In the summer of 1944, the Red Army reconquered Belorussia, one of the Soviet western republics, from the Germans.1 Yet while people were overjoyed to see Nazi occupation end, and while many greeted the Red Army as liberators, they were also apprehensive about the return of Soviet power as such.

In her study The Repressive Factors of the USSR’s Internal Policy and Everyday Life of the Belarusian Society (1944–1953), Iryna Kashtalian analyzes everyday life in Soviet Belorussia from the end of Nazi occupation to the death of Stalin. The focus is on the ways in which individuals were confronted with and suffered from, but also adapted to and resisted state demands, coercion and repression. The analysis is based on three oral history collections – interviews that Kashtalian conducted herself, now available through the Belarusian Oral History Archive at www.nashapamiac.org; the Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation; and the Forced Labor 1939–1945 Archive accessible through Free University Berlin –, which are complemented with Soviet state documents mostly from the National Archive of Belarus.

The book is divided into three chapters. The first (and longest) chapter examines the effects that state policies and practices had on different population groups. For the returning Soviet authorities, the task that lay ahead was enormous: to rebuild the state in an utterly destroyed region, and at a time of great population movement. In the first part of the chapter, Kashtalian focuses on three social groups, identified by her as workers, peasants and the intelligentsia. In the process of economic reconstruction, the state relied heavily on well-established disciplinary regimes. As little as running five minutes late for work was considered absence from work, which could, at worst, result in a short prison term. With the help of the passport system, the peasants, just like in the 1930s, remained tied to the collective farms. Scores of young people were forcibly recruited to attend schools for industrial training (FZO) in other parts of the Soviet Union. Many members of the intelligentsia (writers, teachers, professors, artists), and in particular those who were Jewish, became targets of the so-called anti-cosmopolitan campaign.

In the second part of the first chapter, Kashtalian analyzes three new social groups – war veterans, ‘traitors,’ and ‘Westerners’ (zapadniki) – that emerged from the war, which in eastern Belorussia began in June 1941, and in western Belorussia in September 1939, when the Soviets annexed the region from Poland. War veterans constituted a relatively privileged group within postwar Belorussian society, and often received preferential treatment, for example through access to higher education. ‘Westerners,’ that is, inhabitants of western Belorussia, formerly northeastern Poland, were considered less reliable. This was the case with individuals deemed ethnic Poles, but it was also the case with ethnic Belarusians, seeing as their prewar socialization had taken place in Poland. At the bottom of the social hierarchy stood individuals suspected of having been disloyal to the Soviet Union during the war, including not just former policemen or village heads, but also civilians who returned from forced labor in Germany.

The second chapter examines how the war’s economic and social repercussions made everyday life a constant challenge for inhabitants of Belorussia. Scarcity of goods was the norm, as was a lack of housing. Crimes rates were high, especially in the cities. For many years after the war, peasants on the collective farms in eastern Belorussia received no payment for their labor, and still had to pay high taxes. The state cracked down hard on those accused of stealing from the state: Theft of grain from the collective farm, the most common offense during these years, could result in a labor camp sentence of up to several years.

The Soviet postwar state under Stalin, then, did not differ much from its prewar version: it continued to rely on coercion and punitive measures as a means to mobilize and discipline the population. At the same time, room existed for the individual to try to get around certain restrictions or bend the rules. Given the dire shortage of workers, some factory bosses turned a blind eye to latecomers. Collective farm members managed to bribe officials so that they could leave their impoverished villages. Trying to get by, people from eastern Belorussia travelled to markets in western Belorussia (whose agricultural sector was only collectivized from 1949 on and thus more productive in the first postwar years), and resold the food back home at a higher price.

In her study, Iryna Kashtalian has gathered a wealth of interesting historical material and individual stories. The introduction is quite technical, and also contains unnecessary repetition, but the actual chapters are much more engaging. The book is particularly convincing where it shows how individuals in Belorussia pursued different strategies to minimize or counter the effects that the state’s disciplinary and coercive measures had on their lives. Kashtalian’s study is a significantly expanded version of her dissertation, which, due to its critical assessment of the Soviet state, she was unable to defend in Belarus. In that sense, the book is very different from mainstream historiography in today’s Belarus. In other ways, however, it remains a product of its academia. What is missing is an analytical engagement with arguments that scholars working on that time period have made for other Soviet republics.2 This national focus on Belorussia, representative of most historical studies written in Belarus, not only seems too artificially shaped by today’s nation-state perspective. It also misses out on the opportunity to connect the history of Belarus to larger historiographical debates. What the benefits of that might have been becomes particularly clear in the third, and last, chapter.

Building on the first two chapters, the third chapter analyzes in detail the behavioral strategies that inhabitants of Belorussia employed in response to the demands of the Soviet state. People’s responses, Kashtalian argues, can either be categorized as active adaptation, passive resistance, or active resistance. People who actively adapted were those who, for example, sought senior positions in the party and administration. Passive resistance included sending a complaint letter to the authorities, trying to evade collective farm life by moving to the city, or, if possible, even leaving the Soviet Union itself (under the conditions of the 1944–1946 Soviet-Polish population exchange). Active resisters were members of anti-Soviet nationalist formations, in the case of Belorussia primarily members of the Polish Armia Krajowa, but also others. What that framework cannot explain, however, are statements made by some of Kashtalian’s interview partners who, despite the hardships that they recalled, “began to glamorize the Soviet regime” and justified the state’s repressive measures (p. 230). Similarly, Kashtalian notes that a large part of the population was imbued with Soviet ideals and thus trusted the press. For her, these people were brainwashed by Soviet propaganda (p. 230), or else had distorted perceptions of reality (p. 244). However, if one takes oral history interviews as authentic expressions of people’s understanding of self and their interpretations of historical events, then that should pertain to all aspects of their personal stories. In Kashtalian’s analysis, there is no space for individuals who genuinely believed in some aspects of the Soviet project and at the same time rejected others, or believed in conflicting ideas. Arguably, her argument would have been more nuanced had it taken into account the rich literature on individual agency and subjectivity in Stalin’s Soviet Union, which is missing from her study.3

In short, Iryna Kashtalian’s book shows well the different hardships, many of these a result of the war yet exacerbated by Soviet postwar state practices that inhabitants of Belorussia were confronted with in the years from 1944 to 1953. Analytically, however, the study would have benefitted from engagement with larger scholarly debates within Soviet history.

Notes:
1 I am following the convention to speak of Belorussia when referring to the Soviet Socialist Republic, and of Belarus when referring to the post-1991 independent state.
2 For example, Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War. The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution, Princeton 2001; Jeffrey Jones, Everyday Life and the “Reconstruction” of Soviet Russia During and After the Great Patriotic War, 1943–1948, Bloomington 2008; and more recently, although not in time for Kashtalian’s study: Vanessa Voisin, L’URSS contre ses traîtres. L’Épuration soviétique, 1941–1955, Paris 2015.
3 Among the most important: Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain. Stalinism as a Civilization, Berkeley 1995; Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind. Writing a Diary under Stalin, Cambridge, MA 2006; and more recently, although not in time for Kashtalian’s study: Alexis Peri, The War Within. Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad, Cambridge, MA 2017.