Michael David-Fox, Crucibles of Power: Smolensk Under Stalinist and Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2025). 480 pp. 35. 00. This book discusses human fates interlocked in a city and around it. The book underscores the role of raw power, which for Michael David-Fox rests on multidimensionality and thus depends on the confines of time and space (p. 7). In that sense, the book shows how singular humans are often powerless against overwhelming odds. This might be a starting point when asking the question, “Why do people behave the way they do, especially during cataclysm and war? Why do they choose a side? ” Factors such as citizenship, half-baked politics, and ethnic background are important but do not cover the whole range of reasons. This book seeks to bring all of power's ebbs, waves, ripples, subcurrents, and storms within a singular frame in one city's story—Smolensk. David-Fox acknowledges that all works, including his own, are shaped by the context of their time (p. 372) —and thus, supposedly, by the balance of power around them. One of the features of the book is its tracing of identity switches and half-hearted, silent, and imposed adjustments of self in word, deed, and memory (p. 15). In my own work over the past few years, I have been looking at similar matters pertaining to the space of war and German occupation. 1 The universe of German war was not clearly demarcated, and neither was the Soviet counterpart. Some would say in both cases it was sheer chaos as a state of things—I would say chaos was the factor that bent human behaviour, already saturated with all sorts of values, imposed or chosen, creeds, allegiances, and natural characters. This is why there is no system that allows us to explain why humans go one way or the other and extrapolate it to all the cases involved (in one space, one region, one city in this case). Heroes are rare, self-sacrificing martyrs too. Most people simply (or not so simply) adjust. They carefully tread the middle ground. I found seemingly similar reflections in David-Fox's account (scattered all over the book, e. g. pp. 159–160). The book certainly inspires thoughts and a renewed way of thinking about the space of German occupation. As David-Fox shows repeatedly, one system of governing does not immediately disappear when challenged from outside. This point allows us to see the complexities of the German-occupied space. It was a case of power without a throne—a given reality of imposed institutions and foreign competences that were never fully finalized nor realized. In its genesis, the German space was a ferocious anomaly, a corrupt locus of distorted reflections. It shocked, revolted, and surprised those who had to live under it (pp. 123 ff). The very experience of inhabiting it branded all who were involved and were neither martyrs of German policy nor heroes resisting it. What comes through David-Fox's book and other recent literature discussing the entangled “East” is that both sides viewed the occupied lands as an incomplete entity. For the German administration, this regime life in the East was an intermediate variant—a temporary, brief stage on the path to a thousand-year racial empire. 2 For Soviet citizens, the occupation itself was a global dislocation of their pre-1941 world, whose revolutionary immutability and indomitable progressive force had been so vehemently asserted before June 1941. The mere fact that the enemy could occupy such territories shattered the self-perception and worldview so painstakingly implanted before the war. The contradiction, abnormality, and volatility—and thus the ephemerality of the situation—were recognized by the Germans themselves. The newly arrived power of the mirror-polished boot existed but was not fully entrenched (yet). The consequence of this apparent transience was a desire to gain dominance quickly through wild, mass violence, including mass rapes, volleys of executions, and the burning of villages. The goal was to instill fear of punishment for the slightest disobedience, a cement for any power born out of open violence. The Soviet regime, that is, the previous authority, had withdrawn but not evaporated. Remnants of it came through the scattered fragments of partisan attacks, underground leaflets, and deaths of those who chose allegiance to the new regime. David-Fox's character Andrei Yudenkov's fate comes to mind here (p. 131). An inexperienced but loyal Soviet functionary before the war, Yudenkov managed to reforge his identity in the Soviet partisan movement, violently committing and steeling his resolve to serve Stalinism against all odds. There was plenty to grapple with: armed or not, partisans had to contend with an openly hostile rural population (p. 14). If caught, the Soviet partisans were publicly executed by the Germans, driving the population to the execution site to observe how the new regime asserted itself through death. At times there was massive success and even the restoration of Soviet power, as in the four partisan-controlled territories in the Smolensk region by mid-1942 (pp. 231 ff;). This process was carried out not on the basis of Communist Party directives, but mostly on what these Soviet partisans perceived to be truly “Soviet” themselves. Under the influence of the partisans, war spawned an independent interpretation of Stalinism. Even loyal Soviet subjects marched to their own version of alternative wartime Bolshevism, a “Stalinism without Stalin” (p. 216). It is unsurprising that this interpretative wartime modification, a Stalinist heresy, produced a host of accompanying popular myths of hope: that the hated collective farms would be disbanded after victory and that there would be a radiant, good future, never fully defined. All four of the partisan territories (partizanskii krai) were mercilessly crushed by German counterguerrilla efforts by autumn 1942. Soviet collaborators played a crucial role in this process. In this space of rampant violence and contradictions, the incompleteness of the occupation and the unfinished nature of its extent and reach, the local population not only lived—they, the people, were the field of collision between two systems of life and death. Power was being exercised even when it was seemingly absent. It seemed to have left an imprint of itself, corroding the territory it once inhabited. These locals were simultaneously the participant, the first victim, the collaborator, the partisan—in essence, the arena of this struggle. “Pod nemtsem, ” Soviet citizens adapted—donning new roles, often reinterpreting prewar masks and words (pp. 195–196). People lived not only amid the devastated cities but also amid the rubble of old Soviet laws, procedures, and norms removed from the pedestal of society, upon which the German order was layered. Much of what Soviet citizens wore with ostentatious sincerity under Nazi rule was often as inauthentic as the hand of the German realm that shaped their fates. 