The Paradox of Genocide in Modern Russia: Evolving Narratives of the Siege of Leningrad During the “Great Patriotic Operation”

Introduction

The German-led Siege of Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg) from September 1941 to January 1944 is one of the most tragic losses of civilian life modern warfare.¹ Understandably, it has featured ever since in Soviet and Russian memory culture as an icon of antifascist resistance. Presently, on 20 October 2022, a St. Petersburg court has decided that the siege was an act of genocide after an application by the Prosecutor General seeking such a determination.² Judge Vera Sal’nikova of the St. Petersburg City Court announced the following declaration, which claims:

To recognize the siege of Leningrad by the occupation authorities, German troops and their accomplices ̶ armed units formed on the territory of Belgium, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway and Finland, as well as individual volunteers among which were Austrians, Latvians, Poles, French and Czechs ̶ in the period from 8 September 1941–27 January 1944, as a war crime, a crime against humanity, and genocide of national and ethnic groups representing the population of the USSR, the peoples of the Soviet Union.³

The spirit of this declaration reaches far beyond today’s St. Petersburg, both in time and space. Moreover, the timing of the court decision during the Russian invasion of Ukraine raises important questions not only about genocide recognition as a political act, but also about the exploitation of historical narratives in wars of aggression. Russian state memory, as it vacillates between victor and victim, informs the writing and re-writing of its history as codified in legal bodies, as well as in education, media, and civic doctrine, such as war and commemoration of wars past.

The court’s decision also raises central issues in current debates about genocide’s status as the “crime of crimes” and Holocaust memory as an international currency of state legitimacy. Despite Russia’s declared war aim to “denazify” Ukraine and its recent embrace of Holocaust memory, the recognition of the siege as genocide seems to follow the generic concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity. Previously, Russia had monumentalized the siege as the apogee of the Germany’s signal crime: the attack on “peaceful Soviet citizens-” a non-ethnic or -national designation.⁴ As detailed below, Russia has consequently had an ambivalent relationship to Holocaust memory due to its universalist anti-fascist commitment to a non-ethnic or -national memory of civilian suffering in World War II. However, in the current war, understanding itself at once as a victim of genocide – and guardian of authentic antifascist Holocaust memory – is a convenient position for Russia to take. Unlike some contemporary scholarship, which abandons the “conceptual stretching” of genocide in favour of new concepts, Russian authorities are combining their independent monumentalization of the siege with the monumental category of genocide as the “crime of crimes.” In doing so, they perversely and rhetorically underpin Russia’s commission of international crimes against Ukrainians in the name of preventing them.

Such a declaration by the court, within the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine, raises several questions about its motivations. Namely, why do Russian legal and political bodies seek to monumentalize the siege as a genocide at this time, while a previous narrative mostly emphasized its heroic aspect? As such, this essay explores these conflations and paradoxes as follows. First, it introduces the siege in its historical background, then it examines the St. Petersburg court decision within the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the political functions of genocide recognition. Finally, it explores Russia’s conflation of the siege and the Holocaust as instances of genocide.

Historical Background and Portrayal of the Siege

In June 1941, Nazi Germany declared war on the Soviet Union and invaded in Blitzkrieg fashion, effectively waging one of history’s broadest and most brutal wars both in scope and scale. With Moscow in sight that autumn, Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht to surround Leningrad, overtaking the Soviet Union’s second largest city, in a siege that, according to historian Richard Bidlack, “possessed elements of epoch, epic, and monumental tragedy that transcend the temporal and spatial boundaries of World War II.”⁵ In this impoverished war zone of disease and starvation, more civilians perished in Leningrad than in the Allied bombings of Germany and Japan.⁶ By the time the siege was lifted 872 days later, it had claimed more than one million Soviet civilian lives, with approximately 900,000 deaths occurring during and as a result of the cold and starvation of winter 1941 alone.⁷

The intentions of this campaign were best described by SS-Oberführer Dr. Franz Walter Stahlecker in May 1941: “In Russia, all cities and cultural sites including the Kremlin are to be razed to the ground; Russia is to be reduced to the level of a nation of peasants, from which there is no return.”⁸ Quartermaster General Eduard Wagner professed in late 1941: “There is no doubt that it is Leningrad that must die – to starve to death.”⁹ According to historian Yitzhak Arad, after the invasion of the Soviet Union, on 16 July 1941 in a meeting with Hermann Göring, Alfred Rosenberg, Wilhelm Keitel, Hans Lammers, Martin Bormann, and Hitler, it was noted that the “Fuhrer wants to erase Leningrad from the face of the earth and hand it over to Finland.”¹⁰

Consequently, the justification for various scholars and the St. Petersburg court to move toward a new definition of the siege as genocide is supported by the all-encompassing intentions with which the Nazi leadership sought and oversaw the decimation of Soviet civilization. By war’s end, including the civilian losses in Leningrad, Timothy Snyder estimates that 4.2 million Soviet civilians died as a result of Nazi occupation and the ensuing starvation policy,¹¹ in addition to those directly affected by Nazi violence which accounts for millions more.¹²

However, the St. Petersburg court was not the first to conceive the siege as an act of genocide. In the last decade, some historians have formally proposed the genocidal nature of the siege,¹³ and this perspective has stirred a broader ideological activation within Russian academia, media, and government.¹⁴ Such activation may be attributed to the newfound access to the archives after the fall of the USSR, which afforded historians the chance to broaden the understanding of the siege’s genocidal character and critically revisit the absence of its genocide recognition at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945.¹⁵ In the comprehensive Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization, editors Alex J. Kay, Jeff Rutherford, and David Stahel write:

The extensive research carried out on Nazi decision making and the origins of the “Final Solution” has established beyond doubt that the Nazi Vernichtungskrieg against the Soviet Union coincided with the physical extermination of all Soviet Jews and other so-called undesirables, and that we can no longer study the military history of the eastern campaigns and occupation policies without their genocidal components.¹⁶

Therefore, the inclusion of “genocidal components,” or otherwise related terminology in siege’s historiography is relatively new. Given Finland’s involvement in the siege, albeit far more passive in proportion, scholars suggested in 2011 that since the 1960s “only a few Finnish and international historians assign Finland a share of the blame for the genocide in Leningrad.”¹⁷ Their contention is that while “the mass extermination of the Jews was widely publicized as genocide, the siege of Leningrad, which met all the conditions to be considered genocide, was hardly publicized.”¹⁸

By pointing to the categorical pedestal on which the Holocaust is and has been placed, these scholars question the extent to which discourse and literature dedicated to the siege is consistent with historical interest in other genocidal events. Likewise, historians Nikita Lomagin and Richard Bidlack claim in their 2012 documentary history from the Soviet archives: “Next to the Holocaust, the Leningrad siege was the greatest act of genocide in Europe during the Second World War,” once again underlining the character and concurrence of the two events.¹⁹

Court Ruling: The Siege as Genocide

On 27 January 1994, on the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Leningrad from the siege beset by the German army, Mayor Anatoly Sobchak addressed the people of a city now called St. Petersburg: “History knows no examples of a victory like that of the inhabitants and defenders of the city on the Neva.”²⁰ At this first commemorative anniversary since the fall of the Soviet Union, Sobchak’s appraisal of the siege’s historical exceptionality was most deserving. This aspect has held consistent academic interest beginning at war's end, and especially after state archives opened beginning in the 1990s. Russia’s dominant historical narrative was inherited from its predecessor, and has primarily favoured heroism and victory over the Nazis in the face of its own victims, survivors, and soldiers, in what is referred to as the Great Patriotic War.²¹ This conflict of identities, of victor, victim, and perpetrator, continues to play an integral role in any analysis of Russian state memory.

