and Political Communication in Stalinism. Possibilities and Limits of the Sayable,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 62, no. 2 (2014): 255–272.
3 For example, Malte Griesse, Communiquer, juger et agir sous Staline. La personne prise entre ses liens avec les proches et son rapport au système politico-idéologique (Frankfurt a.M. [et al.]: Lang, 2011).
4 In this book, the terms “refugee” and “evacuee” are used interchangeably to denote all those Jews and non-Jews who moved out of the threatened Soviet regions, whether under a government-initiated program or independently, unless stated otherwise. By the same token, the terms “evacuation,” “flight” and “escape” are also used interchangeably to describe the ways in which people moved out of the threatened Soviet regions, whether under a government-initiated program or on their own, unless stated otherwise.
5 Karel C. Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 134–166.
6 On Soviet newspapers in the 1920s, that is, during the stage framing this perception, see Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
7 The emphasis here is on the words “relatively stable” and “some.” This does not mean that political and moral considerations in their deliberations were entirely non-existent. But several hundred testimonies, analyzed in my book (Kiril Feferman, The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus [Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2016]), roughly half of them pertaining to the Caucasus, point to the overwhelming importance of economic factors when the Jews were discussing their motives for evacuation from this region.
8 Anna Shternshis, “Between Life and Death: Why Some Soviet Jews Decided to Leave and Others to Stay in 1941,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 15, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 478–479.
9 For example, Mordechai Altshuler, “The Distress of Jews in the Soviet Union in the Wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact,” Yad Vashem Studies 36, no. 2 (2008): 85–88.
10 Unfortunately, the archives in Rostov and Moscow can only provide fragmentary material, inadequate for establishing the dimensions not only which share of the evacuees the Jews constituted (comparing the relative number of Jews and non-Jews in the local population), but also of the general evacuation program in the city. It seems likely that most records were destroyed or lost during the two occupations of Rostov-on-Don.
11 Scholarship on this topic is rapidly expanding. See, for example, Arkadi Zeltser, “How the Jewish Intelligentsia Created the Jewishness of the Jewish Hero,” in Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering, ed. Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2014), 104–129. Cf. David Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011).
12 Vladimir L. Piankevich, “The Family under Siege: Leningrad, 1941–1944,” The Russian Review 75 (2016): 107–137.
13 For example, Albert Kaganovich, “Jewish Refugees and Soviet Authorities during World War II,” Yad Vashem Studies 38, no. 2 (2010): 85–121. Cf. Vadim Dubson, “On the Problem of the Evacuation of Soviet Jews in 1941 (New Archival Sources),” Jews in Eastern Europe 3, no. 40 (1999): 37–56.
14 For example, Albert Kaganovich, “Evreiskie bezhentsy v Kazakhstane vo vremia Vtoroi Mirovoi voiny,” in Alexander Baron (ed.), Istoriia, pamiat′, liudi. Materialy V mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii (Almaty: Assotsiatsiia “Mitsva,” 2011), 13–31. Cf. Zeev Levin, “Antisemitism and the Jewish Refugees in Soviet Kirgizia, 1942,” Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe 1 (2003), 191–203.
15 The notable exception is Shternshis, “Between Life and Death,” 477–504.
16 On the Bolshevik policies in housing question before the war, see Steven E. Harris, Communism on Tomorrow Street: Mass Housing and Everyday Life after Stalin (Baltimore, MD: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press and the Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 45–47, 49–52, 55–70.
17 We can only speculate on why this movement of evacuees into the North Caucasus happened: for example, none of the Ginsburg respondents observed this movement (highly unlikely), or they did not deem it worth mentioning in their letters (more plausible).
18 On this issue, see Christina Winkler, “Rostov-on-Don 1942: A Little-Known Chapter of the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 30, no. 1 (2016): 105–130.
19 For a brief overview of the Soviet newspapers during the War, see S. V. Shpakovskaia, “Sovetskie gazety v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny,” Voprosy istorii 5 (2014): 64–74.
Part One
Historical Background
CHAPTER 1.1
The Ginsburg Family in the North Caucasus
The Ginsburg family came originally from Odessa, which was probably the most important trading center of the Russian Empire and a major harbor on the Black Sea. Home to more than 125,000 Jews in 1897, the city was a flourishing center of Jewish economic life from the second half of the nineteenth century.1 However, it was also a difficult place for many Jews to live in; most of them could only eke out a miserable existence in the city as small-time traders, shopkeepers, and workshop employers.2 They faced vigorous competition with one another—every third inhabitant of Odessa was Jewish—and with non-Jews.
The new generation of the Ginsburgs: the sisters Manya (Monya), Anna (Anya), Elizaveta (Liza), and their brother Efim, were born in Odessa between 1890 and 1897. It is likely that their parents (father Gedaliya and mother Hanna-Rachel) were frustrated by the tough competition and the need to provide for their growing family. It is also likely that they were scared into leaving Odessa, especially after the pogrom that broke out in the city in October 1905, which led to the murder of some 400 Jews—the bloodiest pogrom in the Russian Empire up to that point.3 As a result, Gedaliya and Hanna-Rachel took their four children and left Odessa, somewhere before 1912, probably soon after the pogrom.
The Ginsburgs chose to move to the city of Rostov-on-Don, situated only 800 km to the east of Odessa, where they managed to survive the turbulent years of World War I and the Russian Civil War. When they arrived in Rostov-on-Don, it already had a substantial Jewish population. The city, founded in 1749, had its own distinct history, including the history of its Jewish residents. It was a part of what we refer to today as the “North Caucasus,” all of which now belongs to the Russian Federation. The region first came under the sway of the Russian Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Russian penetration into these territories was met with occasional fierce armed resistance by the local inhabitants.4 Still, the Empire prevailed, and from the early 1860s onwards, the region was subdued.5
The settlement of Ashkenazi Jews in most of the North Caucasus region was generally prohibited, as the area was situated outside the Pale of Settlement.6 The only exceptions were the cities of Rostov-on-Don and Taganrog, which, until 1887, were part of the Ekaterinoslav guberniya (province), and thus part of the Pale. The first reference to a Jewish presence in the North Caucasus can be traced back to 1800, when ten Jewish meshchane (petty bourgeois) were registered as residents of the Rostov uezd (area).7 As the Russian penetration into the region brought peace and prospects for economic development, Jews began to flock to the North Caucasus. Their prospects were doubtless better in these