3 Everything was momentary, and for those who could not or did not want to be martyrs or heroes, it was compressed into a merciless focus of survival and pragmatism in the here and now. 4Perhaps the most burdensome task facing people was the mental process of adapting to the new and incomprehensible. Soviet society was possibly the only one in the world prepared, to some small extent, for the chaos of the unpredictable, having already experienced the rapid tumult of meanings. All citizens who had lived through the mass repression and terror of the 1930s remembered that a comrade who was deemed reliable and honorable today could tomorrow turn out to be a Trotskyist and be forever erased from life and from memory, as David-Fox demonstrates in chapters 2 and 3. All these citizens knew how to keep the conscientious Soviet omertà, observe, go with the flow. After 1941, under foreign occupation, the stakes were harsher and higher, the lever of action often shorter, but the notes of the unfolding drama had consonance, and the sum of the game could be the same—life itself. Thus, the practices of Soviet society were transferred to the space of a formally anti-Soviet society, producing a separate community under the occupation. This latter fact was practically impossible to acknowledge after the victory celebrations in the spring of 1945. Isolated brave Soviet authors who attempted to break ranks on what truly transpired during the occupation were subjected to intimidation and prohibition. 5The victory cannonade, which marked a seeming end to the four-year nightmare, could not instantly cleanse the scars left by the war. The year 1945 bequeathed a tripartite legacy to Soviet society. First on the heirloom list was a series of sharp discontinuities and radical social leaps during the war itself, —from Soviet citizens to “subhumans” occupied and lassoed by foreigners, and then back to Soviet citizens, but now under suspicion. The late-war society was split into those who were marred by the German presence and those who were not. 6 After 1943, this distinction left many of those living under occupation with the unbearable choice of “safer” options: retreating with the murderous Germans into the unknown, certainly never to come back, or facing an equally certain suspicion, perhaps punishment, at the hands of the returning Soviet authorities, even if one's daytime job had no direct link to aiding the occupiers. 7This split of the war years continued to hover in society even after May 1945. David-Fox speaks of it (pp. 325), but he could have developed it further. Not only does power flow in multiple directions, but also people's identities cannot cease to be erased or forgiven. Hence, they simultaneously wore multiple masks, that of a “byl pod nemtsami” (one who was under German occupation) and that of a Soviet citizen, encapsulating both after 1945. Thus, even with the Wehrmacht defeated and Berlin reduced to rubble, remnants of the Nazi occupation “remained” in Smolensk—and beyond. The labyrinthine roles and identities created during the German reign, even if redrafted after 1945 by the subjects themselves, persisted. Soviet society after 1945 continued to wear not only the crown of victory but also the cilice of the catastrophe people had endured. The society was most severely divided into those who had been “under the Germans” and those who had not; those who simply scraped by under them and those who died fighting against them. From the perspective of Soviet unity, such splits needed to be glossed over and removed. But at the same time, society was simply unable to forget that the occupation had occurred; that it was worse than the official version; that there were fundamentally different roles in it; and that it lasted far longer than one day. Fear remained, rounding up the list of war inheritance. In the margins of the military catastrophe, mixed with the victory's catharsis, knowledge lurked like a poisonous doubt, which society had gained about itself. The unsettled German “new order” was more terrifying only because it revealed abysses in people's souls. The Germans who came to hunt for slaves and loot exposed all pre-war splits, pressing on forcefully against all the still fresh birth traumas of Soviet society: from the fracture of collectivization and restriction of freedoms to bitter poverty, the fervent party faith of some and the widespread cynicism of others against the background of loud slogans, the destruction of religion, the exhausting campaigning of dictatorship, and so on. The German pseudo-order demonstrated human fragility and mutability, not overcome even in the social transformation attempted by the Bolsheviks—some two decades of social education to try to usher in the “new Soviet man. ” Could it be that this education had failed so disastrously? The humiliating and bloody occupation imposed by the foreign invaders drew frightening questions about the life of the victors. Why did some Soviet citizens—just yesterday conscious urban comrades, even Party members beyond doubt, or ordinary conscripted peasants—become so enthusiastic about prostrating themselves before soldiers in steel helmets? Who taught them that the spark of human life could be extinguished with impunity? Worse yet, was their and many others’ professed devotion to the Soviet Union before the war just as much of a performance? The Soviet regime, returning after 1944, tried to block the entrance to this echoing cave of contradictions as quickly as possible. The shards—or crucibles—of German dominion needed to be extracted, and memory brought to a wrinkle-free, parade-like state. After 1945, it was inexpedient, undesirable, and simply unpleasant to remember that the country had walked along the edge of an abyss, and that among “our own” some had joined in pushing it toward the gaping precipice. Forgetting was seen as the right thing to do—and, because of that, became an impossible one to achieve. Despite a few errata, 8 David-Fox has produced a highly readable book, an immersive work that is strong in its intellectual novelty and high-quality prose. It is wonderful to see that research on the complicated topic of collaboration is acquiring such a dimension. We are clearly gearing up for a new stage in historiography. David-Fox's book is one of the harbingers of that turn in the making, and it should be praised as such.
Oleg Beyda (Thu,) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: