World War II, Nazi Crimes, and the Holocaust in the Soviet Union

10 a.m.

Welcome and Opening Remarks

Paul A. Shapiro, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies,

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, USA

Oleg Budnitskii, Director, International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

Plenary Session

Moderator: Michael David-Fox, Associate Professor, Department of History, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: The Context and the Challenge

Paul A. Shapiro

The Great Patriotic War and Soviet Society

Oleg Budnitskii

The “European Civil War” and the Soviet Union, 1941–45

1 p.m.

Lunch

2 p.m.

Panel I: Metamorphoses of Memory

Soviet Jewish Memory of the War and the Holocaust: Variations and Modifications

Galina Zelenina, Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

When Stalin Lost His Head: World War II and Memory Wars in Contemporary Ukraine

Serhii Plokhii, Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History, Department of History, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA

The Kliachkivs’kyi Cult in Volhynia: The Invention of a Ukrainian National Hero

Per Rudling, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of History, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

Denial: My German Family and the Holocaust

4 p.m.

Coffee Break

4:30 p.m.

Panel II: Gender Relations and Sexual Violence

Sexual Violence as “Weapon of War”? Enforced Nakedness, Sexual Torture, and Rape by German Soldiers during the War of Annihilation, 1941–45

Regina Mühlhäuser, War and Gender Working Group,

Hamburg Institute for Social Research, Hamburg, Germany

Women, Violence, and the Ukrainian Nationalist Insurgency during World War II

Olena Petrenko, PhD Candidate, Department of History,

Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

Jewish Youth in Nazi Ghettos in Byelorussia: How Age and Gender Mattered

6:40 p.m.

Lives of the Great Patriotic War: Oral History Video Presentation

7:30 p.m.

Reception

9 a.m.

Panel III: Experiences in Investigating War Crimes

The Holocaust in the Eyes of Soviet Non-Jewish Military Personnel during World War II: Were the Victims Just Citizens or Jews?

Arkadi Zeltser, Director, Center for Research on the History of Soviet Jews during the Holocaust, International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel

The Osveia Tragedies: A Case Study of Mass Violence against Jewish and Non-Jewish Populations in Occupied Belarus

Juliette Denis, PhD Candidate, Institut d’histoire du temps présent, Université de Nanterre, Paris, France

Nathalie Moine, Researcher, Centre d’études des mondes russe, caucasien, et centre-européen, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, France

Stalinist Justice as a Site of Memory: Anti-Jewish Violence in Kyiv’s Podil District in September 1941 through the Prism of Soviet Investigative Documents

Oleksandr Melnyk, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

The Fields of Berezovka: Crimes and Abuses against Jews Investigated in the War Criminal Trial of 1949

Andrei Muraru, Associate Professor, Department of History, Alexander Ioan Cuza University, Iaşi, Romania

Panel IV: Reflections of the War Experience in Literature

The Politics of Forgetting in Soviet Literary Works on World War II as the Result of Interaction between Author and Censorship

Il’ia Kukulin, Associate Professor, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

Cranes as a Symbol of Memory of the War in the Soviet Union in the Mid-1950s and 60s: The First Attempts at Working with Trauma

Mariia Maiofis, Deputy Director, Center for Humanities Research, Graduate Institute of Humanitarian Studies, Moscow, Russia

Cossack Valor as an Element of Soviet (Post)Wartime Jewish Identity: Does a Jew Who Sits on a Horse Cease to Be a Jew?

11 a.m.

Panel V: War and Cinema

Brutal Realism and Female Bodies

Oksana Bulgakova, Professor, Department of Film Studies, Johannes Gutenburg University Mainz, Mainz, Germany

“At Six O’Clock in the Evening after the War”: Memory and the Expectation of Peace in Wartime Soviet Cinema

Valérie Pozner, Researcher, Atelier de recherche sur l’intermédialité et les arts du spectacle, Paris, France

Another War behind the War? Soviet Attempts to Capture the Film Market of the Allied States, 1942–45

Vanessa Voisin, Deputy Director, Centre franco-russe de recherche en sciences humaines et sociales, Moscow, Russia

Representations of World War II in the First Soviet Films of the Cold War

Elena Baraban, Assistant Professor, Department of German and Slavic Studies, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada

Panel VI: The Genocide of Roma in the Former Soviet Union

Moderator: Krista Hegburg, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, USA

Memory of the Holocaust of Roma in Contemporary Ukraine and Belarus: Mass Graves and the Politics of Commemoration

Andrej Kotljarchuk, University Lecturer, School of Gender, Culture, and History, Södertörn University, Huddinge, Sweden

The Genocide of Roma in Reichskommissariat Ukraine and Galicia in the Testimonies of Survivors in the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive and in the Occupation Press

Piotr Wawrzeniuk, Senior Lecturer, School of Gender, Culture, and History, Södertörn University, Huddinge, Sweden

The Nazi Persecution of Soviet “Gypsies” in the Militarily Administered Parts of Army Group North, 1941–44

Martin Holler, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany

Representations of the Genocide of Roma

David Gaunt, Professor, Centre for Baltic and East European Studies, Södertörn University, Huddinge, Sweden

1 p.m.

Lunch

2 p.m.

