ranged from repulsion to shock. A similar exhibition opened at the U.S. Library of Congress in June.120 For the second point, American and British liberation photographers at places such as Dachau, Belsen, and Buchenwald, had an entirely different scene in front of their camera, which also demanded a different approach. The extermination camps in Poland did a more complete job of extermination—of both bodies and the relics of destruction—than did the concentration camps in Germany. As the Wehrmacht retreated from Poland back to Germany, it brought many of its prisoners back on death marches, like the one described by Elie Wiesel in Night. Dachau, Belsen, and Buchenwald, which had been concentration camps for a wide variety of prisoners throughout the war, became, effectively, death camps in 1945 as people died en masse from disease and starvation. When American liberators arrived, they found thousands of starving survivors and piles of relatively fresh corpses. They found survivors instead of the empty landscapes and traces of mass murders at burial sites and extermination camps. Susan Sontag, as a critic and theorist of photography, has argued that images “do not tell [people] anything . . . they were not already primed to believe. In contrast, images

Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes

• 183 •

offering evidence that contradicts cherished pieties are invariably dismissed as having been staged for the camera.”121 In other words, “photographs cannot create a moral position.”122 They merely reinforce what we already believe. These are powerful and contestable words, but Sontag reminds us that we situate photographs into our own ideological world and within our prior experiences. The Soviet audience could integrate photographs of the Holocaust into an already developing story of Soviet heroism and victory, as well as of Nazi atrocities and defeat. American and British audiences had not yet seen the representation of that story. American newspapers and other press outlets had shunned graphic battle images (let alone atrocities against civilians) in presenting a sanitized picture of the war effort. Because of this, in the words of historian Paul Fussell, the American home front had a “deep deficiency in imagination.”123 That is, until Dachau, Nordhausen, and Buchenwald. Photos of Dachau with trainloads of bodies and ash heaps presented big questions to newspaper editors and to government censors, who shaped journalistic policies, about the sensitivities of the American public, who only had their first glimpse into the violence of war in 1943 with photographs from Buna Beach and Tarawa. And then, those dead were dead soldiers, the expected outcome of war. Unlike American and British photographers, whose photographs of Dachau documented the emotional revulsion the army and these journalists felt upon discovering concentration camps, Soviet Jewish photojournalists had already spent three years both documenting and experiencing atrocities. They were the first Holocaust liberator photographers, who created a photographic genre to help them and those who would see and use their photographs make sense of the genocide that unfolded before their cameras.

•

6

•

When Jews Talked to Jews wartime soviet yiddish culture and soviet photographers’ jewishness

Hitler’s war against the Jews of Europe and the Soviet Union was a moment when Soviet Jewish photographers and all Soviet Jews were most radically integrated into the heroic Soviet nation as Red Army soldiers and simultaneously singled out as racially inferior victims. This tension between the pull to universalism and the stark reminders of particularism shaped the world of these photographers and their photography throughout the war. In 1940, Evgenii Khaldei returned to his home town of Stalino to visit his dying grandmother and had a family portrait taken that would be the last of its kind (Fig. 6.1). The dapper twenty-three-year-old photographer is pictured in the background, surrounded by members of his family. The phrase “Our family, 1940” is handwritten on the photograph. This photo is a far cry from that of his family’s living room in Stalino, then called Yuzovka, from the 1920s (see Fig. I.1), which showed how the Khaldei family embodied the early twentieth-century Russian Jewish experience with pianos and the Russian language, on the one hand, and a kippah, Yiddish, and bearded men on the other. The comparison of the two family portraits shows how far the Khaldeis had come in the twenty years of Soviet rule. In the later photo the men are clean-shaven and are wearing ties; the women are in dresses with high necklines and somewhat modern hair; and the note on the photograph is in Russian. Although this picture was taken before the German invasion, Khaldei recalled the photo frequently after he went to Stalino during the war in 1943 and discovered the mass murder of several of those pictured in the photograph. According to Khaldei, these visits prompted him to think more “Jewishly” about this Soviet war. It perhaps prompted him to take photographs of the Budapest ghetto or of Jewish cemeteries throughout Eastern Europe. Georgii Zelma engaged with his Jewishness during the war more subtly. He spent most of fall 1942 photographing Stalingrad and subsequently took a short break in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, to visit his family, who was living there having evacuated from Moscow. It was probably accidental that Tashkent was not only home to many wartime Jewish evacuees, but was also Zelma’s birthplace. The return to his home town was a • 184 •

When Jews Talked to Jews

• 185 •

figure 6.1. Unattributed, Khaldei family in his hometown of Stalino, 1940. Courtesy of Evgenii Khaldei and the Fotosoyuz Agency.

reunion, unlike Khaldei’s return to his hometown in 1943, when he became a witness to his family’s murder. Tashkent was also perceived as a symbolically Jewish city during the war, but in a negative way. Many Soviet citizens, including Jews, lived for part of the war in evacuation in places like Tashkent. But because it was a place of evacuation and one with a large Jewish population, those in the city were said to be fighting on the “Tashkent front.” The antiSemitic joke was that Jews shirked their war duties by hiding out in evacuation, fighting on a Tashkent front—where there was no fighting. The presumptions that Jews were evacuated, fled the front, or were hiding out in Tashkent waiting for the Russians to save them from the Germans affected how Jews themselves saw the war and their role in it. For many Soviet Jews, and among them the photographers, myths of Jewish cowardice increased their resolve to fight even harder to disavow the prejudice. In fact, Jews served in the Red Army at rates exceeding their percentage of the population. Therefore, Zelma’s visit to his Tashkent Jewish family, despite being a reunion, reminded him of his own stake in the war. It also stirred in him a Jewish pride that he hid well, but that came out on rare occasions in his wartime diary. For instance, in a 1942 entry, Zelma recalls a famous boxing match that pitted a Jew against a German. The match Zelma recalls was the famous 1933 fight between Max Baer, whose grandfather was Jewish and

• 186 •

world war ii and the holocaust

who famously wore a Jewish star on his boxing trunks, and Max Schmeling, a German who would go on to fight for the Wehrmacht during World War II. The June 1933 fight that took place in Yankee Stadium in New York was enmeshed in global politics as word of Nazi German anti-Semitism spread through the United States. As one observer recalled, when Baer won by technical knockout in the tenth round, singer Al Jolson, the Jewish star of The Jazz Singer, the first talkie, was reportedly shouting from ringside, “Come on, Jewboy! Kill that Nazi!”1 The event appeared in Zelma’s field notebook nearly ten years after the fight. Zelma attributes to Baer the declaration, “I am an American and also a Jew. Today I will defend this sign of the star and get revenge for all Jews who have been killed by fascists.”2 Baer is unlikely ever to have said this, since the boxing match happened before Nazis began killing Jews. Instead, this rewriting of the Baer-Schmeling fight in the language of a Soviet Jew tells us something about Zelma. Our urbanite photographer, who at the time had been working for Soviet victory for nearly two years, nonetheless recognized that this was also a war between the Nazi fascists and Jews. Zelma recalled this moment when a Jew briefly had power over a German (Schmeling was not a Nazi, although he was a favorite of the regime). And he recalled a time when the Star of David was worn with pride, rather than as he, a liberator-photographer, saw it, on bodies of dead Jews in places he had photographed or in trophy photographs taken by the Nazis themselves. Occasionally, while on assignment in liberated territory, Jewish photographers took pictures that were most likely not part of their assignment, but that they took nonetheless as a form of Jewish memory practice. Yakov Khalip, who spent most of the war with the Soviet navy, took a series of photographs during the liberation of Vilna in July 1944. Included among them were images of the Vilna ghetto and one of an entryway into a synagogue. The caption, “Behind a stone walkway in the Jewish ghetto of Vilna. An inscription in Hebrew of a secret synagogue,” is taken from Khalip’s own notes written on the envelope. The inscription over the door, which dates the founding and reconstruction of the building, tells us that Khalip had unwittingly photographed the kloyz, or synagogue, of the famous eighteenth-century rabbi the Gaon of Vilna.3 There would have been no demand in the Soviet media for a photograph with a Hebrew inscription from the Gaon’s synagogue. Instead, Khalip found something significant for Jews in both the image of the Hebrew inscription and the idea of a secret synagogue existing in the Vilna ghetto. These images by Soviet Jewish photographers reflect a similar sentiment of many Jewish writers working for the Soviet press during the war. On August 24, 1941, leading Soviet Jewish cultural figures held a major rally at Moscow’s Gorky Park to call on the Jews of the world to fight fascism. The goal was to enlist support for the war from American Jews, since at the time, the United States was still not in the war. Ilya Ehrenburg famously said, “I grew up in a Russian city. My mother tongue is Russian. I am a Russian writer. Like all Russians, I am now defending my homeland. But the Nazis have reminded me of some-

When Jews Talked to Jews

• 187 •

thing else; my mother’s name was Hannah. I am a Jew. I say this proudly. Hitler hates us more than anyone else.”4 Less well known is that Ehrenburg opened his speech, excerpts of which were published in the next morning’s Pravda, by recalling an experience of a pogrom during his childhood. Ehrenburg’s first words at the rally in Gorky Park were “In my childhood I saw a Jewish pogrom [Malchikom ia videl evreiskii pogrom]. The czarist police and a few vagabonds carried it out.”5 Like Khaldei, who often recalled the 1919 pogrom that killed his mother, Ehrenburg had his coming-out as a Jewish victim of antiJewish violence on the pages of the central Soviet press with the outbreak of the war. In addition to important Russian cultural figures like Ehrenburg, many famous Yiddish cultural figures spoke at the Gorky Park rally. David Bergelson (1884–1952) and Perets Markish (1895–1952), however, needed no official coming-out, since they were widely known as Jewish writers. Bergelson was one of the most established Yiddish writers in the Soviet Union, publishing his first book in 1907. After a thirteen-year absence from his homeland, Bergelson returned to the Soviet Union in 1934 and quickly became one of the most powerful and highest paid Yiddish writers. Markish developed his reputation as a young, rebellious writer and expressionist poet during the Revolution and civil war. During World War II, Markish wielded considerable cultural authority, stemming both from his position in the Soviet Yiddish literary hierarchy and from the power of his poetic vision. From 1939 to 1943 he served as the chair of the Yiddish section of the Soviet Writers’ Union, the body that oversaw all writing and writers in the country, and he was a member of the board of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, established in April 1942, along with four other “special interest” committees, to foster international support for the Soviet war effort.6 Both Markish and Bergelson attended the August 1941 Gorky Park rally, which was broadcast by Radio Moscow in Yiddish, Russian, and English. When Markish took to the podium, he addressed his “fellow Jews” in Yiddish, unlike Ehrenburg, who spoke in Russian: Cities and roads are drenched with the blood of our people as they are trampled on from country to country under the boots of Hitler’s butchers. The blood, spilled by the fascist monsters in Germany, had not yet dried up; the groans of tens of thousands of plundered and degraded refugees had not yet abated, when a new bloody carnage broke out in Austria, into which the frenzied butcher threw the strangling noose of the dark swastika.7

Markish was angry, like most speakers, but differentiated himself by emphasizing the very particular images of blood and butchers, the visceral nature of genocide. In the end he called for an equally violent response. Bergelson’s Yiddish speech at the 1941 rally, titled “I Will Not Die but Will Live” (“Lo amut ki ekhye”), also wrestled with the tension between a universal war that targeted all “peace-loving” people of the world and the very particular onslaught on world Jewry: “It

• 188 •

world war ii and the holocaust

is [Hitler’s] plan to wipe out all peoples, and in the first place, the Jewish people.”8 The phrase “all peoples and in the first place the Jewish people” would become the framework of Bergelson’s wartime Soviet writing. It was his way of synthesizing the universal with the particular, unlike Markish, whose writing and speechmaking tended to emphasize Jewish particularity. Bergelson expressed Jewish pride throughout his speech, celebrating the “great thinkers” that the Jewish people had given to humanity, among them Baruch Spinoza, Heinrich Heine, Moses Mendelssohn, Louis Brandeis, and Albert Einstein, a Who’s Who of acculturated, assimilated, and secular Jews, many of whom were German. Perhaps this was a direct reminder that the true German legacy lay not in crude German nationalism but in liberal German (and often Jewish) culture.9 Moreover, the question of Jewish identity profoundly interested Bergelson, especially since Hitler and Nazism had so radically changed the relationship between Jewish selfidentity and the way others ascribed identity to Jews. Although it may have been muted (but rarely absent) in the mainstream Russian press, Jews were on the radio in Russian, in Ehrenburg’s words and even in the voice of the Soviet Union’s chief wartime radio announcer, Yuri Levitan. In his Yiddish speech, Bergelson reminded his listeners that under this new world order, Jewish secular universalism, as adopted by many Soviet Jews, was not enough: “The bandit Hitler makes no distinction between workers and manufacturers, between freethinkers and religious people, between assimilated and unassimilated Jews.” The title of Bergelson’s speech, “I Will Not Die but Will Live,” is taken from Psalm 118, which forms part of the traditional Jewish Hallel prayer. Hallel pays homage to God’s power in the world and is recited on major Jewish holy days. After the war, this psalm was commonly recited to commemorate Holocaust victims and celebrate its survivors and the Jewish people as a whole. Bergelson reminded his Yiddish-speaking, sometimes psalm-reading, audience that this was a war against the Jews, which is why he deliberately evoked the verse first in its original biblical Hebrew, and then in its translation into the vernacular. The speeches from the rally circulated internationally. According to reports gathered by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the event sparked protests and rallies of solidarity around the world.10 Pravda quoted Ehrenburg extensively and paraphrased Markish, mentioning “the fascist murderers and oppressors who were inundating entire cities and villages of Europe with the blood of their inhabitants.”11 The excerpted translation in Pravda did not shy away from the violence or from the Jewishness of Markish’s speech. As for our photographers, they were not well known enough to have the propaganda value of Ehrenburg, Bergelson, and Markish. Instead, they were off doing their job in August 1941—photographing the front, the rear, and possibly the rally itself. We have seen how Soviet Jewish print and photojournalists visualized, wrote about, spoke about, and memorialized the war, Nazi atrocities, and the Holocaust in the Russianlanguage Soviet press. The Russian-language press told universal stories about Nazi

When Jews Talked to Jews

• 189 •

atrocities while subtly incorporating the fact that Jews were the primary victims. Jews told a very different story of the war and the Holocaust for a Jewish audience in the official language of Soviet Jewry, Yiddish. This is not to say that the photographers took special pictures for the Yiddish press. They did not know which papers would pick up their wire photographs. Nonetheless, by examining the wartime Soviet record in Yiddish alongside photographs, excerpts from diaries, and other materials, we see that these photographers, writers, and others were wrestling with Jewishness during the war. We also learn that some things could be said in Yiddish that could not be said in Russian, and although it seems counterintuitive, there are some things that could be seen in Yiddish that could not be in Russian.

Picturing the Holocaust in Unity In August 1941, there was no central Soviet Yiddish periodical in which to publish the speeches from the rally in Yiddish. Instead, they came out in a pamphlet produced by the Emes publishing house. Emes was publishing quite a bit of Yiddish-language war related material in 1941–1942, but no one was producing a central Yiddish newspaper.12 The vast network of Yiddish cultural institutions that the state had established in the 1920s and early 1930s had shrunk dramatically by the time of the war. In the late 1930s, the Soviet Union moved away from its affirmative action policies toward a more assimilatory approach by which all Soviet citizens would identify with Russian culture. This meant closing down schools in ethnic minority languages, shrinking ethnic newspapers, and encouraging Russian language and culture. State-sponsored Yiddish culture waned in the late 1930s with a few key institutions serving as the wartime reservoirs of official secular, socialist Yiddish culture—Yiddish theaters, outlets for Yiddish culture in Birobidzhan, and a small number of newspapers. In the 1940s, there were only two regularly published Yiddish newspapers in the Soviet Union, a far cry from the dozens that had circulated in the early 1930s, but a reminder that Jews were still one of dozens of Soviet ethnicities with their own language and culture. One was Birobidzhan Star (Birobidzhaner Shtern), from the far-eastern Jewish autonomous region of Birobidzhan; for most of the war, however, it was published in Russian.13 The other was Unity (Eynikayt), founded in 1942 as a mouthpiece for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Since July 1941, the Jewish intelligentsia had been working to reestablish a Soviet Yiddish newspaper that would serve as a central base for Yiddish culture. But with the chaos brought on by occupation, evacuation, and destruction, Jewish culture makers were scattered around the country. Many important political and cultural leaders were evacuated from Moscow in October 1941. Markish stayed in Moscow, but writers Itsik Fefer and David Hofshteyn were in Ufa, Rokhl Korn was in Samarkand, Leyb Kvitko was in

• 190 •

world war ii and the holocaust

Kazakhstan, and David Bergelson and Yehezkiel Dobrushin ended up in Tashkent, while the headquarters of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and its head, Solomon Mikhoels, were based in Kuibyshev (present-day Samara).14 It took nearly a year before Unity began appearing, printed in Moscow, but edited and laid out in Kuibyshev where many government agencies had been evacuated.15 In addition to Unity, partisans and other underground organizations were also producing state sponsored Yiddish newspapers, such as Yedies vegn matsev af di frontn (News from the Front), which came out of occupied Kaunas (Kovno) from 1942 to 1944.16 The editors, D. Halperin and Kh. Elinas, also produced a Lithuanian version of their newspapers that reached other local resistance forces.17 Through the war, Unity had a circulation of about ten thousand, of which circulation abroad was two thousand. The domestic readership, particularly the Jewish intelligentsia and also Jewish soldiers on the front, was relatively small, considering the large Yiddishspeaking population.18 Subscriptions were low, but came in from all over the country and clearly reflected the new dispersion of Soviet Jewry. Three hundred copies went to Tashkent, 200 to Ufa, 250 to Gorky (contemporary Nizhny Novgorod), 200 to Omsk, and 400 to Sverdlovsk, and smaller numbers were circulated to dozens of cities in unoccupied parts of the Soviet Union.19 From the first weeks of its publication, in June 1942, Unity “judaized” the war for both its domestic and international Yiddish-reading audiences and functioned as a kind of Jewish public sphere for Soviet Jewry. The paper received more than five thousand letters in the first year of publication from its readers, including Red Army soldiers.20 Unlike the Russian-language press, which tended to universalize Nazi atrocities and captioned victims as “peaceful Soviet citizens,” Unity generally named victims as Jews. For example, in late June Ehrenburg published an article titled, “Why Do the Fascists Hate Jews So Much?” The Russian-language original, published in May in the Soviet army newspaper Red Star, was titled simply “About Hatred,” and there was no mention of Jews. Unity published special columns on Jewish war heroes and notices about Jewish men and women on the front and frequently included their portraits.21 Throughout 1942, the newspaper published graphic photographs of German atrocities and named the victims as Jews. During the summer of 1942, the newspaper published photographs of Jewish burial sites, examples of Nazi atrocities, and trophy photographs from the Warsaw ghetto. Although usually small, trophy photographs showed what was happening in Germanoccupied Poland, which might—a reader could extrapolate—be the fate of Soviet Jews also under Nazi occupation.22 Bergelson had followed many Jewish cultural leaders by evacuating in the fall of 1941 and became one of Unity’s editors. His first essay in the new newspaper discussed the unfolding destruction of European Jewry, with Bergelson using the Yiddish word khurbn. And khurbn would come to be the Yiddish word for the Holocaust, but, unlike that word, was in use from the beginning of the war. In “May the World Be a Witness,” Bergelson

When Jews Talked to Jews

• 191 •

pictured a world after the tide had turned in favor of the Soviets, a piece of hopeful fantasy in the summer of 1942. He imagines Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels pacing in fear.23 At a time when the Nazi death machinery was in full operation, Bergelson imagined a world in which Jews would be able to rewrite history on their own terms, as they had in the past, an impulse amply fulfilled by those after the war who compiled memorial books, or yizker bikher. The editors of Unity illustrated Bergelson’s article by publishing a photograph of an impoverished, hungry man in the Warsaw Ghetto, the only mention or visualization of Jewish weakness in the entire article. The photograph allowed the readers to bear witness to the suffering of Jews in the ghetto as they read Bergelson’s account. In the inaugural edition of Unity, Markish published “The Memorial in the Reichstag.”24 He opens by remarking on Hitler’s blaming the Jews for the unusually cold winter that greeted the German army as it reached the outskirts of his home in Moscow: “In a hundred and forty years there hasn’t been such a bitter winter in Europe. 50 degrees below zero.” This is how Hitler explained his blitz-defeat near Moscow, —Whose gusts blew in these frigid temperatures? —Jews! —And in a hundred and forty years there hasn’t been so much snow. Who poured it down? —Jews!

Markish told his readers that the Soviet Union was up against an enemy with an irrational fear and hatred of Jews. It was a fear based in the myth of Jewish power that Markish put into the Führer’s mouth. The Nazis’ fear of Jewish power is almost ironic in a wartime climate that had many Russians and others falsely accusing Jews of shirking their war duties and of fighting on the “Tashkent front” instead. If Hitler’s propaganda emphasized mythic Jewish power, the Russian rumor mill emphasized Jewish cowardice and powerlessness. His next essay in Unity, “The Heroism and Patriotism of Jewish Red Army Soldiers,” challenged the myth of the Tashkent Jew and highlighted the role of Jews in the fight against Germany.25 Dealing with the rumors of Jews’ shirking their military duty was high on the agenda of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Some members even proposed compiling a special book documenting Jewish wartime heroism.26 Only in the Yiddish press could Markish air these frustrations about presumed cowardice and instead express pride about the role Jews played in the fight against Germany. By late 1942, the nadir of the war, some writers articulated a deep depression with the state of affairs. In a new series of articles, Bergelson began writing of mass Jewish loss and the need to name the perpetrators. In a piece dated September 5, 1942, titled “Remember,” he introduced the Holocaust into the general narrative of the war. This two-column article told the grim story of mass murder in the city of Vitebsk, in present-day Belarus, a site

• 192 •

world war ii and the holocaust

of the “earliest recorded eyewitness account on the annihilation of the Jews.”27 A ghetto had been established in Vitebsk immediately after the Nazi invasion in July 1941; it was liquidated on October 8.28 According to Bergelson, “By October 12, 1941, not more than eleven people were left alive, mostly medical workers, and of those, four managed to escape with help from partisans.” Bergelson tried to salvage some form of heroism in the essay by celebrating the evacuation of three-quarters of Vitebsk’s Jewry and reminding his readers that partisans were active in the area. Yet despite this Soviet optimism, the Holocaust overwhelms the heroism. Bergelson interviewed two of the Vitebsk survivors, Esther Sverdlov and Khaye Polman, both medical professionals, who related to him the megiles Vitebsk, the story of Vitebsk. His description of the two women is grim: “Both are skin and bones. Their cheeks and brows, darkened but not by the sun, have long grown unaccustomed to squeezing out a smile.” He then recounts the liquidation of the ghetto: In the course of four days, from October 8 to 12, 1941, the punishment battalion brought an end to the remaining Vitebsk Jews. The . . . fascist tourists [who had stayed behind] . . . saw the shooting of the [remaining] Jews with their own eyes. What becomes of such eyes? And they heard the cries of the wounded and the screams of children who were thrown alive, along with corpses, into the Tulav Ravine. What becomes of such ears?29

Bergelson then calls on “Jews from all countries” to remember those who committed this terrible violence.30 The essay’s title, “Remember,” is a command to the reader, one of the earliest demands for Holocaust memory in the Soviet, and indeed the global, press. It is shocking to recognize that as early as the autumn of 1942—with Europe occupied, Jews driven to extermination camps, and ghettos liquidated—Bergelson was already talking about memory. But unlike what would later be called “Holocaust memory,” remembering the Jewish dead, Bergelson’s call is to remember the perpetrators, those who flung living children into a ravine. This is angry memory, more retributive than reflective. And this kind of memory made sense in the autumn of 1942, especially in a newspaper that could reach readers in New York, London, and elsewhere. Alongside such descriptions of Nazi violence, especially those that emphasized the power of bearing witness to atrocities, Unity occasionally published photographs. These actual images of violence, juxtaposed with literary references to bearing witness, served as documentation, “proof ” taken by liberators’ cameras, that what writers such as Bergelson and Markish were writing about was, in fact, true. For the one-year anniversary of the liberation of Kerch, Unity published a photograph by Mark Redkin of dead women and children. It had been published in the Russian press in February 1942 and was one of the first liberation photographs to appear in the Soviet Yiddish press. The caption spoke universally about the victims as women, children, and the elderly, but the well-known Soviet Yiddish writer Itsik Fefer’s poem “I Am a Jew” was published on the preceding page.

When Jews Talked to Jews

• 193 •

Associating the photograph with Fefer’s poem and presenting its caption in Yiddish rendered the scene Jewish.31

Biblical Revenge and Liberation From January 1943 through late 1944, as the course of the war turned dramatically, so too did the Soviet Yiddish press’s coverage. With the defeat of the German army at Stalingrad, the Soviet Jewish story began to look more optimistic and the picture painted of the enemy became even more graphic and vicious. Unity covered Jewish military heroism extensively. According to one of its own reports, the newspaper covered Jewish participation in the Red Army and heroism 568 times from June 1942 to March 1943, making this the most common topic in the paper.32 (Not surprisingly, the second most popular topic in that first year of publication was fascist atrocities against the Jewish population.) In 1943, the Red Army began the long and painful process of liberating city after city from German occupation. Its discoveries of Nazi atrocities and mass ruin made front-page headlines in the Soviet press. Unity pictured these events through its particular Soviet Jewish lens. Bergelson wrote about Kiev after its liberation in November 1943, describing a messianic vision of its reconstruction: And summer twilights will come again, when the city will be filled to excess with creativity, like a goblet of wine, and the goblet will overflow. And the newly rebuilt Kreshchatik will rumble noisily. From very early on, many electric lights will twinkle, and, merged with the glow of the sunset, together they will illuminate everything as though on a holiday. And it will seem to everyone and everything that in the depths of the beautiful, broad street a great holiday is taking place. A procession will form like a wedding canopy accompanied with candles, in an enchanted, joyous country, and it will approach in the company of blaring trumpets and the echoing of drums.33

Although the word Jew does not appear in this passage, Bergelson introduced biblical references in his story of liberation, published during the month in which the anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution was commemorated. He viewed the liberation and rebuilding of Kiev through the prism of Jewish prophecy. The closing image of trumpets and drums evokes Psalms 149–150, as Bergelson importantly connects the music of praise in Psalm 150 with the thanks offered to God in Psalm 149 for deliverance and the possibility of revenge.34 Markish too drew on biblical sources, but he chose the history of Jewish vengeance in the face of anti-Jewish crimes as his historical and textual reference. In August 1943, with the first war crimes trial taking place in Krasnodar, Russia, Markish published his most powerful poetic essay of the war, “To the Jewish Warrior,” in which he brings together images of destruction and vengeance with heroism and pride and stakes a clear claim to Jewish nationalism in the war effort.35

• 194 •

world war ii and the holocaust

I know: you kissed your rifle on the day when the life of the nation hung in the balance and, with each shot, as if accompanied by a thundering bell’s chime, you blessed the land that gave that rifle to you. You made a fiery vow, with fire and with blood through uprising and through . . . pain. You, the Jew, the Citizen, the Soldier. You, the Jew, the Partisan, the Red Army Soldier!36

In addition to the obvious references to Jewish heroism, Markish shows that these Jewish soldiers have multiple identities and that first among those identities was “the Jew.” Thus the dominant theme of the poem is Jewish vengeance—not Soviet, partisan, or Red Army revenge—framed with biblical references. Later he invokes the four forms of capital punishment in the Torah to show that the revenge killing of those who committed atrocities against Jews is divinely sanctioned. Here, “blood is crying out from all directions, ‘Vengeance! ’ ” If invoking the Torah’s capital punishment weren’t enough to embed the Soviet Jewish soldier in a biblically grounded history of Jewish vengeance, Markish turns to the enigmatic story of Simeon and Levi, the Israelite avengers: “I do not forget how Simeon and Levi slaughtered Shechem for defiling and raping their sister.” In the Bible, in response to Shechem’s rape of the patriarch Jacob’s daughter Dinah, two of her brothers, Simeon and Levi, murder all the males of the city, loot the area, and carry off the women and children. By invoking this story, Markish suggests that the Soviet Jewish warrior is in good company by being compared to the biblical avengers. Markish then urges Soviet Jewish soldiers to turn Berlin into a destroyed wasteland: The crying earth of the city of Odessa, and the cry from the bloodied Lukianov cemetery [in Kiev], for the communities ritually slaughtered. You, Jewish soldier, will not part from your gun, just as your grandfathers refused to part with their holy book. . . . A city for every slaughtered child! A city for every raped sister. Now go, Jewish Red Army soldier, take revenge, and may the pain never be depleted from your heart until Berlin lays in ruins like Shechem, until the blood of your graves is repaid.

For Markish, Berlin will become Shechem, and the new generation of Jews uses guns as its means of resistance, while the old generation relied on books. Passivity is rejected in favor of vengeance. The photographs of Berlin in ruins taken by triumphant Soviet Jewish photographers such as Khaldei and Tyomin created the images of an avenged people.

Majdanek: German Perpetrators and Jewish Victims As we saw in chapter 5, Soviet Jewish photographers, writers, and filmmakers were documenting Majdanek extensively for the Russian-language reading public. But no photographs of Majdanek appeared in Unity. Instead, the task of describing the camp was given to Bergelson. In “The Germans Did This!” Bergelson turned Majdanek into a powerful

When Jews Talked to Jews

• 195 •

symbol of German depravity and human loss. The publication of this article also marked a significant shift in the tone of his Holocaust narrative, one that had been evolving for three years. In mid-1944, Bergelson began the process of universalizing the story of the Holocaust in Yiddish. He moved away from speaking in a Jewish voice and wrote universally about victimhood and vengeance. He did this, however, not by simply erasing the crimes against Jews, as often happened in the Russian-language press. Instead, he renders crimes against Jews “crimes against humanity,” foreshadowing what the Nuremberg Trials would do shortly after the war: This will be engraved on the memory of humanity for ever. . . . In Majdanek! . . . This is the spit in the face of everyone who feels and thinks and sees in life something rational and good, and who believes that it is in man’s power to make life better and more beautiful.37

In the first part of the essay, Bergelson never uses the word Jew. Rather than focusing on the ethnic or religious identity of the victims, he turns his eye to the perpetrators: “Mothers and teachers will have to declare to their children, clearly and explicitly, that this was not done by human beings. . . . It was the Germans who did this!” He names the crematorium director who “lived inside the crematorium itself, and said that he loved the smell of dead burning people” and the man who tore a four-year-old child in two. He rages against the “nineteen- or twenty-year-old German with the tender girlish face, who selected a healthy young Jew from among the ill-fated victims and ordered him to bow his head. And when the one chosen had indeed bowed his head, he began beating his neck with a rod.” By opening the next section with the assertion “It was the Germans, and only the Germans, who did this,” Bergelson damns the entire German nation. He also potentially exonerates Nazi collaborators—Ukrainians and others—a political strategy that was becoming more important in a Soviet discourse that wanted to rebuild a family of Soviet nations as the war neared its close. Bergelson also changed the way he addressed his Jewish reading audience. In one poignant passage, he questions the culpability of the entire German nation and also tells Jews that they need to start seeing their loss as part of something bigger than themselves: Was it only Manfeld and Tuman [who ran the camp] who did this? This is the question each of our Red Army soldiers had to ask himself when bearing witness to a field strewn with hundreds of thousands of people’s shoes, soldiers who were led to see a decaying body killed by an electric current, who were led to . . . a person begging, as though for alms, “Please, hang me.” Who can, in such a moment, attempt to calculate how many pairs of shoes on that field belonged to Jews, and how many belonged to Poles, to Russians, Ukrainians, Greeks, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, to Norwegians or to Serbs?

• 196 •

world war ii and the holocaust

We Jews? Almost to the last person [the Germans] exterminated our brothers in the occupied regions. In the places where Polish, Lithuanian, and Latvian Jews used to live and create, all he left behind was emptiness, and with an abandoned cynicism he inscribed into that emptiness: —Vilna without Jews! —Kovno without Jews! —Warsaw without Jews! And yet we do not have the power to gain restitution for our great tragedy alone, and the plague called “Germans” is not ours alone. It is a plague on the whole world.

Like the Majdanek photographers, Bergelson painted liberation as the discovery of emptiness, in this case a landscape empty of Jews. Although acknowledging the need for vengeance, Bergelson also warns his Jewish readership not to turn revenge and memorialization into parochialism and nationalism. This was an unusual turn. His earlier work for Unity had fostered Jewish particularism, even as Russian-language journalism was fostering universalism. But with the impending end of the war, and with the rising Soviet state suspicion of Jewish national expression, Bergelson tempered his Jewish national voice. Too much nationalism, he now began to argue, would be harmful to the Jews’ own long-term interests. He calls on them to see the mass murder of their European brothers and sisters as a problem for humanity, not for Jews alone, for both ideological and practical reasons. The debates about how much to universalize the story of Nazi atrocities against Jews happened in the captioning of photographs, on the pages of Unity, and behind the scenes in the making of the Black Book. On October 13, 1944, the literary commission of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee met to discuss various issues related to Nazi atrocities. They brought up the local Moscow showing of the 1944 American Holocaust film None Shall Escape but spent most of the meeting talking about the Black Book.38 Halfway through the conversation about the book, Vasily Grossman raised the issue of how to refer to the victims of Nazi atrocities: When I was reading the material that has already been prepared, the word “Jew” jumped out at me too often. If, in a small note, the author writes, “they took out a Jew,” that is simply reflecting the facts. But if the book is entirely about Jews, then we should avoid the word “Jew.” Otherwise we will repeat the word 6,000 times, and this becomes very irritating. One can write “they collected people” or “people went out to the square” or “5 people fell,” without writing the word “Jew.”

The excessive use of the word Jew in the text bothered Grossman, and his irritation with language led him to universalize the story. Perhaps this is also why editors of the Yiddish newspaper felt it unnecessary to mention in a caption that the victims were Jewish. It is important to remember that the same Grossman had just returned from Treblinka, a camp

When Jews Talked to Jews

• 197 •

that killed almost exclusively Jews, and was finishing up The Treblinka Hell. So he knew firsthand about the specificity of the Jewish story. Ehrenburg replied to his younger colleague: The issue is that when a person writes about what happened—for example he writes that all Jews had to wear an armband and were then taken to the marketplace or to a ghetto— when a person tells about this, he cannot not write the word “Jew.” Of course, if someone is describing Odessa, he does not need to write “Jew” every time, but can write it differently each time. But if there’s a document that describes a specific event and repeats the word Jew 4 or 5 times, then the word cannot be removed. If you say, “people were driven into a ghetto” this is simply not completely accurate.39

The internal debate shows the fine line between politics and style and between parochialism and universalism. This fear of narrowness came up again at the end of the meeting, this time with Ehrenburg expressing his concern of parochialism. He was worried about the composition of the Black Book’s editorial board. In addition to Jews, he wanted to recruit ethnic Russian writers to work on the book, so that “the book isn’t put together only by Jews. In order for this book to evoke friendship and solidarity we need to attract three Russian writers, aside from Platonov who seems to be in the odd position of being the Shabbes goy,” the non-Jew, who works on behalf of Jews on the Sabbath.40 The editorial board’s challenge of finding non-Jews to write about Nazi atrocities for the Black Book echoes one of the arguments of this book—that Soviet Jews, as photographers, writers, filmmakers, and radio personalities, were mediating Nazi atrocities for the Soviet population. This fact made Ehrenburg and others uncomfortable. By writing the word people in place of Jew, by adding Russians to the editorial board (they talked about adding a Ukrainian writer, but couldn’t think of anyone working on Nazi atrocities against Jews), the most important Jewish writers in the country hoped to embed even the most particular stories into broader narratives. The literary commission rarely discussed photography. Ehrenburg briefly talked about images from the Kovno ghetto that he wanted to include in the book. These included two photographs by a local Kovno photographer, presumably Jewish, who survived. The other Kovno photographs Ehrenburg wanted to include appeared in a photo album of a German officer, who “labeled one page ‘Jude’ and on that page he laid out photographs of living Jews, who were then photographed dead.”41 But in general, photographs did not seem to play a major role in the Black Book project, which put it at odds with the Russianlanguage press, which thought of photographs as documentary and forensic evidence of the Nazis’ crimes. Photographs also did not play a big role in the emerging concentration camp narrative in the Soviet Yiddish press. Unity’s editors did not publish any photographs alongside Bergelson’s article on Majdanek, an unusual choice given how widespread such imagery was in the Russian press. It was not until September 1944 that photographs about camp

• 198 •

world war ii and the holocaust

liberation began appearing, and they were not from Majdanek or Treblinka. As we saw in chapter 5 with Auschwitz, funerals were a common visual motif in the liberation story. Funerals in the Soviet Union were defined by red flags and peasant women such as those that appeared in Unity from Minsk. By choosing to represent liberation with photographs of funerals, rather than forensic photographs like those published in the Russian press, Unity told a different story about liberation. Rather than focusing visually on the crime itself, the editors emphasized the Soviet memorial process, in this case, a mass funeral for the mostly Jewish victims of Trostinets (Fig. 6.2). Perhaps the editors chose Trostinets, a camp located on Soviet soil, rather than Majdanek or Auschwitz, because publishing photographs of Polish Catholic funerals would have ruptured the Jewish and larger human stories of the war told in Unity. Having a Catholic funeral for the mass murder of Jews might have been too much for Unity’s editors. Like the Redkin photograph of Kerch that appeared in Unity, the editors did not label the victims at Trostinets as Jewish. Similarly, in September 1944, when the newspaper ran trophy photographs from ghettos, there seemed to be no need to say “these are Jews.”42

figure 6.2. Unattributed, “The Funeral for the Victims of German Fascist Terrorism in Minsk and in the Minsk Region. The funeral took place on September 8th in Maly Trostinets. In the picture: a women’s demonstration at graveside with more than 10,000 participants . . . ,” Unity, September 21, 1944.

When Jews Talked to Jews

• 199 •

The visual record of the war in Yiddish was sparse compared with the one that appeared in Russian. This is not surprising, for the very practical reason that the newspaper was operating on such a shoestring budget and coming out so rarely that there was neither the money nor the column inches to publish photography. As early as February 1943, editor in chief Shakhno Epshteyn was explaining to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which supervised the newspaper, that the editors were doing the best they could with extremely challenging material conditions: “The small size of the newspaper combined with the abundance of important themes and questions whose exposure cannot be delayed, demands very careful planning of each issue. It demands paying attention to proportionality and being systematic about the layout of all material, and in being concise in our explanations so that ideas are clear and the writing very tight.”43 So space and cost were major issues preventing the inclusion of photography. Grossman did publish several photographs of Treblinka in the Yiddish translation of his reportage about the camp.44 But the fact that the only published photographs in the Yiddish newspaper from the liberation of Nazi extermination camps were of mourners and not victims suggests something deeper about the editorial policies of the Yiddish newspaper. Perhaps there was a conscious resistance to publishing images of the mass murder of Jews in the Soviet Yiddish press. Rather than turn the mass murder of Jews into police reportage, the editors may have wanted to leave discussion of Nazi crimes to the printed word. Or maybe one could say that in a Yiddish newspaper trying to reach Jewish audiences around the world, there might have been a subconscious recoiling from publishing pictures of dead Jews. Yet perhaps the resistance was not one of protecting audiences from secularized prohibitions of human images, but of protecting the universal narratives of concentration camps that the Russian, and global, press had been fostering. Publishing camp photographs in the Yiddish newspaper would have embedded and framed extermination camps in a particularly Jewish way. Perhaps, then, the August publication of Majdanek photographs in the Russian press meant that images of the camps were meant to be universal, not particular, and therefore could not appear in a Soviet Yiddish newspaper.

Jews with Six-Pointed Stars: The End of the War in Yiddish Although the pictures coming out of the camps were universalized, some photographs coming from sites of liberation around Europe showed that the victims were Jewish, at least according to Nazi definitions—with the marker of the six-pointed star. In one image, Soviet Yiddish readers learned the story of Jews being deported from central to southern Europe on a reverse death march, only to be, according to the caption, “saved from death by the Red Army” (Fig. 6.3). The structure of the story—headlined “Soviet Army Saves Jews”—became a standard motif in the stories published in Yiddish that were coming out of Eastern Europe when writers and photographers began encountering Jewish survivors

• 200 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 6.3. P. Makrushenko, “In the Yugoslavian town of Bor, the Red Army saved from death 3,000 Jews, whom the Hitlerites brought here from Budapest, Prague, and from other cities in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Pictured: A group of liberated Jews,” published in Unity, December 21, 1944. Sovfoto Archives. Labels prepared in Moscow.

of the war. Unity picked up this photograph by a little-known photographer off of the wires. The archival version attributes the photograph to Mark Redkin and has the following description: “A group of Jews liberated from German camps. On order of Hitlerite command, they had to wear six-pointed stars on their coats.” The same photograph ended up in New York with Sovfoto, whose archive contains dozens of photographs showing Jews marked with the yellow star. For example, the archive contains photographs taken by Samarii Gurarii from Majdanek that explicitly mention Jewish victims as well as some by TASS photographers of Nazi victims with Jewish stars on their shirts.45 The fact that these photos were sent from Moscow to New York for possible circulation suggests that editors in Moscow presumed that there were outlets for such overtly Jewish images, likely the American Yiddish press, which did publish Soviet Holocaust photography. On March 3, 1945, just two months before the end of the war, Unity published a grim layout of photographs from the Budapest ghetto (Fig. 6.4). The photographer, unidentified in the issue, was Khaldei. During the battle to take the city, the Red Army liberated two ghettos—the small international one and the larger Hungarian Jewish one—on January 16 and 18, 1945, respectively.46 Khaldei was in Budapest, along with Georgii Zelma, to photograph the Soviet conquest of the destroyed city. Although they did not appear in the

When Jews Talked to Jews

• 201 •

Russian-language press, his photographs of the ghetto, including a photograph similar to the one reproduced here, occupied a large section of page 1. The captions of the individual photographs had both to describe the awful scene and to help readers make sense of it: Jews in Budapest. Hitlerites drove tens of thousands of Jews from all over Hungary into the Budapest ghetto region. The first building served as the beginning of the ghetto, and the fascists transformed the store in this building into a torture room, in which they used to inflict all kinds of things on Jews, shoot them, and then toss their bodies onto the square. Thanks to the hate-driven attack of the Red Army, thanks to the fact that Soviet forces quickly encircled the city, a significant part of Hungarian Jewry was saved from murder. In the pictures (from right to left): 1. Budapest is liberated. Jews go in every direction back to their places of permanent residence. 2. A mother and daughter whom the fascists dragged out from their cellar, beat in the middle of the street, and then shot. Next to them sits their husband and father. 3. Jews with yellow stars of David. The fascists forced them to wear these on their chests. 4. A store in which Jews were shot. 5. Slaughtered Jews, whom the Germans and fascists murdered before retreating from the city.

The third photograph in the series echoed the earlier photograph of liberated Jews in Yugoslavia (see Fig. 6.3). Its caption was a description of the act of visually marking

figure 6.4. Evgenii Khaldei, Budapest Ghetto. Unity, March 3, 1945. Courtesy of Evgenii Khaldei and the Fotosoyuz Agency.

• 202 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 6.5. Evgenii Khaldei, “Jewish Couple,” 1945. Courtesy of Evgenii Khaldei and the Fotosoyuz Agency.

these people with a Jewish symbol that the Nazis turned into a violent icon of dehumanization. Unity’s editors chose to express a Jewish and Soviet story in one. Using active verbs like murdered, forced, and dragged, rather than passive constructions that would be more common in both Yiddish and Russian, the caption writer articulated a clear perpetrator, the fascists/Hitlerites/Germans, and victims, the Jews. The Soviet role was as heroic liberators who saved Jews, not “peaceful Hungarian citizens,” from murder and destruction.47 The third photojournalistic image in Unity had a descriptive caption that emphasized the violent act of fixing identities—marking Jews by putting yellow stars on them. In addition, the stars, not their faces, were at the center of the frame. Unlike the one reproduced here, titled “Jewish Couple,” in the version that appeared in Unity, on March 3, 1945, the woman looks away from the camera, suggesting disengagement with the photographer (see chapter 7 for more on “Jewish Couple”). The image is cropped close in on their bodies, so the viewer sees few of the buildings and streets of the once grand, now ruined, Budapest, as we see here. This Khaldei photo essay was the most graphic visualization of the ghettoes by liberation photographers, and it appeared in Unity, not in any Russian-language publication. Language served as a boundary between nationalities and reading communities and also between different Soviet narratives of the war. But why would Nazi atrocity photo-

When Jews Talked to Jews

• 203 •

graphs, as in the extensive coverage of Majdanek, appear widely in the Russian press, while Khaldei’s ghetto photographs only appeared in Yiddish? First, as we saw in chapter 5, most Soviet liberation photographs are of landscapes, camps, or corpses, each a metaphor for an event. In fact, what they most powerfully depict is absence. What is not in the photo is as important as what is in it. The viewer or the caption writer is left to fill in the blanks. The narrative of Nazi atrocities that appeared on the pages of the Russianlanguage Soviet press included very graphic images of unmarked bodies, and those photographs documented Nazi atrocities in a way that the image of seemingly well-clothed, well-fed Jews on a Budapest street could not do. But most important, the Budapest photos have the icon of the Jew attached to them.48 Mark Markov-Grinberg’s photograph of a hand coming out of an oven at Stutthof or Mikhail Trakhman’s pictures of bodies at Majdanek were most likely images of Jews, but those photographs did not have a Jewish narrative in the form of a six-pointed star written into them the way Khaldei’s Budapest photographs did. They could be published in Pravda, Izvestiia, and Red Star; Khaldei’s could be published in Unity. Yiddish, then, served as a narrative boundary around a collective Soviet Jewish story. This also meant that images generally did not cross over from one linguistic universe into the other. In my reading of Unity, the only photograph published there that I found elsewhere was the Redkin photograph from Kerch. Majdanek photos published extensively in the Russian-language press were not published in Soviet Yiddish newspapers, even though some appeared in the American Yiddish press. Perhaps there was a presumption that their appearance would threaten the universalism of the images and therefore the universal understanding of Majdanek. Soviet Jews reading only in Russian understood the war very differently from those Soviet Jews reading about the war only in Yiddish. One group understood the war primarily through the lens of the Soviet nation with Jews incorporated into the nation; the other saw the war as one primarily against Jews, secondarily against others, even if writers such as Bergelson understood crimes against Jews as crimes against humanity. And those reading both had a more complicated and nuanced narrative than either of the two groups. But Yiddish also served as a means of transcending boundaries in the media as well as in interpersonal encounters. Unity was published in Yiddish, not because all Soviet Jews knew Yiddish, but because Yiddish was still the international Jewish lingua franca in the 1940s.49 If the Soviet Union wanted to round up support among the Western Allies, it could do so among Jewish émigrés around the world in Yiddish. The editors of the newspaper were very proud of the role it played in international propaganda among Jews. According to one account, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee circulated three thousand photographs to the foreign Yiddish press.50 Unity’s aim was to transcend national boundaries by appealing to the transnational Jewish community. Similarly, as he tells the story of “The Jewish Couple” (see Fig. 6.5), when Khaldei encountered this couple, he, a Soviet

• 204 •

world war ii and the holocaust

war photographer in an intimidating leather coat, found a common language with these Hungarian Jews by greeting them with the Yiddish “Sholem aleichem” (Peace be with you).51 In Bucharest, Khaldei used a similar tactic to determine who was Jewish and to identify himself as a Jew. As he tells the story, he and several colleagues met a group of U.S. Air Force pilots. Khaldei pointed out a tall, muscular captain and said to his friend Grinya “I bet he’s a Jew,” to which Grinya replied, “No way, a captain of a Flying Fortress, a big guy like that? Can’t be a Jew.” Khaldei tested the hypothesis by speaking to the commander in Yiddish. Each understood the other. Not coincidentally, both lamented their discomfort with Yiddish, expressing a tinge of Jewish nostalgia that colored this SovietAmerican battlefield encounter.52 With its very obvious visual marking, Khaldei’s “Jewish Couple” was shown only in a Jewish context. It did not fit into a universal Russian one. Epshteyn and the other editors of Unity chose to publish his photographs, something they did not do with Majdanek photographs in July and August 1944, or Auschwitz images in January and February 1945. We do not know what Bergelson said when Unity’s editorial board decided to publish the Budapest photos. Perhaps he relented in his attempt to universalize this story that had many layers of tragedy—human, Soviet, Jewish, local, and familial. Each one of these groups, each one of these collective memories, had its own way of telling the story of the war. While Majdanek photographs could be used to support any of these stories, Khaldei’s could not. During the war, Nazi atrocity photographs were ever present, with the Russian press generally eliding the ethnic specificity of the victims, while the Yiddish press emphasized it. Even after the war, the Holocaust as a narrative developed differently depending on time, place, and language. Elie Wiesel, for example, told a different story of the Holocaust in Yiddish from that in the French version of his memoir Night.53 American Jews were already creating a particular Jewish narrative of World War II in Yiddish before VE Day (Victory in Europe Day), well before the word Holocaust became part of general parlance in English.54 The wartime Soviet press was always ambivalent about the Jewishness of this Soviet war, either masking or marking victims’ identities, depending on the presumed audience or perceived political gain. But only in the framework of Yiddish—in the smudged print of the newspaper and in the gently uttered words Sholem aleichem on a desolate street in the Budapest ghetto—could a simple photograph make the Soviet war into a Jewish tragedy.

•

7

•

From Photojournalism to Icons of War and the Holocaust photographs and photographers after the war

The war proved to be the turning point for the careers of Soviet Jewish photographers, many of whom made it to the Reichstag in May 1945 (Fig. 7.1).1 Some first-generation photographers, those whose significant work came out in the 1920s and 1930s, saw the peak of their careers already behind them. Others in the second generation, who came of age under Stalin, continued building their careers and became the most famous photojournalists in the country. As important as the biographies of the photographers are the

figure 7.1. Evgenii Khaldei, “Soviet Photo and Print Journalists at the Reichstag,” May 1945. Copyright Evgenii Khaldei and the Fotosoyuz Agency. Image courtesy of Teresa and Paul Harbaugh. • 205 •

• 206 •

world war ii and the holocaust

stories of the photographs they took to document wartime heroism and tragedy. As Amir Weiner has shown, the war came to surpass the Bolshevik Revolution as the crucible of Soviet identity.2 In her hundreds of interviews with elderly Soviet Jews, especially war veterans, Anna Shternshis has also shown that the experience of the war overshadowed all other aspects of their lives.3 It follows that the photographs associated with the war would become some of the most iconic images of the Soviet Union. And the photographers and their editors became the arbiters of war memory.

After Berlin: Soviet Jews See Europe for the First Time I interviewed surviving family members of Soviet photographers who made it to Berlin. As they spoke, they glowed with pride for their ( Jewish) fathers or husbands who had been at ground zero when Berlin was liberated. They photographed the hoisting of flags, the feeding of survivors, and the discovery of the remnants of the Nazi war machine. As Perets Markish might have commanded them to do, they were there to document the vengeance against Berlin. Evgenii Khaldei’s famous photograph of the raising of the red flag over the Reichstag (Fig. 7.2) attests to the bravado of Soviet Jewish photographers in the German capital.4

figure 7.2. Evgenii Khaldei, “Raising the Red Flag over the Reichstag,” May 2, 1945. Courtesy of Evgenii Khaldei and the Fotosoyuz Agency.

From Photojournalism to Icons

• 207 •

figure 7.3. Evgenii Khaldei, Women in Berlin, summer 1945. Courtesy of Evgenii Khaldei and the Fotosoyuz Agency.

After May 9, 1945, photojournalists shifted their task from documenting tragedy and fomenting revenge to celebrating victory and, for the first time in years, working at a less frenetic pace without the constant threat of violence. Emmanuel Evzerikhin was in East Prussia, far from the building-by-building conquest of the German capital, when war ended. This was the first time that the native of Rostov-on-Don had been in Europe. He couldn’t help but be tickled by the opportunity to imbibe Western culture. According to his son Yuri, at the end of the war, Evzerikhin had a driver and toured around Sovietoccupied central Europe in a relatively fancy Opel-Kadet. He photographed the liberated cities of Hungary, Austria, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, a touristic junket that he called his “gallop around Europe.” His job was to show how peaceful people were now reestablishing life. In the words of his son, “He was taking photos of anything he wanted—architecture, art, even cows on a bridge.” Such a life must have seemed miles away from the wartime journalistic regime in which he had worked for four years. Khaldei spent the summer of 1945 in Germany photographing Berlin, often picturing the Germans ambiguously, as people trying to regain a sense of normalcy in the destruction around them (Fig. 7.3). His photographs of reconstruction efforts and of the happy encounters between Soviet liberators and their German comrades appeared regularly in the main Soviet press throughout the summer.

• 208 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 7.4. Evgenii Khaldei, “Goering on Trial,” Nuremberg, 1946. Courtesy of Evgenii Khaldei and the Fotosoyuz Agency.

But unlike Evzerikhin, Khaldei did not have the opportunity to enjoy peacetime for too long. On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and on August 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan in order to play a role in the Pacific peace that was soon to follow. This new front in the seemingly never-ending war demanded photographs. Khaldei, who had become well known during the war, and Yakov Riumkin, who had been photographing battle since the 1930s, were sent to take pictures of the liberation of Manchuria from Japanese occupation.5 After his tour of the Far East, Khaldei received what would be his most important assignment, that of a chief Soviet photographer of the Nuremberg Trials. Nuremberg was the culmination of war crimes trials that the Soviet Union had been conducting since the Krasnodar and Kharkov trials in 1943. Nuremberg was, however, of a different magnitude, as the Allies got together to put Nazi war criminals on public trial in a show of victor’s justice. For the Soviet Union it was an opportunity to put itself very publicly on the international stage, a position the Soviets had been cultivating since the wartime conferences in Yalta and Potsdam. At Nuremberg, Khaldei proved himself to be a savvy photojournalist, capturing images of Nazi war criminals not only at the trial, but also behind the scenes, images that his

From Photojournalism to Icons

• 209 •

American and British colleagues were not able to get. His photographs attest to the “banality of evil,” to quote Hannah Arendt, of the mass murderers whose deeds Khaldei had been documenting for four years (Fig. 7.4). He went to Paris to photograph the peace conference in 1946 before returning to Moscow later that year. From the moment he crossed the Soviet frontier into Romania in late summer 1944, Khaldei was photographing some of the most important moments of liberation throughout Eastern Europe, documenting both the destruction of war and the Soviet help in reconstruction. For Khaldei, Evzerikhin, and others, the conquest of large parts of Europe was a memorable moment, when they saw the “other side,” the world of capitalism that Stalinist Russia had been demonizing in text and images for many years.

When Jewishness Was Made Visible . . . and Then Made to Disappear: The Anticosmopolitan Campaign During and immediately after the war, the Soviet Union was integrated globally, with hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers on foreign soil and Soviet representatives attending peace conferences. With the creation of the five-member United Nations Security Council, which included the Soviet Union as a permanent member, the Communist utopia had officially arrived. The Soviet Union became part of the international community, rather than pariah. Throughout its young history, the Soviet Union had an uneasy relationship with its role in the international community. Was it to fan the flames of Communist insurrection, at the expense of normal state relationships, or was it to gain international power by playing along with the rules of international politics? The initial intervention of foreign powers during the civil war and persistent war scares and fears of foreign saboteurs did little to make the Soviet state feel comfortable with relations to those beyond its borders. But with the Popular Front and Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s and then, more seriously, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 (with the shocking almost two-year removal of the Soviet Union from the international system with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the country’s violent conquest of parts of Eastern Europe), the Soviet Union began its forced engagement with global politics. As part of its move to work within an emerging global political system, in 1943, Comintern, the fomenter of global revolution and the institution that bound global Communists to Moscow, was abolished. At the same time, the late 1930s and the war period saw a shift away from Soviet internationalist class-based identities and a celebration of Soviet national diversity. In its place, Soviet identity came to be defined by Russian nationalism and a biologically determined system of differentiating peoples by race or ethnicity.6 Two clear manifestations of this in Soviet popular culture and propaganda were the 1944 abandonment of the “Internationale” in favor of the “Hymn of the Soviet Union,” a more patriotic national anthem,

• 210 •

world war ii and the holocaust

and the late 1941 replacement of the slogan “Proletarians of the World, Unite” in favor of “Death to the German Occupiers.” Photographers worked at the intersection of Soviet power and global engagement, as documenters of the diversity of the Soviet empire in the 1930s and then of the war in the 1940s. But they began feeling the effects of creeping xenophobia, Russian nationalism, and the end of the era of internationalism that had brought many of them to Moscow in the first place. They were keenly aware of these political changes, because of their professions as war photographers, which placed them on foreign soil and enmeshed them in an international network of photographers, but also because they were Jews. Since the 1930s, Jewish journalists and photographers had felt pressure (or the desire) to make their names less obviously Jewish. They changed names out of revolutionary fervor, or just to blend in. Many of the photographers changed their names so the pages of Pravda would not be overburdened with too many Jewish names. During the war, the fact that Jews were highly represented in the journalistic and photographic professions led to the layoffs of David Ortenberg from Red Star and L. Rovinsky from Izvestiia. Interviews with Soviet Jewish war veterans suggest that although nearly all went into the war fighting for the Soviet Union and in the spirit of internationalism, sometime in 1943 or 1944, they felt their Jewishness became an impediment to full participation in the Soviet “family of peoples.”7 Nonetheless, despite the removal of Jews from the staffs of propaganda, cultural, and Party organizations, in the postwar period, Jews were still found on editorial boards and in high-ranking positions as photojournalists and writers. In 1945, out of eleven members of the Pravda editorial board, two were Jewish.8 As Khaldei’s picture of Soviet photographers at the Reichstag shows, many of the key photographers of the conquest of Berlin were Jewish (see Fig. 7.1). They had a great deal of influence in shaping the visual record of the war until its last days and even through the war crimes trials at Nuremberg. With xenophobia and anti-Semitism becoming more visible in Soviet society during and immediately after the war, questions about Jews’ visibility in key Soviet professions began translating into doubts about Jews’ loyalty to the country and to Communism. Could Jews be trusted in such key media positions if they were so committed to people and places beyond the borders of the Soviet Union? Soviet Jewish media makers understood these covert (and sometimes overt) questions, and they responded in kind. In February 1945, at a conference for Pravda staffers, the writer David Zaslavsky, who had covered the Krasnodar and Kharkov war crimes trials, spoke about the treatment of Jews in pre- and postrevolutionary Russia and how it revealed the difference between bad czarist nationalism and good Soviet patriotism. He talked about the famous 1913 Beilis trial, which exposed the resurgence of the anti-Semitic blood libel in late czarist Russia. As Zaslavsky said, “In czarist Russia there existed the wildest form of nationalism. Before the war, there was a trial in which a Jew was accused of using Christian blood. The trial

From Photojournalism to Icons

• 211 •

was carried out with one clear goal—to exclude the Jewish people from the ranks of nations, and to put the Jew in the position of being an undervalued race in order to deny him all rights. . . . I was at that trial from the first day to the last.”9 Zaslavsky argued that contemporary Soviet patriotism should bear no resemblance to crude Russian nationalism. After all, the Soviet state was built on a union of peoples based on ideas rather than the exclusion of nations based on racial hierarchies. These were challenging words in February 1945 near the end of a war that divided the world into nations, and in which Pravda’s own writers had been demonizing the German enemy. In fact, Zaslavsky had long been made uncomfortable by the wartime cries for German blood coming from his fellow journalists. When discussing the trials at Krasnodar, he wrote in his diary that he was disturbed by what he considered crass calls for revenge and immediate execution of the accused on the part of his fellow journalist Ehrenburg, who was becoming known as the bard of vengeance throughout the country.10 Other Jewish staff members of Pravda at the conference referred to Zaslavsky’s impassioned plea for an ideologically based nationalism that had room for anyone committed to Communism. The fact that he had to make this speech at all shows how xenophobia and anti-Semitism had infiltrated all sorts of conversations about Soviet society, culture, and the media. But it also shows that in 1945 Jews were still drawing on Jewish history in order to make a case for their inclusion in the Soviet family. Much has been written about the postwar rise of public, politicized anti-Semitism, as opposed to private, low-level, social anti-Semitism that was endemic to Russian and Soviet society. Gennady Kostyrchenko, Louis Rapoport, Jonathan Brent, Vladimir Naumov, Joshua Rubenstein, and many others have mined the archives to explain why the state became openly anti-Semitic and how that anti-Semitism manifested itself. In some ways, this debate resembles the argument among historians of the Holocaust between the “intentionalists,” who thought that murderous anti-Semitism was endemic to Nazism and to German culture and simply took time to manifest under Nazi rule, or the “functionalists,” who argue that only in particular historical exigencies of the war and through specific means of social control did “ordinary Germans” get turned into Jew killers. In the case of Soviet anti-Semitism, some, like Kostyrchenko, show how anti-Semitism was endemic to Stalin’s rule and that in the postwar period, he could fully manifest his hatred of Jews. Others, like David Brandenberger, approach the question “functionally” and place state anti-Semitism in the context of broader postwar Soviet xenophobia, a time when all forms of difference were suppressed and all connections to the foreign were considered suspicious.11 No matter how one contextualizes and explains anti-Semitism, the facts are that Jews suffered disproportionately during this period, more than Jews in earlier periods of Soviet history and more than most other ethnic and social groups in the late 1940s. The Yiddish writers who published in Unity (Eynikayt), such as David Bergelson and Itsik Fefer, and all those connected with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee ( JAFC),

• 212 •

world war ii and the holocaust

were among the most harshly targeted. Perets Markish’s story is illustrative of the rise of Jewish national sentiment and Soviet anti-Semitism. As early as March 1941, even before the Soviet Union had entered the war, Markish was mentioned in internal Party memoranda as someone with “nationalistic tendencies,” whose work emphasized the “heroism and even more the tragedy of the ‘eternal’ Jewish people.”12 This denouncer from the Party was not necessarily wrong. Markish’s work from 1943 on did become increasingly nationalistic, more invested in the specific Jewish story of the war and angrier at non-Jews. Markish often found himself on the side of the “nationalists” even among JAFC members. Historian Shimon Redlich points out that Markish, Isaac Nusinov, and Ilya Ehrenburg “demanded that the Committee become involved in Jewish-oriented activities,” in contrast to Shakhno Epshteyn, editor of Unity; Itsik Fefer; and Pravda writer Zaslavsky, who insisted on the official, minimalist role of JAFC.13 Redlich is merely pointing out what members of the JAFC knew at the time—that some members wanted to use the JAFC for more national purposes than others. In September 1944, at a meeting of the JAFC board, Markish spoke out against proposed name changes for several Soviet Jewish agricultural colonies. The proposal was to change Stalindorf and Kalinindorf, with their Yiddish endings, to the Russified Stalinsky and Kalininsky. Markish railed against this as a violation of the Stalin Constitution, which protected national minority rights and languages. He also lamented the sorry treatment of Jewish repatriates to the newly liberated regions. In response, one member of the JAFC presidium, Solomon L. Bregman, denounced the writer in a letter to S. A. Lozovsky, head of Sovinformburo.14 Epshteyn also criticized Markish for spreading false rumors about rampant anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union in his articles for Unity.15 Shortly after the war, Markish’s work was held up as a problematic example of nationalistic tendencies in Soviet Yiddish literature. In a report to the Central Committee, titled “Concerning Nationalistic and Religious-Mystical Tendencies in Soviet Yiddish Literature,” M. Shcherbakov wrote harshly about all Soviet Yiddish writers’ work during the war, but marked Markish as one of the worst offenders.16 As an important member of the JAFC, a member of the editorial board of the Black Book, and a member of the Bureau of Moscow Jewish (Yiddish) Writers, Markish used his positions as a platform to advocate for the revival of Yiddish culture in the postwar Soviet Union.17 Markish’s wartime and postwar work helped lay the foundation for Jewish literary representations of the Holocaust. As part of this body of what we would now call Holocaust literature, Markish was also writing his magnum opus about the Soviet Jewish experience of the war, called simply War (Milkhome). The book was published in 1948 by the Emes publishing house. Solomon Mikhoels, the great Yiddish actor and the head of the JAFC, had been killed in a “car accident” in January 1948—an event that most argue launched the anticosmopolitan campaign. A November 1948 Politburo resolution called the JAFC a “center of anti-Soviet propaganda.”18 Writers, doctors, scientists, and photographers lost their jobs,

From Photojournalism to Icons

• 213 •

and the most famous Yiddish writers in the country were arrested. Pravda fired four Jewish journalists as part of its purge.19 Markish experienced a fate worse than that of these Pravda staff members. His last work, The March of Generations (Trot fun doyres), was written just as all forms of public Yiddish culture were being closed down during the anti-Semitic campaign against cosmopolitans. He was arrested on January 27, 1949. The period of his incarceration dredged up every possible form of nationalism his prosecutors (or persecutors) could find.20 Markish was forced to account for his relationships with Mikhoels and with Yiddish writers who had been killed in the purges that decimated Soviet Yiddish culture. In an attempt to protect himself from accusations leveled at him, Markish denounced one group of Yiddish writers who were arrested and killed in the 1930s Great Purges, the “Minsk nationalistic group, headed by the poets Kharik, Kulbak, and Akselrod, who tried to slow down the natural process of assimilation among Jews, and who fought against the national politics of the Party and of the Soviet government.”21 The April 1952 ruling said of Markish: “Until his arrest he was a member of the JAFC, in which he was involved in nationalistic and spy activities. Flouting a law of the Soviet government in Russia, in 1920, he illegally fled to Poland where he maintained connections with Jewish nationalists and printed in the reactionary Warsaw Jewish press.”22 Pronounced guilty, he, along with the other greats of Soviet Yiddish literature and other members of the JAFC, including David Bergelson, was executed by firing squad on August 12, 1952. Soviet Jewish photographers did not experience the fate of the Yiddish writers, but they were also caught up in the purge of Jews from the journalistic establishment. Khaldei’s own career highlights the creeping anti-Semitism of the period and its violent culmination in the late 1940s and early 1950s. During the war Khaldei became an acclaimed photographer but he was nearly fired from TASS in 1943 for failing to submit his work to the proper censor. After his travels to Berlin, Nuremberg, and Paris, Khaldei returned to Moscow and there faced mounting problems. In 1946, he was taken off an assignment, as punishment for, according to the official paperwork, refusing to turn in photographic equipment that he had borrowed for another assignment. In 1947, he was brought before a Communist Party attestation commission to be reprimanded for his “low cultural level”: After returning to peacetime conditions, he did not develop himself at all, and at the present moment, he is considered a passable photojournalist. . . . The reasons for this are several. First, all the praise that was heaped upon him as a military photojournalist finally went to his head, and he rested on his laurels. His growth as a photojournalist stopped. The other reason has to do with Khaldei’s “cultural level,” which is exceptionally low.23

