RESISTANCE SKILLS

Skills as such are not a new variable in the study of contentious politics and political violence. Social movements scholars working in the resource mobilization tradition have devoted substantial attention to the skills that are crucial for the attainment of resources necessary for movements’ survival and success (e.g., McCarthy and Zald Reference McCarthy and Zald1977; Voss and Sherman Reference Voss and Sherman2000). These works, however, have tended to focus on skills required for the acquisition and management of material and financial resources in the context of Western democracies; notes McAdam (Reference McAdam1999, 1), they sometimes read “like little more than an organizer's manual on fundraising.” A much smaller number of social movements studies have also noted the importance of nonmaterial resources, including organizational expertise and social skills (Brady, Verba, and Schlozman Reference Brady, Verba and Schlozman1995; Cress and Snow Reference Cress and Snow1996; Fligstein and McAdam Reference Fligstein and McAdam2012; Ganz Reference Ganz2009; Van Dyke and Dixon Reference Van Dyke and Dixon2013), but also predominantly in democracies during peacetime. A quite different set of skills is needed to sustain organized antigovernment activism under conditions of violent repression.

Skills are also often discussed in the literature on repertoires of contention—what people “know how to do” when they are making claims on the government (Tarrow Reference Tarrow1993, 3; Tilly Reference Tilly1978, Reference Tilly2008). Scholars usually view antigovernment violence and resistance as making up one such repertoire. Yet, the repertoires of contention scholarship focuses predominantly on open, “above the ground” tactics such as protests and demonstrations. Studies that do analyze clandestine contentious repertoires, such as della Porta (Reference Della Porta2013), fail to pay proper attention to the actual mechanics of sustaining a violent group (but see Shapiro Reference Shapiro2013). Furthermore, “exactly how people draw on contentious repertoires remains variable and controversial” (Tilly Reference Tilly2006, 39). This article helps explain this process by outlining specific skills required for sustained armed resistance in repressive environments.

McCormick and Owen (Reference McCormick and Owen2000) distinguish between two crucial components of underground movements: operational capacity and operational security. An organization's operational capacity determines its ability to successfully fight the regime. Operational security is the level of an organization's ability to withstand the government's assault. The exact nature of operational capacity varies depending on the organization's goal and the overall context; operational security features, in contrast, are largely identical across underground groups and substantially different from those of “above the ground” organizations (Bell Reference Bell1989, 18–19; Stohl and Stohl Reference Stohl and Stohl2011).

Numerous historical case studies, memoirs, and insurgents and counterinsurgents’ manuals show that the paramount concern of clandestine groups—be they Africans rising up on a slave ship (Rediker Reference Rediker2007); Marxist urban guerillas in Latin America (Marighella Reference Marighella2011); nationalist and religious terrorist organizations such as the Provisional IRA (Horgan and Taylor Reference Horgan and Taylor1997), ETA (Clark Reference Clark1984), and Al Qaeda (Al Qaeda n.d.) in Western Europe; or criminal cartels in the United States (Baker and Faulkner Reference Baker and Faulkner1993)—is to maximize secrecy and minimize exposure to the government's security services. In practical terms, operational security skills, which I refer to as the “resister's toolkit,” is the ability to outfox the governments’ security services by doing the following:

• • establishing secure communication channels

• • procuring weapons without being detected by government agents

• • maintaining well-hidden meeting places and munitions caches

• • producing high-quality forged identification documents

• • being able to identify and neutralize informers and government agents trying to infiltrate the organization

Operational security is more important than operational capacity. According to Vladimir Lenin—the leader of one of the world's most successful underground groups—“secrecy is such a necessary condition for this kind of organization that all other conditions must be made to conform to it” (quoted in Erickson Reference Erickson1981, 195). Conversely, operational security and, by extension, the organization's survival do not depend on the mobilization and deployment of large numbers of troops and weapons, advanced military training, and the ability to defeat the government's armies in an open engagement (Marighella Reference Marighella2011; USASOC 2013b, 104). Thus, operational security skills are the ones that make or break a newly formed resistance.

Most nascent resisters are obviously aware of the need to have operational security capabilities, but in practice the toolkit takes time and effort to acquire and hone. Many underground groups’ “initial organization process is [often] ad hoc or ill-conceived” (USASOC 2013b, 7), which exposes the group to being easily detected and eliminated during this early stage. In contrast, people and groups that move to the underground with an already existing toolkit are in a much better position to establish sustained resistance. This, I argue, is precisely when previous experience with repression becomes important.

