On March 22, the Russian Parliament declared that “it recognizes the criminal acts of the Nazi occupiers and their helpers vis-à-vis the civilian population of the USSR as a genocide of the peoples of the Soviet Union.” This approach, reminiscent of Soviet rhetoric, entails the distortion of the distinct nature of the Holocaust that began with the persecution in Nazi Germany and culminated in the policy of the Final Solution.
This fundamentally erroneous view draws an equivalence between the policy of the annihilation of the Jews, rooted in Nazi racial antisemitism and the notion that the Jews are an “anti-race” that disrupts the world order, on the one hand, and the selective attitude of the Nazi Germans toward the racially inferior Slavs, on the other hand. For all the cruel mistreatment of Slavs by the German occupiers, which resulted in millions of deaths, the Nazi plans for them lacked the totality that characterized Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies.
The tendency to obfuscate the causes of the Nazi mass murder of Jews is apparent in the “Concept of Teaching Russian History to non-History Majors in Universities,” which was published in late 2022. This document treats the mass murder of Jews (and Roma) and the Generalplan Ost (the Master Plan for the East) as equivalent phenomena. Generalplan Ost, drawn up in 1941, spoke about the enslavement, brutal mistreatment and deportation of the Slavs, but not about their total annihilation. Moreover, the plan was never worked out in detail, let alone significantly implemented.
In recent months, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly invoked the notion of the genocide of the people of the Soviet Union. The penetration of the idea of the equal suffering of all Soviet peoples during the Great Patriotic War into official Russian discourse represents the culmination of a trend that has been developing over the past decade.
In previous years, the question of Holocaust memory would be decided by the authorities on a case-by-case basis. Nowadays, we see a centralized approach, most apparent in the trials from 2021–2023 related to the legacy of Nazi war crimes in places like Orel, Simferopol and Stavropol. Although the mass shootings of Jews in these three regions has been amply documented, the court verdicts spoke only of the genocide of the Soviet peoples, thereby ignoring the Holocaust as a distinct phenomenon.
The selective approach to the Holocaust is reflected in the St. Petersburg court ruling in March 2023, which used the pretext of the “expiry of the statute of limitations” to clear professor Valentin Matveev, who had been condemned for Holocaust denial, of the charge of rehabilitating Nazism. The case resulted from public pressure in January 2021, following an incident where Matveev, in a public lecture, denied the existence of the death camps and the murder of six million Jews.
The opposite tendency can be seen in the application of the charge of rehabilitating Nazism (with references to the Holocaust) to the staff of the memorial society, which has been investigating Stalinist repression and human rights violations, and which won the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. To justify these accusations and investigations, in March 2023, the Russian authorities cited the biographies of three victims of Soviet repression who are listed in the Memorial database who may have taken part in the murder of Jews during the Nazi occupation.
OBVIOUSLY, A database consisting of millions of names is likely to include information about some persons whose actions may be interpreted as collaboration with the Nazi Germans. Of course, it would be much easier to set the historical record straight were scholars able to freely access the materials of the Soviet trials of Nazi criminals and collaborators, but such access is virtually impossible in the present-day Russian Federation.
Russia, the Holocaust and the invasion of Ukraine
Unfortunately, current Russian authorities treat the Holocaust more as an instrument of policy, rather than as a historical phenomenon worthy of study and memorialization in its own right. Moreover, the use of the “Denazification” slogan to justify the invasion of Ukraine has led to a banalization of the Holocaust and to a proliferation of pseudo-historical references and allusions.
Against this backdrop, two statements by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in May 2022 and January 2023, are worthy of mention. In the first, underscoring the alleged pro-Nazi sympathies of Volodymyr Zelensky – a Jew and the president of Ukraine – Lavrov referred to Hitler’s “Jewish blood” (an utterly baseless assertion). In the second, Lavrov reframed negative attitudes worldwide to present-day Russian policy as an expression of exceptional Russian victimhood speaking of a “final solution of the Russian question” by drawing an analogy with the Nazi “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”
With these statements, Lavrov legitimized popular myths in Russia, e.g., that Hitler had a Jewish mother and that certain Jews (including Hitler, according to this view) are the most vicious antisemites. These assertions transfer blame for the Holocaust from the actual perpetrators to the Jews themselves.
An even more pernicious effect on the common perceptions of Nazism and the Holocaust is exercised by the propaganda campaign being waged in the Russian media, which often oversteps the boundaries of legitimate historical interpretation. Lavrov’s first thesis was developed on the Russian Channel One in mid-March when Colonel Konstantin Sivakov, deputy head of the Russian Academy of Rocket and Artillery Sciences, who has a Ph.D. in military sciences, said, “When people say that Zelensky isn’t a Fascist, I’d like to remind them that [some] ethnic Jews served in the SS...”
The speaker was not bothered by the blatant ahistoricity of the idea that Jews were allowed to join the SS. Lavrov’s second thesis, which uses the Holocaust to promote the image of Russians as victims of irrational hatred, is echoed in a song by Leningrad, a popular Russian rock band. This music video, from the very beginning of the war in Ukraine, depicts young men in traditional Russian dress, with blue Stars of David on their chests, standing behind the vocalist, who sings: “A Russian is now like a Jew in Berlin in 1940.”
Contrary to Soviet propaganda, which is now being re-echoed by Russian officialdom, a recognition of the special features of the Holocaust does not constitute “an insult to the memory of the victims of fascism of other nationalities.”
It is only by grasping the differences between the Nazi policies vis-à-vis various categories of civilians and Soviet POWs, and by analyzing the ideological reasons and motives for the Nazi invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941, that we can attain a more accurate understanding of history, thereby ensuring appropriate remembrance of all the victims of Nazism.
The writer is the director of the Moshe Mirilashvili Center for Research on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union at Yad Vashem.