In 1948, the bombshell hit. On October 7, Khaldei received notice that he was being terminated from TASS, after twelve years of employment, for reasons of “staff downsizing.” In January 1950, he wrote to M. A. Suslov, secretary of the Central Committee, begging

• 214 •

world war ii and the holocaust

for an explanation for his dismissal. The photographer complained that as he subsequently sought employment, every publication he approached said that it couldn’t hire him, because of the “unknown reasons for his dismissal from TASS.” Some publications that wanted his work were willing to print his photographs only if his name didn’t appear: “The editors of USSR in Construction ordered prints and published six of my images on a special edition for the 70th birthday of Comrade Stalin, but they published without including my last name among the contributors.”24 The anticosmopolitan campaign shook up the entire Soviet Jewish photographic community, many of whose members lived in the same building, on the Ovchinnikovskaia Embankment, and later in the House of Journalists, along Leningradskii Prospect near the Sokol metro station. When asked how the anticosmopolitan campaign affected TASS photographers, Yuri Evzerikhin related that his father, Emmanuel, decried the wave of firings. “Before the campaign,” reported Yuri, “50 percent of the photographers were Jewish. Afterward, only two remained, my father and [Naum] Granovsky” (a first-generation Soviet photographer.) If Evzerikhin survived the major purge with his job intact, he nonetheless found his photographic domain limited. According to Yuri, before the war, his father had had access to major Party leaders, including Stalin, but during the anticosmopolitan campaign had trouble gaining that kind of access.25 Perhaps because of this lack of access, Evzerikhin changed from being an active photojournalist to a photography instructor, a not uncommon move for a person in his position. Max Markov-Grinberg also lost his job with TASS in 1948, an event that, according to Yuri Evzerikhin, was particularly traumatic for the Jewish photographic community. Mark Penson was fired from Pravda in 1948 (dying penniless in 1959), and Samarii Gurarii was fired from Izvestiia. As for Georgii Zelma, the great photographer of Stalingrad, his work was not exhibited between 1948 and 1958. Even for those who weren’t fired, fear gripped the imagination of all photographers. According to his son, Timur, in 1952 Zelma began destroying many of his negatives after being interrogated about some of the people in his photographs.26 However, Zelma’s archives also reveal his struggle against the anticosmopolitan campaign, in part, through his negotiations over his signatures. From 1950 to 1955, some of his publishers put down Zelma’s name as “Zelmanovitch,” a name he hadn’t published under since his Birobidzhan series had appeared in Ogonyok in 1934. This was part of the campaign to “unmask” the hidden Jews of the Soviet intelligentsia by publishing their “real” Jewish names. But Zelma quietly asserted himself, and several contracts show that he signed the name “Zelma,” beside the printed “Zelmanovitch.”27 When I spoke with Nikolai Khalip, the son of photographer Yakov Khalip, he at first insisted that nothing bad had happened to his father in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But at one point in our conversation, he paused and then said, “Well, now that I think about it, he did have a time when he wasn’t working. He had been working for the big news-

From Photojournalism to Icons

• 215 •

papers immediately after the war, but there was a break. I never thought about why there was a break. And then after the break, he ended up in India, Morocco, Italy, England, Finland, Czechoslovakia, and in all of the socialist countries.”28 He was unwittingly referring to the period when many Soviet Jewish photographers lost their jobs, and their access to exhibition space—from 1948 until about 1958, the period that Yehoshua Gilboa calls the “black years.”29 After 1948, Soviet Jewish photographers just tried to make a living—and to survive— in the xenophobic, anti-Semitic climate of late Stalinism. Khaldei, like many others, worked as a freelance photographer, taking commissions from the All Union Society for Cultural Contact and Friendship with Peoples of Foreign Countries (VOKS), Soviet Woman magazine, and the newspaper Labor (Trud). It was not until 1959 that Pravda hired him back as a staff photographer.30 Many Jewish photographers ended up working for two institutions that, in the black years of late Stalinism and the early Khrushchev period, were ready to hire them. One was the photo studios of the massive, Disney-like theme park called the Exhibition of the Achievements of the People’s Economy (VDNKh). Many photographers worked at VDNKh, including Markov-Grinberg, who took family portraits and landscape photographs. The other outlet was the lesser-known magazine Club and Art Hobby (Klub i khudozhestvennaia deiatel’nost’ ), which employed Markov-Grinberg, along with Khaldei, Gurarii, Khalip, and the naval photographer Robert Diament—an illustrious lineup of underemployed Jewish photographers. It was in this postwar period that Jewishness became an ever-present absence that everyone knew about but hardly anyone acknowledged out loud. It was in this period that the oppressive, anti-Semitic image of the Soviet Union developed and, eventually, became the way most people around the world understood the country. Elie Wiesel coined the term “Jews of silence” to describe a group of people—Soviet Jews—who, he claimed, had no voice. But Soviet Jews understood the silence differently. After all, they were still writers, photographers, filmmakers, scientists, doctors, dentists, and engineers. In other words, they were far from being “Jews of silence.” It was the word Jew itself that was silent in postwar Soviet culture. This point is well illustrated by the history of the photograph of three men in Berlin in May 1945 (Fig. 7.5). Both Anna Khaldei and Yuri Evzerikhin mentioned this photo to me. It shows three Jewish culture makers standing proudly in Berlin with the ruined Brandenburg Gate behind them. Many versions of this photograph circulated in the archives of the photographers, and Evzerikhin’s archive had a copy print with the following notation on the back written by Khaldei, with a dash indicating an omission: “To Yuri Evzerikhin. It shows how three——took Berlin and here it appears as if they were the first: Karmen, Dolmatovskii, and Khaldei.”31 In the 1960s, Khaldei gave Yuri, the child of his photographer colleague Emmanuel, this photograph from Berlin as a gift. In the

• 216 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 7.5. Unattributed, Roman Karmen, Evgenii Dolmatovskii, and Evgenii Khaldei in front of the Brandenberg Gate, May 1945. Image courtesy of Teresa and Paul Harbaugh.

From Photojournalism to Icons

• 217 •

photo are Khaldei, standing beside the poet Evgenii Dolmatovskii, who famously read poetry to the troops at the Brandenburg Gate, and the filmmaker Roman Karmen. All three were key creators of the images and myths of the war, and all three were Jewish. When I asked Yuri what text was missing, that is, what the dash indicated in Khaldei’s inscription on the back, he said, “Jews [evrei] of course, but you couldn’t really be so proud about it back then in the 1960s.” “Then why did Khaldei put the notation on the photograph at all?” I asked myself. Khaldei was teaching the next generation two lessons: about coded Jewishness among the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and about the fact that Jews were among the key culture makers of the Soviet Union and documenters of the great Soviet victory. Why else write the mysterious dash on the back, which anyone in the know knew meant “Jews”? For a few photographers, the difficult years seemed to have had little effect. This could be our impression because few records of the internal struggle on editorial boards have survived. There is even less documentation expressing an ongoing fear of losing one’s job, because of the word Jew in one’s passport. It could also be because some “Jews by passport” tried to protect themselves and their families in different ways. Dmitrii Baltermants had generally distanced himself from Jews among the Soviet intelligentsia and rarely socialized with other Jewish photographers, probably because he didn’t identify as Jewish. As his daughter, Tatiana, who was secretly baptized by her mother, said, “He was always a Soviet. Yes, his passport said Jewish, but it meant nothing to him.”32 Yuri Evzerikhin concurred that Baltermants did not socialize with the group of Soviet Jewish photographers. During the war, Baltermants had found himself in trouble politically for a photograph he took for Izvestiia. After surviving a prisoner battalion, he worked for a front newspaper but was minimally employed once the war ended. Aleksei Surkov, editor of Ogonyok, was willing to take a chance on the young Baltermants and hired him to work for the illustrated magazine, remaining his employer until Baltermants died in 1990. Perhaps it was his distance from his own Jewish background and from socializing with other Jews that allowed him to maneuver so well during the anticosmopolitan campaign. In his position with Ogonyok, Baltermants would become one of the top photojournalists in the country. His archive of the 1950s and 1960s shows that he traveled the Communist world photographing meetings with Mao Zedong (Fig. 7.6) and other leaders as well as more humble encounters with Vietnamese peasants. In 1965, he was named photo editor of Ogonyok, a position that gave him the power to shape the visual record of the Soviet Union.33 In his 1990 obituary, the International Center of Photography in New York called him the “dean of Soviet photographers.”34 His archive and interviews with family suggest that he was not outwardly affected by the purge of the photographic community. Unlike Baltermants, Semyon Fridlyand was always an integral member of the network of Soviet Jewish photographers. He never changed his very Jewish-sounding name. Once hired by Mikhail Koltsov, his cousin, he worked for Ogonyok from his first days in Moscow

• 218 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 7.6. Dmitrii Baltermants, “Dancing Is Politics Too,” 1959. Courtesy of Michael Mattis.

in the 1920s and continued taking photographs for the publication until his death in 1964. His archive does not show a major break during the anticosmopolitan campaign, and he published important photo essays under his name throughout the early 1950s in the magazine. Who knows why (or how) he rode out the anticosmopolitan campaign, despite his Jewish name and Jewish social connections. In other words, after Stalin’s death and the end of those terrible years for Soviet Jewry, Soviet Jewish photographers were still among the most active photographers in the country. Some, such as Fridlyand, photographed the vast diversity, industrial development, and new iconography of the postwar Soviet Union just as they had in the 1930s.35 But as important as their 1950s and 1960s photographs of new Soviet icons, factories, and the diversity of the Communist world was the resurrection of their images of World War II and Nazi genocide.

The Myth of the War and the Making of Icons During the 1960s, as photo editor of Ogonyok, Baltermants oversaw the mass circulation of images of the war throughout the Soviet Union and other Communist countries. This was a big change from the Soviet Union’s relationship to the so-called Great Patriotic War

From Photojournalism to Icons

• 219 •

in the immediate postwar years. After the war and the Nuremberg Trials, which Khaldei had so deftly photographed, the Soviet press quickly stopped talking about war in general and Nazi atrocities in particular. During high Stalinism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, war memory moved out of the public sphere and into the private. The realities of a war that we now know killed about 27 million Soviets reflected poorly on wartime Soviet leadership, and the high losses were a permanent scar on the rebuilding process. In 1947 Stalin demoted May 9, Victory Day, from a state holiday to a regular working day. Very few photographs from the war were republished until the late 1950s, and Victory Day was not reinstated as a holiday until 1965, when Leonid Brezhnev officially put war memory at the center of Soviet identity.36 Ideological space for war commemoration opened up under Nikita Khrushchev, who ushered in the “Thaw” (whose name was taken from the title of an Ehrenburg novel that came out in 1954) of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In film, the war came back with a vengeance with The Cranes Are Flying (1957) and Ballad of a Soldier (1959). Both critically acclaimed films broke open a public silence about the war in Soviet culture. In 1958, the Ministry of Culture put on the Exhibition of Photo Art of the Soviet Union, a major exhibition of dozens of Soviet photographers. Among the many photographs of 1950s factories, meetings with Chinese leaders, and smiling laborers were a few heroic photographs of the war.37 In the mid-1960s, under Brezhnev, war commemorations became a major operation of the state. Monuments and memorials went up in every part of the country, culminating with the giant statue in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad) symbolizing the motherland and unveiled in 1967. The war became the primary point of reference for Soviet identity, and this was no less true for Soviet Jews. As the celebration of wartime heroism opened up before the Soviet public, so too did the tragic losses of the war. Ballad of a Soldier features an amputee as the friend of the soldier who is the lead character, and in 1961 Baltermants published a 1943 photograph of injured war veterans in the Kremlin that had not been published during the war. That same year, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushchenko wrote the poem “Babi Yar,” about that wartime tragedy of Soviet Jewry. Yevtushchenko made public the specific tragedy of Jews in a postwar period that had generally silenced the word Jew.38 In this context, some of the Nazi atrocity photos that had riled up the anger of the Soviet population during the war reappeared in the Soviet and Communist world press and for the first time began to be shown in exhibitions as art photographs. These photographs were no longer documenting crimes but were now part of the process of creating war memory.

From the Destruction of War to Soviet Heroism: Zelma’s Stalingrad After the war, Georgii Zelma turned Stalingrad into the icon of military victory. He compiled several edited illustrated volumes on the battle of the city and on its reconstruction.39

• 220 •

world war ii and the holocaust

During one particularly fierce battle to retake the heart of Stalingrad, Zelma took two photographs that would become part of a series (Fig. 7.7, top). As we saw in chapter 4, photographers at Stalingrad were encouraged to take panoramic shots of the city from across the Volga River. Evzerikhin did this by photographing the smoldering city from the other side of the river. Zelma got in closer to the action with this panorama of soldiers charging up Mamayev Hill. He positioned himself in a trench at the center of the diptych’s frame. The left half of the image shows soldiers charging up a hill, attempting to retake the bombed-out city in the background. The right half shows a relatively empty landscape of destruction. At the center of the frame is a dead soldier. In fact, a closer look at this image shows that the body ends at the torso. The crop marks on the middle maquette for one of Zelma’s Stalingrad books shows how he ended up with a dead soldier whose legs were not present. The crop marks on the right run right through the dead soldier. When printed and fused together, Zelma was left with a completely untenable image that made it as far as the maquette of his book. Needless to say that a dead soldier at the center of the diptych in and of itself would have challenged the heroic narrative that Zelma was trying to cultivate. A dead soldier who was mutilated would have been unacceptable (see Fig. 7.7, center). The easiest way to make a more heroic narrative was to remove the dead Soviet soldier entirely. This could be done by simply publishing the left side, cropped to focus on the charging soldiers. When Zelma’s editors published the Stalingrad assault photograph during the war, they printed it as a single image, the one of the left, without the right side (see Fig. 7.8). But Zelma did not want to give up on using both images. In a photo for a maquette of his book The Battle of Stalingrad, published in 1972, which included the full diptych of “Assault,” the left and right sides are integrated. Here, Zelma and his editors more successfully cropped out the dead soldiers and fused the two images to make it look as if it were one panorama (Fig. 7.7, bottom). Zelma finally turned his tragically tempered battle photograph into a grand icon of unambiguous heroism.

From Nazi Mass Murder to Universal Tragedy: Baltermants’s Kerch and the Making of “Grief ” In January 1965, to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the end of the war, Ogonyok published “We Will Not Forget” (Fig. 7.9). The editors created a two-page layout of a single, blown-up Baltermants photograph of the weeping woman in Kerch, the third one in the series shown in Figure 4.7, whom readers from 1942 would remember to be P. I. Ivanova. This was the first time that Baltermants’s photographs of Kerch had been published in the Soviet Union since the war, when they had circulated widely. It appeared in the magazine at the same time that Baltermants exhibited the photograph in Germany with a new title (as opposed to the caption), “Grief.” The photograph was given its title in the

From Photojournalism to Icons

• 221 •

figure 7.7. Georgii Zelma, “Among the ruins of the city a counterattack by our storming troops turned around a German attack. The names of many of these have entered the history of this heroic battle.” The caption is taken from one of Zelma’s own maquettes. Three Diptychs of “Assault,” Stalingrad. Last version as published in Battle of Stalingrad (Stalingradskaia bitva), 1972. Courtesy of Teresa and Paul Harbaugh.

• 222 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 7.8. Georgii Zelma, “Assault,” Stalingrad, 1942. Courtesy of Teresa and Paul Harbaugh and Michael Mattis.

From Photojournalism to Icons

• 223 •

figure 7.9. Dmitrii Baltermants, “Grief,” photo taken in 1942, published in Ogonyok, 1965. Courtesy of Michael Mattis.

early 1960s by the Italian photographer Caio Mario Garruba, who first saw the image when he was in Moscow looking for photographs and posters for an exhibition he was putting together on war. “Grief ” made its first appearance in print in 1963 in the Czech illustrated publication Praha-Moskva, which published a series of Baltermants photographs in its January edition.40 After more than twenty years, this photo of Ivanova’s loss, published as an art photograph, pictured grief very differently from how it was presented during the war. Then, it was about the German mass murder of Soviet citizens and aimed to foment anger at the enemy. Now, it was about the nature of evil and fostered a national memory of the war. The image is also literally different from the one first published in 1942. First, Baltermants darkened the sky in the exhibition photograph. In interviews with the photographer, he explains, “I filled in the sky. But I didn’t do this for aesthetic effect, but simply because of specks from the glue.” Apparently, while developing the film on a field near Kerch, Baltermants got the film stuck to some contact paper. When pulling them apart, he noticed that there were specks left on one exposure, of course the exposure he liked the best, the one that would become his most famous photograph. The original image of Ivanova,

• 224 •

world war ii and the holocaust

printed from a different negative, had the flat gray sky over Kerch, not the haunting darkened sky of the 1965 version.41 Although Baltermants claims to have altered this particular image from his Kerch series because of damage, it was common for Soviet photographers to compose their photographs at every stage of the process—from selecting a scene before taking the picture to altering the negatives or creating composite prints of two negatives. During the war, adding smoke was one of the most common manipulations. His 1945 photograph “Crossing the Oder” (Fig. 4.25) depicts Soviet soldiers pushing heavy artillery through the river, enshrouded in thickening smoke from explosions that seem to be on top of them. Baltermants added the thick smoke in this photograph to create a more powerful image, one that emphasized imminent danger and Soviet heroism. When he fixed up the damaged Kerch negative for exhibition and publication, he made sure to put out the best image of “Grief ” he could, one that reflected the photograph’s new function as a universal meditation on loss. In the 1942 image, the focus is on the woman and the search for her husband. The sky itself is incidental, gray and lifeless. More important, the 1942 image is embedded in a broad narrative about the crimes discovered at Kerch, and her image is just one of many. In 1965, “Grief ” was a two-page spread. The retouched image’s darkened sky and wider panorama changed the mood and aestheticized the violence. It became more ominous; more threatening; and ironically, more heavenly. The sky itself became a subject, and the woman is figured as a representative of grief, one of many mourners, as the image leads off into infinity on the left side. The 1965 image suggests an endless landscape of grief, while the 1942 image localizes it. Beyond the immediate scene is emptiness, while the 1965 image shows bodies laid out into the distance. As significant as the differences in the two actual images was how the two photographs were presented. In 1942, the photograph was part of a news story about Nazi/German atrocities directed against Ukrainians, Russians, Tatars, and especially Jews. It was but one photograph among many illustrating the event, including the image of the interethnic marriage of Tereshchenko and Kogan. We might assume that Ivanova was in a similar relationship. In 1965 the photograph was no longer documenting a specific crime, but was memorializing human tragedy. According to Baltermants, “The photograph expressed not the personal grief of that individual woman, or even a single nationality or country, but it represents the grief of humanity in general,” a statement that became true as the image moved from documenting news in a Russian magazine to aestheticizing war memory on the walls of a German exhibition or on the pages of a 1960s Czech journal. The surrounding text also clearly marked this reappearance of “Grief ” as a form of memorial practice. “We Will Never Forget” trumpeted the sidebar that accompanied the photograph. Unlike during the war, when the words We will never forget was a call for vengeance against the Nazi enemy, in 1965, they were now cause for reflection and mem-

From Photojournalism to Icons

• 225 •

ory.42 The 1965 photograph’s caption reads, “January 1942, Kerch. As they were withdrawing, fascist troops shot thousands of peaceful Soviet citizens, tossing their corpses in a nearby antitank trench.” There is no mention of Germans or Hitler, but merely “fascist troops.” Nor is there mention of Jews. By 1965 Germans were liberated friends, not barbaric enemies, and the Great Patriotic War, as World War II was called in the Soviet Union, was figured as a battle of ideologies, not peoples, of Soviets against fascists, not Germans against Jews, Russians, and others. The photo editor, most probably Baltermants himself, also added a comment from the future Nobel Prize–winning German writer Heinrich Böll, who apparently saw the photograph at the German exhibition, and said, “Women on the field of battle searching among the dead for their loved ones. Their cry stops being their own. It becomes the cry of humanity.” Baltermants made a German writer the one responsible for universalizing the woman’s personal grief to his Soviet readership, after an Italian writer gave the photograph its name. The former fascist enemies became partners with Baltermants in refiguring this atrocity photograph from a record of the news to a device for remembrance.43 Baltermants has been asked to recount the story of the famous “Grief ” photograph many times: “During the war I photographed and printed a lot, but here is what’s surprising. Fifteen photographs that I’m proud of and that gave me a name as a photographer—“Attack,” “Tchaikovsky,” “Battle for the Village,” and finally my most important photograph, “Grief,” were never published during the war [emphasis mine]. Other photographs appeared in the newspapers. . . . But these photographs . . . that really showed what it was like, and that today have artistic value, found life only after victory.” In a 1980s interview with Time magazine photo editor Arnold Drapkin, Baltermants said, “The [Kerch] pictures were never published during the war, because the editors thought they were too gruesome.”44 We know that Baltermants’s photos from Kerch were in fact published during the war and that the images circulated widely in TASS Windows posters. But today, when asked, “When were Baltermants’s Kerch photographs first published?” curators, collectors, and even Baltermants’s family members unanimously say, “The 1960s,” basing their understanding of the history on Baltermants’s own story of the photographs. Reviews of Baltermants’s exhibitions invariably mention that this photograph, in the words of New York Times art critic Charles Hagen, “was censored by the Soviet government for many years.” Neither reviewers nor family members seem to know that Baltermants’s Kerch photographs were among the first published Holocaust liberation photographs. Why would Baltermants claim that his Kerch photographs were censored during the war? By downplaying the wartime history of the news photograph, the specific story of Kerch, and the first discovery of Nazi mass murder of Jews and others on a scale of thousands, Baltermants could more easily make his photograph function as a visual icon in the Soviet war memory that emerged in the 1960s.

• 226 •

world war ii and the holocaust

The story of wartime censorship of his more gruesome images illuminates how people like Baltermants rethought their identities during de-Stalinization. In the Thaw and early Brezhnev years, when the photograph made its comeback, all things associated with Stalin were politically problematic (including the city named for him, Stalingrad, whose name was changed to Volgograd in 1961, and his burial spot in Lenin’s tomb on Red Square, from which he was removed that year). A changed reality demanded a changed history. With the appearance of “Grief ” in the 1960s as an art photograph dedicated to memory, without the complicated and overlapping narratives of Soviet and Jewish loss, it became embedded in a story of universal tragedy. Baltermants, the ( Jewish) photo editor of Ogonyok in the 1960s, who probably wrote the caption for his own photograph, followed the trend toward universalizing the story of the Holocaust and toward highlighting censorship under Stalin.45

The Boundaries between Soviet and Jewish: Khaldei’s Budapest Jewish Couple Khaldei’s war photographs, especially of the raising of the red flag over the Reichstag (see Fig. 7.2), were republished in books, journals, and newspapers and were exhibited throughout the Eastern Bloc in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Even the story about how he produced the red flag photograph took on mythic significance. As Khaldei tells it, just before the assault on Berlin, he made a brief trip to Moscow. He asked a friend, a Jewish tailor named Israel Solomonovitch Kishitser, to sew him three Soviet flags. Kishitser made the flags out of red tablecloths, stolen for the occasion from a government office. The next day Khaldei was flown back to Berlin. He raised the first at the liberated Tempelhof Airport, the second at the Brandenburg Gate. Then he approached the Reichstag, the last of the three iconic sites of Berlin to be liberated. A soldier told him that they should climb to the roof to get the shot of the century. He ran onto the roof together with soldiers who were at the site and looked for a good angle. He asked one to climb up onto a ledge, had a second soldier hold his feet, and began photographing, taking thirty-six pictures of the scene. The negatives of that photo shoot, with the ruins of Berlin on a gray May day, show that it took a while to capture the best photograph. There are photos of close-ups of the soldier holding the flag, shots from various angles of the raising of the flag, and images of the soldiers and the roof area. We also know from these negatives that the iconic image is not to be found on the roll of film, unlike the version published in Ogonyok on May 13, 1945 (see Fig. 4.26). To make it an iconic symbol of Soviet victory, Khaldei added plumes of black smoke against the dull gray sky. Next, Khaldei did not like how on a windless day, the flag hung straight down. A huge, billowing flag made a more grand vision of victory, so he billowed out the flag. Perhaps most famously, at the request of his editor, he cut out a second watch on the wrist of

From Photojournalism to Icons

• 227 •

the soldier holding the legs of the flag holder. Two watches on one soldier suggested looting, not exactly the message of victory to be sent to the Soviet public. Like Rosenthal’s photograph of the victory at Iwo Jima, Khaldei’s icon of victory had to be created every step of the way, from the setup of the scene to the scratching out of the watches.46 But his photographs of the Budapest ghetto that were published in the Yiddish newspaper during the war never became Soviet icons. In fact, they did not reappear until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although they functioned as photojournalism in the wartime Soviet press in 1945, Khaldei’s photographs of the Budapest ghetto were apparently too Jewish for a public Russian-language Soviet war memory. The Yiddish journal Soviet Homeland (Sovetish Heymland), which appeared in 1961, did not publish many photographs, and Khaldei’s Budapest images did not appear there either. But after the fall of the Soviet Union, one of his photographs, captioned “Jews with Yellow Stars of David,” made a fierce return as “The Jewish Couple” (see Fig. 6.5). In the six years between the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 and Khaldei’s death in 1997, he gave many interviews about his life as a Soviet Jewish photographer and about what was quickly becoming one of his most famous photographs. He described his encounter with the couple: I saw them walking down the street. I was in a black leather coat, and at first they were afraid—they thought I was from the SS. I walked over and tore off their stars, first the woman’s, then the man’s. She got even more frightened. She said, “No, no, you can’t do that, we have to wear them!” I told them that the Russians were here. I told them, “Ikh bin oykh a yid. Sholem aleichem. [I’m Jewish too. Hello.]” Then she cried.47

The image clearly shows that Khaldei took their picture before tearing off their stars. In another photograph by Khaldei, we see a clear sign of the yellow star’s being torn off (Fig. 7.10). So why would Khaldei suggest that he tore off their stars? Fifty years later, perhaps Khaldei wanted to see himself in the role of liberator, the one who tore the stars off the couple, rather than just as a photographer capturing other people’s stories. “The Jewish Couple” has hung on the walls of art galleries and Jewish museums around the world, but it is different from the one published in Unity during the war. The photograph published in 1945, the faded photojournalistic image in the newspaper, had, as noted, a descriptive caption rather than the pithy title “The Jewish Couple.” If the emphasis during the war was on the violent act of fixing identities—marking Jews by putting yellow stars on them—then in the 1990s, the story was about the Jews themselves. The composition of the photographs is also different. In the 1945 photo, the stars are at the center of the frame and the woman looks away. In the 1990s exhibition photograph, our gaze is directed into the faces of the couple and into the endless street behind them, which suggests the long journey they have traveled. It tells a more intimate and more profound story about this anonymous Jewish couple. And like “Grief,” which focused on an iconic individual, “The Jewish Couple” made the people—not the wartime anti-Semitic laws

• 228 •

world war ii and the holocaust

figure 7.10. Evgenii Khaldei, Survivors of Budapest Ghetto, 1945. Courtesy of Evgenii Khaldei and the Fotosoyuz Agency.

about wearing yellow stars—the center of the story. Both Baltermants and Khaldei saw their wartime Holocaust images transformed from photojournalistic documents of war crimes to memorial icons. In one case, the specific story of Ivanova was erased in order to turn her image, not her story, into a universal emblem of loss. In Khaldei’s case, we never learn the names of the couple, but the image is altered from one documenting a Nazi war crime into one showing Jewish perseverance during and after the Holocaust. Khaldei’s story about photographing the couple shows just how invested he was in the Jewishness of his work as he presented it late in life to American and often Jewish audiences. Khaldei always began his life story with his birth in 1917 in Yuzovka (renamed Stalino in 1924, then Donetsk, during de-Stalinization in 1961), just before the outbreak of anti-Jewish pogroms during the Russian civil war. We learn of the death of his mother during one of these pogroms and of the murder of most of his family during World War II. His 1997 New York Times obituary described in detail his being raised in an “Orthodox Jewish family.” In the 1990s, the word Soviet disappeared from many biographies of Khaldei published in the West, and even from his own description of the photograph. The focus of Budapest turns away from the Red Army saving Jews toward the Jewishness of the photographer’s encounter with the couple. While the Jewishness of the Kerch news photographs dropped out of Baltermants’s photograph as it became an icon of Soviet war memory, in its 1990s

From Photojournalism to Icons

• 229 •

reincarnation, Khaldei’s Budapest photograph moved in the opposite direction and lost the Soviet wartime liberation story as it became an icon of Holocaust memory.48 However, Khaldei’s post-Soviet legacy in Russia is quite different from that in the West. As the war narrative became official Soviet and then post-Soviet war memory with Jews the continuing ever present absence, Khaldei rarely presented himself, or his story of the Budapest ghetto, as a Jewish story. Rather, he presented himself and the photo as part of Soviet and post-Soviet war memory. This is how Khaldei recounted the story of the Budapest photograph to a Russian journalist in the 1990s: I was walking along a side street, and I ran into these two. Although people knew that Soviet troops had entered the city, the woman stopped and looked distressed. I began to explain to them in German that I was Russian, Soviet. The woman began to cry. I photographed them, and then they immediately began to rip off their stars that had been sewn onto their coats.

The journalist ended the interview with the statement that the photograph had never been published and laid in reserve for sixty years, a mythic story that had become so ingrained, like the story of the suppression of Baltermants’s “Grief,” that it had become fact. In this interview, Khaldei does not use the word Jew once and instead describes himself to the couple as a Russian/Soviet. He does not speak Yiddish to them, as he suggests in his other interviews, but says that he spoke German. He also emphasizes that Soviet troops liberated the city. Perhaps most important, he says that the couple tore off their own markers of Jewishness, rather than that he had carried out this symbolic liberating. To his American, Israeli, and even German audience, Khaldei became a Jewish photographer, who liberated his brethren on the streets of Budapest with the symbolically significant Yiddish “Sholem aleichem.” To his post-Soviet audience, Khaldei maintained his now long-established role as the Soviet war photographer par excellence, the one who took pictures of Berlin and Budapest and glorified the Soviet state in the process. Khaldei presented different selves and different frameworks for his photograph to audiences that fifty years later had very different memories of the war.49 “Grief ” and “The Jewish Couple” first appeared as news photographs embedded in a complicated wartime story. The anticosmopolitan campaign and the destruction of the Soviet Jewish cultural network ruptured many of those linkages that had existed during the war, as many of the photographers lost their jobs and saw friends and colleagues arrested and sometimes killed. When the photographs reappeared after Stalin’s death, “Grief ” in the 1960s with the emergence of official Soviet war memory and “The Jewish Couple” with the 1990s emergence of the story of the Holocaust (the war against the Jews) on Soviet soil, they became icons of seemingly separate memories of World War II and the Holocaust. In the 2000s, two exhibitions attempted to return each photograph to its context in time and place. In 2005 the European House of Photography, in Paris, presented a solo

• 230 •

world war ii and the holocaust

exhibition of Baltermants’s work. The curator contextualized “Grief ” by placing it with other Baltermants photographs from Kerch. The photographs were explained as being from the series “That’s How It Was” (“Tak eto bylo”) and were hung together. The title of the series comes from the title of a book that Baltermants put together in the 1960s, in an attempt to publish the Kerch photographs together, to put “Grief ” back into its specific wartime context. The book, however, was never published. The attempt to put the icon of grief back into history was limited. The names Ivanova, Tereshchenko, and Kogan do not appear; no mention is made of the fact that most of the bodies in Bagerov Trench were Jewish. Contemporary art curators would go only so far in making a universal icon into a Holocaust liberation photograph. And that is exactly as Baltermants himself would have wanted it. Also in 2005, at the Russian State Historical Museum on Red Square in Moscow, the late Khaldei and his son Leonid, a budding photographer in his own right, had an exhibition titled Budapest Through the Eyes of Two Generations. It was the first major exhibition of a wide range of Khaldei’s Budapest photographs and included several taken in the city’s ghetto. Leonid went to Budapest in 2005 to take photographs for the exhibition, nicely contrasting the elder Khaldei’s historic photojournalism of violence and destruction with contemporary documentary photographs of the newly bourgeois capital of a European Union country. Following Khaldei’s self-presentation to Russian audiences as a Soviet photographer, in the online catalog for the exhibition, no mention is made of the fact that both photographers are Jewish, and in the biographical description of the elder Khaldei, there is nothing about pogroms and the Holocaust. Most poignantly, the online catalog says that he was fired in 1948, “because of what was written under ‘nationality’ in his passport.” As befits the Soviet and post-Soviet memory of the war, the word Jew remained the ever-present absence.50 By contrasting iconic photographs with their original photojournalistic images we can see how photographs function as photojournalism in emerging narratives, and then as art photography in the construction of war memory. When Zelma, Baltermants, and Khaldei created their images, they were taking news photographs to illustrate particular stories of this Soviet and Jewish war. The photographers also participated in the transformation of their images into icons that memorialized different events. Zelma turned a photograph of one of the most violent battles of the war into an icon of Soviet heroism at Stalingrad. Baltermants transformed one of the first Holocaust liberation photographs into a symbol of the universal tragedy of war. Khaldei turned his photograph about the fascist treatment of Jews into an icon of Jewish wartime suffering and survival. The photographers too changed over time, as photographers and as Soviet Jews, and sometimes tried to maintain distinct senses of self for different audiences. Khaldei tried hard throughout his life to navigate his different identities. One was his heroic Soviet self, who took socialist realist images of Stakhanovites in the 1930s, images of soldiers raising

From Photojournalism to Icons

• 231 •

red flags in the 1940s, and even after the fall of the Soviet Union, presented himself as a Russian patriot to his Russian fans. The other was his Jewish self, who photographed ghettoes and Jewish cemeteries during the war, whispered the word Jew in youngsters’ ears to teach them about Jewish pride in an era of silence, and proudly proclaimed how he liberated fellow Jews on a quiet street in Budapest. When I met Khaldei, he was preparing for his 1997 solo exhibition at San Francisco’s Jewish Museum. He was proudly on display as a Jew in an iconic Jewish institution. But he also played the role of Russian patriot, drinking vodka, posing with his heroic military pins, and standing proudly by his red flag photograph, which clearly seemed the most important to him, even though it was his Budapest work and photographs such as “The Jewish Couple” that got him a show at the Jewish Museum. In some ways, the tensions in his life and work define his generation of post-Soviet Jewry. It seems, then, that the Jewishness of people and of images was at times not apparent, and at other times was made evident by others, either in anti-Semitic purges in the 1940s or by American Jewish museums in the 1990s. Sometimes it had to be hidden and at others times could be deployed openly. The photographers’ own sense of Soviet Jewish identity changed over time, and changed in various contexts. Perhaps most important, the contrasting stories of Baltermants and Khaldei show that Jewishness was not experienced the same way by all the photographers.