REPRESSION, RESISTANCE, SKILLS

In a survey of the field, Davenport and Inman (Reference Davenport and Inman2012, 620) include in the concept of state repression a wide range of activities from violations of First Amendment-type rights to violations of “due process in the enforcement as well as adjudication of law” and of “personal integrity or security (e.g., torture and mass killing).” This article analyzes resistance to large-scale violations of “personal integrity or security,” the most violent form of state repression.

Scholars of high-risk activism focus almost exclusively on mobilization and the onset of resistance. Many influential studies emphasize the importance of mental factors such as identities, honor, and pride (Einwohner Reference Einwohner2003; Wood Reference Wood2003); perceptions of threat (Maher Reference Maher2010); or commitment to the goal (McAdam Reference McAdam1986). Other works prioritize physical factors that make the outbreak of violence more likely, such as rough terrain (i.e., Fearon and Laitin Reference Fearon and Laitin2003). Still others focus on grievances (Cederman, Wimmer, and Min Reference Cederman, Wimmer and Min2010), the presence of mechanisms designed to overcome the collective action problem (Kalyvas and Kocher Reference Kalyvas and Kocher2007; Lichbach Reference Lichbach1998), competition among nationalist groups (Lawrence Reference Lawrence2010), or tipping points, after which mobilization becomes widespread (Kuran Reference Kuran1991). These studies explain the first necessary, but not always sufficient, step toward sustained resistance; mobilized resistance may or may not coalesce in the next stage.

Consider the case of Primo Levi, a young Italian Jewish chemist and a future Nobel Prize winner who, together with several comrades, fled to the mountains in 1943 to establish a “partisan band affiliated with the Resistance. . . . [C]ontacts, arms, money and the experience to acquire them were all missing. We lacked capable men” (Levi Reference Levi1996, 13). The aspiring resisters, brave and devoted as they were, stood no chance against the fascist security services: They were swiftly captured and Levi was shipped to Auschwitz. In Levi and his comrades’ case we find a resolved collective action problem, the presence of substantial grievances, an abundance of rough terrain, commitment to the struggle, honor, and pride. They failed because they had no skills to translate the initiation of resistance into a sustained fight.

How do resisters obtain these essential skills? I argue that an important pathway to acquiring the toolkit is through past exposure to selective state repression. This argument builds on scholarship that emphasizes the divergent short-term effects of selective and indiscriminate repression, extending it to examine the longer term impact of exposure to different types of repression. Knowing whether people are repressed because of what they do (selective repression) or because of who they are, where they live, and to which identity group they belong (indiscriminate repression) is crucial because different types of repression and violence produce different responses. Recently, Kocher, Pepinsky, and Kalyvas (Reference Kocher, Pepinsky and Kalyvas2011) introduced the concept of “collective” targeting, which is selective at the group level but indiscriminate at the individual level. Thus, when it comes to individual and small-group responses and perceptions—the key focus of this article—collective and indiscriminate targeting are treated as one. It is also important to note that, as Table 1 demonstrates, the type and severity of repression are not identical; both can be (relatively) mild or severe, violent or otherwise. Resistance to each type of repression also necessitates a different set of skills.

TABLE 1.

Examples of Repression by Type and Severity, Violent and Nonviolent

The political violence (e.g., Downes Reference Downes2007; Kalyvas and Kocher Reference Kalyvas and Kocher2007; Lyall Reference Lyall2009) and state repression (e.g., Daxecker and Hess Reference Daxecker and Hess2013; Dugan and Chenoweth Reference Dugan and Chenoweth2012; Hafez Reference Hafez2003; Mason and Krane Reference Mason and Krane1989; Rasler Reference Rasler1996) literatures have paid substantial attention—though with mixed findings—to the effects of different types of targeting and repression. However, it is crucial to note that for these studies the main outcome of interest is the intensity of violence and contention in the short run, during the same violence/repression campaign. In contrast, this article argues that, to understand the origins of skills and their impact on resistance, we should account for both current and past events of repression. In this, my approach differs from the mainstream contentious politics scholarship that links the shape and trajectory of resistance to a co-evolutionary, give-and-take dynamic between the state and the challengers. It shifts the focus to events that predate the outbreak of contention.