On 8 September 2022, the eighty-first anniversary of the beginning of the siege, Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov filed a request to formally recognize the siege as a genocide.²² Upon the determination announced in October, the Investigative Committee charged with presenting and evaluating evidence for the claim emphasized the following criteria: the siege contained premeditated motivation beyond military gain and was intentional as demonstrated by the Nazis’ embrace of the concept of “total war,” a military theory developed by German General Erich Ludendorff in 1935. The court’s prosecutor Victor Melnik positioned the claim as necessary in the defense against criticisms of Soviet wartime leadership, which “challenge the Soviet contribution to liberating the world from fascism.”²³ Additionally, the naming of the Nazis’ “accomplices” as well as “individual volunteers” from other countries is a strategic inclusion²⁴ – at the time of writing, all countries mentioned have sent military, financial, and humanitarian support to Ukraine since the invasion began.²⁵ Moreover, while it has been confirmed that Finland and Spain participated in the siege, involvement of the remaining countries is unconfirmed.²⁶ The language of the decision is equally precise in its use of “national and ethnic groups representing the population of the USSR, the peoples of the Soviet Union,” which fits the criteria of genocide as set forth in several definitions, including Raphael Lemkin’s Axis Rule in Occupied Europe in 1944. Even if the decision’s timing can be explained by the war in Ukraine, genocide recognition has certainly been the focus of Russian scholars since 2018 when Russian professor Mikhail Diadenko outlined how the siege meets its legal criteria.²⁷

By directing attention to the tragedy of Leningrad, in which the court claims approximately 1,093,000 civilians perished,²⁸ the court re-enforces a nationalist narrative about Soviet history and what it suggests about Russia’s future as a protector of its various peoples against genocide. The geopolitical theatre of modern Russia may very well contradict certain aspects of this narrative, as its leaders continue to perform their national and moral commitment to fighting Nazism as it is perceived to exist in Ukraine – and as alleged acts of genocide in Donbas invoke statutes of self-protection, however falsely. Scholars Iryna Marchuk and Aloka Wanigasuriya have analyzed this claim along with the lack of legal authority in Russia’s purported defense by invasion, which point to the “larger issue of Russia resorting to the abuse of fundamental concept of international law.”²⁹

As it is too early to determine the impact of the court decision in Russia, its theoretical, political, and what lawyer Konstantin Dobrynin calls the “quasi-legislative” aspect can be examined.³⁰ He explains how “an attempt is made at least at the national level to equate Soviet citizens and victims of the Holocaust,” since “the international community recognizes that the Nazis planned to completely destroy the Jews, but does not recognize the ‘genocide of the Soviet people.’”³¹ A conception of some “quasi” legislation may allude to its judicial precedence,³² although it is not a court decision that can be formally challenged on any ground. The effects of the decision are left to speculation, though it could influence legislators to adapt the claim into an amendment in federal law to include protections of siege memory, as it does for the memory of Soviet soldiers and leadership during the “Great Patriotic War.”³³ At base, this declaration exemplifies the “performative and symbolic” rhetoric inherent to genocide discourse, or as Ben Meiches describes, “saying ‘genocide’ is supposed to matter, to dramatize action and obligate attention,” irrespective of its legal validity.³⁴ Such rhetoric aligns Russia with a shared awareness of genocide, fascism, and Nazism, making palatable to the rest of world its participation in the retroactive and proactive fight against those threats. However, according to Martin Shaw, such an evaluation is contradicted by Putin’s genocidal language and as reflected on the battlefield.³⁵

Implications in the Context of War

To better understand the decision to label the Leningrad siege as genocide, we must investigate Putin’s reliance on Russian patriotism as a specific psychological maneuver in order to “strive to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.”³⁶ This further complicates the debate on claims of genocide in the context of Russia’s campaign, as the war itself continues to develop. As was immediately rebutted by several prominent scholars within relevant fields after the invasion,³⁷ Putin purposely conjured the Great Patriotic War and postwar efforts of denazification to lead the Russian public into an international conflict. The moral inflection of Putin’s analogies evokes a pride in geopolitical intervention, even as Putin has expressed clear opposition to such interventions as modelled by the West, while at the same time intervening in Ukraine.³⁸ Historian Nikolay Koposov explains this logic as a function of a much greater and unrelenting historical narrative that embraces Russian historical pride as central to the formation of a national identity and state ideology,³⁹ which is then deployed for claims of self-defense and humanitarian intervention.

Russia’s opposition to foreign intervention can be observed in the strategic inclusion of the various nationalities other than Germany as implicated in the court decision; in March 2022, soon after the “special military operation” commenced, Putin commented on the alleged use of human shields in Ukraine by “foreign mercenaries.”⁴⁰ These actions, from genocide recognition to accusations of foreign meddling in Russian affairs, highlights the state’s insistence on securing “security.” The invasion of Ukraine, then, can be best understood as a series of measures demonstrating what Dirk Moses refers to as “permanent security,” whereby state actors determine real or perceived threats as undermining present and future state objectives, which then serve to justify the violent means often manifested in state agendas.⁴¹ This strategy, derived from the insecurity of being undermined, is oblivious to its own irony as it evidently and perpetually obstructs its own humanity-seeking by the violence by which it is often accompanied.