•

Epilogue

•

soviet jewish photographers as war heroes

In 1943 Soviet filmgoers were treated to a wide variety of films about the war that had been ravaging their country for two years. The films often glorified the motherland and its soldiers and celebrated brave women on the home front. And as we have seen with the Soviet press, these films did not shy away from the destruction wreaked on the country. In the same year, the tide of the war turned in favor of the Red Army at Stalingrad. But the political climate for Jews began changing as David Ortenberg and other Jewish media makers lost their jobs in a growing campaign to de-judaize Soviet journalism, photography, and film. If in the early years of the war, Jews were included as both a heroic and victimized Soviet ethnicity, in the last few years of the war, Jews’ specific ethnic heroism and victimization became muted. But the story of the removal of Jews from the Soviet ethnic family is not nearly that simple. We know that many Soviet photographers and filmmakers were Jewish. We know that they were photographing Nazi atrocities against Jews since the first Holocaust liberation scene at Kerch. We know that the Black Book, dedicated to documenting the specific Nazi crimes against Jews, materialized, and its full suppression did not happen until after victory, after the book was compiled. We know that Russian Jewish poets were publishing Russian-language poetry about the Holocaust in 1945 and 1946. We also know that in the Soviet Yiddish press, stories of Jewish suffering and heroism were widely circulated. In her research on Jewish themes in Soviet film, Olga Gershenson has found that during the war, the Soviet film industry produced movies that celebrated the heroism of each Soviet titular nationality. There were films about Uzbek soldiers, Ukrainian fighters, heroic Turkmens, and of course Stalin’s own Georgians. But there was no film explicitly documenting Jewish heroism and the contributions of Soviet Jews to the war effort. Perhaps the only film that might be seen as an acknowledgment of the Jewish contribution to the war is the 1943 Wait for Me (Zhdi menia), directed by Boris Ivanov and Aleksandr Stolper. Wait for Me was based on a 1941 poem by Konstantin Simonov, the celebrated Soviet poet and documenter of Majdanek, who also cowrote the screenplay. Simonov’s poem is a • 233 •

• 234 •

through soviet jewish eyes

tale of the mutual longing of a soldier, Nikolai, on the front and his beloved, Liza, at home, who has no idea of the fate of her man. The poem appeared in Pravda in February 1942, just as the country was reading about and witnessing in pictures the discovery of Nazi mass murders at Kerch. Wait for Me struck such a chord with readers that Simonov turned it into a play and then a film script. In her book on Russian war films, Denise Youngblood pans the film as a maudlin and convoluted story about a chaste woman’s hopes for the return of her heroic husband, who may or may not be dead.1 Others have celebrated the sweet, innocent love affair that the poem, play, and film capture. But in all summaries of the film, the central story echoes that of the poem—a couple in love torn apart by war. The film version of Wait for Me does preserve Liza and Nikolai’s love story, but puts a third character at the center of the plot—Misha Vaynshteyn, a Soviet Jewish photojournalist working for one of the central Soviet newspapers. The movie opens with Vaynshteyn, who will be embedded with Nikolai’s unit, taking a picture of domestic bliss on the home front as men are being sent off to war, and women are left home to wait for them. With the last name Vaynshteyn, the filmmakers have clearly figured the photographer as Jewish, and they have placed him and his photographs front and center in the film. The story quickly shifts to the shooting down of Nikolai and Misha’s plane, which had been on a reconnaissance mission. Most of the airmen survive the crash, including Vaynshteyn, who had been gathering evidence of the enemy by taking pictures of German airfields. More important than the survival of any of the men, however, is the survival of Vaynshteyn’s pictures, which must be delivered to Moscow. After Nikolai retrieves Vaynshteyn’s photographs from the burning plane, he orders Vaynshteyn to “take the cassettes back to headquarters.” The photographer manages to escape and bring his photographic intelligence to Red Army headquarters. Already in the first minutes of the movie, Vaynshteyn is the one documenting the war—both at home and on the front—and is a hero for beating the odds by saving the most important artifacts of war, evidence of the enemy. Throughout the film Vaynshteyn functions as the link between the home front and the war. He brings Liza news of Nikolai when he gets back to Moscow. When he is sent on his next assignment to photograph Soviet partisans, he discovers that Nikolai has survived behind enemy lines and now leads the partisan unit that Vaynshteyn was sent to photograph. Vaynshteyn brings him news of Liza’s faithfulness. He photographs the partisans, develops the film, and even prints several photographs while encamped with the partisans. On his flight back to Moscow to deliver the material to his editor, German fighters attack his plane. The plane’s gunner is shot, and Vaynshteyn bravely takes over the gun and shoots down a German plane. His plane is shot down in turn, and he dies.

Epilogue

• 235 •

Vaynshteyn proved himself not just as a photographer, but also as a brave fighter. His own photograph appears in the newspaper for which he worked. The film ends with Liza gazing at one of Vaynshteyn’s photographs, an image of her Nikolai, who bursts into the room as the film closes. Officially or not, this 1943 film celebrated Jewish heroism and the contribution of Jews to the war effort, as documenters, visualizers, and communicators of the war—and even as fighters. If Gershenson is correct and each nationality had its war film and this movie was the primary fictional film about Jews, then Soviet Jews’ primary wartime responsibility was to document the enemy and mediate the war for the Soviet population. It is clear from the list of who made the film that the anti-Jewish purge of the Soviet media did not affect the making of Wait for Me. Many of its creators, such as Stolper, were Jewish. The cast, including Boris Blinov, who played Nikolai, was mostly Russian. But importantly, the role of Vaynshteyn was played by the prominent Soviet actor Lev Sverdlin, also Jewish. Sverdlin had an illustrious career on the Soviet screen beginning in the 1930s. Early in his career, he played the potentially risky role of the enemy, in the form of a Japanese colonel and of a Central Asian character, in a Soviet form of blackface. Thirty years later, shortly before his death, Sverdlin appeared in his last film, the 1969 TV movie The Price (Tsena), by the upstart Jewish filmmaker Mikhail Kalik. Sverdlin played a central character in the film, ninety-year-old Solomon, a Russian Jewish immigrant in the United States. In between, during the war, he played a heroic Jewish photographer who dies doing his job. Such a portrayal of Vaynshteyn shows that Soviet Jewish photographers were Jewish war heroes and that Jewishness was not erased from the wartime narrative, not on screen in the form of Vaynshteyn, nor in real life in the form of Sverdlin, Stolper, and others making this movie. Soviet Jewish photographers, such as the fictional Vaynshteyn, were documenters and artists photographing the building of Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s and then its near total destruction during the war. They were Jews who came to Moscow looking for work and found themselves at the vanguard of a visual revolution. They had the power to elevate workers and peasants and to celebrate the ethnic diversity of the world’s Communist empire. During the war, these photographers united a country by celebrating Soviet heroism and demonizing the enemy. In the end, perhaps Vaynshteyn, and not Nikolai, is the real hero of Wait for Me. His work ultimately leads to victory, and he makes the ultimate sacrifice for his country. In his doing so, the story of Vaynshteyn and of these photographers reveals the centrality of Jews in the building and preservation of the Soviet Union. At the same time, they photographed the rise of Jews in the Soviet intelligentsia; the establishment of a Soviet Jewish territory in the 1930s; and the murder of their own family members and friends and the mass killings of the Holocaust. Had Vaynshteyn survived

• 236 •

through soviet jewish eyes

the plane crash, he would have photographed liberation sites and perhaps returned to his hometown to bear witness to what the enemy had done. The story of these photographers—both real and fictional—reveals that Jewishness was not incidental to their lives or to the stories they were telling in the Soviet press. In the opening scene of the movie, Vaynshteyn turns on his camera’s timer so he can get in the picture. As the camera clicks, Vaynshteyn tells his compatriots that he uses the timer because sometimes “a photojournalist can be in the pictures too.” By sitting at the center of a picture surrounded by Russian war heroes and the women who love them, he and the makers of Wait for Me remind us that these Soviet Jewish photographers were not passively telling other people’s stories, but were active creators of the world they photographed.

•

Notes

•

• Introduction • 1. Neil Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Anchor, 1989). 2. J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, eds., Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 3. Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 6–7. 4. Max Kozloff, “Jewish Sensibility and the Photography of New York,” in New York: Capital of Photography, ed. Max Kozloff (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). See also Richard Woodward’s critique of Kozloff, “Behind a Century of Photographs, Was There a Jewish Eye?” New York Times, July 7, 2002, Art/Architecture, 1. 5. William Klein quoted in Anthony Lane, “The Shutterbug: With Two New Shows, William Klein Is Back in Town,” New Yorker, May 21, 2001, 78. For a summary of the arguments about Jewish photography, see Alan Trachtenberg, “The Claim of a Jewish Eye,” Pakntreger (Spring 2003): 20–25. Klein references three Jews: Weegee, Arbus, and Frank. Weegee is the pseudonym of Usher Fellig, born in Z ⁄loczów in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 6. Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 7. Personal communication with Anna Shternshis, February 6, 2009. 8. Most, Making Americans, 6–7. 9. Khaldei’s birth date has been a matter of contention. In the mid-1930s, to get a job with a local newspaper, Khaldei backdated his birth one year to 1916 so that he was old enough for the job. Thus, many of the documents in his archive give his birth year as 1916. He claimed that it was, in fact, 1917. 10. The photo was reproduced in Ernst Volland and Heinz Krimmer, eds., Jewgeni Chaldej: Der bedeutende Augenblick (Berlin: Neuer Europa Verlag, 2008), 15. 11. Yuri Emmanuelovitch Evzerikhin, interview by the author, June 2004. The written biographical accounts of Evzerikhin, all published in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, • 237 •

• 238 •

Notes to Pages 8 –16

do not mention his Jewish background. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 12. Dmitrii Baltermants (Moscow: Moskovskii dom fotografii, 2002). See also Faces of a Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union, 1917–1991. Photographs by Dmitrii Baltermants (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Press, 1996). 13. On late Stalinist anti-Semitism, see Yehoshua Gilboa, Black Years of Soviet Jewry (New York: Little, Brown, 1971); Vladimir Naumov and Joshua Rubenstein, eds., Stalin’s Secret Pogroms: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Gennadii Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina: Vlast’ i antisemitizm (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2003).

• 1 . How a Group of Jews from the Provinces Built Soviet Photojournalism • 1. Grigorii Boltianskii, “Russkaia fotografiia v datakh,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 6 (1939): 29. 2. Ibid. 3. Marvin Lyons, Russia in Original Photographs, 1860–1920 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977). 4. Iurii Sergeev and A. Mineeva, Fotografii na pamiat’: Fotografy Nevskogo prospekta, 1850–1950 (St. Petersburg: Slaviia, 2003), 63. 5. Robert Allshouse, ed., Photographs for the Tsar: The Pioneering Color Photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (New York: Dial Press, 1980). 6. Michael Berkowitz, “Jews and the History of Photography: New Areas of Research,” Parkes Institute Seminar Programme, University of Southampton, October 22, 2008. Thanks to Michael for sharing his information about his great-grandfather. 7. Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 120; see also Vitaly Charny, “Konstantin Shapiro: Court Photographer of Russian Art,” Jewish Gen, www.jewishgen.org. 8. Jonathan Wilson, Marc Chagall (New York: Schocken, 2007), 22. 9. Alexander Ivanov, “Experiments of a ‘Young Man for Photographic Works’: Solomon Yudovin and Russian Pictorialism,” trans. A. Kushkova, in Photoarchive of An-Sky’s Expeditions (St. Petersburg: Petersburg Judaica, 2005), 2. 10. See Kalman Bland, The Artless Jew (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 11. Nachum Gidal, “Jews and Photography,” Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute, 1987, 437–453. 12. Berkowitz, “Jews and the History of Photography.” 13. See Lucjan Dubroszycki and Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Image Before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland before the Holocaust (New York: Schocken, 1994). 14. Sergeev and Mineeva, Fotografii na pamiat’. Only two Jews among several dozen photographers participated in early photography exhibitions commissioned by Czar Alexander III and then Nicholas II in Moscow. See the Ukazatel’ fotograficheskoi vystavki 1892 goda ustroennoi fotograficheskim otdelom ORTZ v Moskve (Moscow: T. Gagen, 1892). I noted only one obviously Jewish name, that of a medical photographer, Lazar Solomonovitch Minor, who participated in this particular exhibition. By 1912, St. Petersburg had a well-developed institutional apparatus to take, produce, and display photographs, including a small publication called Vestnik vystavok (Bulletin of Exhibitions), which included photo exhibitions. The czar’s

Notes to Pages 17 –21

15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

• 239 •

photo exhibition from April 12 to May 4, 1912, had one or two Jewish photographers participating, based on the names and biographies of the photographers included in the exhibition catalog. But these numbers mask the large number of Jews involved in portrait, studio, and other kinds of photography. Louise McReynolds, “Autocratic Journalism: The Case of the St. Petersburg Telegraph Agency,” Slavic Review 49, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 49. “The History of Ogonek,” ogoniok.com. See also “Letters to the Editor,” Ogonek no. 14 (April 6, 1998), ogoniok.com; “Vystavka zhurnala “Ogonek” v dome fotografii,” www.museum.ru. Erika Wolf, “The Context of Early Soviet Photojournalism, 1923–1932,” Zimmerli Journal 2 (Fall 2004), 106–117. On the Jewish community of prerevolutionary St. Petersburg, see Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late-Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). On Otsup, see Piotr Otsup: The Space of Revolution: Russia, 1917–1941 (Moscow: Golden Bee, 2007). For the Otsup family tree, see www.r-g-d.ru. See also Sergeev and Mineeva, Fotografii na pamiat’. See also Irina Tchmyreva, “The Master from the Shadow: Piotr Otsup, 1883–1963,” in Piotr Otsup, 16–21. On the prerevolutionary press, see Louise McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a Mass Circulation Press (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). On Otsup’s exhibition, see Tchmyreva, “The Master,” 19. Pyotr Otsup, as quoted in Elena Lebedeva, “Vezdesushchii Otsup,” Rodina, no. 9 (2003): 110. Grigory Shudakov, Pioneers of Soviet Photography (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983), 11. Lebedeva, “Vezdesushchii Otsup,” 110. Shudakov, Pioneers of Soviet Photography, 12. “Pyotr Adolfovitch Otsup,” Grove Dictionary of Art, artnet.com. Ilya Rudiak, Moisei Nappel’baum: Nash Vek (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1984), 10. Unlike Soviet histories of Nappelbaum, Rudiak’s romanticized description of Nappelbaum’s rise to photographic fame emphasizes the Jewishness of the story. The introduction to his book also ends as darkly as one could imagine by showing how many people portrayed on the pages of the book were murdered by the Soviet regime. On the idea of Jews as “people of the media,” see Olga Gershenson, “Ambivalence and Identity in Russian-Jewish Cinema,” in Jewish Cultural Studies, vol. 1, Jewishness: Expression, Identity, and Representation, ed. S. J. Bronner (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization), 175–195. M. Nappelbaum, Izbrannye fotografii (Moscow: Planeta, 1985), 5. L. F. Volkov-Lannit, Istoriia pishetsiia ob’ektivom (Moscow: Planeta, 1971), 6. For more on the conversation between Otsup and Lenin, see also A. S. Budiak, “Slovo ob avtore,” in Iskusstvo fotoportreta, by L. F. Volkov-Lannit, 3rd ed. (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1987). Anatoly Lunacharsky, “The Opening of the Photography Courses for Students of City Schools and for Workers,” Fotograf, no. 3–4 (1926): 6. Volkov-Lannit, Istoriia pishetsiia ob’ektivom, 44. On the conventions of Stalin portraiture, see Jan Plamper, Alkhimiia vlasti: Kul’t Stalina v izobrazitel’nom iskusstve (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozreniie, 2010). Russian State Archive for Literature and Art (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva; RGALI), Moscow, 2325 (personal files of Moisei Nappelbaum), opis (inventory;

• 240 •

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

Notes to Pages 21 –26

op.) 2, delo (file; d.) 15, l. 5. The stories about Nappelbaum’s photograph of Lenin repeatedly circulated in print on anniversaries of Nappelbaum’s death. Unlike in Rudiak’s version of Nappelbaum’s life, which virtually ignores Nappelbaum’s forty years of Soviet photography, Soviet historical works begin his career in January 1918 with his Lenin photograph. RGALI 2325, op. 2, d. 15, l. 5. Volkov-Lannit, Istoriia pishetsiia ob’ektivom, 43. Ibid., 48. On the Jewishness of the Soviet intelligentsia, see Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). See Sabine Kriebel, “Photomontage in the Year 1932: John Heartfield and the National Socialists,” Oxford Art Journal 97, no. 1 (2008): 97–127. Photohistorians often claim that photojournalism was born in Germany in 1928. But most historians ignore the Soviet case entirely. See, for example, Nachum T. Gidal, “Jews in Photography,” Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute, 1987, 447. Dziga and His Brothers (dir. Evgenii Tsymbal, Russia, 2002) charts the cinematic lives of the three Kaufmans. A. Rubashkin, Mikhail Koltsov (Leningrad: Izd. Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1971), 7. S. V. Yakovleva, “Predislovie,” in Mikhail Koltsov: Vostorg i iarost’ (Moscow: Izd. Pravda, 1990), 8. See Steven Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). Jarrod Tanny, “City of Rogues and Schnorrers: The Myth of Old Odessa in Russian and Jewish Culture” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2008). As Tanny states about the post-Stalin years, “The abrogation of Jewishness in Soviet culture ironically reinforced and even strengthened the mythical character of old Odessa and its people, as old Odessa had always been implicitly rather than explicitly defined as a Jewish city—through the subtle use of Yiddish inflections in Russian texts and dialogues; through the use of traditional Jewish folkloric motifs, without reference to their cultural origins; through the creation of characters whose gestures, movements, and appearances marked them as Jewish even if their proper names suggested otherwise. Jewish culture may have been forced underground in the post-Stalin era, but the myth of old Odessa often served as a surrogate channel through which some aspects of this culture could be publicly expressed” (311). Ilya Ilf ’s daughter, Alexandra Ilf, has been publishing a series of volumes on her father’s life and work. These include his personal notebooks (zapisnye knizhki) and new illustrated editions of 12 Chairs and Single-Story America, among other works. On the image of Odessa as created by these Moscow-based Odessan Jewish writers, see Tanny, “City of Rogues and Schnorrers.” On the mass migration of Jews to Moscow, see Gabriella Freitag, Nächstes Jahr in Moskau: Die Zuwanderung von Juden in die sowjetische Metropole, 1917–1932 (Leipzig: Simon Dubnow Institut, 2004). On the Soviet publishing industry in the early 1920s, see Brian Kassof, “The Knowledge Front: Politics, Ideology, and Economics in the Soviet Book Publishing Industry, 1925–1935” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000). On the Soviet Jewish publishing industry, see David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Grigorii Boltianskii, Ocherki po istorii fotografii (Kharkov: Goskinoizdat, 1939).

Notes to Pages 26 –34

• 241 •

49. Volkov-Lannit, Istoriia pishetsiia ob’ektivom, 43. 50. N. Z. Beliaev, B. E. Efimov, and M. B. Efimov, eds., Mikhail Koltsov: Kakim on byl. Sbornik vospominaniia (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel,’ 1989), 310. 51. Leonid Maksimenkov, “Mne strogo nakazali,” Ogonek 5000, no. 24 ( June 11–17, 2007), www.ogoniok.com. Maksimenkov quotes from documents that he claims to have found in the Russian State Archive for Social and Political Research (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii; RGASPI), Moscow. 52. Volkov-Lannit, Istoriia pishetsiia ob’ektivom, 43. Efim Zozulya died on November 3, 1941, fighting with the Red Army on the outskirts of Moscow. 53. Erika Wolf, “The Context of Soviet Photojournalism, 1923–1932,” Zimmerli Journal 2 (Fall 2004): 106–117. 54. On LEF and debates about socialist art, see Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005). 55. Beliaev, Efimov, and Efimov, Mikhail Koltsov, 277. 56. Ibid., 310. 57. Wolf, “The Context of Soviet Photojournalism.” 58. See A. N. Lavrentiev, Rakursy Rodchenko (Moscow: Isskustvo, 1992), 23–26. 59. Alexander Rodchenko, “Perestroika of an Artist,” Sovetskoe foto, nos. 5–6 (1936): 19, as cited in Alexander Lavrentev, Rodchenko: Photography, 1924–1957 (Cologne: Konemann, 1995), 13. 60. Anatoly Shaykhet, “Odin raz uvidet,” in Arkadii Shaykhet, fotografii, 1924–1951: Katalog vystavki v chest’ 100 letiia so dniia rozhdeniia (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi muzei izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv im. A. S. Pushkina, 2000), 8–9. 61. Semyon Fridlyand, “M. Alpert,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 4 (1935): 14–15. 62. Maks Alpert, Bespokoinnaia professiia (Moscow: Planeta, 1962). 63. “Biographical Information,” Semyon Fridlyand Archive, Dalbey Photographic Collection, University of Denver.

• 2. Seeing Red • 1. “Za sovetskuiu fotografiiu,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 1 (April 1926): 1, as cited in Erika Wolf, “The Context of Soviet Photojournalism, 1923–1932,” Zimmerli Journal 2 (Fall 2004): 106–117. 2. Wolf, “The Context of Soviet Photojournalism,” 106–117. 3. See L. Mezhericher, “Skhema diferentsiatsii fotodela v SSSR,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 7 (1934): 20. 4. “Assotsiatsiia foto-reporterov,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 1 (April 1926): 26. 5. On pictorialism, see Piktorial’naia fotografiia v Rossii (1890–1920s) (Moscow: Moscow Art Center, 2002). 6. Leonid Volkov-Lannit, “Za ob’ektivnost’ ob’ektiva,” Novyi LEF, no. 7 (1928): 44, as cited in Margarita Tupitsyn, The Soviet Photograph, 1924–1937 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 39. 7. See Erika Wolf, “Semyon Fridlyand and the Politics of Soviet Photography before World War II,” talk given at University of Colorado at Boulder, January 2009. 8. Osip Brik, “Ot kartiny k foto,” Novyi LEF, no. 3 (1928): 29–33. 9. Alexander Lavrentiev, Alexander Rodchenko: Photography, 1924–1954 (Cologne: Konemann, 1995), 24–25. For a closer reading of the political debates in the photographic community, see Wolf, “Semyon Fridlyand.”

• 242 •

Notes to Pages 35 –40

10. Valery Stigneev, “Razvitie otechestvennogo fotoreportazha kontsa 19go, nachala 20go veka,” http://favoritfoto.ru/razvitie.html. See also Valery Stigneev, “Fototeoriia: Dve tendentsii,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 7 (1989): 22–25. 11. L. Mezhericher, “O ‘pravykh’ vliianiiakh v fotografii,” Fotograficheskii almanakh (February 1929): 219–243. 12. Ibid., 225. 13. Alexander Ivanov, “March of the Enthusiasts: Photographs from the OZET and ORT Archives,” in The Hope and the Illusion: The Search for a Jewish Homeland, a Remarkable Period in the History of ORT, ed. Valery Dymshits and Alexander Ivanov (London: ORT, 2006) (catalog; in English and Russian), http://www.ozet.ort.spb.ru/rus/index.php?id=1374. 14. Aleksei Loginov, “Stepen’ obnazheniia kak kriterii dozvolennogo,” in Obnazhennye dlia Stalina: Sovetskaia fotografiia 1920–1940kh godov (Moscow: Punktum 2004), 13. 15. Erika Wolf, “Belomorstroi: The Visual Economy of Forced Labor,” in Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture, ed. Valerie Kivelson and Joan Neuberger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008): 168–174. 16. Grigory Shudakov, Pioneers of Soviet Photo, 1917–1940 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983), 19. 17. “SSSR v karmannom zerkale: Vystavka ‘Ogon’ka v Londone, organnizovannaia VOKS,” Ogonek, no. 1 ( January 10, 1931): 10–11. 18. Samarii Gurarii, Eto istoriia (Moscow: Verein, 1995). See also Mikhail Lezinsky, “NektoIzkin,” http://proza.ru:8004/texts/2003/10/05–125.html. See also Konstatin Simonov, Raznye dni voiny: Dnevnik pisatelia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1982), chap. 21. 19. “Spravka,” document no. 39, Evgenii Khaldei files, housed at Voller Ernst Archives, Berlin. 20. For a definitive version of Khaldei’s professional biography, see the essays in Ernst Volland and Heinz Krimmer, eds., Jewgeni Chaldej: Der bedeutende Augenblick (Berlin: Neuer Europa Verlag, 2008). 21. Interview with Yuri Evzerikhin by the author, June 2004. 22. V. Kholodkovsky, “Rastushchii fotozhurnalist,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 13 (1938): 24. 23. Interview with Mark Markov-Grinberg by Paul Harbaugh, July 1997, videotape, Mark Markov-Grinberg Archive, housed in the collection of Paul Harbaugh, Denver, Colorado. 24. Boris Velinkin, introduction to Georgii Zel’ma: Izbrannye fotografii (Moscow: Planeta, 1978), 1–7. This is one of the most extensive published biographies of Zelma. 25. On the history of USSR in Construction, see Erika Wolf, “When Photographs Speak, to Whom Do They Talk? The Origins and Audience of SSSR na stroike (USSR in Construction),” Left History 6, no. 2 (2000): 53–82. 26. Interview with Evgenii Khaldei, as cited in Leah Ben-David Val, Propaganda and Dreams (Zurich: Stemmle, 1999), 63. See also interview with Anna Khaldei by the author, September 2007. 27. Kholodkovsky, “Rastushchii fotozhurnalist,” 24. 28. “Leica,” Sovetskoe foto, no 3 (1934): 36–37. 29. N. K[olli], “S tsvetnoi kameroi na s’emke,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 11 (1938): 21. 30. Georgii Zelma, “Pervye oshibki i pervye udachi,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 14 (1938): 20. 31. “Yubilei bildapparata,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 4 (1936): 40. 32. “Sovetskii bildapparat,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 7 (1935): 17. 33. “Bildsviaz Moskva-Minsk,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 10 (1936): 19.

Notes to Pages 41 –45 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61.

• 243 •

“O kachestve bildperedachi,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 14 (1938): 4. Ibid., 3–4. Viktor Temin, “Pervye snimki s fronta,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 11 (1939): 5–6. G. Boltianskii, “Sovetskaia fotografiia v datakh,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 7 (1939): 16. L. F. Volkov-Lannit, Istoriia pishetsiia ob’ektivom (Moscow: Planeta, 1971), 48. Yu. Rzhevskii, “Fotoreportery Fotokhroniky TASS,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 8 (1939): 15. Hanno Hardt, “Constructing Photojournalism in Weimar Germany, 1928–33,” Communication Review 1, no. 3 (1996): 373–402. See also Volkov-Lannit, Istoriia pishetsiia ob’ektivom, 59. “Soyuzfoto—5 let,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 4 (1936): 40. See also Val, Propaganda and Dreams, 55. On the organization of photojournalism in Weimar Germany, see Hardt, “Constructing Photojournalism in Weimar Germany,” 373–402. Valery Stigneev, “Razvitie otechestvennogo fotoreportazha kontsa 19go, nachala 20go veka,” in Stigneev, Vek fotografii, 1894–1994: Ocherki istorii otechestvennoi fotografii (Moscow: Librokom, 2009). See the masthead of the January–February 1934 edition of Soviet Photography that calls it a “publication of Soyuzfoto.” Iurii Sergeev and A. Mineeva, Fotografii na pamiat’: Fotografy Nevskogo prospekta, 1850–1950 (St. Petersburg: Slaviia, 2003), 458–459. Ibid., 428. On mid-decade debates about Soyuzfoto and its internal structures, see “Ukreplenie raboty Soyuzfoto,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 10 (October 1935): 1–2. See also V. Gordasnikov, “Sovetskie snimki v inostrannoi pechati,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 7 (1939): 13–14, which discusses the improvements in distribution after Fotokhronika became part of TASS. “Khronika,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 8 (1935): 31. On the organization of the All-Union Arts Committee, see Kurt London, The Seven Soviet Arts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938) or Juri Jelagin, Taming of the Arts (New York: Dutton, 1951). On its attack on formalism in the fine arts, see Susan Reid, “Socialist Realism in the Stalinist Terror: The Industry of Socialism Art Exhibition, 1935–1941,” Russian Review 60, no. 2 (April 2001): 159. “Fotoinformatsiia—osnovnaia rabota Soyuzfoto,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 10 (1936): 3–4. “Tablitsa vystavok,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 1 (1937): 16. “Sostav komiteta pervoi vsesoyuznoi vystavki fotoiskusstva,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 12 (1936): 5. “Delo nashei chesti,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 5–6 (1937): 6. Ibid., 7–8. This information is based on dozens of contracts I consulted that are located in several photographers’ personal archives. I. Rumiantsev, “O provintsial’nom fotoreportere,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 2 (1937): 13. Ibid. “V zashchitu avtorskogo prava,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 12 (1936): 18–19. “Familiia avtora—pod kazhdym snimkom,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 2 (1937): 19. Alexander Ivanov, “Bremia propagandy: reprezentatsiia evreiskoi zemledel’cheskoi kolonizatsii v sovetskoi dokumental’no-publitsisticheskoi fotografii 1920–1930-kh godov,” Problemy evreiskoi istorii, ch. 1 (Moscow: Knizhniki, 2008), 395. “Magazin-fotosalon,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 5–6 (1936): 46. “Spetsializirovannyi fotomagazin,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 5–6 (1936): 46.

• 244 •

Notes to Pages 45 –54

62. Ivanov, “Bremia propagandy,” 390. 63. G. Orlova, “Voochiiu vidim,” Fotografiia i sovetskii proekt v epokhu ikh tekhnicheskoi vosproizvodimosti (St. Petersburg: Sovetskaia vlast i media, 2005), 194. 64. M. Dzhavikashvili, cited by A. G. Dementiev, “Voprosy sotsialisticheskogo realizma na pervom vsesoiuznom s’ezde sovetskikh pisatelei,” in Iz istorii sovetskogo iskusstvovedeniia i esteticheskoi mysli 1930kh godov, ed. V. Vanslov and L. F. Deniskova (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1977), 26. 65. Reid, “Socialist Realism in the Stalinist Terror,” 154. 66. Val, Propaganda and Dreams, 58. 67. M. Markov, “Seriia eshche ne zakonchena,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 11 (1937): 15–16. 68. F. Frits, “Primer i gordost’ vsei strany,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 3 (1934): 13. 69. Ibid., 13–14. 70. Kholodkovsky, “Rastushchii fotozhurnalist,” 23–25. 71. Ibid., 25. 72. On the visual representation of Stalin, see Jan Plamper, Alkhimiia vlasti: Kul’t Stalina v izobraziltel’nom iskusstve (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2010). 73. Gurarii photographed Stalin for many years before, during, and after the war. Perhaps his most significant Stalin photograph was taken in November 1941 hundreds of feet beneath Moscow in the makeshift bomb shelter in the Mayakovsky metro station, where he made a famous speech decrying Germany’s invasion of the country and insisting on the need to defend the capital. See Samarii Gurarii, Eto istoriia (Moscow: Verein, 1995). 74. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969). Originally published in 1935 in German. 75. “Kievskie manevry,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 11 (1935): 7. 76. Yakov Khalip, “Pis’mo v redaktsiu,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 6 (1938): 23. 77. M. Royzen, “Foto na oboronnye temy,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 2 (1938): 4–5. 78. Katerina Clark, “Germanophone Intellectuals in Stalin’s Russia: Diaspora and Cultural Identity in the 1930s,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 2, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 529–551, esp. 532–533. 79. Leonid Maksimenkov, “Mne strogo nakazli,” Ogonek 5000, no. 24 ( June 11, 2007). 80. Richard Whelan, “Robert Capa and the Rise of the Picture Press,” in This Is War! Robert Capa at Work (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2007), 26–27. 81. Ibid., 32. 82. Ibid., 43. 83. Irme Schaber, “The Eye of Solidarity: The Photographer Gerda Taro and Her Work during the Spanish Civil War, 1936–7,” in Gerda Taro, ed. Irme Schaber, Richard Whelan, and Kristen Lubben (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2007), 26–28. 84. Ibid., 10. 85. See, for example, Sergeant S. Gurov, “Voennyi korrespondent,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 6 (1939): 3–4. 86. Viktor Temin, “S fotoapparatom u ozera Khasan,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 10 (1938): 7–8. 87. V. Temin, “Pervye cnimski s fronta,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 11 (1939): 5–6. 88. The most well known book about photographic manipulation in the Soviet Union is David King, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Henry Holt, 1997).