Panel VII: Complicity and Collaboration with German Occupiers

Moderator: Sergei Kudriashov, German Historical Institute Moscow, Moscow, Russia

From Collaboration to Perpetration: On the Ways Some Local Residents of South Ukraine Became Perpetrators of Crimes against Humanity

Vladimir Solonari, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Central Florida, Orlando, USA

Nationalism, Anti-Bolshevism, or the Will to Survive: Forms of Belorussian Interaction with the German Occupation Authorities, 1941–44

Olga Baranova, Professor, Gonzaga University, Florence, and Florence University of the Arts, Florence, Italy

Punitive Brigades in Occupied Leningrad Oblast

Steven Maddox, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Canisius College, Buffalo, USA

A Political Mission? The Pskov Orthodox Mission and German Power in the German-Occupied Leningrad Province

Johannes Enstad, PhD Candidate, Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Norway

Panel VIII: Interactions of Victims, Killers, and Witnesses in the Occupied Territories

Bringing the Soviet Population into the Story: Civilian Attitudes toward Jews during the Holocaust in Transnistria

Diana Dumitru, Associate Professor, World History Department, Moldova State Pedagogical University, Chisinau, Moldova

Ruptures and Continuities, Extremes and Exceptions: Ukrainian Responses to the Holocaust in Lviv, 1941–44

Tarik Cyril Amar, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Columbia University, New York, USA

Personal Holocausts: The Messy Intersection of Germans, Jews, and Non-Jews in the Soviet Union, 1941–44

4 p.m.

Coffee Break

4:30 p.m.

Panel IX: Everyday Life on the Soviet Home Front

Culture Victorious: Evacuated Cultural Institutions, the Intelligentsia, and Mobilization during World War II

Erina Megowan, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

Antisemitism on the Soviet Home Front

Oleg Leibovich, Lead Researcher, Laboratory for the Study of Soviet Everyday Life, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Perm, Russia

Long Way Home: The Unknown Soldiers of the Soviet Labor Front

Anna Kimerling, Lead Researcher and Project Manager, Laboratory for the Study of Soviet Everyday Life, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Perm, Russia

Panel X: Roundtable on New Sources

The International Tracing Service Archives

Paul A. Shapiro

Yahad–In Unum’s Testimony Collection

Johanna Lehr, Associate Researcher, Yahad-In Unum, Paris, France

9 a.m.

Panel XI: Atrocities and Law in the Occupied Territories

The War on the Eastern Front: Food, Starvation, and Genocide

Gesine Gerhard, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of the Pacific, Stockton, USA

The Jewish Police in the Vilna and Pinsk Ghettos during World War II

Svenja Bethke, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Hamburg University, Hamburg, Germany

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945: New Findings on Camps and Ghettos in the Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union

Martin Dean, Applied Research Scholar, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, USA

Anatomy of an Atrocity: German Soldiers and the “Pacification” of Lida in the Holocaust’s “First Hour”

David W. Wildermuth, Assistant Professor, Department of Modern Languages, Shippensburg State University, Shippensburg, USA

Panel XII: Strategies and Practices of Resistance

Jewish Partisans in Belorussia and Ukraine: Context, Conflict, and Comparison

Zvi Gitelman, Preston R. Tisch Professor of Judaic Studies, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA

Party Politics in Hell: Ghetto Uprisings during the Holocaust

Evgeny Finkel, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

Soviet Warlords: Partisan Rule under German Occupation, 1941–44

Masha Cerovic, PhD Candidate, Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne, Paris, France

“Kugel-Prisoners” and the “Mühlviertler Hasenjagd”: The Mass Escape of Soviet POWs from Mauthausen

11 a.m.

Panel XIII: Feeding the Front and the Rear: Food and the Soviet War Effort during World War II

Starvation Mortality in Home-Front Industrial Regions during World War II

Donald Filtzer, Professor of Russian History, School of Arts and Digital Industries, University of East London, London, UK

Not By Bread Alone: Food, Workers, and the State on the Home Front

Wendy Goldman, Professor, Department of History, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA

The State’s Pot and the Soldier’s Spoon: Payok as a Social Contract

Brandon Schechter, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of California, Berkeley, USA

A Blockade Cookbook

Sergei Iarov, Lead Researcher, St. Petersburg Institute of the History of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia

Panel XIV: Evacuation: Identities in Change

Gan Eden or Gehennom?: Polish Jewish Refugees Reflect on Life in the USSR on the Brink of War

Eliyana Adler, Visiting Researcher, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

Evacuated, Deported, Wounded: A Study of Images of Outsiders and the Everyday Life of the Soviet Home Front

Aleksandr Chashchukhin, Senior Researcher, Laboratory of the Study of Soviet Everyday Life, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Perm, Russia

On a Journey from a Soviet Citizen to a Jewish Refugee: The Jewish Perceptions of the First Months of the Great Patriotic War

Anna Shternshis, Al and Malka Green Associate Professor in Yiddish Studies, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

Communities of Nomenclature on the Soviet Home Front: Social Adaptation to Life during World War II

1 p.m.

Lunch

2 p.m.

Panel XV: POWs in Documentary and Narrative Sources

Moderator: Catherine Gousseff, Centre d’études des mondes russe, caucasien, et centre-européen, École des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris, France

Soviet POWs in Nazi Calculations during Operation Barbarossa on the Territory of Ukraine: Ideology, Improvisation, Contradictions

Oleksandr Marinchenko, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Oles Gonchar University, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine

A “Double Persecution”? Postwar Soviet POWs’ Accounts of Incarceration and Collaboration

David Rich, Senior Historian, US Department of Justice, Washington, DC, USA

Nazi Concentration Camps in the Occupied Territory of Ukraine

Stanislav Aristov, Head of the Department of Humanities and Natural Sciences, Moscow Regional Institute for the Humanities, Podolsk, Russia

Not a Stranger’s Tragedy: Memories of Soviet Prisoners of War from the Kyiv Encirclement about the Destruction of the Jews

Tat’iana Pastushenko, Research Associate, Institute of History of Ukraine, Department of History of Ukraine during World War II, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine

Panel XVI: Roundtable on Historiography

Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

New Literaray Observer

Rossiiskaya Istoriia

Excursion to the Russian-Jewish Museum of Tolerance