According to historian Lisa Kirschenbaum, the “epic terms in which the state media would narrate the siege were set quite early,” in reference to August 1941 broadcasts appealing to citizens in becoming “heroic defenders” on the “city front.”⁴² Contemporary identity formation in Russia is deeply rooted in its origins in World War II and the “Great Fatherland War,”⁴³ after which both “the Soviet and the Allied press transformed besieged Leningrad into legend, a compelling story of steadfastness and heroism.”⁴⁴ That survivors and authorities from Leningrad both have assumed a mythopoetic role of heroism suggests something about the way in which they process their grief and how state leaders work to “sanitize, co-opt, and contain memory.”⁴⁵

In this way, the long-term imbalance of attitudes between state and society diminishes the suffering imposed on Leningraders, which presents cultural and sociopolitical barriers to genocide recognition, concerns about the suppression of intergenerational trauma,⁴⁶ and the subdued recognition of victims of Stalin’s repressive reign in favour of wartime heroism and success of Soviet leadership.⁴⁷ Moreover, resistance against purported Nazism in the case of Ukraine serves not only as support for a nationalist patriotism among the general public, but so too the state-sponsored civil religion which sustains it.

Historical context also offers a balanced comparison of mythmaking in wartime Leningrad and Moscow today, especially as the present campaign does not afford a full timeline for the same scope of analysis applied to historical events, particularly on issues like grief and evolving processes of collective memory. The use of state propaganda in extremis can provide insight into how the civilian experience and memory formation of a dramatic event can be manipulated. During the siege, glorification and mythmaking by the state served to counterbalance the genocidal experience and the staggering human losses, where the siege was an act of aggression by Nazi Germany while the Soviet Union was engaged in a war of defense. Today’s Russian campaign, in which Ukraine is positioned on the defensive, raises questions about the effects of Putin’s justifications for military aggression on those Russians who have lost their lives and loved ones in Putin’s mission against “Nazism.” However contested his administration’s intent in Ukraine has been on the grounds of genocide, whether in full or as isolated in such atrocities as reported in Mariupol and Bucha, the memory of World War II is adapted to the contemporary narrative imposed on those who are currently living through this campaign.

Presently, Russian officials are intent on safeguarding the education of future generations about the “genocide of Leningrad,” reinforcing Russian identity formation and uniting the people in this mission against Nazism in past, present, and future manifestations. If the memory of the siege was so successfully and immediately distorted as an act of heroism rather than victimhood, one can expect the same mythmaking mechanisms will be deployed in similar ways today. Moreover, it may prove easier to persuade those who did not live through the siege into a modern patriotism anchored in necessary sacrifice and past suffering. Thus, by declaring the siege as genocide, Russia is able to frame the focus of their aggression as motivated by preventative measures against genocide, and against Russia in particular.

While it is too soon to assess whether or not this strategy has been successful on the domestic front, the intention of the court only emphasizes Russia’s attempt to invoke anti-Nazi and anti-fascist narratives from the past into the present, which also opposes the “de-Sovietization” of the former USSR. Meanwhile, to an international audience, as the court decision has offered an alternative perception of the present invasion, its effect is mostly negligible. This may be due to the preexisting disapproval of the war by Western – and some Eastern – populations and governments, but more likely due to the lack of media coverage and publications in English about the court ruling.

The Siege and the Holocaust

As Moses and others have written, genocide has been historically construed as the “crime of crimes.” A related pedestal is the perception of Jewish Holocaust victims as “exemplary victims,” meaning they were murdered on the grounds of identity alone.⁴⁸ This section explores how Soviet and Russian figures have reasoned the two into the modern historical record of the twentieth century.

In his 2020 publication about the concurrence of the siege and Holocaust, Alexander Diukov, Director of the Historical Memory Foundation and a scholar in the Institute of History at the Russian Academy of Science, contends that they were tragic phenomena of the same Nazi plot.⁴⁹ Intended as an instructional and methodological module for educators, the book has also formally marked the entrance of an innovative discourse exploring the parallels between each event and their origins, treating them as the separate events they were while acknowledging a possible sensitivity through a shared lens, echoing Lemkin’s assertion that “Jews and Slavs faced genocide during World War II.”⁵⁰

In fact, the threat of Jewish genocide nearly reached Leningrad around the time the German army began the siege. Yitzhak Arad outlines the evidence of Einsatzgruppen active in the Leningrad region, whose intentions were to reach city limits. In particular, Einsatzgruppe A stationed their headquarters in Krasnogvardeisk in October 1941, merely 40 kilometres south of the city; concentrated in the area of Army Group North, “its final objective was Leningrad.”⁵¹ While there is no reason to believe their objective was reached, Arad specifies the activity of the murder squads leading up to the 17 September capture of Pushkin, just a few kilometres south of Leningrad, where the town’s 250 Jews were murdered in the town’s palace and buried in its gardens.⁵² Leningrad had been sealed off on the 8th of that month, and the Nazis’ first extermination camp in Chełmno would commence operations in December.

In 2008, the German government recognized around 6,000 Jewish survivors of the siege and granted them a one-time reparation payment.⁵³ The German government’s distinction between Jewish and Soviet survivors raises questions about the political utility of such an act, such as whether or not this agreement signals a change in popular perception. Notably, former residents of Leningrad and awardees for its defense during the siege were also granted payments by the Russian government in 2021.⁵⁴ Since then, significant scholarship and research have ushered in a new willingness to interact with an evolving definition of and opinion toward the siege and its position in the war, the Holocaust, and the total continental conquest which Hitler and his military exacted on much of Eastern Europe. Yet, according to Ilya Altman, the “decades-long silence on the Holocaust has had a far greater impact on government officials, Russian society, educational authorities, historical scholarship, and even on many intellectuals than in any other post-Soviet European state.”⁵⁵ Signifying its place in genocide discourse, Diukov labels both tragedies as “crimes against humanity.” For good measure, he adds that “the blockade of Leningrad is as much a crime against humanity as the Holocaust,” and that “the city was in fact turned into a gigantic ghetto starving to death.”⁵⁶

One major barrier to this approach for historians is the representational archetype with the Holocaust at centre, which stands in the way of a more inclusive genocide discourse. Still, chronological, ideological, and methodological parallels are identifiable between the siege and the onset of concentrated extermination. That the genocide “model” as traditionally derived from the Holocaust has relegated other genocidal events to the periphery of scholarship is precisely the reason for lending more visibility to the siege, while correcting for the dilemma of genocide or victimhood “competition” remains a complex and persisting process in genocide discourse.