Notes to Pages 54– 60

• 245 •

89. International Center of Photography obituary, Dmitrii Baltermants Archives, managed by Michael Mattis, Scarsdale, New York. 90. Whelan, “Robert Capa,” 78. 91. Capa’s “Fallen Soldier” has been the subject of much debate. In 2009, El periódico reporter Ernest Alos published a story arguing that “the picture does not correspond to any actual event.” See the series of articles written by Alos that appeared in El periódico in July 2009. 92. M. Alpert, “Sotsializm pereplavliaet cheloveka,” Proletarskoe foto, no. 7–8 (1932): 8. 93. The debates took place on the pages of Proletarskoe foto and are summarized in Stigneev, Vek fotografii, 102–105. 94. N. Kolli, “O khudozhestvennoi pravde,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 2 (1938): 15–16. 95. Y. Portnov, “Protiv falsifikatsii faktov,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 4 (1939): 11–13. 96. Ibid., 12. 97. Val, Propaganda and Dreams, 64. 98. S. Fridliand, “Vzaimootnosheniia s fotoreporterom,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 11 (1936): 8–10. 99. L. Mezhericher, “Chtenie negativov,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 11 (1936): 9. 100. “Nash schet bildredaktoram: Pis’mo leningradskikh fotoreporterov,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 7 (1936): 7. 101. Ibid., 8. The open letter was signed by eight photographers. 102. “Vnimanie fotoreporterov i fotoliubitelei,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 4 (1939): 18. 103. “Aleksandr Grinberg,” in Obnazhennye dlia Stalina, 124. 104. Y. Portnov, “Za korennuiu i bystreishuiu perestroiku raboty ‘Fotokhroniki,’” Sovetskoe foto, no. 3 (1938): 8–9. 105. Stigneev, Vek fotografii, 131. 106. This is according to the Recovered Names project (Vozvrashcheniia imen) of the National Library (http://visz.nlr.ru). 107. K. A. Zaleskii, Imperiia Stalina: Biograficheskii entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (Moscow: Veche, 2000). 108. A. Avdeenko, “Otluchnie,” Znamia, no. 4 (1989): 91–92. 109. As quoted in Maksimenkov, “Mne strogo nakazali.” 110. A. Rubashkin, Mikhail Koltsov (Leningrad: Izd. Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1971). 111. Valery Stigneev, “Zhiznennyi put’ fotografa,” in Dokument i konstruktivnyj obraz: Arkadij Shaykhet, Fotografiia s NEPa do velikoi otechestvennoi (Berlin: Karlshorst, 2001), 31. 112. Interview with Yuri Evzerikhin by the author, July 2004. 113. Jan Plamper, “Abolishing Ambiguity: Soviet Censorship Practices in the 1930s,” Russian Review 60, no. 4 (October 2001): 526–544.

• 3. Soviet Jews on Both Sides of the Camera • 1. See Ronald Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 414–452. For a literary approach, see Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University

• 246 •

2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

Notes to Pages 60 –66

Press, 1994); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). On language politics, Latinization, and Soviet Jews, see David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chap. 3. On visualizing Central Asian women and their burkas, see also Douglas Northrop, “Envisioning Empire: Veils and Visual Revolution in Soviet Central Asia,” in Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture, ed. Valerie Kivelson and Joan Neuberger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 162–167. See Zelma’s correspondence with his wife from 1936, while he was on assignment for Red Star in Turkmenistan. Georgy Zelma Archives, managed by Michael Mattis, Scarsdale, New York. On Max Penson, see Andrew Hale, Max Penson: Man and Machine Exhibition, (Santa Fe: NM: Anahita Gallery, 2005); Stephen Kinzer, “Chronicle of an Upheaval the World Couldn’t See,” New York Times, January 25, 1998; Erika Billeter, Usbekistan: Dokumentarfotografie, 1925–1945 von Max Penson (Bern: Benteli, 1997); and Olga Sviblova, introduction to Max Penson: Classic Soviet Modernist Photographer Max Penson and the Soviet Modernisation of Uzbekistan, 1920–1930s (Moscow: House of Photography, 2006). Billeter, Usbekistan. Cited in Alexander Ivanov, “Bremia propagandy: Reprezentatsiia evreiskoi zemledel’cheskoi kolonizatsii v sovetskoi dokumental’no-publitsisticheskoi fotografii 1920–1930-kh godov,” in Problemy evreiskoi istorii (Moscow: Knizhniki, 2008), 396–397. In the early years of the Soviet Union, and even before the country was established, there were debates about how to define Jewishness. On the one hand, there was the role of religion in defining who Jews were. If Jews were simply a religious group, were they destined to fade away under socialism? Were they a nation with a distinctive culture, residential patterns, languages, and other things? Once the state officially marked Jews as a nationality, there was the “problem” of a diversity of Jews. To be sure, the majority of Soviet Jews, and the ones who flooded Moscow in the 1920s, were eastern European, Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews. But there were Bukharan Jews in Uzbekistan, Georgian Jews, Mountain Jews in Dagestan, and Crimean Jews. By making Yiddish the official language of Soviet Jewry, the state flattened internal ethnic and racial differences among Jews. Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture. See Deborah Yalen, “Red Kasrilevke: Ethnographies of Economic Transformation in the Soviet Shetl, 1917–1939” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2007). Jonathan Dekel-Chen, Farming the Red Land: Jewish Agricultural Colonization and Local Soviet Power, 1924–1941 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1917–1941 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). For an overview history of Birobidzhan as well as great illustrations, see Robert Weinberg, Stalin’s Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996). Alexander Ivanov, “The Work of ORT in the USSR from 1921 to 1938: Events, People, Documents,” in The Hope and the Illusion: The Search for a Jewish Homeland, a Remarkable Period in the History of ORT, ed. Valery Dymshits and Alexander Ivanov (London: ORT, 2006). Ivanov, “Bremia propagandy, 386–387.

Notes to Pages 66 –68

• 247 •

13. Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, “Imagining Europe: The Popular Art of American Jewish Ethnography,” in Divergent Centers: Shaping Jewish Cultures in America and Israel, ed. Deborah Dash Moore and S. Ilan Troen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 155–181. 14. Alexander Ivanov, “Experiments of a ‘Young Man for Photographic Works’: Solomon Yudovin and Russian Pictorialism,” trans. A. Kushkova, in Photoarchive of An-Sky’s Expeditions (St. Petersburg: Petersburg Judaica, 2005). See also Eugene Avrutin and Harriet Murav, eds., Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. Ansky’s Ethnographic Expedition (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2009); Alina Orlov, “Beyond Nationalism: Natan Altman’s ‘Self-Portrait: A Jewish Youth’ ” (1915), Transversal: Zeitschrift für jüdischer Studien 1 (2004): 100–108; Gabriella Safran and Steven Zipperstein, eds., The Worlds of S. Ansky: A Russian-Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). 15. Ivanov, “Experiments of a ‘Young Man for Photographic Works,’” 10. 16. V. Lukin, “An-Sky as an Ideologist of Jewish Museum Work,” in The Jewish Museum (St. Petersburg: Judaica, 2004), 72, as cited in Ivanov, “Experiments,” 2. 17. On Alter Kacyzne, see the YIVO photo archives online exhibition People of a Thousand Towns and Alter Kacyzne, Poyln: Jewish Life in the Old Country (New York: Metropolitan, 1999). On Roman Vishniac, see Maya Benton, “Shuttered Memories of a Vanishing World: The Deliberate Photography of Roman Vishniac” (PhD diss., Courtauld Institute of Art, London, forthcoming) and Roman Vishniac, A Vanishing World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984). 18. Carol Zemel, “Z’chor! Roman Vishniac’s Photo-eulogy of East European Jews,” in Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust, ed. Julia Epstein and Lori Lefkowitz (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 85. 19. Vivienne Silver-Brody, Documenters of the Dream: Pioneer Jewish Photographers in the Land of Israel, 1890–1933 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1998). See also the work of Israeli art historian Gideon Efrat. 20. Dekel-Chen, Farming the Red Land; Valery Dymshits, “Istoricheskii shans: Sozdanie evreiskikh avtonomii v Krymu, na Ukraine, i na dal’nem vostoke v 1920–30x godakh,” http://www.ozet.ort.spb.ru/rus/index.php?id=476. 21. Mikhail Koltsov and Abram Bragin, Sud’ba evreiskikh mass v Sovetskom Soiuze (Moscow: Mospoligraf, 1924). 22. Dymshits, “Istoricheskii shans.” 23. Mikhail Kalinin, speech at the Central Executive Committee’s meeting to discuss Birobidzhan, May 24, 1934, in M. I. Kalinin, Ob obrazovanii evreiskoi avtonomnoi oblasti (Moscow: Emes, 1935), 7. 24. Many urban Soviet Jews felt the same way the photographers did. In 1939 the State Ethnographic Museum mounted an exhibition, called Exhibition on Jews under Tsars and Soviets, that highlighted the poverty and isolation of czarist era Jewry and contrasted that with the achievements of the new Soviet Jew in Birobidzhan. Many visitors to the exhibition criticized the curators for showing a one-dimensional view of contemporary Jewish life under the Soviets, saying things like: “The participation of the Jewish intelligentsia in contemporary art, painting, and sculpture was poorly represented,” or “You need to expand the section on Jews in the USSR, since Jews in Birobidzhan only reflect a part of the general life of the Jewish nation.” See Alexander Ivanov, “‘Jews in Tsarist Russia and the Soviet

• 248 •

25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

Notes to Pages 69 –72

Union,’ An Exhibition on the Achievements of Jewish Agricultural and Cultural Construction in the Country of Soviets,” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 102 (2010). “A Year of Work of the Committee of Jewish Agricultural Toilers,” Der Emes, August 29, 1925. This is a series of articles and photographs documenting the Jewish agricultural colony movement with photographs taken from the Fraylebn colony in Kherson province and from the Nivo colony in Krivoy Rog province. Ivanov, “The Work of ORT in the USSR from 1921 to 1938,” 140. Alexander Ivanov, “March of the Enthusiasts: Photographs from the OZET and ORT Archives,” in The Hope and the Illusion: The Search for a Jewish Homeland, a Remarkable Period in the History of ORT, ed. Valery Dymshits and Alexander Ivanov (London: ORT, 2006). Ibid. Tribuna, no. 9 (1938): 27. “Evreiskie sinagogy: Pod kluby,” Ogonyok, no. 5 (1923): 14. A. Shaykhet, “Deti evreiskikh kolonistov,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 5 (1930): 139, as cited in Ivanov, “Bremia propagandy,” 386. Image unnumbered. Georgii Zelma Archive. The archive was in the process of being organized and thus I only happened upon the Birobidzhan negatives. Viktor Fink, “Birobidzhan: Evreiskaia avtonomnaia oblast’,” Ogonyok, June 5, 1934, 4–5. Photos by G. Zelmanovitch. Valdheim was founded in 1928 by L. Gefen as the first Jewish collective farm in what in 1934 would become the Jewish Autonomous Region. Robert Weinberg, Stalin’s Forgotten Zion (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999). On Zelma’s Central Asia photography, see Georgii Zelma, “Photography Demonstration, Central Asia,” in Leah Ben-David Val, Propaganda and Dreams (Zurich: Stemmle, 1999), 110, or Georgii Zelma, “The Voice of Moscow, Uzbekistan,” in Susan Goodman Tumarkin, Russian Jewish Artists in a Century of Change (Munich: Prestel, 1995), 244. All empires used photography as a means of naturalizing colonial rule and of “knowing” the colonized other. See, for example, Anne Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the Native and the Making of European Identities (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 2000) and James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Georgii Zelmanovitch had published photographs under his full name in Ogonyok before Birobidzhan, for example, his disturbing photograph of a factory’s Communist Party committee purge in 1933. “Birobijan,” in Kinojudaica (Toulouse: Cinémathèque, 2009), 66–69. Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher, chap. 5. Semyon Fridlyand, “Zoloto na Sutari,” Pravda, September 14, 1934, 4. The Semyon Fridlyand Archive, Dalbey Photographic Collection, University of Denver, adr.coalliance. org, contains negatives of most of Fridlyand’s Birobidzhan photography. M. Khavkin and I. Liberberg, “V bor’be za peredovuiu evreiskuiu oblast’,” and Kolmogortsev, “Ne stalo tikhonkoi, est’ Birobidzhan,” Pravda, December 19, 1934, 4. Photo by Semyon Fridlyand. See Alexander Ivanov, “Semyon Osipovitch Fridlyand,” http://www.ozet.ort.spb.ru/rus/ index.php?id=577. This Web site is dedicated to OZET’s photography.

Notes to Pages 74–87

• 249 •

42. Photographs by Semyon Fridlyand, Mikhail Glider, and others, “Types of New Jews,” USSR in Construction (1935): 3–4. 43. On the gaze in socialist realist photography, see Jan Plamper, “The Spatial Poetics of the Personality Culture: Circles around Stalin,” in The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, ed. Evgenii Dobrenko and Eric Naiman (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 19–50. 44. Ivanov, “Bremia propagandy,” 398. 45. Ibid. 46. David Bergelson, “Pervyi kolodets,” trans. from Yiddish by Aleksandr Popovskii, Nashi dostizheniia 2 (1934): 33–41. Photographs are unattributed. 47. David Khait, “Puteshestvie v Amurzet,” Nashi dostizheniia, no. 6 (1936): 61–78. 48. Fridlyand sent eleven prints to the magazine, although only nine appeared in the published edition. See Fridlyand’s files in the Our Achievements (Nashi dostizheniia) archive, Russian State Archive for Literature and Art (Rossiiskii gosudarstevennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva; RGALI), Moscow, fond (collection; f.) 617, opis (inventory; op.) 1, delo (file; d.) 214. 49. On literary representations of Soviet Jews and swine, see Gennady Estraikh, “Pig-Breeding, Shiksas, and Other Goyishe Themes in Soviet Yiddish Literature and Life,” Symposium (Fall 2003): 161–164. Thanks to Sasha Senderovich for this reference. 50. See Lewis Siegelbaum, “The Shaping of Soviet Workers’ Leisure,” International Labor and Workers’ History Review 56 (1999): 78–92. Fascist Italy similarly mobilized leisure as a way of nationalizing diverse social and cultural groups. See Victoria de Grazia, The Culture of Consent: The Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 51. Vladimir Shmerling on the USSR in Construction photo essay of Birobidzhan as cited in Ivanov, “Bremia propagandy,” 398. 52. Semyon Fridlyand Archive, Dalbey Photographic Collection, University of Denver, adr. coalliance.org. 53. For the photograph “Pioneer Friendship,” see Valery Dymshits and Alexander Ivanov, eds., The Hope and the Illusion: The Search for a Jewish Homeland, a Remarkable Period in the History of ORT (London: ORT, 2006). By the late 1930s, images of Koreans in Birobidzhan began disappearing from official exhibitions about the JAR, because Birobidzhan’s Korean population was deported to Central Asia in 1937 as members of a suspect nationality. See Alexander Ivanov, “ ‘Evrei v tsarskoi Rossii i v SSSR’—Vystavka dostizhenii evreiskogo khoziastvennogo i kul’turnogo stroitel’stva v Strane Sovetov,” Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, forthcoming. 54. On the idea of mutual colonization, see Olga Gershenson, Gesher: Russian Theatre in Israel; A Study of Cultural Colonization (New York: Peter Lang, 2005).

• 4 . “Without the Newspaper, We Are Defenseless!” • 1. See, for example, M. Kalashnikov, “S fotoapparatom po zapadnoi Ukraine,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 11 (1939): 3, or S. Loskutov, “Na s’emkakh v zapadnoi Belorussia,” in the same issue of Sovetskoe foto. 2. “Georgii Zelma, Evakuatsiia,” Russian State Archive of Film and Photography (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kino-fotodokumentov; RGAKFD), Krasnogorsk, Russia, Index 36, O-344580.

• 250 •

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

Notes to Pages 87 –96

“Osen’ 1941,” Dnevnik Evgeniia Khaldeiia, Evgenii Khaldei Archives, Fotosoyuz, Moscow. “22go Iunia,” Dnevnik Evgeniia Khaldeiia, Evgenii Khaldei Archives. Mikhail Lemkhin, “Fotograf Evgenii Khaldei,” Chaika 11 (22), June 4, 2004. “Udostoverenie dano tov. Evzerikhinu,” Ogonek, September 1, 1941, Emmanuel Evzerikhin Archive, managed by Yuri Evzerikhin, Moscow. Denise Youngblood, Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914–2005 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 56–57. Russkii Arkhiv: Velikaia otechestvennaia, Glavnye politicheskie organy vooruzhenykh sil SSSR v velikoi otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–1945 (Moscow: TERRA, 1996), 17. Leonid Maksimenkov, “Mne strogo nakazali—delat’ ego khorosho i interesno,” Ogonek 5000 (24), June 11–17, 2007. Valery Stigneev, Vek fotografii, 1894–1994: Ocherki istorii otechestvennoi fotografii (Moscow: Librokom, 2009), 153. Ibid., 145. See also Arkadii Shaykhet, fotografii, 1924–1951 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi muzei izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv im A. S. Pushkina, 2000). L. D. Dergacheva, “Istochnikovedcheskie problemy sovetskoi zhurnalistiki voennogo vremeni (1941–1945),” Vestnik moskovsogo universiteta, ser. 8, no. 2 (1999): 13–14. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 17–18. Ibid., 11–12. N. P. Popov and N. A. Gorokhov, Sovetskaia voennaia pechat’ v gody velikoi otechestvennoi voiny 1941–1945 (Moscow: Voennoe izdatel’stvo ministerstva oborony SSSR, 1981), 39. S. I. Zhukov, Frontovaia pechat’ v gody velikoi otechestvennoi voiny (Moscow: Moskovskii universitet, 1968), 5–6. In 1944, there were thirteen front newspapers. See ibid., 7. I. Levin, Partizanskie i podpol’nye gazety v gody velikoi otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–1944 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Kniga, 1976), 2–14. Popov and Gorokhov, Sovetskaia voennaia pechat’, 54. Zhukov, Frontovaia pechat’, 9–10. See Wartime Correspondence with Wife, Zina, Georgii Zelma Archives. Interview with Yuri Evzerikhin by the author, June 24, 2004. For more on Evzerikhin’s wartime biography, see also Natalia Sukhova, introduction to Emmanuil Evzerikhin (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2007). Evgenii Khaldei, “Noiabr’ 1941,” Dnevnik Evgeniia Khaldeiia, Evgenii Khaldei Archives. P. N. Pospelov to Malenkov, “On Filling Out the Roster of Military Correspondents and the Staff of a Few Other Departments of Pravda,” January 1944, Russian State Archive for Social and Political Research (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii; RGASPI), Moscow, fond (collection; f.) 629, opis (inventory; op.) 1, delo (file; d.) 82, ll. 29–32. Evgenii Khaldei, “22go Iulia 1941,” Dnevnik Evgeniia Khaldeia, Evgenii Khaldei Archives. For first-person accounts of Moscow in the fall of 1941, see Mosvka Prifrontovaia, 1941–2: Arkhivnye dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo ob’edineniia Mosgorarkhiv, 2001). See, for example, Direktiva Glavpu RKKA voennym sovetam i nachal’nikam politicheskikh upravlenii frontov o prisylke v Glavpu RKKA fotodokumentov, August 1, 1941, TsAMO, f. 32, op. 920265, d. 3, l. 157, as printed in V. A. Zolotarev, ed., Velikaia Otechestvennaia (Moscow: Terra, 1996), 55.

Notes to Pages 98 –101

• 251 •

28. On the unfolding of the Holocaust in print journalism, see Ilya Altman and Claudio Ingerflom, introduction to Vasilii Petrenko, Avant et après Auschwitz, as cited in Harvey Asher, “The Soviet Union, the Holocaust, and Auschwitz,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, no. 4 (2003): 886–912. 29. Ogonek, no. 18, June 25, 1941. 30. “Where Germans Rule: Death Dance before Polish Mass Execution,” Illustrated London News, March 22, 1941, as cited in Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), 44. 31. The caption to the most gruesome photograph reads: “Japanese soldiers murder prisoners of war of the Chinese army.” This picture was found by the Chinese on the person of a captured Japanese soldier. The image was printed in the Parisian magazine Chine. Pravda, January 2, 1939, 2. 32. The Dmitrii Baltermants Archive in Scarsdale, New York, holds many photographs from November and December 1941 of liberated villages in the Moscow region that had been under Nazi occupation. See “War Photography, 1941,” Dmitrii Baltermants Archive. In addition, the archive of Semyon Fridlyand (Dalbey Photographic Collection, University of Denver, adr.coalliance.org), who was special war correspondent for Ogonyok, contains similar photographs from late 1941. In the press, the two biggest stories about early Nazi atrocities broke after the liberation of Volokolamsk, eighty miles northwest of Moscow, and Rostov, in southern Russia. About the German’s eight-day occupation of Rostov, journalists and photographers described mass shootings on the streets. See, for example, “Ne zabudem, ne prostim: Fotodokumenty o krovavykh zverstvakh fashistskikh merzavtsev v Rostove-nadonu,” Krasnaia Zvezda, December 11, 1941. 33. Popov and Gorokhov, Sovetskaia voennaia pechat,’ 74. 34. Dmitrii Baltermants Archive. 35. There are conflicting stories about the Nazi mass murders at Kerch. Andrej Angrick’s work on Einsatzgruppe D, which carried out the murders, is based on German archives and trial testimony taken in the 1960s. His report says that only twenty-five hundred Jews were murdered in that first week of December. The remainder were murdered in the reoccupation of the city in June 1942. See Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der südlichen Sowjetunion 1941–1943 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003). Soviet sources, based on survivor testimony and internal documents, put the number at seven thousand to seventy-five hundred. See Leonid Mel’kov, Kerch: Povest’-khronika v dokumentakh, vospominaniiakh i pismakh uchastnikov geroicheskoi zashchity i osvobozhdeniia goroda v 1941 –1944 godakh (Moscow: Polizizdat, 1981). According to one survivor, Jews were rounded up over the course of two weeks and trucked out to the Bagerov trench to be shot. Sinti/Roma (Gypsies) were then rounded up and brought to the same site to be shot. See “Testimony of Neysha Kemilev,” the Yad Vashem Archives, Jerusalem, group M33, file 88, p. 102. 36. The cities liberated before Kerch were primarily in the Moscow region and did not have large Jewish populations, as well as Rostov, which was occupied for too short a time for such mass executions. For dates of cities liberated by the Red Army, see militera.lib.ru. For the demographics of Soviet Jewry, see Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust: A Social and Demographic Profile ( Jerusalem: Center for Research on East European Jewry, 1998). See also Ytzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009).

• 252 •

Notes to Pages 101–108

37. Lev Borodulin, “Lev Borodulin o Dmitrii Baltermantse,” sem40.ru. Interview with Tatiana Baltermants by the author, June 2004. 38. See “Interview with Dmitrii Baltermants,” in V. A. Nikitin, Rasskazy o fotografakh i fotografiiakh (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1991), 175–176. 39. Evgenii Khaldei, “Yanvar’ 1942g.,” Dnevnik Evgeniia Khaldeiia, Evgenii Khaldei Archives. 40. Ogonek, February 4, 1942, 4. The original photograph can be found in Yad Vashem Photoarchives, photograph 4331/16. 41. Angrick suggests that the round-up and mass murder of the city’s remaining Jewish population took place over three days, December 3–5, 1941. See Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Massenmord, 356. 42. V. A. Nikitin, Rasskazy o fotografakh i fotografiiakh (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1991), 153. 43. Joshua Rubenstein, “The War and the Final Solution on the Russian Front,” in The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories, ed. Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 19. See also Karel Berkhoff, “Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population: The Holocaust in the Soviet Media, 1941–1945,” Kritika (Spring 2009): 61. 44. Zvi Gitelman, “Internationalism, Patriotism, and Disillusion: Soviet Jewish Veterans Remember World War II and the Holocaust,” in Holocaust in the Soviet Union, occasional paper, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, November 2005, 116–117. 45. Berkhoff, “Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population,” 66–68. 46. Izvestiia, August 26, 1941; Pravda, August 25, 1941. 47. “Brat’ia evrei vsego mira!” Izvestiia, August 26, 1941, 3. 48. “Zverstva nemtsev v Kieve,” Pravda, November 19, 1941, 4. See also Ilya Altman and Claudio Ingerflom, “Le Kremlin et l’Holocauste,” in Vassili Petrenko, Avant et après Auschwitz/ Suivi de le Kremlin et l’Holocauste 1933–2001 (Paris: Flammarion, 2002), 251. 49. Berkhoff, “Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population,” 96. 50. Picture Post, June 20, 1942, 7–9, as cited in Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 51–53. 51. See the files of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship at the Library of Congress. Baltermants’s Kerch photographs are labeled “Office for Emergency Management.” In original type, the U.S. government note taker wrote that the photograph came from the British, but a handwritten note says that the photograph is Russian. 52. Russian State Archive of Film and Photography (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofotodokumentov; RGAKFD), Krasnogorsk, Russia, oborona Kercha 0–276238. 53. David Ortenberg, God 1942 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1988), 94. Thanks to Harriet Murav for this reference. 54. Maxim Shrayer, “Jewish-Russian Holocaust Poetry in Official Soviet Venues: 1944–1946 (Ehrenburg, Antokolsky, Ozerov),” talk given at the Association for Jewish Studies annual conference, Washington, DC, December 2008. 55. Il’ia Selvinskii, “Ia eto videl,” in Russkaia sovetskaia poeziia, by L. P. Krementsov (Leningrad: Prosveshcheniie, 1988), http://www.litera.ru/stixiya/authors/selvinskij/mozhno-ne-slushat. html. The poem was published in Krasnaia Zvezda (Red Star) on February 27, 1942. 56. Ilya Ehrenburg, Russia at War (London: Hamilton, 1943), 130–131. On Ehrenburg, see Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (Montgomery: University of Alabama Press, 1999). For more of his wartime work, see Ilya Ehrenburg, The War: 1941–1945 (Cleveland: World Publications, 1965); Ehrenburg and Konstantin Simonov, In

Notes to Pages 108 –121

57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

• 253 •

One Newspaper: A Chronicle of Unforgettable Years (New York: Sphinx Press, 1985). On Vasily Grossman’s wartime work, see V. Grossman, A. Beevor, and Luba Vinogradova, Vasily Grossman: A Writer at War, 1942–1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005) Evgenii Khaldei, “Iulia 1942g” Dnevnik Evgeniia Khaldeiia, Evgenii Khaldei Archives. Seniavskii was a journalist and well-known radio personality during the war; Grigorii Nilov, pseudonym for Aleksandr Kravtsov, also wrote during the war. E. Evzerikhin, Letter to Serebriannikov, September 28, 1942, Emmanuel Evzerikhin Archive, Moscow. Directive of GLAV PU to the heads of political administrations, July 12, 1942, TsAMO, f. 32, op. 920265, d. 5, t. 2, ll. 534–5 as found in V. A. Zolotarev et al., Velikaia Otechestvennaia (Moscow: Terra, 1996), 161. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). Popov and Gorokhov, Sovetskaia voennaia pechat’, 43. Ibid., 73. For the story of Khaldei’s near dismissal from his post with the Black Sea Fleet, see Letter from P. Serebriannikov, Head of the Photography Division of TASS, to Comrade Khavinson, Head of TASS, June 1943, Evgenii Khaldei Archives. See also David Shneer, “Jewgeni Chaldej und die jüdischen Fotografen der Sowjetunion,” in Der bedeutende Augenblick: Jewgeni Chaldej—eine Retrospektive (Berlin: Neuer Europa, 2008), 24–33. Dmitri Baltermants (Moscow: Moscow House of Photography, 2005). The Semyon Fridlyand Archive contains many images from near Stalingrad, but to date, none has been found of the city itself. In 1945, as Soviet troops were taking Silesia, Pravda’s editor in chief, Pospelov, asked the Politburo for two editorial staff airplanes, simply to facilitate communication between Pravda correspondents on the quickly moving front and the editorial offices in Moscow. See Pospelov to Malenkov, January 1945, RGASPI f. 629, op. 1, d. 29, l. 58. P. Serebriannikov, Letter to Emmanuel Evzerikhin, August 7, 1942, Emmanuel Evzerikhin Archive. Stalingrad across the Volga, Emmanuel Evzerikhin Archive. Serebriannikov, Letter to Evzerikhin, August 7, 1942, Emmanuel Evzerikhin Archive. Georgii Zel’ma: Izbrannye fotografii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Planeta, 1978). See also Georgii Zelma’s 1975 curriculum vitae; Georgii Zelma’s “kharakteristika,” dated May 27, 1970; “Kharakteristika,” Agenstvo pechati novosti, March 30, 1979; other documents; photographs, all from Georgii Zelma Archive. P. Serebriannikov, Letter to Emmanuel Evzerikhin, October 8, 1942, Emmanuel Evzerikhin Archive. “Prikaz po upravleniiu fotokhroniki TASS,” October 14, 1942, Emmanuel Evzerikhin Archive. P. Serebriannikov, Letter to Emmanual Evzerikhin, November, 1942, Emmanuel Evzerikhin Archive. Ibid. Serebriannikov, Letter to Emmanuel Evzerikhin, January 20, 1943, Emmanuel Evzerikhin Archive. David Ortenberg, God 1942: Rasskaz-khronika (Moscow: Politizdat, 1988), 63–68. Ibid., 13–15, 33–35.

• 254 •

Notes to Pages 121–129

79. Ya. Khavinson, “Rasporiazheniie,” October 1, 1942, Emmanuel Evzerikhin Archive. After the war, Khavinson, who became an inspector for Pravda, would play another important role in the anti-Semitic Doctor’s Plot, in which he coauthored a letter to Stalin accusing Jewish doctors and others of being imperialist spies. For the letter’s text, see “Pis’mo I. G. Erenburg k I. V. Stalinu: K probleme deportatsii sovetskikh evreev v Sibir v 1953 godu,” Vestnik 17, no. 224 (August 17, 1999). 80. “Spisok fotografii,” June 1944–May 1945, Emmanuel Evzerikhin Archive. 81. P. Serebriannikov, “Fotokorrespondentam: Primernye temy,” March 20, 1943, Emmanuel Evzerikhin Archive. 82. Popov and Gorokhov, Sovetskaia voennaia pechat’, 278. 83. See Steve Miner, Stalin’s Holy War: Religion, Nationalism, and Alliance Politics, 1941–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); William Stroyen, Communist Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church, 1943–1962 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1967). 84. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), chap. 4. 85. Gennadii Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina: Vlast’ i antisemitizm (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2003). 86. Il’ia Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn’: Vospominaniia v trekh tomakh, tom vtoroi; Knigi chetvertaia i piataia; Izdanie ispravlennoe i dopolnennoe (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990), 441n. 87. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 271–273; Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 289. 88. For the internal memoranda on the Central Committee’s presumption that there were too many Jews working at the Bolshoi Theater, see G. Kostyrchenko, ed., Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR, 1938–1953 (Moscow: Izd. Materik, 2005), 27–31. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 266. 89. David Ortenberg, Sorok tretii: Rasskaz-khronika (Moscow: Izd. Polit. literatury, 1991), 390. 90. Ibid., 398. 91. Ibid., 400. 92. Ehrenburg, The War, 121. 93. Popov and Gorokhov, Sovetskaia voennaia pechat’, 263. In addition to front editors, there were seven editors of regional newspapers and ninety-five of army newspapers. 94. Ibid. 95. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina, 266. 96. The Emmanuel Evzerikhin Archive is full of such directives, reissued every three months, which influenced the choice of photographers’ subject matter. 97. See, for example, Weiner, Making Sense of War; and Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). 98. Carol Zemel, “Emblems of Atrocity: Holocaust Liberation Photographs,” in Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 216. 99. Aleksei Lebedev on Budapest, as published in V. S. Burkov and V. A. Miakushkov, Letopis’ pobedy (Moscow: Politizdat, 1990), 155. 100. In 2005, the Russian State Museum on Red Square exhibited Khaldei’s Budapest photographs in an exhibition, done jointly with his son Leonid, called Budapest Through the Eyes

Notes to Pages 130 –140

101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

106. 107.

