Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands (2012) drew public attention to the fact that the Holocaust was, by and large, an Eastern European phenomenon, both in terms of victims and geography. Scholars of this topic have known this, but much of that work relies substantially on evidence left by Nazis and survivors whose stories have made it to the West. This edited volume seeks to begin a conversation that broadens our discussion of the Holocaust by looking at the event from the Soviet perspective, to examine “a Renaissance in the English-language scholarship of the Russian and Soviet field, moving it from the margins to a new position of prominence” (viii). The book thus joins similar discussions in which the Holocaust is increasingly seen as definitively connected to other fields and historical foci, rather than as a discipline that can be studied in some historical vacuum. As Zvi Gitelman concludes in her contribution to the collection, “The Shoah should not be sloughed off from mainstream courses and departments to ‘ethnic studies’” (188).

The present volume examines, as the title suggests, the phenomenon of local collaboration in the murder of the Jews, as well as the Soviet response to both that collaboration and the Holocaust itself (with an emphasis on the latter). Having set these goals, the volume discusses cases of actual collaboration, discursive practices of Soviet reporting on the Holocaust, battles over memory work in the Soviet Union, and judicial responses. In addition, not a few of the chapters confront the difficulties associated with using Soviet sources to address these questions. It is refreshing that the authors frequently present arguments that differ from those of other contributors writing on the same subject, allowing the reader to see these contentious issues from multiple points of view.

Focusing on three main themes, the book is divided into nine chapters. The first ones address the treatment of the Holocaust in Soviet state-run media, and the extent to which the regime was able – intentionally or successfully – to remove the particularly Jewish nature of the Holocaust from public discourse. Karel Berkhoff argues in his insightful chapter on the Holocaust in Soviet media that the removal of Jews from the reporting on Nazi atrocities “rarely became complete, let alone a policy” (111). His nuanced argumentation also distinguishes between the portrayal of Soviet Jews and non-Soviet Jews in a media system that was not “created or used to bring ‘news’” (112). Marina Sorokina's detailed chapter on the history of the Extraordinary State Commission takes a harder line, contending that the “Stalinist school of falsification continu[ed] to determine the agenda of work, invisibly but persistently, as before” (124); the upshot was a general absence of Jews from the public understanding of the Holocaust.

The second major theme of the volume addresses the Soviet judicial response to collaboration, both historically and from a methodological standpoint, asking such questions as: Can we responsibly use legal material and reports generated by the Extraordinary State Commission to study the Holocaust? In a chapter that nicely complements Sorokina's, Diana Dumitru succinctly lays out an approach allowing for the use of the Extraordinary State Commission documents that Sorokina finds so problematic. Dumitru argues that, at least in the case of Moldova, “relatively careful investigations were conducted and professional methods were applied to the hearing of mass murders of Moldova's Jewish population” (150).

In the third and final section, the contributors examine the memory of the Holocaust in the Soviet East. Marci Shore provides a detailed summary of Jan Gross's work (Neighbors, 2001) on antisemitism and the Holocaust in Poland, and of the responses by other Polish historians. The most powerful statement on memory comes, however, from Tarik Cyril Amar, who focuses on the Ukrainian city Lviv as an “anti-site of memory” (158). His analysis takes into consideration Ukrainian nationalist propaganda, as well as changing Soviet discourse, and he correctly points out that Ukrainians knew that Jews were being killed simply because they were Jews. He closes with an important reshaping of our conceptions of memory making: “The German genocide of the Jews was not a blank spot, an absence of memory. Instead, it was an anti-site, where memory was not suppressed but reshaped through a constant, resonant interaction of things said and unsaid” (184). Such a reconceptualization offers historians an insightful way to consider “silences” in history.

It is surprising that only one of the chapters – the one by Vladimir Solonari – directly addresses acts of collaboration: in Bessarabia and in Northern Bukovina, two understudied areas. Solonari makes the provocative claim that his chapter “casts doubt on the theory that traditional anti-Semitism could lead to the systematic killing of Jewish populations” (82). He argues that “local gentiles engaged in more traditional forms of antisemitic rioting: beating, plundering and humiliating Jews,” but that these behaviors “would not amount to what we call the Holocaust” [emphasis in original] (82). This strong statement demands more explanation (as does his definition of “Holocaust”). In her valuable essay on the use of Soviet judicial documents for the study of the Holocaust, Diana Dumitru obliquely addresses the participation of Moldovan locals in the murder of Jews. While describing her comparison of Soviet sources with other sources, particularly from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Dumitru gives us glimpses of the nature of local Moldovan participation, and of how ordinary individuals inserted themselves into the killing process.

Fox, Holquist, and Martin have assembled a historically rigorous volume that takes a large “first step” (xii) in jointly advancing the fields of Soviet history and the history of the Holocaust. Those particularly interested in Soviet propaganda about and judicial reactions to the Holocaust will not only find this volume useful, but also appreciate the inclusion of alternate views on how the Holocaust was described and remembered (or downplayed) in the Soviet Union.