Soviet Holocaust Retribution in Lithuania, 1944–64

Abstract

This article is a microanalysis of Soviet Holocaust retribution in four cases studies, with focus on Lithuania. It was difficult to disentangle crimes against Jews and crimes against Soviet power in cases involving high-ranking nationalists. Soviet authorities had a strong motivation to condemn nationalist leaders and to justify their execution or deportation to the Gulag, but were not as strongly invested in the outcome of the trials involving ordinary people. Punishing collaborators in Nazi crimes consistently remained an aim in and of itself (but was not to be pursued at the expense of other state campaigns). The authorities and locals pursued justice for murdered Jews while simultaneously utilizing the Jewish wartime fate in the pursuit of broader political aims during postwar Sovietization. In the broader postwar Soviet prosecution of treason and collaboration, authorities and defendants navigated competing understandings of personal participation (lichnoe uchastie) in atrocities and the (ir)redeemability of defendants.