The Kharkov trial can be characterized as such a defensible show trial. As Arieh Kochavi observes:
American correspondents who followed the trial [in Kharkov] and attended the hanging of the convicted men were generally convinced of the guilt of the accused and of genuineness of the Soviets’ charges of organized atrocities. They thought that the Russians had been punctilious in their observance of the legal proprieties of the trial and found no evidence of duress. The self-abasing testimony of the accused, the journalists observed, was reminiscent of the purge trials of the mid-1930s. Still, this was largely attributed to the care that had been exercised in selecting those who were placed on trial.72
Unlike a paradigmatic “show trial,” whose purpose is to stage-manage falsehoods, the defendants on the dock in Kharkov were indeed guilty of the crimes accused. From the perspective of Greg Dawson, whose mother and aunt are the last-known living survivors of the Drobitsky Yar massacre, the Kharkov trial, “[s]ymbolically at least, was the trial of the men who murdered my grandparents and great-grandparents at Drobitsky Yar…. If this was a ‘show trial,’ it was because the victims were showing the perpetrators far more justice than they deserved.”73 Soviet Jewish lawyer Aaron N. Trainin, in the aftermath of the trial, correctly observed that in the Kharkov trial defendants “were tried for the misdeeds which they themselves committed, with their own hands, for the crimes committed by them personally.”74 Justice, therefore, was meted out in Kharkov by the Soviet judges, albeit through the vehicle most familiar to Soviet jurists at the time, the Stalinist show trial.
The Aftermath
At the outset of the Kharkov trial, Ehrenburg wrote the following while sitting in the press box:
I waited a long time for this hour. I waited for it on the roads to France…. I waited for it in the villages of Belarussia, and in the cities of … Ukraine. I waited for the hour when these words would be heard: “The trial begins.” Today I heard them. The trial commences. On the dock, beside a traitor, three Germans. These are the first. But these are not the last. We will remember the 15th of December—on this day we stopped speaking about a future trial for the criminals. We began to judge them.75
Ehrenburg’s words did not come to pass. The Kharkov trial was not succeeded by other Soviet public trials of captured Nazis. After Kharkov, Stalin acceded to Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s request not to conduct any more high-profile prosecutions of captured Germans for fear that the Nazis would do the same to captured Western POWs. The documentary film of the trial was soon taken off Soviet screens.
For the rest of the war, the Soviets returned to their pre-Kharkov trial behavior of trying captured Nazis and collaborators in secret. The only evidence of such trials was their aftermath: the sudden appearance of gallows with dead men hanging from them.
After the war, the Soviet Union once again began publicly trying war criminals. The first postwar public trial took place in 1947, when ten low-ranking captured Germans were tried in the western Russian city of Smolensk. Other similar trials followed. Prusin notes: “As in the Krasnodar and Kharkov cases, the trials were held to pursue political and ideological objectives. The timing of the trials was chosen carefully to correspond with the Nuremberg Military Tribunal.”76 Sporadic trials of Nazis took place in the Soviet Union well into the 1960s. In total, it appears that the Soviets convicted approximately 25,000 German and Austrian Nazis, with most of the trials taking place within a few years after the end of the war.77
Additionally, over a million German POWs in the Soviet Union and other parts of Eastern Europe were used as laborers to rebuild the destruction that resulted from the war. Many of these men were not returned to Germany until many years after the war ended.78 It would not be until 1955 that the last surviving German POWs returned from the U.S.S.R.
Formation of Holocaust Memory in Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras
In the Soviet Union, immediately after the war, discussion of the mass murder of Soviet Jews during German occupation was repressed, as it had been during the war and at the Kharkov trial. According to Zvi Gitelman, “the term ‘Holocaust’ [was] completely unknown in the Soviet literature. In discussions of the destruction of the Jews, the terms unichtozhenie (‘annihilation’) or katastrofa (‘catastrophe’) [had] been used.”79 Gitelman adds: “It is only recently [as of 1997] that ‘Holocaust,’ transliterated from English [as Holocost/Xолокост]” appears in the public vocabulary.80
Gitelman provides a leading rationale behind the official Soviet policy of treating the suffering of all nationalities and ethnic groups in the Soviet Union under German occupation equally, encapsulated in the above-noted Soviet slogan “Do Not Divide the Dead”:
[N]o country in the West lost as many of its non-Jewish citizens in the war against Nazism as did the U.S.S.R., so that the fate of the Jews in France, Holland, Germany, or Belgium stands in sharper contrast to that of their co-nationals or co-religionists than it does in the East…. Thus the Soviet Union did treat the issue differently from the way it was treated in most other countries, whether socialist or not, though the Soviet treatment was not uniform … the Holocaust was seen as an integral part of a larger phenomenon—the murder of civilians—whether Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Gypsies, or other nationalities. It was said to be a natural consequence of racist fascism…. If the Nazis gave the Jews ‘special treatment,’ the Soviets would not.81
With respect to discussion of the Holocaust of Ukrainian Jews, Dawson explains: “It’s been said that history is written by the winners, but in the history of the Holocaust it’s as though the chapter on Ukraine had been written by Himmler himself. For all practical purposes, the pages are blank.”82 Dawson reflects:
The slaughter by gunfire in Ukraine should have become Hitler’s original sin and Babi Yar—where 34,000 Jews were murdered in two days—the darkest icon of the Shoah. But when the war ended, Stalin abetted Himmler’s cover-ups by throwing an Iron Curtain around his crime scene, off limits to writers, journalists, and historians. The only deaths in the Great War to defend the Motherland would be “Russian” deaths. And so, by default, the liberation of Auschwitz and other camps became the defining images of the Holocaust. Hitler’s crime in Ukraine began to fade slowly from public view and consciousness till it became what it is today—barely a footnote in popular understanding of the Holocaust. 83
After the war, some effort was made by Soviet Jews themselves to bring to light the suffering of the Jewish people at the hands of the Germans and local collaborators. In 1946, Soviet Jewish writers Ilya Ehrenberg and Vassily Grossman published the Black Book in the United States and other foreign countries. The Black Book became the “best source of primary material on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union,”84 but was banned from publication in the U.S.S.R. because, in the eyes of Soviet officials, it emphasized that “the Germans murdered and plundered Jews only. The reader unwittingly gets the impression that the Germans fought against the U.S.S.R. for the sole purpose of destroying Jews.” 85 The volume only made its appearance in Russia and the other former Soviet states in 1993, after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Despite attempts by Soviet officials to restrict the memory of the atrocities committed against the Jews during the war, Soviet Jews did attempt to commemorate their special suffering. One of the first gatherings to commemorate Holocaust victims took place in Kharkov in January 1945 to mark the anniversary of the Drobitsky Yar massacre. The Drobitsky Yar commemoration was an exception. Public commemoratory gatherings and burials became forbidden, though “appropriate institutions” such as synagogues were