Soviet Russians under Nazi Occupation: Fragile Loyalties in World War II (New Studies in European History) by Johannes Due Enstad

Author:Johannes Due Enstad [Enstad, Johannes Due]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2018-06-29T23:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

More than anything, Soviet Russian peasants resented the collective farm system and the fact that the land and its fruits were at the near complete disposal of an oppressive and exploitative state. The German invasion gave rise to spontaneous decollectivization and ignited peasant hopes of land reform. The New Agrarian Order of 1942 kindled those hopes with real improvements, strengthening pro-German attitudes among the northwest Russian peasantry. At the same time, however, deportations to Germany and forced labor mobilization created major grievances and sowed doubt as to whether the Germans were a force for positive change after all. The impact of these policies was not equally heavy in all districts and villages, but their overall effect was to embitter a large part of the population.

If decollectivization was a major rupture in the life of Russian peasants, German forced labor probably felt more like business as usual. As one historian has pointed out, “an essential pre-condition of being able to perceive forced labor as a massive encroachment upon personal freedom rights is that a previous experience of ‘free labor’ has been made.”110 In the 1930s, peasants in northwest Russia were also liable to be deported to Siberia as “kulaks” or sent away from the farm to work for weeks and months, without pay, in logging camps or on construction projects.111 In this light, German forced labor measures were nothing essentially new.

Yet in some respects, such as the scale and intensity of the forced labor mobilization and the material destitution of the workers, the burdens imposed on the peasants appear heavier than that was previously the case. The violence mattered as well. The experience of being beaten and humiliated in the workplace, perhaps more forceful for its happening at the hands of a foreign occupier rather than “one’s own,” surely contributed to much anti-German scorn.

Regardless of what the peasantry thought about the burdens imposed on them by the Germans, their positive experience of decollectivization was real and widespread. Moreover, other parallel developments, this time relating to the Orthodox Church, were also bringing significant change to many people’s lives. Orthodox Christianity was deeply ingrained in Russian peasant culture and traditions, and it was politically charged – peasants had used the language of religion to denounce and protest against the Stalinist assault on their way of life during the 1930s, spreading apocalyptic rumors and imagining Bolshevism as a satanic power. As we shall see in Chapter 6, the political potential inherent in the religious question was not lost on the Germans.

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