While Diukov’s analogy to the ghetto is a challenging one, it raises important questions. In Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster, poet and scholar Polina Barskova offers a selection of creative inquiries:

What if the site of mass death is not covered with faceless barracks, not separated from the outside world by rows of barbed wire or fashioned from the rubble of adjacent villages that have been leveled for building material? What if instead this site is, like Leningrad, a city of architectural grandeur, a palimpsest consisting of myriad levels of historical, cultural, and personal memory?⁵⁷

Seen through the lens of the Holocaust and its proprietary rhetoric, the analogy of ghettoization is intellectually reasonable even if contentious. As ordered from above, German soldiers became guards of an urban encampment. Alex Kay writes of the Wehrmacht, their “military campaign in the east cannot therefore be defused from the parallel war of annihilation, while at the same time Nazi racial policy cannot be seen as distinct from the strategic context of the war, especially in the summer of 1941.”⁵⁸ On the ground, the “fundamental questions about the human condition,” expressed by diarists of Leningrad, “strongly resonate with accounts from the Holocaust and from other episodes of life in extremis.”⁵⁹

As of 2008, Russian archives were still only partially available to historians,⁶⁰ and when the Holocaust is mentioned in academic work, the number of victims is “considerably diminished.”⁶¹ In a 1996 study, 91% of Russian respondents did not know the meaning of the word “Holocaust.”⁶² Perceptions of genocide in Soviet and post-Soviet historiography thus reflects the widespread silence on the Holocaust in textbooks, an otherwise “non-subject” according to Anton Weiss-Wendt, though Soviet discourse on the Jewish Holocaust can be traced to the 1980s, when Soviet spectators of the 1982 Lebanon War judged Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as inversely genocidal.⁶³ He further describes this appropriation of the Holocaust as an “instrument of soft power” for Putin and the foreign ministry, bourgeoning in Putin’s early years in power and manifesting from Russia’s posturing as Allied liberator not only to Soviet Jews but also to the Jews as a nationality.⁶⁴ It was then that Holocaust awareness and Jewish studies began to develop in its own way.⁶⁵ In spite of Russia’s record of historical revisionism and antisemitism, research suggests prejudice against Jews declined after the Soviet collapse.⁶⁶

The Russian Jewish Congress (RJC), led by prominent Russian Jewish philanthropists, and the Research and Educational Holocaust Centre (REHC), led by Ilya Altman and Alla Gerber, a writer and social activist, are responsible for the establishment of Moscow’s Museum of Jewish Heritage and Holocaust (1998), the Museum of Jewish History in Russia (2011), and the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Centre (2012); and accordingly, for the proliferation of public consciousness throughout the country.⁶⁷ These institutions focus on Jewish tradition, culture, and history, with exhibitions on the Holocaust highlighting Jewish Red Army soldiers and the Soviet Righteous Among the Nations. Importantly, as in the case of Diukov, the primary spokespeople representing Russia’s position on the Holocaust have in some way been promoted by resources of “state largesse,”⁶⁸ which explains Putin’s persistence on the foreign and domestic front to align modern Russia to the Soviet heroism that delivered the Jews from the same Nazis who committed genocide in Leningrad.

Marking the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz, Holocaust Remembrance Day used to be observed at the same time as the Day of the Lifting of the Siege of Leningrad (27 January). However, the Russian Ministry of Education removed Holocaust Remembrance Day from the school calendar in November 2021. Upon questioning from Moscow’s Presidential Council for Civil Society and the REHC, the Ministry explained there was already a similar memorial date: the Day of Commemoration of the Genocide of the Soviet People, on 19 April.⁶⁹ While the government reinstated the memorial date in 2022, the Ministry’s explanation reveals the conflation, or substitution of, the genocide of Soviet Jews with that of the monolithic Soviet peoples.⁷⁰

Despite initial withdrawal from Holocaust Remembrance Day, Russia recently dedicated a week of memorial events to 27 January, featuring exhibitions and commemorative recognitions.⁷¹ According to the RJC, schools in most regions offered lessons on the Holocaust in 2023.⁷² Additionally, Altman reported in 2021 that “more than 150,000 schoolchildren and teachers took part in the memorial and educational events dedicated to January 27.”⁷³ Apropos of the innovative digital humanity practices of atrocity memorial sites as employed by, for instance, Auschwitz Memorial, the advent of the “Siege of Leningrad” virtual tour entered school curricula in recent years.⁷⁴ Even so, teaching Holocaust history requires more nuance in Russian secondary education, as a result of ethnicizing the memory of the war in favour of Soviet identities.⁷⁵

According to Altman, competition of state memory can be attributed to the dominant postwar narrative of Soviet heroism – thus the “painful” nature of the Holocaust in Soviet memory.⁷⁶ For the late sociologist Boris Dubin, “the Holocaust as a topic in Russian mass culture does not exist,”⁷⁷ while Altman has written extensively on the underrepresentation of the Holocaust in popular memory culture deriving from World War II.⁷⁸ The long-term consequences of the Holocaust in Russia (and Ukraine) have also been studied statistically; in places where it had its greatest effects, the socioeconomic structure and development in and of these places have lagged behind.⁷⁹ The Holocaust, whose survivors led the postwar memorialization efforts in the Soviet Union under Stalin, was subsequently omitted in state memorialization of the war, followed by an era of intense and consistent antisemitism under and proceeding Stalin’s rule.⁸⁰ Koposov’s theory on the “cult” of war remembrance and Soviet glory affirms this heroism as a dominant theme of manipulative memory discourse, while Holocaust commemoration has improved in the last two decades but remains an ancillary myth in Soviet and Russian history.⁸¹

In post-Soviet Eastern Europe, states “appropriated” Holocaust memory to suit nationalist and populist agendas.⁸² Embodied in the controversial case of Poland’s recent “Holocaust law,” the amendment criminalizes false attributions of German crimes to the Polish state. Though the harsher sections were eventually removed, those who are deemed to have “harmed the good name of the Republic of Poland or Polish nation” can still be held accountable to civil claims.⁸³ Legal and symbolic rhetoric on the protection of state sanctity and pride, whether in Polish or Russian law, then justifies the prioritization of nationalist memory over particular histories which can on their own threaten the perceived security of state majority cultures.⁸⁴

On the logic of hegemonic memory, Alexander Etkind claims: “mourning for the past is often connected to warning about the future.”⁸⁵ Therefore, when proponents of Russia’s invasion defend its present and past legitimacy, they do so with the future in mind. Recently, on the eightieth anniversary of the Soviet victory of Stalingrad, Putin strategically conjured images of the Wehrmacht: “It is incredible but it is a fact, we’re being threatened again by German Leopard tanks, with crosses painted on their armour. Once again, they are going to war with Russia on Ukrainian soil with the hands of Hitler’s followers.”⁸⁶ The glorification of Stalingrad, which briefly replaced Volgograd in name for the duration of his trip, coincides with the tribute paid to newly erected monuments of Stalin and two of his marshals, a trend in recent years.⁸⁷ By Etkind’s assessment, memorialization grants Russia entitlement to a secure future as it sees fit.

Current relations between Israel and Russia are crucial to understanding Putin’s evolving position on Russian Jewry and Holocaust memory. Weiss-Wendt locates the “building [of] historical analogies” as far back as 2003, when former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited Russia and was met with Putin’s promise to incorporate a Holocaust exhibition in the Victory Museum of Moscow.⁸⁸ Putin’s later co-endorsement with Benjamin Netanyahu’s of Moscow’s first major Holocaust monument may represent a growing fissure in hegemonic Soviet memory,⁸⁹ following years of Russian emigration and unstable diplomatic relations between the countries.⁹⁰ It was in 2012, Weiss-Wendt notes, that the Russian delegation to the UN first coupled Ukraine and the Holocaust in a statement condemning Ukraine’s vote against UN Resolution 67/154, sponsored by Russia, which summarily condemned the “glorification of Nazism.”⁹¹ Similarly, while visiting Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Centre in 2015, Putin urged his audience to resist the “violent nationalism of the Ukrainian and Baltic kind, which is based on the exact same ideology that made the Holocaust possible.”⁹²

On Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2023, World War II veterans, Israeli parliament members, and Russian diplomats came together at the Monument to the Siege of Leningrad in Jerusalem to memorialize the Soviet losses to Nazi Germany as well as Soviet Jews who perished in the Holocaust, during which the Russian Ambassador to Israel, Anatoly Viktorov, venerated the countries’ joint efforts in combatting antisemitism and historical revisionism of Nazi crimes; they “do not have a statute of limitations and should not be forgotten,” he added.⁹³ This stance positions Russia as the authentic protector of genocide memory, and liberator of fascist entities to come.⁹⁴

To be sure, genocide definition in Soviet and modern Russia is particularly complex since the term has not become as familiarized there than in the West, on account of what Michelle Penn refers to as “the Soviet Union’s relative estrangement from international law.”⁹⁵ In her article on the Soviet legal scholar Aron Trainin, Penn calls attention to the gaps in usage and adoption of “genocide” by comparing Trainin’s outlook to Lemkin’s, which is found to be quite similar despite the term’s foreignness in the Soviet Union. Modern Russia then inherited this “estrangement” but in recent years has applied the concept to their own history. Such propaganda efforts, including those pertaining to the Holocaust, reflect what Weiss-Wendt calls the Kremlin’s “hybrid warfare strategy.”⁹⁶

The instrumentalization of genocide in the case of Leningrad then exposes a continuity between the term’s historical and contemporary weaponization in defense of Russian actions.⁹⁷ By Trainin’s views, the St. Petersburg court decision seems to uphold the historical uniqueness of Soviet suffering and at the same time justify the invasion of Ukraine as a rightful declaration of war not only against Ukraine but more broadly against the spectre of genocide as the “crime of crimes.” Where Lemkin ethnicized categories of civilians, Trainin and Russian jurisprudence referred to Nazi “crimes against peaceful Soviet citizens.” The victims of Leningrad, therefore, were “peaceful Soviet civilians.” Moreover, Putin’s conceptualization of Ukraine as a fascist entity serves to permit Russia to intervene, in response to what has been deemed a false claim of genocide against Russians in Ukraine; here genocide is “inherently” fascist, and the reverse applies.⁹⁸

Conclusion

As determined by scholars and the recent court decision in St. Petersburg, the siege was a “war crime, a crime against humanity, and genocide.”⁹⁹ Given how it was planned, implemented, and then monumentalized in Soviet and Russian cultural mythology, Putin’s insistence that “the Nazis were defeated first and foremost by the Soviet people”¹⁰⁰ underlines Russian authorities’ symbolic commitment to preventing any possibility of repeating what happened in Leningrad, while also opposing legitimate criticism of Russian historical revisionism as “attempts to falsify history,” however contradictory.¹⁰¹

The politicization of the siege in Russian state memory, a product of the civil religion devoted to the Great Patriotic War, may also be viewed as a response to the growing international interest in defining, recognizing, and preventing acts of genocide.¹⁰² However, Russia’s inherited hesitation toward Holocaust memory distinguishes ethnicized suffering as second to the dominant heroic narrative, thus challenging the ways in which Russians identify and identify with genocide, as well as how genocide’s moral imperatives are manipulated to sustain public approval. As such, the court’s decision raises important questions on the use of genocide as a currency whose value is vital to understanding genocide memory in Russia today.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Noah Krasman

Noah Krasman is a master’s graduate of the Weiss Livnat International MA Programme in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa and is pursuing a thesis on the interplay between critical theories of race and the contemporary Jewish experience. He was also a research assistant in the international project Sites of Tension – Shifts in Holocaust Memory, Antisemitism, and Political Contestation in Europe based in the Weiss-Livnat International Centre for Holocaust Research and Education.

Notes

1 Article title refers to Elena Chernenko and Marianna Belen’kaia, “Velikaia otechestvennaia operatsiia (Great Patriotic Operation),” Kommersant, 3 March 2022, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/5240230.

2 “Novosti (News),” The Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation, 20 October 2022, https://epp.genproc.gov.ru/web/gprf/mass-media/news?item=77587481.

3 Irina Bykanova, “Davnie schety: pochemu blokadu Leningrada priznali genotsidom (Old Scores: Why the Siege of Leningrad was Recognized as Genocide),” Izvestia, 20 October 2022, https://iz.ru/1413349/irina-bykanova/davnie-schety-pochemu-blokadu-leningrada-priznali-genotcidom. Recognition of genocide was also granted to the locales of Novgorod, Pskov, Bryansk, Krasnodar, Oryol regions, and the Crimea. Cases of cultural genocide have been recognized in locales of Gatchina, Pavlovka, Pushkin, and Peterhof.

4 Thomas Earl Porter, “In Defense of Peace: Aron Trainin’s Contributions to International Jurisprudence,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 13, no. 1 (2019); Francine Hirsch, Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II (New York: Oxford University Press 2020); Gleb Bogush, “Aron Trainin: The Legal Mind Behind a Soviet International Criminal Law Project,” in The Dawn of a Discipline: International Criminal Justice and Its Early Exponents, ed. Frédéric Mégret and Immi Tallgren (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 260–79.

5 Richard Bidlack, “Foreword,” in Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina, Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs, and Documentary Prose (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), ix.

6 Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 160.

7 Richard Bidlack and Nikita Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 1941-1944: A New Documentary History from the Soviet Archives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 1. A death toll which includes military personnel is estimated to be between 1.6 and 2 million.

8 Alex Kay, Jeff Rutherford, and David Stahel, Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2012), 108.

9 Alexander Diukov, Obshchaia tragediia. Blokada. Kholokost. Sbornik stateĭ i metodicheskikh materialov (The Shared Tragedy: The Siege. The Holocaust. Collection of Articles and Methodological Materials) (Moscow: Historical Memory Foundation, 2020), 10.

10 Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 98.

11 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 411.

12 See M.V. Philimoshin, “O rezul’tatakh podscheta poter’ sredi grazhdanskogo naseleniia SSSR i Rossiĭskoĭ Federatsii 1941–1945 (About the Results of Calculation of Losses Among Civilian Population of the USSR and Russian Federation 1941–1945),” in Human Losses of the USSR in the Period of WWII: Collection of Articles (St. Petersburg: Russian Academy of Sciences, 1995). The report places total Soviet civilian losses at 13,684,692.

13 For example, see Bidlack and Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941, ed. Kay, Rutherford, and Stahel (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2012); Timo Vihavainen and Gabriele Schrey-Vasara, “Opfer, Täter, Betrachter.”; Mikhail Diadenko, “Blokada Leningrada v 1941–1944 gg. kak genotsid: ugolovno-pravovaia kharakteristika prestupnogo deianiia (The Siege of Leningrad in 1941–1944 as a Genocide: The Legal Characteristics of the War Crime),” Zhurnal Rossiĭskikh i Vostochnoevropeĭskikh Istoricheskikh Issledovaniĭ 15, no. 4 (2018): 133–50.

14 Early literature on the siege is limited to journalistic and empirical accounts such as that written by journalists and party officials, respectively, as Lisa Kirschenbaum explores in The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (Cambridge University Press: 2006). Alexander Werth, a British reporter who documented his time in Leningrad from May 1942 to its liberation in 1944, published his report in 1945. Its content is observational, in part anthropological, while reports on residents and officers alike with respect and admiration. Similarly, in 1946, Aleksandr Fadeev published a reportage chronicling daily life in the blockade, and includes a wealth of dialogue and a recurring optimistic humanism. Documentation by local authorities, beginning with a documentary film in 1942 called Leningrad in Battle, complements these narratives with vast collections of formal and informal records, diaries, and letters, organized by institutions such as the Leningrad Institute for Party History (during the siege), and after, by the State University and European University of Saint Petersburg, which founded the Center for Oral History and conducted multiple studies about the event. (Pörzgen, “Siege Memory,” 412; Bidlack and Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 3, 8.) Outside of St. Petersburg, Lomagin and Bidlack’s documentary history credits both an American and Russian advisory committee to its publication, both comprised of scholars from top institutions from each country. This indicates a mutual and collaborative interest in the siege, a departure from Soviet-era censorship and Cold War relations. Lomagin suggests that after 1953, in spite of Nikita Khrushchev’s “cultural ‘thaw’,” victory was the dominant motif found in Soviet publications with regards to the siege, which is astounding in light of the nearly 17,000 books on the war set into circulation between 1945 and 1991. (Bidlack and Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 4.) In the late 1950s, D.V. Pavlov and A.V. Karasev each published their own studies founded in archival sources, and after the archives opened again, Andrei Dzeniskevich’s 1992 compilation of archival materials spearheaded a new era. (Ibid., 4-7) Outside of Russia, the 1960s saw Harrison Salisbury’s comprehensive narrative The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad, which builds on an earlier 1962 publication by Leon Goure having concluded that the heroism of Leningraders was, at the least, an intentional instrument used by city officials to retain control and efficacy. (Ibid., 9) Likewise, Salisbury’s book is widely cited due to its comprehensiveness for its time, and retains a respected standing among scholars.

15 Although the Trials preceded the introduction of genocide terminology as in international law (UN Convention of 1948), the terminology had been developed by Raphael Lemkin beginning in 1944.

16 Kay, Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 10–11.

17 Timo Vihavainen and Gabriele Schrey-Vasara, “Opfer, Täter, Betrachter: Finnland und die Leningrader Blockade (Victims, Perpetrators, Bystanders: Finland and the Leningrad Blockade),” Osteuropa 61, nos. 8–9 (2011): 49. The involvement of Finland in the siege is beyond the scope of this article but no less important. See Nikolai Baryshnikov, Finland and the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1944 (St. Petersburg: Johan Beckman Institute, 2005).

18 Ibid., 50.

19 Bidlack and Lomagin, The Leningrad Blockade, 1.

20 Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 290.

21 See Yvonne Pörzgen, “Siege Memory – Besieged Memory? Heroism and Suffering in St. Petersburg Museums Dedicated to the Siege of Leningrad,” Museum & Society 14, no. 3 (2016): 412–30. Pörzgen asserts that contemporary Russian memory of the siege serves as an “appropriation” (412) of the Soviet heroism narrative and so transcends the fall of the Soviet Union.

22 Maria Lisitsina, “Sud Peterburga priznal blokadu Leningrada genotsidom (The Court of St. Petersburg Recognized the Blockade of Leningrad as Genocide),” RBC, 20 October 2022, https://www.rbc.ru/society/20/10/2022/63512b0c9a794773dd5e20ad.

23 Ibid. For research on long-term health effects, see Oksana Rotar et al., “Seventy Years After the Siege of Leningrad,” Journal of Hypertension 33, no. 1 (2015).

24 Putin reiterated this claim in January 2023. See Alona Mazurenko, “Putin Suddenly Claims that Representatives of ‘Many European Countries’ Took Part in the Siege of Leningrad,” Ukrainska Pravda, 18 January 2023, https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/01/18/7385379/.

25 Christoph Trebesch et al. “The Ukraine Support Tracker: Which Countries Help Ukraine and How?,” Kiel Institute for the World Economy, no. 2218 (February 2023).

26 See Carlos Caballero Jurado and Ramiro Bujeiro, Blue Division Soldier 1941–45: Spanish Volunteer on the Eastern Front (Oxford: Osprey, 2009).

27 Diadenko, “Blokada Leningrada v 1941–1944 gg. kak genotsid (The Siege of Leningrad in 1941–1944 as a Genocide): 133–50.

28 Lisitsina, “Sud Peterburga.”

29 Iryna Marchuk and Aloka Wanigasuriya, “Beyond the False Claim of Genocide: Preliminary Reflections on Ukraine's Prospects in Its Pursuit of Justice at the ICJ,” Journal of Genocide Studies (9 November 2022): 1. DOI: 10.1080/14623528.2022.2143528.

30 Alina Ampelonskaia, “Politicheskaia aktsiia? Zachem blokadu Leningrada hotiat priznat’ genotsidom (Political Action? Why Do They Want to Recognize the Blockade of Leningrad as Genocide?),” Fontaka, 8 September 2022, https://www.fontanka.ru/2022/09/08/71639816/.

31 Ibid.

32 According to Ampelonskaia, Russia has previously recognized acts of genocide against the Soviet people, namely in 2020 regarding the mass killings in Zhestianaia Gorka which occurred between 1942–1944. Other cases opened by Russian courts, though without verdicts, pertain to the areas of Stalingrad, Pskov, Rostov-on-Don, and Krasnodar.

33 This verdict does not seem to recognize any means of appeal. In fact, Russian Federal Law includes multiple amendments which might dissuade such action. See “Law Against Rehabilitation of Nazism,” 128-FZ (2014); “On Perpetuating the Victory of the Soviet People in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945,” 80-FZ (1995, 2022); “On Perpetuating the Memory of Those who Died Defending the Fatherland,” 4292–1 (1993, 2022).

34 Ben Meiches, The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 173.

35 Martin Shaw, “Russia’s Genocidal War in Ukraine: Radicalization and Social Destruction,” Journal of Genocide Research (2023): 2. DOI: 10.1080/14623528.2023.2185372. Shaw focuses on the challenges posed by the politicization of genocide, alongside the intellectual debate on the gaps between intent and action. See also: Shaw, “The General Hybridity of War and Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 9, no. 3 (2007): 461–73.

36 Joscha Weber, “Vladimir Putin’s False War Claims,” Deutsche Welle, 2 February 2022, https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-do-vladimir-putins-justifications-for-going-to-war-against-ukraine-add-up/a-60917168.

37 Izabella Tabarovsky and Eugene Finkel, “Statement on the War in Ukraine by Scholars of Genocide, Nazism and World War II,” Jewish Journal, 27 February 2022, https://jewishjournal.com/news/worldwide/345515/statement-on-the-war-in-ukraine-by-scholars-of-genocide-nazism-and-world-war-ii.

38 Shpend Kursani, “Beyond Putin’s Analogies: The Genocide Debate on Ukraine and the Balkan Analogy Worth Noting,” Journal of Genocide Research (2022): 5. DOI: 10.1080/14623528.2022.2099633.

39 Nikolay Koposov, “‘The Only Possible Ideology’: Nationalizing History in Putin’s Russia,” Journal of Genocide Research 24, no. 2 (11 July 2022): 205–15. DOI: 10.1080/14623528.2021.1968148.

40 Chernenko and Belen’kaia, “Great Patriotic Operation,” Kommersant, 3 March 2022, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/5240230.

41 A. Dirk Moses, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 34–43.

42 Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 2.

43 Ibid., 13.

44 Ibid., 1.

45 Kirschenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 4. Alexis Peri presents an exemplary illustration of this master-narrative in her exploration of state revision in Soviet poet Vera Inber’s wartime writing and postwar publication. See Alexis Peri, “The Art of Revision: How Vera Inber Scripted the Siege and Her Self during World War II,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 19, no. 1 (2018): 143-174.

46 For more on representations of the siege in Russian memory culture, see Tatiana Voronina, Pomnit’ po-nashemu: sotsrealisticheskii istorizm i blokada Leningrada (Remembering Our Way: Socialist-Realist Historicism and the Siege of Leningrad) (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2018).

47 Kathleen E. Smith, “A Monument for Our Times?,” Europe-Asia Studies 71, no. 8 (2019): 1.

48 Moses, The Problems of Genocide, 477.

49 Diukov, Obshchaia Tragediia, 2-21. Diukov is a controversial historian due his record of negationist and distorted perspectives of Soviet history, and reliance on archives from the Federal Security Service to which other researchers have restricted access. Therefore the publication at hand is analyzed with this in mind and serves only as an example of emergent scholarship in siege historiography.

50 Scott Straus, “Contested Meanings and Conflicting Imperatives: A Conceptual Analysis of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 3, no. 3 (2001): 361. DOI: 10.1080/14623520120097189.

51 Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, 126.

52 Ibid., 196.

53 “70 Years After Leningrad Siege, Working for Its Victims,” Claims Conference, 8 September 2011, http://www.claimscon.org/2011/09/newsleningrad-siege/.

54 Maria Lisitsina and Anna Gromova, “Blokadnikam Leningrada vyplatiat po 50 tys. rub. (Blockade Survivors of Leningrad Will Be Paid 50 Thousand Rubles Each),” RBC, 17 September 2021, https://amp.rbc.ru/rbcnews/society/17/09/2021/614477679a794703e91dc01d.

55 Ilya Altman, “Memorializatsiia Kholokosta v Rossiĭskoĭ Federatsii: sostoianie, problemy, tendentsii (Holocaust Memorialization in the Russian Federation: Status, Problems, Trends),” in Evroaziatskiĭ Evreĭskiĭ Ezhegodnik, Pallada (2007/2008): 1.

56 Diukov, Obshchaia Tragediia, 7, 11. Such an analogy admits to intellectual challenges given Diukov’s controversial scholarship and position within national memory institutions.

57 Polina Barskova, Besieged Leningrad: Aesthetic Responses to Urban Disaster (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2017), 4.

58 Kay, Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 319.

59 Peri, The War Within, 9.

60 Altman, “Memorializatsiia Kholokosta,” 230.

61 Altman, “Holocaust Memory in Modern Russia,” 58.

62 Ilya Altman, “Der Stellenwert des Holocaust im historischen Gedächtnis Russlands (The Place of the Holocaust in Russian Historical Memory),” in Erinnerung an Diktatur und Krieg Brennpunkte des kulturellen Gedächtnisses zwischen Russland und Deutschland seit 1945, ed. Andreas Wirsching, Jürgen Zarusky, Alexander Tschubarjan, and Viktor Ischtschenko (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015), 214.

63 Anton Weiss-Wendt, “Holocaust Discourse in Putin’s Russia as a Foreign Policy Tool,” in The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, ed. David L. Hoffman (London and New York: Routledge, 2022), 276.

64 Anton Weiss-Wendt, Putin’s Russia and the Falsification of History (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 185.

65 For an overview of the development of Jewish studies in modern Russia, see Victoria Mochanova, “Jewish Studies in Russia in the Post-Communist Era,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 10, no. 1 (2011): 119–33.

66 Thomas Sherlock, “Antisemitism in Russia,” Post-Soviet Affairs 38, no. 3 (2022): 175–205.

67 Victoria Mochalova, “Jewish Museums in Moscow,” in New Directions in the History of the Jews in the Polish Lands, ed. Anthony Polonky, Hanna Węgrzynek, and Andzrej Żbikowski (Brookline, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018), 150–69.

68 Weiss-Wendt, Putin’s Russia, 217.

69 “V Rossii iz shkol’noĭ programmy ischez Den’ pamiati zhertv Kholokosta: pravozashchitniki pishut pis’ma (Holocaust Memorial Day has Disappeared from the School Curriculum in Russia: Human Rights Activists Write Letters),” Channel 9, 30 November 2021, https://www.9tv.co.il/item/36945.

70 “Den’ pamiati zhertv Kholokosta – v obrazovatel’nom kalendare Rossii (Holocaust Memorial Day in the Russian Educational Calendar),” Nauchno-prosvetitel’nyĭ Tsentr (NPC) «Kholokost», 12 July 2022, https://holocf.ru/%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%8C-%D0%BF%D0%B0%D0%BC%D1%8F%D1%82%D0%B8-%D0%B6%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%82%D0%B2-%D1%85%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0-%D0%B2-%D0%BE%D0%B1%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%BE%D0%B2/.

71 “V Rossii nachinaetsia nedelia pamiati zhertv Kholokosta (Holocaust Remembrance Week Begins in Russia),” РИА Novosti, 16 January 2023, https://ria.ru/20230116/kholokost-1845063584.html.

72 Ibid.

73 Altman, “Holocaust Memory in Modern Russia,” 57–8.

74 L. V. Kalinina, I. M. Popova, and Iu. A. Riabtseva, “Virtual’naia jekskursiia “Blokadnyĭ Leningrad” - sredstvo patrioticheskogo vospitaniia mladshikh shkol’nikov (Virtual Tour ‘Siege of Leningrad’ as a Means of Patriotic Education of Younger School Students),” Nachal’naia shkola, no. 5 (2021): 16–23.

75 Olga Konkka, “‘Millions of Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Jews, People of All Ethnicities,’” Holocaust Studies, no 1 (2023): 39–65. See also: Olga Konkka, “Teaching and Remembering the Great Patriotic War in Soviet Schools,” in The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, ed. David. L. Hoffman (London and New York: Routledge, 2022), 86–101.

76 Ilya Altman, “The Holocaust in the Occupied USSR and its Memorialization in Contemporary Russia,” in Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe, ed. Alex Kay and David Stahel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 219.

77 Boris Dubin, “Vtoraia mirovaia voĭna i Kholokost v rossiĭskom obshchestvennom soznanii (World War II and the Holocaust in Russian Public Consciousness),” Uroki Istorii, 14 November 2013, https://urokiistorii.ru/articles/boris-dubin-vtoraja-mirovaja-vojna-i-hol.

78 Ilya Altman, “Holocaust Memory in Modern Russia,” Public Policy.bg 12, no. 4 (2021); Altman, “The Holocaust in the Occupied USSR” (2018).

79 Daron Acemoglu, Tarek A. Hassan, and James A. Robinson, “Social Structure and Development: A Legacy of the Holocaust in Russia,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 126, no. 2 (2011): 895–946.

80 Ibid., 899. On the presence and absence of Holocaust awareness in wartime Soviet Union, see Karel C. Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

81 Nikolay Koposov, “Holocaust Remembrance, the Cult of the War, and Memory Laws in Putin’s Russia,” in Memory Laws and Historical Justice, ed. Elazar Barkan and Ariella Lang (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 131–65.

82 Jelena Subotić, “The Appropriation of Holocaust Memory in Post-Communist Eastern Europe,” Modern Languages Open 1, no. 22 (2020): 1–8.

83 Daniel Tilles, “One Year On From the ‘Holocaust Law’ Dispute, Poland’s Government Has Won,” Notes From Poland, 29 January 2019, https://notesfrompoland.com/2019/01/29/one-year-on-from-the-holocaust-law-dispute-polands-government-has-won/. Poland’s ruling political party, Law and Justice, has notably demonstrated this approach by vitalizing the Institute of National Remembrance, which has recently been criticized for its politicization of history. See Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, “The Uses and the Abuses of Education About the Holocaust in Poland After 1989,” Holocaust Studies 25, no. 3 (2019).

84 One such example can be found in the legal case of historians Jan Grabwoski and Barbara Engelking, who were sued in civil court for libel by the niece of a man mentioned in the scholars’ recent two-volume work, Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties in Occupied Poland. Ultimately, a Warsaw judge ordered Grabowski and Engelking to publically apologize for include “inaccurate information,” but rejected the demand for damages by the plaintiff. This case, for many other scholars and institutions, represented a major threat to academic freedom in alleged defense of Polish national pride. See Andrew Higgins, “Polish Court Orders Scholars to Apologize Over Holocaust Study,” New York Times, 9 February 2021.

85 Alexander Etkind, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 3.

86 Matt Murphy, “Ukraine War: 80 Years On, We are Facing German Tanks Again – Putin,” BBC, 3 February 2023, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64502504. Notably, numerous other countries besides Germany have sent support to Ukraine, including tanks.

87 Tatiana Gomazova, “Putin Evokes Stalingrad to Predict Victory Over 'New Nazism' in Ukraine,” Reuters, 3 February 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-expected-channel-stalingrad-victory-key-moment-ukraine-war-2023-02-02/.

88 Weiss-Wendt, “Holocaust Discourse in Putin’s Russia,” 278–9.

89 Cnaan Liphsiz, “Putin Attends Unveiling of Moscow’s First Major Holocaust Monument,” The Times of Israel, 5 June 2019.

90 Mark N. Katz, “Russia and Israel: An Improbable Friendship,” in Russia’s Return to the Middle East: Building Sandcastles?, ed. Nicu Popescu and Stanislav Secrieru (Paris: European Union Institute for Security Studies, 2018): 103–108.

91 Weiss-Wendt, “Holocaust Discourse in Putin’s Russia,” 285.

92 Ibid., 287.

93 “V Ierusalime v Den’ pamiati Kholokosta vozlozhili venki k monumentu blokadnikam Leningrada (In Jerusalem, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, Wreaths Were Laid at the Monument to the Siege of Leningrad),” TASS, 27 January 2023, https://tass.ru/obschestvo/16903735/amp.

94 On Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2019, Oded Forer, an Israeli politician and grandson of a Holocaust survivor, conflated the two events. See Oded Forer, “Kholokost i blokada Leningrada – prestupleniia odnogo masshtaba (Holocaust and Blockade of Leningrad – Crimes of the Same Scale),” Channel 9, 27 January 2019, https://archive.9tv.co.il/news/2019/01/27/266580-2aga.html.

95 Michelle Penn, “‘Genocide is Fascism in Action’: Aron Trainin and Soviet Portrayals of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 22, no. 1 (2019): 3. DOI: 10.1080/14623528.2019.1651558.

96 Weiss-Wendt, “Holocaust Discourse in Putin’s Russia,” 291.

97 Penn, “‘Genocide is Fascism in Action,’” 8.

98 Ibid., 13.

99 Bykanova, “Davnie schety.”

100 David L. Hoffmann, “Introduction: The Politics of Commemoration in the Soviet Union and Contemporary Russia,” in The Memory of the Second World War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, ed. David. L. Hoffman (London and New York: Routledge, 2022), 1.

101 Weiss-Wendt, “Holocaust Discourse in Putin’s Russia,” 288.

102 For further analysis, see Nikita Petrov, “The Soviet Past and the 1945 Victory Cult as Civil Religion in Contemporary Russia,” in The Future of the Soviet Past: The Politics of History in Putin’s Russia, ed. Anton Weiss-Wendt and Nanci Adler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 2021.