108.

109.

110.

• 255 •

of Two Generations. This was the first time the bulk of his Budapest work was exhibited to the public. Julius Hay, Born 1900: Memoirs, trans. J. A. Underwood (Lasalle IL: Library Press, 1975), 273, as cited in Naimark, The Russians in Germany, 71. See G. Aleksandrov, “Tovarishch Erenburg oproshchaet,” Pravda, April 14, 1945. State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv rossiiskoi federatsii; GARF), Moscow, f. 8114, op. 1, d. 912,1. 1. GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 912, ll. 5–6. Shrayer, “Jewish-Russian Holocaust Poetry in Official Soviet Venues: 1944–1946 (Ehrenburg, Antokolsky, Ozerov).” For the text of the cited works, see Shrayer’s An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2007). See Evgenii Khaldei, Icons of War (Tel Aviv: Bet Ha-tfutsot, 1997). His daughter, Anna Khaldei, repeated the story in my interview with her, September 2007. Naimark, The Russians in Germany, chaps. 1, 2. It was obviously not just Soviet soldiers who exacted revenge. Jewish Holocaust survivors occasionally give a glimpse of their own revenge against Germany. In the last pages of the original version of Elie Wiesel’s Night, a longer Yiddish work called And the World Was Silent, the author describes how liberated concentration camp survivors went on a rape rampage through the streets of Berlin. Their actions further complicate this particular liberation, which was primarily about a new power’s domination of the war’s loser. On Wiesel’s calls for revenge in his original work Un di velt hot geshvign, see Naomi Seidman, “Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage,” Jewish Social Studies 3, no. 1 (Fall 1996): 1–19. The Evgenii Khaldei Archives contain the full reel of film showing his photography of the Reichstag as well as that of the red flag over Templehof Airport and the Brandenburg Gate. On the history of the Reichstag and on its liberation, see Michael Cullen, Der Reichstag: Parlament, Denkmal, Symbol (Berlin: Be Bra, 2008). Ernst Volland, Das Banner des Sieges (Berlin: Berlin Story Verlag, 2008). In 2008, the Martin Gropius Bau held the largest exhibition of Khaldei photographs. See Ernst Volland and Heinz Krimmer, eds., Jewgeni Chaldej: Der bedeuntende Augenblick (Leipzig: Neuer Europa Verlag, 2008). Volland, Das Banner des Sieges, 44–45.

• 5. Picturing Grief, Documenting Crimes • 1. Arieh Kochavi, “Britain and the Establishment of the United Nations War Crimes Commission,” English Historical Review (April 1992): 324. 2. On Soviet jurisprudence at the outbreak of the war, see Alexander Prussin, “Fascist Criminals to the Gallows! The Holocaust and Soviet War Crimes Trials, 1945–1945,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 1–30. 3. For more on the establishment of the Extraordinary Commissions, what would come to be called the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of Atrocities Committed by the German-Fascist Invaders and Their Accomplices, see Marina Sorokina, “People and Procedures: Toward a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 4 (Fall 2005):

• 256 •

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

Notes to Pages 141 –146

797–831. See also Kiril Feferman, “Soviet Investigation of Nazi War Crimes,” Journal of Genocide Research 5, no. 4 (December 2003): 587–602. Letter from Alexandrov to Molotov, Shcherbakov et al., August 24, 1942, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Washington, DC, RG 22.009.01, file 5 (MID 6 /4/7/69), 12–13. Ibid. “Chrezvychainaia komissiia po ustanovleniiu i rassledovaniu zlodeiianii nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov i ikh soobshnikov,” Pravda, November 2, 1942. For more on the establishment of the commissions, see Marian Sanders, “Extraordinary Crimes in Ukraine: An Examination of Evidence Collected by the Extraordinary State Commission of the USSR, 1942–1946” (PhD diss., Ohio University, 1995). Sorokina, “People and Procedures,” 824. Sorokina, “People and Procedures,” 797–831. See also Feferman, “Soviet Investigation of Nazi War Crimes,” 587–602; Niels Bo Poulsen, “The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission on War Crimes” (PhD diss., Copenhagen University, 2004), 171–72, 175. The Extraordinary Commission files document more precise locations of the Nazi shootings and almost always include a pit near town. In Lugansk, then called Voroshilovgrad, mass burial pits were found at Ivanishchev Ravine; in Artemovsk at Chasov Ravine. Ilya Ehrenburg, “Babi Yar,” from 1944, first published in January 1945 in Novyi mir. Files of the Extraordinary Commissions can be found in two places: the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv rossiiskoi federatsii; GARF), Moscow, f. 7021 and USHMM, RG 22.002, both of which have been consulted for this research. The People’s Verdict: A Full Report of the Proceedings at the Krasnodar and Kharkov German Atrocity Trials (London: Hutchinson, 1943). The word Jew does not appear in the book. The Kharkov trials were widely covered in the Soviet press, including good coverage in front newspapers that circulated among active-duty soldiers. See S. I. Zhukov, Frontovaia pechat’ v gody velikoi otechestvennoi voiny (Moscow: Moskovskii universitet, 1968), 63. David Zaslavsky, “Zapiska iz protsesa v Kharkove,” USHMM, RG 22.006 M03, folder 2, 5. The entries are dated December 10–19, 1943. Ibid., 1. The date of liberation is based on the extensive data provided at the Web site Voennaia literatura (www.militera.lib.ru). Photographs of Sumy, liberated on September 2, 1943, can be found at USHMM, RG 22.002, reel 7, p. 95. Discussion of Nazi atrocities in Artemovsk had appeared in the Soviet press back in early 1942. See Sovetskaia Ukraina, February 28, 1942, 3, and Sovetskaia Ukraina, March 4, 1942, 1, as found in Karel Berkhoff, “Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population: The Holocaust in the Soviet Media, 1941–1945,” Kritika (Spring 2009): 14. Carol Zemel, “Emblems of Atrocity: Holocaust Liberation Photographs,” in Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 214. USHMM, RG 22.002, reel 7, p. 23. Ilya Altman, “Kholokost na Ukraine,” in Kholokost i evreiskoe soprotivlenie na okkupirovannoi territorii SSSR (Moscow: Kaleidoskop, 2002). USHMM, RG 22.002, reel 7, p. 95. The reproductions of these photographs are not of high enough quality to reproduce here.

Notes to Pages 147 –153 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

• 257 •

USHMM, RG 22.002 reel 7 (GARF f. 7021, op. 74, d. 507, ll. 1–3). USHMM, RG 22.002, reel 7 (GARF f. 7021, d. op. 56, d. 3,11. 40–46). Sorokina, “People and Procedures.” “Osen,’ 1941,” Dnevnik Evgeniia Khaldeiia, Evgenii Khaldei Archives, Fotosoyuz, Moscow. Evgenii Khaldei, “Yanvar’ 1942 g.,” Dnevnik Evgeniia Khaldeiia, Evgenii Khaldei Archives. In my interview with Khaldei’s daughter, she described how the town’s Jews were marched to a mine shaft on the outskirts of town and were shot. Only one of Khaldei’s siblings had evacuated the city before the Germans arrived, leaving Khaldei nearly alone. Interview with Anna Khaldei by the author, September 2007. Vasily Grossman, “Ukraine on yidn,” Eynikayt, November 25, 1945, 2, and December 2, 1943, 2. A. Avdeenko and P. Olender, “Babii Yar,” Krasnaia Zvezda, November 20, 1943, 2. For a history of the commission report and its revisions, see Berkhoff, “Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population.” “O razrusheniiakh i zverstvakh, sovershennykh nemetsko-fashistskimi zakhvatchikami v gorode Kieve,” Pravda, March 1, 1944, 2. From the report Ilya Ehrenburg gave to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee on July 24, 1944, as found in GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 1053, ll. 63–75. The text can be found in Leonid Smilovitsky, “Ilya Ehrenburg on the Holocaust in Belarus: Unknown Testimony,” East European Jewish Affairs 29, no. 1–2 (1999): 62–63. USHMM, Maly Trostinets Subject File, photograph 1. Ibid., photographs 3–6. “Trostinets Camp: Crematorium in which the Germans burned Soviet citizens [Krematsionnaia pech’ v kotoroi szhigalis’ nemtsami sovetskie grazdhane],” USHMM Subject Files, Trostinets. “Testimony of Golovach given to senior lieutenant Krasnov of the State Security Services,” July 18, 1944, as published in Z. I. Beluga et al., eds., Prestupleniia nemetsko-fashistskikh okkupantov v Belourussii, 1941–1944 (Minsk: Gosizdat BSSR, 1963), 188. USHMM, Maly Trostinets Subject Files, packet 2, photograph 6. The two commission photographs appeared with the publication of the commission’s report on Minsk. “Soobshcheniie chrezvychainnoi gosudarstvennoi komissii o zlodeianiakh nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov v gorode Minsk,” Izvestiia, September 17, 1944; Krasnaia Zvezda, September 15, 1944. Vassily I. Chuikov, The End of the Third Reich (Moscow: Progress, 1978), 41–42. Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also John Erickson, The Road to Berlin, new ed. (New York: Cassell, 2007). Israel Gutman, ed. Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, vol. 3 (New York: Macmillan Library, 1990), 938–939. The State Museum of Majdanek’s information can be found at http://www.majdanek.pl/articles.php?acid=45&mref=1. A. Aleksandrova, “Schet krovi. Inostrannaia pechat’ ob istreblenii gitlerovskimi palachami naseleniia okkupirovannykh stran Evropy,” Trud, January 7, 1944, 4, as cited in Berkhoff, “Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population,” 32. See Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); “Majdanek,” in Holocaust Encyclopedia (Washington, DC: U.S. Holocaust

• 258 •

43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

Notes to Pages 153–165 Memorial Museum, 2007). Jozeh Marszalek, Majdanek: Konzentrationslager Lublin (Warsaw: Interpress, 1984), 189. On Auschwitz as icon, see Oren Stier, “Different Trains: Holocaust Artifacts and the Ideologies of Remembrance,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 19, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 81–106. Evgenii Kriger, “Nemetskaia fabrika smerti pod Liublinom,” Izvestiia, August 12, 1944, 2, and August 13, 1944, 2. Simonov’s stories first appeared on August 10–12, 1944, in Krasnaia Zvezda and were quickly translated into dozens of languages and circulated around the world. According to Berkhoff, they were also read on the radio on three evenings at 8:40. See Konstantin Simonov, “Lager’ unichtozheniia,” Krasnaia Zvezda, August 10–12, 1944. Simonov’s complete account was published in English and can be found in Ilya Ehrenburg and Konstantin Simonov, eds., In One Newspaper: A Chronicle of Unforgettable Years (New York: Sphinx Press, 1985), 405–430. See also Berkhoff, “Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population,” 92 Boris Gorbatov, “Lager’ na maidaneke,” Pravda, August 11, 1944, 2. Evgenii Kriger, “Tak bylo v Kieve,” Izvestiia, November 16, 1943, 2. On Majdanek in Soviet front newspapers, see Zhukov, Frontovaia pechat’, 65. Simonov’s article circulated in English through the Soviet Information Bulletin, a publication of the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC. See the Majdanek subject files at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum archives. Boris Tseitlin, “Majdanek—Death Camp,” Ogonek, no. 32 (899), 1944, 7–10. Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), 141. Yad Vashem Photoarchives, Jerusalem, photograph 3031/13. Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941–1945 (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1984), 895. Photographs of the Majdanek procession can be found at the Yad Vashem Photoarchives, series 3013, and in Mikhail Trakhman’s private archives, managed by his widow, Yelena Sitnina, in Moscow. Luc Sante, Evidence (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992), 61–62. The “World War II” section of the Mikhail Trakhman Archive, managed by Yelena Sitnina, Moscow. Trakhman negatives can also be found in the Moscow Central Municipal Archive (Tsentral’nyi munitsipal’nyi arkhiv Moskvy; TsMAM) and in the Russian State Archive of Film and Photography (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kino-fotodokumentov; RGAKFD), Krasnogorsk, Russia. Sante, Evidence, 97. Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 142. Photographs such as this can be found in many private archives. They are also available at Yad Vashem, 5318/189, and in the 3031 series. See Pravda, April 14, 1945. On Ehrenburg, see Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). See, among others, Werth, Russia at War, 895–896. Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 47–51. Werth, Russia at War, 890. Ibid., 898. Roman Karmen, “Lublin Extermination Camp Called ‘Worst Yet’ by Writer,” Daily Worker, August 14, 1944, 8.

Notes to Pages 165 –169

• 259 •

65. Roman Karmen, “Writer Describes Nazi Murder Plant in Poland,” Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1944, 5. 66. Ralph Parker, “Soviet Writer Tells Horror of Lublin Camp,” New York Times, August 11, 1944. 67. W. H. Lawrence, “Nazi Mass Killing Laid Bare in Camp: Victims Put at 1,500,000 in Huge Death Factory Gas Chambers and Crematories,” New York Times, August 30, 1944, 1, 9. 68. Polina Barskova, “The Spectacle of the Besieged City: Repurposing Cultural Memory in Leningrad, 1941–44,” Slavic Review, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 327–355. 69. Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 142. 70. “Lublin Funeral: Russians Honor Jews, Whom Nazis Gassed and Cremated in Mass,” Life, August 30, 1944. 71. Sovfoto got most of its wartime photographic material from Sovinformburo and served as the distributor of photographs to the American press. English captions were attached to the photographs in Moscow before they were sent to New York. The largest collection of wartime photographs in the archive is of the Majdanek liberation. Sovfoto Archives, New York. See alphabetical photo notebooks under “Majdanek” and “Nazi Atrocities.” Interview with Victoria Edwards, director of Sovfoto, by the author, August 5, 2004. According to Edwards, Sovfoto always remained officially independent of TASS and other Soviet agencies to avoid being labeled an enemy agent by the U.S. government. 72. Sovfoto Archives, New York. See alphabetical photo notebooks under “Majdanek.” 73. “Toytn-lager in Lublin,” Der Tog, August 14, 1944, 2; “Toyt makhshirim un karbones in Lublin,” Der Tog, August 17, 1944, 2. 74. Stuart Liebman, “Documenting the Liberation of the Camps: The Case of Aleksander Ford’s Vernichtungslager Majdanek—Cmentarzysko Europy (1944),” in Lessons and Legacies VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective, ed. Dagmar Herzog (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 334. See also Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 139–140. 75. Liebman, “Documenting the Liberation,” 335. 76. Christina and Eugene Cenkalski, “Polish Film Builds for the Future,” Hollywood Quarterly 2, no. 3 (April 1947): 294–296. 77. Liebman, “Documenting the Liberation.” 78. Stuart Liebman, “La liberation des camps vue par le cinéma: L’exemple de Vernichtungslager Majdanek,” Les cahiers du judaisme 15 (Summer 2003): 54. 79. Liebman makes the point for motion pictures; Carol Zemel makes a similar point for liberation photography at Dachau. 80. Stanislaw Ozimek, “The Polish Newsreel in 1945: The Bitter Victory,” in Hitler’s Fall: The Newsreel Witness, ed. K.R.M. Short and Stephan Dolezel (London: Croom and Helm, 1988), 72. 81. “V liubline nachalsiia sud nad maidaninskimi palachami,” Izvestiia, November 29, 1944, 2. The article mentions that the documentary film was playing in the city concurrently with the trial. 82. “Kazn’ v liubline gitlerovtsev—uchastnikov zlodeiianii v Maidaneke,” Izvestiia, December 5, 1944, 2. 83. Gennadii Kostyrchenko, ed., Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR ot nachali do kulminatsii, 1938–1953 (Moscow: Materik, 2005) and his Tainaia politika Stalina: Vlast’ i antisemitizm (Moscow: Mezh. Otnosheniia, 2003).

• 260 •

Notes to Pages 169 –173

84. Zvi Gitelman, “Politics and the Historiography of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union,” in Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR, ed. Zvi Gitelman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 14–42. 85. Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory: The American Experience (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), 28–29. 86. Zvi Gitelman, “Internationalism, Patriotism, and Disillusion: Soviet Jewish Veterans Remember World War II and the Holocaust,” in Holocaust in the Soviet Union, occasional paper, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, November 2005. 87. On how the Holocaust was covered in the New York Times, see Laurel Leff, Buried in the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 88. The Four Chaplains Memorial Foundation was established to commemorate the sacrifice of four U.S. military chaplains—two Protestant, one Catholic, and one Jewish—who gave up their life vests and went down with the USS Dorchester in 1943. The text of the sermon can be found at “Rabbi Gittelsohn’s Iwo Jima Sermon,” myjewishlearning.com. 89. See, among others, Deborah Dash Moore, GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004). 90. Barry Sax, speech at the annual convention of the Four Chaplains Memorial Foundation, May 27, 2004, Washington, DC. 91. Il’ia Erenburg, “Nakanune,” Pravda, August 7, 1944, 3. 92. A. Rutman and S. Krasil’shchik, “Fabrika smerti v sobibure,” Komsomol’skaia pravda, September 2, 1944; A. Pecherskii, “Pis’mo o korrespondentsii v ‘Fabrika smerti v sobibore,’ ” Komsomol’skaia pravda, January 31, 1945; S. S. Vilenskii et al., eds., Sobibor (Moscow: Vozvrashchenie, 2008), 140. 93. USHMM, RG 06.023, file 1434, p. 1. 94. Vladimir Naumov and Joshua Rubenstein, eds., Stalin’s Secret Pogroms: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 18–19. 95. Vasilii Grossman, “Zapisnaia knizhka treblinki,” USHMM, RG 22.006 M02, folder 5, p. 50, or Russian State Archive for Literature and Art (Rossiiskii gosudarstevennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva; RGALI), Moscow, 1710, op. 1, d. 110, l. 50. 96. “2,000,000 Murders by Nazis Charged,” New York Times, August 8, 1943, 11. 97. “Treblinka,” Yad Vashem Photoarchives, nos. 238B02 and 238A09. 98. Lichnyi fond Vasiliia Grossmana, RGALI, f. 1710, op. 1, d. 123, ll. 82–114. The Treblinka photographs are ll. 94–98, 101, 105. 99. RGAKFD. See under “Treblinka” located in the Kontslageri files in the photo card catalog. R. Kekalo also photographed the death camp at Ozarichi in Belorussia near the city of Gomel. Obshchev’s photograph is dated September 16, 1944; Kekalo’s, September 11. 100. “Kombinat smerti v treblinke,” Ogonek, no. 8, February 28, 1945, 11. 101. Grossman’s archive contains much correspondence about the publication of the Black Book from 1945 to 1946. For more on its publication history, see Rubinstein, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom. 102. Vasilii Grossman, “Zapisnaia knizhka treblinki,” RG 22.006 M02, folder 5, p. 41, or RGALI 1710, op. 1, d. 110, l. 41. 103. Grossman, “Zapisnaia knizhka,” 5. 104. The drawing reproduced here can be found in the original manuscript of his Treblinka notebooks, USHMM, RG 22.006 M02, folder 5, p. 41 or RGALI 1710, op. 1, d. 110, l. 40.

Notes to Pages 174 –186

• 261 •

105. Vasilii Grossman, “Treblinskii ad,” Znamia, November 1944, 121–145; Treblinker genem (Moscow: Der Emes Farlag, 1945). An English-language translation was circulated at the Nuremberg Trials as documentary evidence. For a republished version, see Vasilii Grossman, Gody voiny (Moscow: Izdatelstvo Pravda, 1989), 107–145; for the archival version with Grossman’s edits, see RG 22.006 M02, Fiche 1 and 2 (RGALI 1710, 1, 103, 1–39). 106. Andrew Charlesworth, “Contesting Places of Memory: The Case of Auschwitz,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12 (1994): 580–584. 107. On Auschwitz in the Soviet press, see Berkhoff, “Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population,” 29. 108. “Lager’ smerti v osventsime,” Izvestiia, October 27, 1944. 109. Boris Polevoi, “Kombinat smerti v Osventsime (Ot voennogo korrespondenta ‘Pravdy’),” Pravda, February 2, 1945; “Saved from ‘Murder Factory,’” New York Times, February 3, 1945, 2. 110. For some of his published photographs from wartime and postwar Leningrad, see R. Mazelev, Pod vechnoi okhranoi granita (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1975); R. Mazelev, Leningrad: Vidy goroda (Leningrad: Gosizoizdatelstvo, 1960). 111. R. Mazelev, “Klooga,” Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents (RGAFKD), Kontslageri files, 0–25811. 112. See under “Osventsim” located in the Kontslageri files in the photo card catalog in RGAFKD. 113. Yudin’s Vinnitsa photographs are dated March 28, 1944, and his photos from Berdichev were taken on February 17, 1944. Both show documents of Nazi atrocities in the style produced by the Extraordinary Commission. See “Ukraine” in the photo card catalog of RGAKFD. 114. Photographs of the Auschwitz funeral procession are in the Yad Vashem Photoarchives, file 7212 nos. 30–54. The documentary film made by the Soviet army film crew is available at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. 115. For basic information about Auschwitz, see “Auschwitz,” in Holocaust Encyclopedia, www. ushmm.org. 116. Yad Vashem Photoarchives, photographs 4201 nos. 36–53. The archival series 4201 contains photographs taken at Majdanek and Auschwitz that were acquired from the State Photography and Film Archive (Tsentra’nii derzhavnii kino-foto-fono arkhiv Ukraini) in Kiev. 117. “Soobshcheniie chrezvychainoi gosudarstvennoi komissii,” Izvestiia, May 8, 1945. 118. Carol Zemel, “Emblems of Atrocity: Holocaust Liberation Photographs,” in Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 209–210. 119. Leah Ben-David Val, Propaganda and Dreams (Zurich: Stemmle, 1999). 120. Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 124–131. 121. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2004), 10. 122. Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977; rpt., New York: Picador, 2001), 17–19. 123. Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 11–13, 269.

• 6 . When Jews Talked to Jews • 1. Karl Seigfried, “A German-American Life: Max Schmeling as Villain and Hero, www.eastsideboxing.com. See also David Margolick, Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink (New York: Knopf, 2005)

• 262 •

Notes to Pages 186 –190

2. Zelma Field Notebooks, November–December 1942, 12–13, Georgii Zelma Archives, managed by Michael Mattis, Scarsdale, New York. 3. For more on the Gaon of Vilna’s synagogue, see Carol Krinsky, Synagogues of Europe: Architecture, History, Meaning (New York: Dover, 1996), 223. 4. Ilya Ehrenburg, “Speech Made at the Mass Jewish Rally in Moscow,” August 24, 1941, as cited in Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 201. 5. Il’ia Erenburg, “Bratia evrei vsego mira,” Pravda, August 25, 1941, 3. The full text of Ehrenburg’s speech as circulated in Yiddish can be found in Brider yidn fun der gantser velt (Moscow: OGIZ, Der Emes Farlag, 1941), 35–37. 6. The history of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee has been well documented in recent years. See, for example, Shimon Redlich, War, Holocaust, and Stalinism: A Documentary Study of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee of the USSR (Luxemburg: Harwood, 1995); Vladimir Naumov and Joshua Rubenstein, eds., Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 7. Perets Markish, “Der baleidikter koved fun undzer folk fodert an entfer,” in Brider yidn fun der gantser velt (Moscow: OGIZ, Der Emes Farlag, 1941), 11–14. 8. Dovid Bergelson, “Lo amut ki ekhye: Ikh vel nit shtarbn; Ikh vel lebn,” in Brider yidn fun der gantser velt (Moscow: OGIZ, Der Emes Farlag, 1941), 17–19. 9. Pravda published excerpts of the speeches, including Bergelson’s speech, with its call to arms and the list of famous Jewish thinkers. But no mention was made either of Jewish vengeance or of Bergelson’s biblical call to live. “Bratia evrei vsego mira: Vystuplenie predstavitelei evreiskogo naroda na mitinge, sostoiavshemsia v Moskve 24 avgusta 1941 g.,” Pravda, August 25, 1941, 3. 10. Shakhno Epshteyn to A. S. Shcherbakov, Secretary of the Central Committee, April 13, 1942, as printed in Redlich, War, Stalinism, and the Holocaust, 200–201. 11. “Brati’a evrei vsego mira: Vystupleniia predstavitelei evreiskogo naroda na mitinge sostoiavshemsia v Moskve 24 avgusta 1941 goda,” Pravda, August 25, 1941, 3. This is the same title as that used for the brochure of speeches that circulated in Yiddish. 12. Brider yidn fun der gantser velt (Moscow: OGIZ, Der Emes Farlag, 1941). 13. Chone Shmeruk, Jewish Publications in the Soviet Union 1917–1960 ( Jerusalem: Galuyot, 1961), 345. 14. S. M. Mikhoels and Sh. Epshteyn, “A Proposal Concerning the Membership and Functions of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee,” March 4, 1942, as printed in Redlich, War, Holocaust, and Stalinism, 198–199. See also GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 1063, l. 5 with a list of locations for people on the JAFC committee. 15. See Vladimir Naumov and Joshua Rubenstein, eds., Stalin’s Secret Pogroms: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 7. Unity’s editor in chief was Shakhno Epshteyn, a longtime Yiddish Communist both in the United States and the Soviet Union who had been one of the early editors of the Soviet Yiddish paper The Truth (Der Emes). The editorial board and list of contributing writers was a who’s who of Soviet Yiddish culture, including David Bergelson, Perets Markish, and Itsik Fefer. Ilya Ehrenburg also published in Unity, translated from Russian. The Soviet Information Agency, Sovinformburo, did not give permission until spring 1942. See Naumov and Rubenstein, Stalin’s Secret Pogroms, 11–12.

Notes to Pages 190 –193

• 263 •

16. A February 1943 internal memorandum by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee listed nine Soviet Yiddish newspapers. This included Eynikayt and Birobidzhaner Shtern and seven produced by partisan units: two in Vilna, and one each in Kovno, Kiev, Kalinindorf, Stalindorf, and Bialystok. See GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 897,1. 35. 17. I. Levin, Partizanskie i podpol’nye gazety v gody velikoi otechestvennoi voiny, 1941 –1944 (Moscow: Izd. Kniga, 1976), 111, 132. 18. Russian State Archive for Social and Political Research (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii; RGASPI), Moscow, f. 17, op, 129, d. 868,1. 106–127 as found in Gennadii Kostyrchenko, ed., Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR ot nachali do kulminatsii, 1938–1953 (Moscow: Materik, 2005), 89. On Eynikayt at the front, see Lieutenant Hershl Vinokur, “Di eynikayt afn front,” Eynikayt, November 15, 1943, 3. 19. GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 1062, ll. 8–12. This subscription list was from 1944. 20. Dov Ber Kerler, “The Soviet Yiddish Press: Eynikayt 1942–1945,” in Why Didn’t the Press Shout?” American and International Journalism during the Holocaust, ed. Robert Moses Shapiro (New York: Yeshiva University, 2003), 223. 21. Il’ia Erenburg, “O nenavisti,” Krasnaia Zvezda, May 5, 1942. Ilie Erenburg, “Farvos hasn azoi di fashistn di yidn?” Eynikayt, June 28, 1942. On wartime Soviet Yiddish journalism, see David Shneer, “Bearing Witness, Calling for Vengeance: Bergelson on World War II and the Holocaust,” in David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism, ed. Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh (London: Legenda, 2007). These images appear from the first issue of Eynikayt, June 7, 1942. 22. See, for example, the photograph of the Warsaw Ghetto, Eynikayt, June 28, 1942. 23. Dovid Begelson, “Zol di velt zayn an eydes,” Eynikayt, July 25, 1942, 2. 24. Perets Markish, “Di hazkore in raykhstag,” Eynikayt, June 7, 1942, 3. 25. Perets Markish, “Heroik un patriotizm fun yidishe roytarmeyer,” Eynikayt, June 28, 1942, 3. 26. See several documents on the need to combat rumors of Jewish cowardice in Redlich, War, Stalinism, and the Holocaust. 27. Dovid Bergelson, “Gedenkt,” Eynikayt, September 5, 1942, 2. The quote is from Dov Ber Kerler, “The Soviet Yiddish Press: Eynikayt, 1942–1945,” in Why Didn’t the Press Shout, ed. Shapiro, 230. 28. Bergelson claims that of the one hundred thousand Jews in prewar Vitebsk, the Red Army successfully evacuated seventy-eight thousand of them, leaving twenty-two thousand to face the fury of the “Hitlerite beast.” Bergelson’s statistics were not completely accurate. According to the 1937 Soviet census there were seventy-seven thousand Jews in the entire Vitebsk province. Estimates are that in 1940, after Polish Jews fled east from the German invasion of Poland, Vitebsk’s municipal Jewish population reached fifty thousand. For more on the history of the Holocaust in Vitebsk, see Mikhail Ryvkin and Arkadii Shulman, Khronika strastnykh dnei (Vitebsk: UPP, 2004). Thanks to Arkadii Zeltser for this reference. 29. The ellipses indicate text that is missing in the damaged copy of Eynikayt, the only copy available to me. 30. Bergelson, “Gedenkt,” 2. 31. “Der shlakhtman fun a farnikhtung-batalion,” photograph, Eynikayt, June 17, 1942, 2. For Redkin’s photograph, see Eynikayt, December 27, 1942. Fefer was arrested in late 1948 during the anticosmopolitan campaign. In his trial, his “nationalistic” poetry, such as “I Am

• 264 •

32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53.

Notes to Pages 193 –204

a Jew,” written during the war was used as evidence against him. See Naumov and Rubinstein, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom. Eynikayt, March 15, 1943, 3. See also GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 1064, l. 33. In 1943, the same two topics were the most often discussed in the newspaper. Dovid Bergelson, “Undzer Kiev,” Eynikayt, November 11, 1943, 2. “For God delights in His People. He adorns the lowly with victory. Let the faithful exult in glory; let them shout for joy upon their couches, with paeans to God in their throats and two-edged swords in their hands, to impose retribution upon the nations, punishment upon the peoples, binding their kings with shackles, their nobles with chains of iron, executing the doom decreed against them.” Psalm 149:4–9. For a close reading of “To a Jewish Warrior,” see Chone Mlotek, “Perets Markish—der sovetisher yiddisher poet,” Forverts, November 23, 2007. Perets Markish, “Dem yidishn shlakhtman” [To the Jewish Warrior], Eynikayt, August 31, 1943, 7. Dovid Bergelson, “Dos hobn geton daytshn!” Eynikayt, August 14, 1944, 2. GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 912, l. 2. GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 912, ll. 17–18. GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 912, l. 28. GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 912, ll. 7–8. Trophy photo, “In the ghetto before the slaughter; these photos were found on a German officer,” Eynikayt, September 7, 1944. Because of low production quality, images were not printed well at the time, did not survive well after sixty years, and do not reproduce well. GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 1064, l. 72. See, for example, the landscape of Treblinka, similar to the one that appeared in the Russianlanguage newspaper article about Treblinka. Vasilii Grossman, Treblinke Genem (Moscow: Der Emes Farlag, 1945), 73. Notebooks on Nazi atrocities in the Sovfoto archives, New York. See Timothy Cole, Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto (New York: Routledge, 2003). On the Soviet press, see Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) or Matt Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). The photograph appeared with “Yidn in budapesht,” Eynikayt March 3, 1945, 1. For a theoretical discussion of Holocaust iconography, see Oren Stier, Committed to Memory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), chap. 2. In the 1939 census, only 40 percent of Jews named a Jewish language as their native tongue. See Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust: A Social and Demographic Profile ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1998), 90–92. GARF f. 8114, op. 1, d. 1063, l. 16. See chapter 7 for more on how Khaldei tells the story of the couple. Alice Nakhimovsky and Alexander Nakhimovsky, eds., A Witness to History: The Photographs of Yevgeny Khaldei, (New York: Aperture, 1997) 10. Naomi Seidman, Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2006), chap. 5.

Notes to Pages 204 –211

• 265 •

54. Hasia Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

• 7 . From Photojournalism to Icons of War and the Holocaust • 1. Evgenii Khaldei noted many of the names of the individuals pictured in this image. Among the memoirs from the period that are useful for identifying those present at the Reichstag is Martyn Merzhanov, Tak eto bylo: Poslednye dni fashistskogo Berlina (Moscow: Politliteratura, 1975). From left to right, bottom to top: Oleg Knorring, A. Arkhipov, Martyn Merzhanov, N. Kovalyov, Mark Redkin, Roman Karmen, Ivan Shagin, Georgii Petrusov, A. Morozov, Yakov Makarenko, Pavel Troyanovsky, H. Denisov, L. A. Vysokoostrovsky, Vyshnovsky, Gabrilovitch, I. Zolin, F. Kislov, Bulgakov, Boris Gorbatov, B. Afanasev, A. Kapustyansky, Poltoratsky, Vsevolod Ivanov, Leonid Kudrevatykh, Yelin, N. Finnikov, M. Dolgopolov. 2. Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 18–20. 3. Anna Shternshis, “Between the Red and Yellow Stars: Ethnic and Religious Identity of Soviet Jewish World War II Veterans in New York, Toronto, and Berlin,” Journal of Jewish Identities, forthcoming. 4. On the history of the “Raising of the Red Flag” photograph, see Ernst Volland, Das Banner des Sieges (Berlin: Berlin Story Auflag, 2008). 5. On Yakov Riumkin, see his notes to Pravda called “From Moscow to Port Arthur,” Russian State Archive for Social and Political Research (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’nopoliticheskoi istorii; RGASPI), Moscow, f. 629, op. 1, d. 89, l. 36. On Khaldei’s Far Eastern assignments at the end of the war, see several assignments (komandirovki) in the Evgenii Khaldei Archives, Fotosoyuz, Moscow. 6. On the profound change from an internationalist to a Russian nationalist approach to popular culture and Soviet identity, see David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). On the decline of the “affirmative action empire” that fostered Soviet cultural and ethnic diversity, see Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). On how the war accelerated the shift from class-based to ethnobiologically based identities, see Weiner, Making Sense of War. 7. Zvi Gitelman, “Soviet Jewish Veterans of World War II Remember: Listening to Oral Histories,” Michigan Jewish History 40 (Fall 2000): 2–15. 8. RGASPI f. 629, op. 1, d. 82, ll. 59–61. 9. “Transcript of the Theory Conference for Pravda Employees, February 22, 1945. RGASPI, f. 629, op. 1, d. 183, ll. 28–33. 10. David Zaslavsky, “Zapiska iz protsesa v Kharkove,” U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Washington, DC, RG 22.006 M03, folder 2, 1. 11. David Brandenberger, “Stalin’s Last Crime? Recent Scholarship on Postwar Antisemitism and the Doctor’s Plot,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 187–204. Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot against the Jewish Doctors, 1948–1953 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003). G. V. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina: Vlast’ i antisemitizm (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2001);

• 266 •

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

Notes to Pages 212 –215

Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 372–376; Louis Rapoport, Stalin’s War against the Jews (New York: Free Press, 1990), 177–178. N. A. Belikovsky to A. Zhdanov on the appearance of nationalism in the work of S. Mikhoels and other Jewish cultural activists, March 14, 1941. Published in G. Kostyrchenko, ed., Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR, 1938–1953: Dokumenty (Moscow: Materik, 2005), 17–20. Shimon Redlich, introduction to War, Stalinism, and the Holocaust: A Documentary History of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New York: Routledge, 1995), 27. Ibid., 302. A. Vaisberg, “Evreiskii antifashistskii komitet u M. A. Suslova (iz vospominanii E. I. Dolitskogo),” in Zven´ia: istoricheskii al’manakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress, 1991), 548. Doc. 168, Report by M. Shcherbakov to A. A. Kuznetsov on Soviet Yiddish literature, October 7, 1946, in Redlich, War, Stalinism, and the Holocaust, 418. See Document 72, in Redlich, War, Stalinism, and the Holocaust, 277–280. Text of the Politburo resolution can be found at http://www.ort.spb.ru/nesh/jewworld/eak. htm. RGASPI f. 629, op. 1, d. 82,1. 69. See also http://www.idf.ru/fond/issues-doc/62107/68620. The Indictment of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee for Illegal Activities, March 26, 1948, to Stalin, Molotov, Zhdanov, and Kuznestov, RGASPI f. 82, op. 2, d. 1012, ll. 53–71. “Pokazanie P. D. Markisha o dovoennoi deiatel’nosti evreiskikh literatorov na territorii ukrainy i belorussii,” July 18, 1949, TsAFSB, as published in Kostyrchenko, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm, 21–22. “Obvinitel’noe zakliuchenie po ‘delu EAK,’” April 2, 1952, TsAFSB, as published in Kostyrchenko, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm, 197–198. See “Attestation,” from N. Kuzovin, Chairman of the Attestation Commission, on Comrade Khaldei, November 1947, Evgenii Khaldei Archives. Letter to Suslov with a complaint about the unprompted firing from his position as photojournalist at TASS, January 28, 1950, RGASPI, f. 17, op. 13, d. 295, l. 1, as published in Kostyrchenko, Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm, 321–322. Although I did not find them in his archive, one imagines that he was writing throughout 1949 to find out more about his dismissal. Interview with Yuri Evzerikhin by the author, June 2004, Moscow. Only parts of Evzerikhin’s archive reflecting the period of the anticosmopolitan campaign have survived. It was common at the time for people to destroy any potentially incriminating documents in their possession. Interview with Timur Zelma by Paul Harbaugh, January 2005, transcript. See for example “Opis’ sdannykh negativov fotoreporterom zelmanovitch G. dlia pavil’ona ‘Dalnyi Vostok’ v fototeku VSKV” or several proposed lists of illustrations for books that have Zelmanovitch printed at the bottom with the handwritten “Zelma” next to it. Georgii Zelma Archives, managed by Michael Mattis, Scarsdale, New York. Interview with Nikolai Khalip by the author, Moscow, April 2004. Yehoshua Gilboa, The Black Years of Soviet Jewry, 1939–1953 (Boston: Little Brown, 1971). See Ernst Volland and Heinz Krummer, eds., Jewgeni Chaldej: Der bedeutende Augenblick (Berlin: Neuer Europa Verlag, 2008) or Alice Nakhimovsky and Alexander Nakhimovsky, eds., Witness to History: The Photographs of Yevgeny Khaldei (New York: Aperture, 1997), 12–13.

Notes to Pages 215 –229

31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

• 267 •

On the arrest and murder of Yiddish writers, see Vladimir Naumov and Joshua Rubenstein, eds., Stalin’s Secret Pogroms: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). His archives contain documentation about Khaldei’s firing, or as his boss called it, “downsizing of the staff,” including a petition from Khaldei to get his job back on the basis of his outstanding war photography and the fact that he had never received any kind of political or ideological reprimands. See “Spravka, Fotokhronika TASS,” October 25, 1948, Evgenii Khaldei Archives. See photograph “Yure Evzerikhinu,” Emmanuel Evzerikhin Archive, Moscow. Interview with Yuri Evzerikhin, June 2004. The writer actually included dashes in place of the letters e-v-r-e-i ( Jew). Interview with Tatiana Baltermants by the author, June 2004. Olga Sviblova, “Biography of Baltermants,” in Dmitri Baltermants (Moscow: House of Photography, 2005). Tatiana Baltermants relates the story in more detail in my interview with her, June 2004. International Center of Photography obituary of Dmitrii Baltermants, Dmitrii Baltermants Archive, Scarsdale, New York. Semyon Fridlyand, On the Road in the Soviet Empire: Semyon Fridlyand Photographs (Denver: University of Denver Press, 2008). Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 98–104. Katalog: Vystavka foto iskusstva SSSR (Moscow: Ministry of Culture, 1958). See especially the Stalingrad photographs of Georgii Zelma. On how Babi Yar became the political focal point in the fight for a specifically Jewish memory of Nazi genocide, see Frank Grüner, “Die Tragödie von Babij Jar im sowjetischen Gedächtnis: Künsterlische Erinnerung versus offizielles Schweigen” and Edith Clowes, “Entwürfe zur Erinnerung an den Holocaust: Evtushenkos und Kuznecovs Babij Jar,” in Frank Grüner, Urs Heftrich, and Heinz-Dietrich Löwe, Zerstörer des Schweigens: Formen künsterlischer Erinnerung an die nationalsozialistische Rassen- und Vernichtungspolitik in Osteuropa (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006), 57–98, 115–128. Georgii Zelma, Velikii podvig: Fotoal’bom (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1965) or Georgii Zelma, Stalingradskaia bitva (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1972). Dmitrij Baltermanc, “Hore,” Praha-Moskva 1 (1963): 45. “Interview with Dmitrii Baltermants,” in V. A. Nikitin, Rasskazy o fotografakh i fotografiiakh (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1991), 153. Interview with Dmitrii Baltermants by Arnold Drapkin, Time magazine photoeditor in the late 1980s, June 2, 1988. Transcript provided by Arnold Drapkin. “Nikogda ne zabudem,” Ogonek, January 1965, photo layout. The first quote comes from Nikitin, Rasskazy, 153. The second quote comes from interview with Baltermants by Drapkin. Transcript of the interview provided by Arnold Drapkin. Interview with Tatiana Baltermants by the author, June 2004. Volland, Das Banner des Sieges. Nakhimovsky and Nakhimovsky, Witness to History. Douglas Martin, “Yevgeny Khaldei, 80, War Photographer, Dies,” New York Times, October 9, 1997.

• 268 •

Notes to Pages 229 –234

49. See http://cityscan.ru/catalog.php?view=687. The original Russian reads: “Ia idu po ulochke, a eti dvoe mne navstrechu. Khotia v obshchem-to znali, chto sovetskie voiska voshli, zhenshchina ostanovilas’, i kakoe-to napriazhenie pochuvstvovalos’. Ia nachal po-nemetski im ob’iasnit’, chto ia russkii, sovetskii. Zhenshchina rasplakalas’. Ia ikh sfotografiroval, a potom oni priamo u menia na glazakh stali sryvat’ zvezdy, kotorye u nikh byli nashity na pal’to.” In my September 2007 interview with Khaldei’s daughter, she insisted again that the photograph had never been published in the Soviet Union, until I showed her scanned images of the Yiddish newspaper from March 1945. 50. The State Historical Museum’s online record of the exhibition Budapesht glazami dvukh pokolenii is at http://www.shm.ru/ev3884078.html.

• Epilogue • 1. Denise Youngblood, Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914–2005 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006).

•

Index

•

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. “About Hatred” (Ehrenberg), 190 absence: of Jewishness in postwar Soviet discourse, 215; in Soviet Holocaust atrocity photographs, 157, 163, 203 access, Jewish, photography as, 15, 20 Adams, Ansel, 4 Advanced Arts and Technical Ateliers (VKhUTEMAS), 27 Advanced Institute for Photography, 20 aestheticization vs. documentation, 53–57 Afanasev, A., 265n.1 airplanes, and photo transmission, 41 AIZ, see Workers’ Illustrated Newspaper Akselrod, Zelik, as member of so-called Minsk nationalistic group, 213 Aleksandrov, Georgii, 140–41, 149 Alexander III, czar, 238n.14 All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK), 19 All-Russian Photo Film Division, 20 All-Union Arts Committee (Komitet po delam iskusstv), 43; Photo Section, 58 All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (VTsSPS), 19, 43 All-Union Radio Committee, 111–12 All-Union Society for Cultural Contact and Friendship with Peoples of Foreign Countries, see VOKS Alpert, Max, 1, 29, 40, 43, 46, 69 Altman, Ilya, 146 “Amerikanka” generator, 94 And the World Was Silent (Wiesel), 255n.107 Angrick, Andrej, 251n.35 Anichovsky Palace exhibition of Nappelbaum portraits (1918), 22

Ansky, S. (Sh. Z. Rapaport), 15, 66 anticosmopolitan campaign, Soviet, 209–12 anti-Semitism, as Soviet government policy, 122–24, 169, 209–12, 211–12, 254n.79 Antokolsky, Mark, 16 Antokolsky, Pavel, 134 Antselovitch, Yakov, 104, 105 Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ), see Workers’ Illustrated Newspaper “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate, Auschwitz, 151, 153, 181 Arbus, Diane, 3, 237n.5 Arendt, Hannah, 209 Arkhipov, A., 265n.1 Artemovsk: Nazi atrocities at, 256n.9, 256n.16; photodocumenting massacre at, 143–46 Art (Iskusstvo) publishing house, 43 “Assault” (Zelma), 222; diptychs, 220, 221 assimilation, Jewish, 169–70, 210 Association of Moscow Photojournalists, 33, 34, 44–45 Atelier Adele, 16 Auschwitz, 174–81; “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate at, 151, 153, 181; Birkenau, 153 Avdeenko, Alexander, 58, 149 Babel, Isaac, 4, 25 Babi Yar, mass murder at, 106, 108, 141, 148 “Babi Yar” (Ehrenberg), 134 “Babi Yar” (Ozerov), 134 “Babi Yar” (Yevtushchenko), 219 Baer, Max, 185–86 Bagerov Trench, Kerch, 101, 103, 230, 251n.35 Bagritsky, Eduard, 4, 25

• 269 •

• 270 •

Index

balegole (wagon-driver), 77 Ballad of a Soldier (film), 219 Baltermants, Dmitrii, 37; “Crossing the Oder,” 135, 135, 224; “Dancing Is Politics Too,” 217, 218; “Death to the German Occupiers” photo series, 106, 107, 252n.51; forensic photography, 142; “Grief,” 145, 220, 223–26 (see also Ivanova, P. I.); “Hitlerite Atrocities in Kerch,” 104, 104 ; Jewish identity of, 7–8; and the Kerch massacre, 2, 100–101, 101, 102, 104–5, 106, 143; liberation photographs, 251n.32; “Residents of Kerch Search for Their Relatives,” 102; runs afoul of wartime regulations, 112; solo exhibit at European House of Photography (Paris, 2005), 229–30; “That’s How It Was” series, 230; on truth in photography, 54; weathers anticosmopolitan campaign, 217 Baltermants, Tatiana, 7, 8, 217, 267n.33 Barskova, Polina, 165–66 The Battle of Stalingrad (Zelma), 220 Beilis trial (1913), 210 Belsen (Bergen-Belsen), 182 Be ⁄lz·ec, 170 Benjamin, Walter, 50 Berdichev: home town of Vasily Grossman, 148; liberation of, 175; migrants to Birobidzhan, 76; Yudin’s photographs from, 261n.113 Bergelson, David, 76, 187–96, 204, 211, 213, 262n.9, 262n.15, 263n.28 Berkhoff, Karel, 105, 168 Berkowitz, Michael, 16, 238n.6 Berlin, Soviet Jewish photojournalists in, 133–39 Bernshteyn, Mikhail, 49, 121 Beskin, Osip, 43 bildperedacha (photo-wire service), 40 Biow, Hermann, 16 Birobidzhan, 4, 9, 67–83, 246n.10, 247n.23; criticism of 1939 exhibition on Jews under czars and Soviets, 247n.24; Georgii Zelmanovitch’s photographs of, 214; Koreans in, 67, 82–83, 249n.53; as socialist realist photo essay material, 143; wartime Yiddish culture in, 189 Birobidzhan (Bergelson), 76 Birobidzhan (film), 72 Birobidzhan Star (Birobidzhan Shtern), newspaper, 189

“Birofield Beekeeping” (Fridlyand), 77–78, 79 Black Book, 148–49, 171–72, 196–97, 212, 233 Blinov, Boris, 235 blood libel, 210 Böll, Heinrich, 225 Bolshevik Transformation (Bolshevistskaia Smena), magazine, 49 Bolshoi Theater, purges of Jews at, 122, 254n.88 Bolshoi Trostinets, 149. See also Maly Trostinets Boltianskii, Grigorii, 25, 43, 58 Borochov, Ber, 65 Borodulin, Lev, 101 Borshovyi Liady, massacre at, 127 Bossak, Jerzy, 168 Bourke-White, Margaret, 182 Bragin, Abram, 67 Brandenberger, David, 211 Bregman, Solomon L., 212 Brent, Jonathan, 211 Brezhnev, Leonid, 219 Brik, Ossip, 34 Buchenwald, 127–28, 153, 163, 181, 182 Budapest: Khaldei’s Unity photo spread, 200; liberation of, 128–30, 129, 130, 131 “Budapest Through the Eyes of Two Generations” (exhibition), 230, 254–55n.100 Bulgakov (journalist in Reichstag photo), 265n.1 Bulla, Karl, 13, 17 Bureau of Moscow Jewish (Yiddish) Writers, 212 “Camera Operator Otilia Reizman” (Zelma), 129, 129 Capa, Robert, 13, 52, 245n.91; “Fallen Soldier” photo, 54 Central Press (Tsentropechat), 41 Central Studio for Documentary Film, 167 Ce Soir, newspaper, 54 Chagall, Marc, 8, 15, 16 Change (Smena), magazine, 38 Charlesworth, Andrew, 174 Chasov Ravine, Artemovsk, 145, 256n.9 Chekhov, Anton, 15 Cheprunov, A., 150 Chernov, D., 138 “Children of Jewish Agricultural Colonies” (Shaykhet photo essay), 69

Index “Children’s Colony” (Fridlyand), 72, 73, 76 chimneys, 100, 157, 158, 159 “Chimneys, Taganrog” (Evzerikhin), 157, 158 Christian iconography, and depictions of Holocaust, 127, 168 Chronicle of the War with Japan (newspaper), 17 Chuikov, Vassily, 152 Churchill, Winston, 140 Chuzhin, Ya., 43 cinema: Ballad of a Soldier, 219; Birobidzhan, 72; Christian iconography in liberation footage, 259n.79; The Cranes Are Flying, 219; Henry Luce’s March of Time series, 54; Jews on the Land, 67; Majdanek: Cemetery of Europe, 167–68; None Shall Escape, 196; The Price, TV movie, 235; Professor Mamlock, 105; Seekers of Happiness, 72; streamlining of Soviet wartime production, 90; Wait for Me, 233–35 class affiliations, within Soviet photography, 33 Club and Art Hobby, magazine, 215 collaborators with Germans: executions of, 179; in liberation photographs, 124–25; at Treblinka, 173 color photography, 40 Comintern, disbanded, 122, 209 Commissariat for Enlightenment, 41 Communist Party: oversight of photographers, 42; and the visual representation of socialism, 56 “Concerning Nationalistic and ReligiousMystical Tendencies in Soviet Yiddish Literature” (Shcherbakov), 212 constructivism, 31, 39, 46, 50 content, photographic: chimneys, 100, 157, 158, 159; eyeglasses, 179, 180; Holocaust atrocities (see Holocaust atrocity photographs); Jewishness of, 4–5; Jews of the Soviet Union, 64–69; Nazi atrocities (see Nazi atrocity photographs); the “old Jew,” 65–66; six-pointed star, 199–204, 200, 202, 228; Soviet ethnic diversity, 60–64; subject lists, editorial, 124, 254n.96; tanks, 118–19; wartime Party oversight of, 90 The Cranes Are Flying (film), 219 “Crossing the Oder” (Baltermants), 135, 135, 224

• 271 •

Cultural Revolution, Soviet (1928–1932), 34, 36, 39 Czo⁄lówka Polish Military Film Unit, 167 Dachau, 127–28, 153, 163, 181, 182, 259n.79 Daily Worker, newspaper, 165 Davidzon, Yakov, 94 The Day (Der Tog), newspaper, 167 “Death Camp” (Antokolsky), 134 “Death to the German Occupiers” (Baltermans photo series), 106–7, 107, 252n.51 “Death to the German Occupiers” (newspaper masthead slogan), 99 Denisov, H., 265n.1 Dephot photo agency, 52 Dergacheva, L. D., 93 Diament, Robert, 215 Dinah, rape of, in Bible, 194 diversity, Soviet, photographic documentation of, 60–64 Dobrushin, Yehezkiel, 190 Doctor’s Plot, 254n.79 documentation: of death camps in Yiddish press, 194–99; in liberation photographs, and the Soviet war effort, 129; of massacred Jews at Kerch, 100–108; and revenge, photography as, 148; of Soviet ethnic diversity, 60–64; vs. aestheticization, 53–57. See also forensic photography Dolgopolov, M., 265n.1 Dolmatovskii, Evgenii, 137, 215, 216, 217 Donetsk, as de-Stalinized Stalino, 228 D’Ora, Madame (Dora Kallmus), 16 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 15 Drapkin, Arnold, 225 Dudnik, Ivan, 175 Dzerzhinsky, Felix: eponymous camera, 40; photographed by Nappelbaum, 22; photographed by Otsup, 19 Echo (Ekho), magazine, 26 editor-photojournalist relationship, 114, 121. See also Serebriannikov, P.; subject lists, editorial Edwards, Victoria, 259n.71 Ehrenberg, Ilya, 108, 122, 123, 262n.15; on being Russian and Jewish, 186–87; and the Black Book, 148–49, 197; calls for revenge, 134, 211; covers Kharkov war crimes trial,

• 272 •

Index

Ehrenberg, Ilya (continued) 142; on a devastated Russia, 141; and Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee agenda, 212; Pravda piece on “death factories,” 171; “Why Do the Fascists Hate Jews So Much”/ “About Hatred,” 190 Einsatzgruppen, 99, 251n.35 Elinas, Kh., 190 Elkin, Alexander, 17 Der Emes (The Truth), newspaper, 69, 262n.15 emptiness: of Jewishness in postwar Soviet discourse, 215; in Soviet Holocaust atrocity photographs, 157, 163, 203 Epshteyn, Shakhno, 199, 204, 212, 262n.15 European House of Photography, Paris, 2005 Baltermants exhibit at, 229–30 Evening Moscow (Vechernaia Moskva), newspaper, 93, 121 Evzerikhin, Emmanuel, 7, 37, 39–40, 44, 131; and the anticosmopolitan campaign, 214, 266n.25; “Chimneys, Taganrog,” 157, 158, 159; “Declaration of War,” 90, 91; “Filmmaker in Stalingrad, 1942,” 116, 117; “Fountain, Stalingrad, 1942,” 117, 118; and the Great Purges, 58–59; Maxim Gorky portrait, 49, 50; photographs appear in Izvestiia and Evening Moscow, 121; in postwar Europe, 207; staged-photo scandal, 55; “Stalingrad, 1942,” 116, 116, 220; Stalin portrait, 50; “Warsaw Across the Vistula,” 133; and World War II, 92, 95, 108–9, 111–21 Evzerikhin, Noy, 7 Evzerikhin, Yuri, 7, 58, 95, 207, 214, 215, 217 Exhibition of the Achievements of the People’s Economy (VDNKh), 215 Exhibition of the Works of Masters of Soviet Photographic Arts (1935), 72 exhibitions: of Baltermants photographs, at European House of Photography (Paris, 2005), 229–30; “Budapest Through the Eyes of Two Generations” (Khaldei father and son, Moscow, 2005), 230, 254–55n.100; of early Russian photography, 238–39n.14; First All-Union Soviet Photography (1937), 43; Jews Under Tsars and Soviets (State Ethnographic Museum, 1939), 247n.24; of Khaldei photographs, at Jewish Museum, San Francisco (1997), 6, 231; of Khaldei photographs, at Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2008), 6–7; Library of

Congress, U.S., of Holocaust liberation photographs (1945), 182; of Nappelbaum portraits, at Anichkov Palace (1918), 22; at Rembrandt Studios (1923), 29; “Seeing Is Believing” (Britain, 1945), 182; “Ten Years of Soviet Photography” (1928), 34; Union of Art Photographers, Moscow (2002), 1; at World War II Memorial Complex (Moscow, 2003), 1–2 Extraordinary Commissions, 140–42, 179, 256n.9, 256n.11, 261n.113; at Artemovsk, 145, 146; Auschwitz report, 181; Majdanek, 154, 161; Maly Trostinets files, 151–52; photographic genre developed by, 164; Starobelsk reburial photographs, 147; Tolstoy, at Kharkov, 143; Treblinka, 171 eyeglasses, and clear seeing, 179, 180 Eynikatyt, see Unity, newspaper Fainzelberg, Eykhel, 29. See also Ilf, Ilya “Fallen Soldier” (Capa), 245n.91 The Fate of the Jewish Masses in the Soviet Union (Koltsov and Bragin), 67 FED camera, 40 Fefer, Itsik, 189, 192, 211, 212, 262n.15, 263–64n.31 Fellig, Usher, see Weegee “Fighting Near the Don” (Fridlyand), 114, 115 film: 35mm, 40; motion picture (see cinema) Fink, Viktor, 70 First All-Union Soviet Photography exhibition (1937), 43 First Congress of Soviet Writers, 46 Fishman, Boris, 88 Five-Year Plan, 48, 81–82 Flame (Plamia), magazine, 22 Ford, Alexander, 167–68 forensic photography, 142, 163, 197 Forward (Forverts), newspaper, 66 Fotograf, magazine, 13 Fotokhronika TASS, 37, 42, 49; fires Evzerikhin, 55, 58; Foreign Division, denunciation of, 58; rehires Evzerikhin, 59 Four Chaplains Memorial Foundation, 170, 260n.88 Frank, Robert, 3, 237n.5 Free Magazine (Svobodnyi Zhurnal), 26 Fridlyand, Mikhail, 23, 29. See also Koltsov, Mikhail

Index Fridlyand, Semyon, 30, 31, 34, 35, 39, 43, 56, 253n.66; “And What Is the ‘Right of Residence’?,” 80; “Birofeld Beekeeping,” 77–78, 79; “Children’s Colony,” 72, 73, 76; “Fighting Near the Don,” 114, 115; first uses color photography, 40; “In Birobidzhan, Capital of the Autonomous Jewish Region,” 77, 78; “Industrialization,” 64; liberation photographs, 251n.32; “New Type of Jew: Beekeeper,” 72, 74; “New Type of Jew: T. Trochik, Birobidzhan,” 75; “One of Many Violations of Biblical Law” 80; “On the Fronts of the Patriotic War” series, 96, 97; Our Achievements photographs, 249n.48; “Parachutist,” 32; “Pioneer Friendship: Jewish, Russian, and Korean Pioneers,” 82–83; “Poltava Is Ours” photo spread, 125, 126, 127; published in Tribuna, 69; “The Sixth Day on the Valdheim Collective Farm,” 81, 81; “The State Farm Stalinfeld, Birobidzhan,” 81–82, 82; “This Is How the Taiga Begins,” 76, 79; war photographs in Ogonyok, 91–92; weathers anticosmopolitan campaign, 217 Friedlander, Lee, 127, 182 Friedmann, André, 13, 52. See also Capa, Robert Frits, F., 48 front editors, 254n.93 Front Illustration (Frontovaia Illiustrastiia), magazine, 92, 112, 118 Front Newspaper (Frontovaia Gazeta), 58 front newspapers, 93, 94, 250n.17; editors, 123 FT-5 photo-wire, 40 Fussell, Paul, 183 futurism, 31 Gabler, Neil, 3 Gabrilovitch (journalist in Reichstag photo), 265n.1 Gai, Aleksandr, 26 GAKhN (State Academy of Artistic Sciences), 34 Ganin, P., 69 Gaon of Vilna, 186 Garruba, Caio Mario, 223 Gefen, L., 248n.34 gender: masculinity of the new Jew, 75; photo documentation of new Soviet roles, 61, 61, 64

• 273 •

´ General Walter (Karol Swierczewski), 52 Gerasimov, Alexander, 43 Gerasimov, M., 26 “German Factories of Death Near Lublin” (Kriger), 154 “The Germans Did This!” (Bergelson), 194–96 Gershenson, Olga, 233, 235 Gershkovitch, L., 69 Gestapo, registration and massacre of Jews at Kerch by, 100–108 “The Giant and the Builder” photo essay (Alpert), 40 Gilboa, Yehoshua, 215 Gitelman, Zvi, 105, 169 Gittelsohn, Roland, 170 Glider, Mikhail, 72, 74 Goldberg, Oskar, 52 Golomb, Emmanuel, 26 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 7 Gorbatov, Boris, 265n.1 Gorky, Maxim, 39, 50, 72; photographed by Evzerikhin, 49, 50; photographed by Nappelbaum, 22 Gorky Park rally (1941), 187–88 Gorodetsky, S., 26 Gosizdat (State Publishing House), 26 Goskultsnab (State Organization for Cultural Procurement), 45 Gottlieb, Maurycy, 16 Grakov, Alexander, 13 Granovsky, Naum, 214 graven images, prohibition against, 16 Great Patriotic War, 39. See also World War II Great Purges of 1930s, 39, 213; effect on Soviet Jewish photojournalists, 57–59 Greim, Mikhail, 16 “Grief ” (Baltermants), 145. See also Ivanova, P. I. Grinberg, Alexander, 31, 33, 34, 39, 57–58 Grinberg, Kh., 69 Grossman, Vasily, 148, 154, 171–74, 196–97, 199 GUKF (Main Administration of the Film and Photography Industry), 42 Gurarii, Samarii (Shmuel Mikhailovitch Gur-Arye), 37, 50, 156, 166, 200, 214, 215, 244n.73 Gutman, Israel, 153 Gypsies (Roma), massacred at Kerch, 251n.35

• 274 •

Index

Hagen, Charles, 225 Hallel prayer, 188 Halperin, D., 190 Hay, Julius, 130 Heilpern, Adele Perlmutter, 16 Himmler, Heinrich, 153 “Hitlerite Atrocities in Kerch” (Baltermants and Ozerskii), 104, 105 Hoberman, J., 3 Hofshteyn, David, 189 Hollywood, film industry founded by immigrant Jews, 3 Holocaust, in Russian-language vs. Yiddish press, 9, 194, 199 Holocaust atrocity photographs, 4, 100–108; Christian iconography in, 127–28; Kharkov, 142, 143, 144; in Yiddish press, 199. See also Nazi atrocity photographs House of Journalists, Moscow, 214 “Hymn of the Soviet Union (Soyuz Nerushimyi),” 209–10 “Ia Eto Videl (I Saw This)” (Selvinskii), 107–8 “I Am a Jew” (Fefer), 192, 264n.31 icons: and making myths about World War II, 217–19; of military victory, Stalingrad as, 219–22, 221, 222; photographic, and original images compared to, 230; of separate memories, 228–29 Ignatovitch, Boris, 39, 127 Ilf, Alexandra, 240n.45 Ilf, Ilya, 4, 25, 29, 58, 240n.45 Illustrated London News, newspaper: publishes Majdanek photographs, 156; publishes Nazi photo of Polish mass execution, 99 The Illustrated News, newspaper, 58 Illustrated Newspaper (Illustrierte Zeitung), 53, 149. See also Workers’ Illustrated Newspaper In Defense of the Motherland (Na Strazhe Rodiny), newspaper, 93 ingathering of the exiles, trope of, 74–75 International Center of Photography, New York, 217 “Internationale,” replaced as Soviet national anthem, 122, 209 International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 174 “I Saw This” (Selvinskii), 107–8 Iskusstvo publishing house, 43

ITAR-TASS, 42 Ivanishchev Ravine, Voroshilovgrad, 256n.9 Ivanov, Alexander, 4, 45, 66 Ivanov, Boris, 233 Ivanov, Vsevolod, 265n.1 Ivanova, P. I., 101, 104, 220, 223, 223–24, 228 “I Will Not Die but Will Live (Lo amut ki ekhye)” (Bergelson), 187–188, 262n.9 Izogiz (State Art Publishing House), 43 Izotov, Nikita, 46–48, 47, 143 Izvestiia, newspaper, 26, 94; on the Babi Yar massacre, 106; covers Majdanek, 156; fires Gurarii, 214; fires Rovinsky, 210; Jewish editor-in-chief fired, 122–23; publishes Auschwitz Extraordinary Commission report, 181; in wartime, 92, 121 Japan, Russian wars with: at Lake Khasan (1938), 53; Russo-Japanese (1904–1905), 17 Jasdoin, Wulf, 14 Jewish agricultural movement, Soviet, 65–69 Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, 134, 150, 187, 188, 190, 191, 196–97, 199, 203, 211–12; and postwar purges, 211–12 Jewish Autonomous Region, 70. See also Birobidzhan “The Jewish Couple” (Khaldei), 201–2, 202, 203–4, 227–28, 268n.49 “Jewish eye,” and Soviet Jewish photographers, 3–5 Jewishness: absence of, in postwar Soviet discourse, 215; bleached from concentration camp photographs, 162–63; encoded, 217, 267n.31; of Kerch massacre, 102–8; Khaldei’s, vs. his socialist realist self, 230–31; of musical theater and Hollywood, 3; of Nappelbaum’s rise to fame, 239n.26; of Russian Revolution, 69; Soviet definitional debates, 246n.8; of Soviet Jewish photojournalists, 184–86 Jewish press, biblical revenge and liberation in, 193–94. See also Yiddish press Jewish stars, 4; as marker in photographs, 199–204, 200, 202, 228 Jewish theaters, Soviet, 75–76, 76 Jews: assimilation of, 169–70, 210; “new,” 67, 74–75, 247n.24; “of silence,” 215; “old,” 65–66, 76; as Soviet ethnic “nation,” 64–65, 246n.8; as subject of Soviet Jewish photojournalism, 64–69; urban, 247n.24

Index Jews on the Land (film), 67 Jews Under Tsars and Soviets, exhibition (State Ethnographic Museum, 1939), 247n.24 “Jews with Yellow Stars of David” (Khaldei), see “The Jewish Couple” (Khaldei) Joint Distribution Committee, 66 Kacyzne, Alter, 66 Kalik, Mikhail, 235 Kalinin, Mikhail, 68 Kalinovsky, Konstantin, 59 Kallmus, Dora (Madame D’Ora), 16 Kapustyansky, A., 265n.1 Karmen, Roman, 52, 69, 165, 167, 215, 216, 217, 265n.1 Katyn Forest massacre, 141 Kaufman, Denis (Dziga Vertov), 23, 54 Kekalo, R., 172, 260n.99 Kerch: conflicting mass murder stories about, 251n.35; liberation of, 192; Soviet Jewish photojournalists document massacred Jews at, 2, 100–108, 203, 230 “Kerch Resident P. I. Ivanova Found her Husband, Who Was Tortured by the Fascist Executioners” (Baltermants), 101. See also “Grief ” (Baltermants) Khait, David, 76 Khaldei, Anna, 6, 215, 257n.26, 268n.49 Khaldei, Evgenii, 1, 37, 39, 44, 121; backdated birth year, 237n.9; Berlin photographs, 136–38, 194, 207; “Budapest,” 130; “Budapest Ghetto,” 201; “Budapest Through the Eyes of Two Generations” exhibition, 230, 254–55n.100; “Conquered Berlin,” Ogonyok photo spread, 138; describes the first bombing raids near Moscow, 95–96; the family in 1920, 6; Far East tour, 208; fired by TASS, 267n.30; forensic photography, 142; “Goering on Trial,” 208; “How Three––––Took Berlin” photo, 215, 216, 217; “The Jewish Couple,” 201–2, 202, 226, 268n.49; joint exhibition of Budapest photographs with his son (2005), 230; on journalist casualties, 108; Kerch massacre anecdote, 102; liberation photographs, 2, 87–88, 128–29, 130; “Molotov’s Announcement of War,” 88, 89; at Nuremberg trials, 208; “Our Family, 1940,” 184, 185; and own Jewishness, 5–8,

• 275 •

228–29; photographs Paris peace conference (1946), 209; and postwar purges of Jews, 213–14; relatives murdered at Stalino, 148, 257n.26; “Residents of Kerch Examine TASS Windows,” 107; runs afoul of wartime regulations, 112; socialist realist vs. Jewish self, 230–31; solo exhibition, Jewish Museum (San Francisco, 1997), 6, 231; “Soviet Photo and Print Journalists at the Reichstag,” 205, 205, 210, 265n.1; “Soviets Dig a Grave,” 103; “Survivors of Budapest Ghetto,” 228; “Troops Hearing Dolmatovskii at Reichstag,” 137; Unity photo spread, 200–202; “Victory Flag Over Berlin,” 136, 137, 206, 206, 226–27, 255n.108; wartime work and travel, 92, 95; “Woman in Murmansk,” 99, 100, 157; “Women in Berlin,” 207; “Worker in Donbass,” 48, 49; works for VOKS and VDNKh, 215; Yiddish conversation with American airman, Bucharest, 204 Khaldei, Leonid, 230, 254–55n.100 Khalip, Nikolai, 214–15 Khalip, Yakov, 40, 52, 214–15 Khalkin-Gol, battle of, 53 Kharik, Izi, as member of so-called Minsk nationalistic group, 213 Kharkov, massacres and war crimes trials at, 134, 142–43, 256n.13 Khavinson, Yakov, 121, 254n.79 Khlebnikov, Alexander, 43 Khorol’ death camp, 149 Khrushchev, Nikita, 149, 219 khurbn (Yiddish for “Holocaust”), 190 kibbutz movement, 65 Kiev: exodus of Jews from, 25; liberation of, 148–49, 193. See also Babi Yar Kino-Eye, Vertov’s, 54 Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 66 Kislov, F., 265n.1 Klein, William, 3–4, 237n.5 Klin, liberation of, 251n.36 Klooga concentration camp, 175 Knorring, Oleg, 156, 265n.1 Kogan, I. Kh., 105 Kogan-Tereshchenko interethnic marriage photo, 224 Kolli, Nikolai, 55 Koltsov, Mikhail, 23, 25, 26, 29, 33, 41, 52, 58, 67, 217

• 276 •

Index

Komsomol, 59; Central Committee, 43 Komsomolskaya Pravda, newspaper, 94, 111, 171 Konotop, Nazi atrocity photographs from, 146–47 Koreans, in Birobidzhan, 67, 82–83, 249n.53 Korn, Rokhl, 189 Kosciuszko Division, Polish army, film unit, 167 Kostyrchenko, Gennady, 122, 169, 211 Kovalyov, N., 265n.1 Kovno ghetto, photographs from, 197 Kozloff, Max, 3 Krasnaia Niva, magazine, 26 Krasnaia Zvezda, newspaper, see Red Star, newspaper Krasnodar, war crimes trials at, 142, 211 Kravtsov, Aleksandr, 253n.58 Kriger, Evgenii, 154 Kristallnacht, 105 Krock, Arthur, 170 Kronstadt mutiny, photographed by Otsup, 19 Kulbak, Moyshe, as member of so-called Minsk nationalistic group, 213 Kudrevatykh, Leonid, 265n.1 Kuznetsov, L., 129 Kvitko, Leyb, 189–90 Labor (Trud), magazine, 153, 215 Langman, Elazar, 29–30 language: as boundary between different narratives of war, 202; Jewish, as native tongue, percentage of respondents in 1939 Soviet census, 264n.49; Latinization campaign, 60; of perpetration, 179–81 Lauterbach, Richard, 163 Lawrence, W., 165 Lebedev, Aleksei, 128–29 LEF (Left Front of Art), magazine, 27, 31, 37 Leica 35mm camera, 40 Lenin, V. I.: on cover of first Soviet Ogonyok issue, 24; Nappelbaum portrait, 9, 20–21, 21, 22, 240n.33; photographed by Otsup, 19; on photography, 13, 20 Leningrad, siege of, 93, 108, 166, 175 Leonovo, massacre at, 127 Levitan, Yuri, 92, 188 Levitsky, Sergei, 13, 14 liberation: ambivalence of, 124–28; conquest of Eastern Europe framed as, 87

liberation photographs, 163, 181–83; as documentation, and the Soviet war effort, 129; Eastern European war photography as, 87–88; by Fridlyand, 251n.32; and Holocaust atrocities, 100–108; Ignatovitch’s Pietà allusion, 127; Kerch, 2; Library of Congress exhibition of (1945), 182; of Nordhausen, 181; published in Ogonyok, 124, 125, 126, 127; Shayket’s, of Kiev, 149; of suspected Nazi collaborators, 124–25. See also Holocaust atrocity photographs; Nazi atrocity photographs Liebman, Stuart, 167, 168, 259n.79 Life magazine: Majdanek coverage, 156, 166–67; reports on liberation of Klooga camp, 175 Lissitsky, El(iezer), 39 Loskutov, Sergei, 130, 132, 133 Lozovsky, S. A., 212 Luce, Henry, 54 Lugansk (Voroshilograd), 256n.9 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 20, 22 Magazine and Newspaper Conglomerate (ZhurGazObedinenie), 41–42, 52, 58 Magid, A., 58 Maiberg, B., 43 Main Administration of the Film and Photography Industry (GUKF), 42 Main Political Administration for the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army (GPU RKKA), 92, 109 Majdanek, 152–64, 171; coverage by Life magazine, 156, 166–67; de-judaizing of, by Jewish documenters, 167–70; reception in West, 164–67; Simonov’s stories, 258n.45, 258n.48; Unity’s coverage of, 194–96; universalized photographs, 203 Majdanek: Cemetery of Europe (film), 167–68 Makarenko, Yakov, 265n.1 Makrushenko, P., 200 Maksimenkov, Leonid, 52, 241n.51 Malenkov, Georgy, 95 Malkin, Boris, 26, 41, 43 Maly Trostinets: atrocity photographs from, 149–52; unattributed funeral photo, 198 Mao Zedong, Baltermants photo of, 217 The March of Generations (Trot fun doyres) (Markish), 213 March of Time film series, 54

Index Markish, Perets, 72, 187, 189, 191, 193–94, 212–13, 262n.15 Markov(-Grinberg), Mark, 9, 37–38, 42, 44; fired by TASS, 214; Izotov photo essay, 46–48, 47; Stutthof oven photo, 2, 203; works for Exhibition of the Achievements of the People’s Economy, 215; World War II Memorial Complex exhibition (2003), 1–2 Martin Gropius Bau, Khaldei show at (Berlin, 2008), 6–7 masculinity of the new Jew, 75. See also gender mass photography, 33 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 22, 67; Markov portrait, 37–38, 38 “May the World Be a Witness” (Bergelson), 190–91 Mazelev, Rafail, 42, 175, 176, 178–79 Mekhlis, Lev, 52, 90–91, 118 Mel’nik, Viktor, 42 “The Memorial in the Reichstag” (Markish), 191 Merzhanov, Martyn, 265n.1 Mezhericher, Leonid, 34–35, 43, 46, 55, 57 Mikhoels, Solomon, 67, 72, 190, 212 Mikulina, Elizaveta, 45 Milkhome (War) (Markish), 212 Minor, Lazar Solmonovitch, 238n.14 Minsk, funeral photographs from, 198. See also Maly Trostinets Molotov, Viacheslav, 87, 105, 140 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 41, 59, 87, 105, 209 “Molotov’s Announcement of War” (Khaldei), 88, 89 Morozov, A., 265n.1 Morozov, Sergei, 64 Most, Andrea, 3, 5 Munich Conference (1938), 59 Murmansk, firebombing of, 99, 100 musical theater, Jewishness of, 3 mythmaking, about World War II, 218–19 Naimark, Norman, 134 Nappelbaum, Ida, 35 Nappelbaum, Moisei, 9, 19, 29, 31, 34, 39, 43, 50; Jewishness in his rise to fame, 239n.26; Lenin portrait, 240n.33; Lenin portrait by, 9, 20–21, 21 Nashi dostizheniia (see Our Achievements)

• 277 •

Na Strazhe Rodiny, newspaper, 93 Naumov, Vladimir, 211 Nazi atrocities: centrality of, to Soviet story of war, 109; against Jews, universalizing of in Yiddish press, 196–97; photographs of, 95–100, 109, 110, 124, 204, 251n.32 (see also Holocaust atrocity photographs) New Economic Policy (NEP), 22 “new Jews,” Soviet, 67, 74–75; of Birobidzhan, 247n.24 New World (Novyi Mir), magazine, 134 New York Times, Holocaust coverage by, 169–70, 175 Nicholas I, czar, 16 Nicholas II, czar, 17, 238n.14 Night (Wiesel), 255n.107 Nilov, Grigorii (Grisha), 108, 253n.58 Niva, magazine, 17 None Shall Escape (film), 196 Nordhausen, liberation photographs, 181 “Not a Step Backward” order, Stalin’s, 111 Novick, Peter, 169 Novyi Mir (New World), magazine, 134 Nuremberg war crimes trials, 195 Nusinov, Isaac, 212 Obshchev, A., 172, 260n.99 October (Oktiabr’), photographers’ group, 29–30, 35 October (Oktiabr’), magazine, 134 Odessa: exodus of Jews from, 25; Jewish culture of, 23 Office for Emergency Management, U.S., 106; Baltermants photographs at, 252n.51 OGIZ (State Publishing House), 41 Ogonyok, magazine, 26–27, 29, 31, 33, 42; Auschwitz coverage, 175; Baltermants retained by, 217; circulating on war front, 94; Kerch massacre photographs in, 101, 102, 103–4, 104; liberation photographs, 124, 125, 126, 127; Petrov replaces Koltsov as editor, 58; photo coverage of outbreak of war, 88; photo essay on Jewish agricultural colonies (1923), 69; pre-Soviet, 17, 18; publishes Khorol’ death camp photo essay, 149, 150; publishes Treblinka photo, 172; publishes Tseitlin’s Majdanek photographs, 156; publishes Zelma photographs, 38, 69–72; reestablished, 22–23, 24 Okna TASS (TASS Windows), 106, 107

• 278 •

Index

“Old Glory Goes Up on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima” (Rosenthal), 135, 137 “old Jew,” 76; acting as “new Jew,” 78; as photo subject, 65–66 Olender, P., 149 Operation Bagration, 152–53 Orlova, Galina, 45 Orlovsky, Dr. L., 150 Ortenberg, David, 121, 123, 169, 233 ORT (Society for Trades and Agricultural Labor), 65 “Osventsim” (Mazelev photo spread), 176. See also Auschwitz Otsup, Joseph and Alexander, 17 Otsup, Pyotr, 13, 17, 19, 22, 34 Our Achievements (Nashi dostizheniia), magazine, 39; publishes Fridlyand’s Birobidzhan photo essay, 76–83, 249n.48 Ozarichi death camp, 260n.99 Ozerskii, Israel, 104, 104 Ozerov, Lev, 134 OZET (Society for Jewish Agricultural Toilers), 67 Pale of Settlement, 15, 77–78 Paola, Nikolai Svishchov, 35 Paris Commune Shoe Factory photo staging scandal, 55 Parisian Yiddish Workers’ Theater, 52–53 Parker, Ralph, 165 partisans, newspapers published behind Axis lines by, 93–94 Partisan War in the Leningrad Region (Trakhman et al.), 94 pavilions, photo, 33 Pen, Yehuda, 15 Penson, Max, 63–64, 214 People’s Commissariat of Communications, 40 perpetrator images, 99, 111, 147 Petrov, Evgenii, 58, 92 Petrusov, Georgii, 55, 265n.1 photo editors, oversight and direction by, 56–57 photo essays: “Children of Jewish Agricultural Colonies” (Shaykhet), 69; concentration camp, as genre, 152; Fridlyand’s Birobidzhan, in Our Achievements, 76–83; “The Giant and the Builder” (Alpert), 40; on Jewish

agricultural colonies, 69; Khorol’ death camp, 149; “Majdanek Death Camp” (Trakhman and Tseitlin), 156, 157; Maly Trostinets death camp, 150, 150–52; Markov’s, on Nikita Izotov, 46–48, 47; of Nazi atrocities, as genre, 143; “Osventsim” (Mazelev), 176, 178–79; “Retribution” (Tseitlin), 143; “Twenty-four Hours in the Life of the Filippov Family,” 35, 46 Photographer (Fotograf), magazine, 13 Photographers’ Studio of the Art Department of the Leningrad City Executive Committee, 42 Photographers’ Studio of the Arts Works Trust, 42 Photographers’ Studio of the Economy and Finance Department of the Presidium of the Leningrad Soviet, 42 photography: beginnings of, 13–15; and class struggle, 25–26; colonialism and empire, 248n.35; color, 40; entry of Russian Jews into, 14–17; erasure of Jewishness of, 9; and the expansion of empire, 14; forensic, 142, 163, 197; of Holocaust atrocities, 100–108; and Jewish access, 15, 20; liberation (see liberation photographs); as link to Eastern European past, 15–16; marked as a Jewish profession, 16; of martyrs, 6; mass, 33; by perpetrators, 99, 111, 147; portraits, 9, 14–15, 33; scientific, 13, 33; socialist realist, 45–53; “societal propaganda,” 33; Soviet, class affiliations within, 33; as tool of revenge, 148; trophy, 96, 190, 198, 264n.42; truth and evidential validity of, 53–57, 166; wartime (see wartime photography); wire services, 37; Zionist, of 1930s, 67 photojournalism, 9–10; birth of, 20–30, 240n.39; business of, 44–45; and the documentation of ethnic diversity, 60–64; emergence of, 17–20; “Fleet Street,” 13; and the “liberation” of Eastern Europe, 87–88; in the 1930s, 31; at outbreak of World War II, 90–95; photo equipment, 39–40; production and circulation of, 39–44, 90; professionalizing of, 33–34; and truth, 53, 54 photomontage, 27, 53 Photo Section, of Communist Party, 42 photo studios, private, nationalization of, 42 photo-wire, 40–41 Picture Post (Britain), newspaper, 106

Index Pietà, allusion to, in Ignatovitch liberation photo, 127 Pilnyak, Boris, 26 Pioneers (Soviet youth group), 7 Plamia, magazine, 22 Plamper, Jan, 59 Platonov, and the Black Book, 197 pogroms, 5–6, 77 Pohorylle, Gerta, 13, 52. See also Taro, Gerda Polevoi, Boris, 175 Political Administration of the Red Army (PURKA), 43 Poltoratsky (journalist in Reichstag photo), 265n.1 Popular Front, 52, 59, 209 Portnov, Y., 55–56 portraits, 33; of Russian cultural figures, 14–15; by Soviet Jewish photojournalists, 9. See also individual portrait subjects Pospelov, P. N., 95; Pravda editor-in-chief, 253n.67 Poulson, Niels Bo, 141 Praha-Moskva, magazine, 223 Pravda, newspaper, 26, 52; allowed special reporter at front, 111; asks Politburo for airplanes for communication with front, 253n.67; Auschwitz coverage, 175; Babi Yar massacre coverage, 106; covers official establishment of Jewish Autonomous Region, 72; de-judaizing of, 210, 213–14; denunciations of Koltsov, 58; publishes Japanese atrocity photographs, 99; reader catches Evzerikhin photo staging, 55; rehires Khaldei, 215; reports on Gorky Park rally, 188, 262n.9; runs Ehrenberg piece on “death factories,” 171; wartime, 92, 94–95 Prekhner, Mikhail, 95 Press-Cliché, 41 The Price (TV movie), 235 print shops, army, 94 Productive-Creative Masters of Photographic Arts, 40 Professor Mamlock (film), 105 Projector (Prozhektor), magazine, 26, 50 Prokudin-Gorskii, Sergei, 14; “Bukharan Jews,” 14 Proletarian Photo, magazine, 35; Max Alpert’s “Giant and the Builder” photo essay, 40. See also Soviet Photo Propper, Stanislav, 17

• 279 •

Pulver, Leyb, 72 purges, see anti-cosmopolitan campaign; Great Purges of 1930s PURKA (Political Administration of the Red Army), 43 Rabochaia Gazeta, newspaper, 29 Rapaport, Shlomo Zanvl, 15. See also Ansky, S. Rapoport, Louis, 211 re-creating the facts (vosstanovlenie fakta), 54–55 Red Army, newspaper, 94 Red Field (Krasnaia Niva), magazine, 26 Red Fleet, newspaper, 111 Redkin, Mark, 2, 103, 143, 175, 192, 199, 265n.1 Redlich, Shimon, 212 Red Star (Krasnaia Zvezda), newspaper, 38, 63, 92, 94; allowed reporter at front, 111; covers Babi Yar and liberation of Kiev, 149; covers Majdanek, 156; publishes Selvinskii’s “I Saw This,” 107; purge of Jews at, 123, 169, 210; Simonov’s Majdanek stories, 258n.45 Red Tataria (Krasnaia Tataria), newspaper, 53 Regards, magazine, 47, 48, 52 Reid, Susan, 46 Reizman, Otilia, 129, 129 Rembrandt Studios exhibition (1923), 29 “Remember” (Bergelson), 191–92 revenge, 255n.107; Ehrenberg calls for, 134, 211; Jewish, 194 Revolution of 1905, 17 Revolution of February 1917, 17 Revolution of October 1917, as Jewish event, 69 Riumkin, Yakov, 128, 130, 131, 156, 159, 208 Rodchenko, Alexander, 27, 34, 35, 39, 43 Rodov, S., 26 Rokossovsky, Konstantin, 152 Roma, massacred at Kerch, 251n.35 “Roman Karmen, Evgenii Dolmatovskii, and Evgenii Khaldei in Front of the Brandenburg Gate” (anon. photo), 215, 216, 217 Room, Abram, 67 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 140 Rosenthal, Joe, 135; Old Glory Goes Up on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, 135, 137 Rostov, liberation of, 251n.32, 251n.36

• 280 •

Index

“Rota,” Polish hymn, 168 Rovinskii, L., 123, 210 Rubenstein, Joshua, 211 Rudiak, Ilya, 19, 239n.26, 240n.33 Rumiantsev, I., 44 Russfoto, 38 Russia at War (Ehrenberg), 108 Russian Orthodox Church, patriarchate reestablished by Stalin, 122 Russian State Historical Museum “Budapest Through the Eyes of Two Generations” exhibition (Moscow, 2005), 230, 254n.100 Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA), 41 Samoilov (Magid), A., 58 Sante, Luc, 162–63 Sax, Barry, 170 Schmeling, Max, 186 scientific photography, 33 “Seeing Is Believing” exhibition (Britain, 1945), 182 Seekers of Happiness (film), 72 self-rebuilding, Jewish, 74–75 Selvinskii, Ilya, 107–8 Seniavskii, Vadim, 108, 253n.58 Serebriannikov, S., 114, 116, 118, 120–21, 122, 124 Sergeev, Yuri, 17 Shagin, Ivan, 265n.1 Shandler, Jeffrey, 3 Shapiro, Konstantin, 14 Shashkin, S. N., 55 Shaw, George Bernard, 35 Shaykhet, Arkady (Avrom Shmuelovitch Shoykhet), 1, 5, 29, 34, 46; “Battle for Stalingrad,” 114; and the battle for Stalingrad, 112, 114; expresses concerns about staging, 55; “Kiev Rail Station,” 28; loses job in Great Purges, 58; photographs liberation of Kiev, 149; published in USSR in Construction, 39; wartime work for Front Illustration, 92 Shcherbakov, Alexander, 92, 123, 140 Shcherbakov, M., 212 Shechem’s rape of Dinah, biblical story of, 194 Sherm, Rudolf, 175 Shklovsky, Viktor, 67 Shrayer, Maxim, 107, 134 Shteinberg, Yakov, 13, 17

Shteinmets, Mikolsh, 129 Shterenberg, Avrom, 1, 30, 38, 43, 50, 69 Shternshis, Anna, 5, 206 Shudakov, Grigory, 9, 17 Shvernik, Nikolai, 149 Simeon and Levi, biblical story of, 194 Simonov, Konstantin, 123, 154, 156, 165, 233–34; Majdanek stories, 258n.45, 258n.48 Single-Story America (Ilf ), 240n.45 Sinti/Roma, massacred at Kerch, 251n.35 Slezkine, Yuri, 122 Slutsky, Mikhail, 72 Smena, magazine, 38 Sobibor, 170, 171 socialist art, struggle to define, 31 socialist realism, 36; in photography, 45–46 “societal propaganda” photography, 33 Society for Jewish Agricultural Toilers (OZET), 67 Society for Trades and Agricultural Labor (ORT), 65 Society for Young Photographers of Rostov, 37 Solomon, Erich, 13 Sontag, Susan, 182–83 Sorokina, Marina, 141, 169 Sovfoto archives, New York, 94, 166, 259n.71 Soviet Homeland (Sovetish Heymland), journal, 227 Soviet Information Agency, see Sovinformburo Soviet Jewish photojournalists, 3; as culture makers and cultural subjects, 235–36; and defining the new Soviet Jew, 68–69; first wave, 13–30; in postwar Europe, 206–9; postwar purges of, 10; second generation, 36–39; staff vs. freelance, 44–45 Soviet Photo (Sovetskoe foto), magazine, 33–35, 42, 49, 52; denunciation of “enemies” during Great Purges, 58; Evzerikhin blacklisted from, 58; Kolli’s article critical of staging, 55; publishes photographers’ critique of photo editors, 56–57; publishes Shaykhet’s “Children of Jewish Agricultural Colonies” photo essay, 69; on staged photographs of Paris Commune Shoe Factory, 55 Soviet Russia in Pictures (Sowjet Russland im Bild), magazine, 22 Soviet South, newspaper, 37

Index Soviet Woman, magazine, 215 “Soviet Writer Tells Horror of Lublin Camp” (Parker), 165 Sovinformburo, 92–94, 111–12, 263n.15 Soyuzfoto, 35 Soyuzkhronika (Union of Documentary Film), 72 “Soyuz Nerushimyi,” replaces “Internationale,” 122, 209 Spanish Civil War, socialist realist photography during, 52 staging (instsenirovka) in photographs, 54–56 Stakhanov, Aleksei, 46 Stakhanovites, 46, 230 Stalin, Josef: and altered photographs of his entourages, 53–54; anti-Semitism of, 123, 169; body removed from Lenin’s tomb, 226; demotes Victory from state holiday status, 219; “Not a Step Backward” order, 111; orders purging of Koltsov, 58; photographs of, 50, 51, 244n.73; reestablishes Russian Orthodox patriarchate, 122 Stalingrad: battle of, 112–17, 233; as icon of military victory, 219, 220, 221, 222. See also Volgograd Stalinist Hawk, newspaper, 111 Stalino: de-Stalinized to Donetsk, 228; mass murders at, 148, 257n.26 Star (Zvezda), magazine, 93 State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN), 34 State Art Photographers’ Studio of the City Department for Culture and Education of the Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Soviet, 42 State Art Publishing House (Izogiz), 43 State Organization for Cultural Procurement (Goskultsnab), 45 State Publishing House (OGIZ), 41 Stolovitski, Dmitrii, 7. See also Baltermants, Dmitrii Stolper, Aleksandr, 233, 235 street photographers: in America, 31; Russian, 33 Struk, Janina, 163 Stutthof oven, Markov-Grinberg photo, 2, 203 subject lists, editorial, 124, 254n.96

• 281 •

suffering, Jewish, trope of, 66–67 Sulzberger, Arthur, 170 Sumy: liberation of, 256n.16; Nazi atrocity photo essay, 146 Surkov, Aleksei, 92, 217 survivors, concentration camp, 177–79, 182, 199–200, 200, 228; rape rampage by, 255n.107 Suslov, M. A., 213–14 Sutskever, Avrom, 134 Sverdlin, Lev, 235 Svobodnyi Zhurnal, magazine, 26 ´ Swierczewski, Karol (General Walter), 52 Szurek, Alexander, 52 Talensky, Nikolai, 123 tanks, images of, 118–19 Taro, Gerda, 13, 40, 52 “Tashkent front,” 185, 191 TASS, 37, 38, 41, 111–12, 120–21; and changing fortunes of Red Army, 121–22; fires Khaldei, 213; fires Markov-Grinberg, 214; in wartime, 92 TASS Windows (Okna TASS), 106, 107, 225 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr, 15 Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union, see TASS Ten Years of Soviet Photography exhibition (1928), 34 Tereshchenko-Kogan interethnic marriage photo, 224 “That’s How It Was” series (Baltermants), 230 the Thaw, 219 Der Tog, newspaper, 167 Tolstoy, Aleksei, 143 Tolstoy Commission, 143 “To the Jewish Warrior” (Markish), 193–94 Tout, magazine, 48 Trakhman, Mikhail, 37, 92, 94; “Empty Landscape of Majdanek,” 163; “Local Residents Tour Majdanek,” 159, 159; “Local Visitors at Majdanek,” 160; “Majdanek Death Camp” photo essay, 156, 157; Majdanek photographs, 203; “Poles Watching Germans Bearing Witness to Corpses,” 161, 161–62 Treblinka, 170–74, 173, 196–97, 199, 260n.99, 264n.44 Treblinka Hell (Grossman), 173–74, 197

• 282 •

Index

Tribune of Soviet Jewish Social Movements (Tribuna), magazine, 69 trophy photographs, 96, 190, 198, 264n.42; “Punishment in Poland,” 98, 98–99 Trot fun Doyres (Markish), 213 Trotsky, Leon, 52, 58 Troyanovsky, Pavel, 265n.1 Trud (Labor), magazine, 153, 215 The Truth (Der Emes), newspaper, 69, 262n.15 Truth, newspaper, see Pravda, newspaper truth in photography, 53–57 Tseitlin, Boris: Majdanek death camp photographs, 155, 156, 157; “Retribution,” 143, 144 Tsena (TV movie), 235 Tsentropechat (Central Press), 41 The Twelve Chairs (Ilf and Petrov), 58, 240n.45 “Twenty-four Hours in the Life of the Filippov Family” (ROPF photo essay), 35–36, 46 20 Years of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army (RKKA), 52 Tyomin, Viktor, 41, 53, 87, 120, 121, 137, 166, 172, 194 Ukraine, civil war following declaration of independence, 25 “Ukraine without Jews” (Grossman), 148 Ukrainian Photo-Union, 37 Union Bild (Germany), 42 Union of Arts Photographers, 1 Union of Documentary Film (Soyuzkhronika), 72 Union of Russian Proletarian Photographers (ROPF), 35 Union Photo, 35, 37, 40–43, 45, 48. See also Fotokhronika TASS; Soyuzfoto United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), 140 Unity (Eynikayt), newspaper, 148, 189–93, 262–63n.15; Markish articles criticized by Epshteyn, 212; on Nazi atrocities, 194–99; postwar purges of writers, 211–12; publishes Khaldei’s Budapest photo spread, 200–202, 204 universalizing, in war and Holocaust stories, 203 USS Dorchester, sinking of, 260n.88

USSR in Construction, magazine, 38, 42, 46; Birobidzhan photo layouts, 74–76; Evzerikhin blacklisted from, 58; publishes Fridlyand’s photographs, 83 Val, Leah Ben-David, 182 Valdheim collective farm, 248n.34 Vaynshteyn, Misha (fictional war photographer), 234–36 VDNKh, see Exhibition of the Achievements of the People’s Economy Vechernaia Moskva, see Evening Moscow vengeance narrative, in Soviet press, 134. See also revenge Vertov, Dziga (Denis Kaufman), 23, 54 Victory Day, 219 “Victory Flag over Berlin” (Khaldei), 136, 137, 206, 206, 226–27, 255n. 108 Vinnitsa, liberation of, 175, 261n.113 Vishniac, Roman, 66 Vitebsk, mass murder at, 191–92, 263n.28 VKhUTEMAS (Advanced Arts and Technical Ateliers), 27 VOKS (All-Union Society for Cultural Contact and Friendship with Peoples of Foreign Countries), 38, 41, 215 Volgograd, 226; Motherland colossus at, 219. See also Stalingrad Volkov-Lannit, Leonid, 34 Volokolamsk, liberation of, 251n.32, 251n.36 von zur Muehlen, Irmgard, 168 Voroshilov, Kliment, 58 Voroshilovgrad, Ivanischev Ravine mass grave, 256n.9 VTsIK (All-Russian Central Executive Committee), 19 VTsSPS (All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions), 19, 43 Vysokoostrovsky, L. A., 265n.1 Wait for Me (film), 233–35 Wait for Me (Simonov book), 233–34 War (Markish), 212 War Communism experiment, 22 war crimes trials: Kharkov, 142, 256n.13; Krasnodar, 142, 193, 211; Majdanek, 168; Nuremberg, 195, 208, 208–9 war photography: of “liberation” of Eastern Europe, 87–88; by Soviet Jewish photojournalists, 9; Spanish Civil War, 52

Index Warsaw, liberation of, 130, 132, 133 Warsaw Ghetto uprising of April 1943, 133 Weegee (Usher Fellig), 3, 237n.5 Weiner, Amir, 206 Werth, Alexander, 162, 164 Weston, Edward, 4 “Why Do the Fascists Hate Jews So Much?” (Ehrenberg), 190 Wiesel, Elie, 182, 204, 215, 255n.107 wire services, 37, 40, 120 witness: Life carries images of people at mass grave, 167; by survivors, 179; by townspeople, to nearby atrocities, 159, 159, 160, 161; visually attested, by journalists, 165 Wolf, Erika, 33 Workers’ Illustrated Newspaper (ArbeiterIllustrierte Zeitung), 22, 36, 48. See also Illustrated Newspaper The Worker’s Newspaper (Rabochaia Gazeta), 29 World War II, 9, 90–95, 108–11, 121–24 Writers’ Union: Foreign Bureau, 52; Yiddish section, 187 Yedies vegn matsev af di frontn (News from the Front), newspaper, 190 Yefimov, Boris, 96 yellow star, 4; as marker in photographs, 199–204, 200, 202, 228 Yerukhimovitch, Isaak, 92 Yevgenov, S., 37, 43 Yevtushchenko, Yevgeny, 219 Yiddish: as official language of Soviet Jewish “nation,” 64, 67, 246n.8; ubiquity of, within Birobidzhan, 76; and urban Russian Jews, 68 Yiddish press, 9, 167, 187, 262n.15; American, 66, 200, 203; Der Emes, newspaper, 69, 262n.15; Holocaust reporting in, 189–94; partisans’ newspapers, 94; Soviet, 65 Yiddish theater, 189

• 283 •

Youngblood, Denise, 91 Yudin, Vladimir, 175, 179, 180, 261n.113 Yudovin, Solomon, 15–16, 66 Yuzovka, see Stalino Zaslavsky, David, 142–43, 210–11, 212 Zelma (Zelmanovitch), Georgii, 5, 9, 38, 42, 72, 248n.35, 266n.27; and the anticosmopolitan campaign, 214; “Assault,” 119–20, 222, 230–31; and the battle for Stalingrad, 118; “battle pastoral” photo, 130; “Boy Reading Pushkin,” 61, 63; Budapest liberation, 128, 129, 200; “Camera Operator Otilia Reizman,” 129; “Crossing the Volga at Stalingrad, Fall 1942,” 119; diptychs from “Assault” maquettes, 221; engages with own Jewishness, 184; Georgia photographs, 40; “Leah Feldman’s Garden Brigade,” 70–71, 71; “Leveling Streets in Birobidzhan,” 70; “liberation” photographs of Eastern Europe, 87; Majdanek photographs, 156; photographs Soviet Central Asians, 60–64; in Soviet Far East, 69–72; “Stalingrad, Fall 1942,” 118–19, 119; and Stalingrad as icon of military victory, 219–220, 221, 222; Stalin portrait, 50, 51; “Voice of Moscow,” 61, 62; “Woman Reading Local Newspaper,” 60–61, 61 Zelma, Timur, 72, 214 Zelmanovitch, Zina, 63 Zemel, Carol, 66, 127–28, 145, 182, 259n.79 Zhdi Menia (film), 233–35 Zhotikova, Maria, 1–2 ZhurGazObedinenie (“Zhurgaz”), magazine and newspaper conglomerate, 41–42, 52, 58 Zionism, 65; photography of 1930s, 67; and trope of ingathering of the exiles, 74–75 Znamia, magazine, 134 Zozulya, Efim, 26, 241n.52 Zvezda, magazine, 93

•

About the Author

•

David Shneer is associate professor of history and director of the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Called a taboo-breaking scholar by Tikkun magazine, he has published New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora and Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, nominated for the National Jewish Book Award.