Exodus and Its Aftermath: Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Interior by Albert Kaganovitch (review)

Reviewed by: Exodus and Its Aftermath: Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Interior by Albert Kaganovitch Mark Edele Exodus and Its Aftermath: Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Interior. By Albert Kaganovitch. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2022. 313 pages. 79. 95 (cloth). Albert Kaganovitch has provided a long overdue landmark study of the refugee crisis in the wartime Soviet Union. There are some precursors, of course, including Rebecca Manley's To the Tashkent Station (2009), Natalie Belsky's 2014 doctoral dissertation and associated essays published since 2016, two monographs by Larry E. Holmes, Wendy Goldman and Donald Fitzer's 2021 book on the Soviet home front, as well as a huge Russian language literature on "evacuation" (the Soviet euphemism for flight, but also a term denoting the allegedly orderly removal of industrial plants, pigs, cattle, grain, and "human resources"). The study of the survival of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union has become a sub-field since the teens of the twenty-first century. Finally, there is a growing literature on the Soviet Union at war, studies that could have provided further context to Kaganovich's work. Some of these publications probably came too late to be considered by Kaganovitch, but others he chose to ignore. This reluctance to cite the work of others is understandable, given that he was one of the trail blazers in the study of Jewish refugees in the Soviet hinterland. But it does reduce the usefulness of his book to students of the Soviet Union at war. They will need to look elsewhere if they want a historiographical introduction or a working bibliography. Instead of fully engaging with the more recent literature, Kaganovitch continues the good fight against Soviet historiography, a quaint fallback to the last Cold War. The title is somewhat misleading. The book could just as well have been called "Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Interior. " Jews are only one, if important, subgroup in the history of refugees in the wartime Soviet interior as described in the book. They made up about a quarter of the overall group according to Kaganovitch, who in fact tells the story of refugees in general. This is true for chapter one on the overall migration east during the war, chapter End Page 179 two on the approach local authorities took toward the refugees, chapter three on the problem of finding employment, chapter four on mortality and hunger, chapter five on unaccompanied minors, chapter seven on statistics, and chapter eight on the refugees' return home. In some cases, such as the chapters on employment or mortality, the author explains part of the history of Soviet civilians at war more generally. It is only in chapter six, on culture clashes, and in the section on antisemitism in postwar Ukraine in chapter eight, that the book really focuses on the specific situation of Jewish refugees. Kaganovitch makes a heroic effort at quantification. This focus is laudable but the detailed statistical discussion—perhaps more suitable for a specialized journal—makes the book harder to read. This also causes specialists some headaches. Soviet statistics are notoriously complex to interpret, and the tally of refugees is no exception. "Determining the number of refugees who found themselves in the Soviet rear, " writes Kaganovitch, "remains one of the most problematic issues in the history of this war" (198). The authorities, despite their heavy-handedness, were not in control of population movements. Registration efforts were hampered by the sheer chaos surrounding everybody and everything. Authorities had all kinds of reasons to misreport the number of refugees: to conceal their poor performance in assisting them, to mobilize resources from the center, or to distract from other shortcomings. Not all people who fled, for one reason or another, registered as "evacuees. " Many moved on repeatedly, leading to double or even triple counting. The label of "evacuation" was sometimes slapped onto populations who were in fact forcibly deported. Non-Russians often concealed their ethnic identity and used wartime confusion to change their nationality to a more desirable one ("Jewish" was one of the officially recognized nationalities of the Soviet empire, written into domestic passports, but "Russian" was, by the wartime years, a much safer option). Thus, some. . .