In the case of selective repression, when people are targeted because of what they do (e.g., political or social activism) they have a choice between ceasing their activities or sticking to their ideals and risking punishment. If they decide to stick to their ideals, the activists, to avoid punishment, need to either go underground fully or adopt a semi-clandestine lifestyle. A study of underground movements in several Western countries found that activists “experienced state pressure as an immediate, personal threat” and that “those unwilling to accept arrest and imprisonment had no alternative” to the underground (Zwerman, Steinhoff, and della Porta Reference Zwerman, Steinhoff and della Porta2000, 93–94). Mason and Krane (Reference Mason and Krane1989, 180–81) observed a similar process in Central America. Because the targeted population is relatively small and the risk of individual punishment is high, an underground becomes more likely and easier to organize. To survive, activists are forced to learn operational security skills (Bell Reference Bell1989). Some might be killed or captured, but for the rest every additional day in the underground provides an opportunity to better learn the toolkit. Because repression is selective, the rest of the population does not have to worry about their safety. They have no incentives to go underground and, by extension, acquire the resister's toolkit.

Indiscriminate repression works differently. Extensive evidence from numerous case studies as diverse as the besieged Sarajevo (Maček Reference Maček2009), China during the human-made famine of the 1950s (Jisheng Reference Jisheng2012), and the Second Intifada suicide bombings in Israel (Somer et al. Reference Somer, Ruvio, Sever and Soref2007) shows that the typical responses to indiscriminate violence are acceptance of and adaptation to the situation as the “new normal,” fear, and demobilizing feeling of powerlessness, rather than mobilization. Under indiscriminate violence, the threat is distributed among a much larger group than under selective violence, and hence overcoming the collective action problem and organizing an underground become much harder. The incentives structure changes only when the threat becomes imminent, lethal, and immediate (Maher Reference Maher2010; see also Goldstone and Tilly Reference Goldstone, Tilly and Aminzade2001). Before that point, organizing resistance and going underground expose the first movers to an increasing, rather than decreasing, risk of punishment. Yet, when the danger is already immediate and lethal, aspiring unskilled resisters will be unlikely to survive in such an environment; they might simply not have enough time and opportunities to learn and adapt. At this stage, the key problem is not free-riders, but loose lips, snitches, and sheer incompetence. However, if some members of the community were subject to past selective repression and already possessed the needed skills, the transition from initial mobilization to sustained resistance becomes more likely.

CASE SELECTION

The Holocaust, notes King (Reference King2012), is an “index case” of large-scale state repression and arguably is the best documented one. Yet, with few exceptions (Dumitru and Johnson Reference Dumitru and Johnson2011; Goldhagen Reference Goldhagen1996; Kopstein and Wittenberg Reference Kopstein and Wittenberg2011) the Holocaust has been understudied by political scientists. This is unfortunate because, due to its scope and duration, the Holocaust provides numerous opportunities for comparative analysis. It took place in many countries and under different conditions, but several key variables—such as the ethnic and religious identities of both the main victims and the main perpetrators—remained constant. Also constant, at least until mid-1943, was the Nazis’ level of control over the territory they governed. Furthermore, the Nazi policy of isolating Jewish communities from one another and from the outside world created a setting that allows for illuminating analysis of why places subject to similar policies and inhabited by virtually the same people exhibited variation in the sustainability of resistance.

On September 21, 1939, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Main Security Office, held a meeting to discuss occupation policies in Poland. Heydrich was explicit: “[T]he Jews are to be concentrated in ghettos in cities.” Eventually, the majority of Jews in Eastern Europe were concentrated in more than one thousand ghettos. The ghettos shared several defining features: the resettlement and concentration of the locality's Jewish population into an area only for Jews coupled with severe restrictions on entering and leaving the designated area. In contrast to camps where the Jews were incarcerated on an individual basis, ghettos confined entire local Jewish communities. Hence, in seeking to better understand the impact of pre-violence factors, ghettos are a natural unit of analysis.

This study focuses on three large but understudied ghettos: Minsk, Kraków, and Białystok. These ghettos were similar along numerous dimensions. They were inhabited by members of the same ethnic and religious group. They had overlapping historical legacies: Minsk and Białystok were part of the Russian Empire until 1917 and the USSR in 1939–-41; Kraków and Białystok were part of Poland from 1918 to 1939. All three were major urban centers near large forests. In the early twentieth century the three cities had organized Jewish self-defense groups. In each ghetto lived people who were ideologically committed to anti-Nazi activism and who were “biographically available” (McAdam Reference McAdam1986) to emergent resistance organizations.

These three ghettos also had a similar opportunity structure for contentious collective action (Tarrow Reference Tarrow1998; for opportunity structures in ghetto uprisings, see Einwohner Reference Einwohner2003). They were enclosed by man-made physical barriers, located in major German administrative centers, and subject to total Nazi control and extermination policies. Finally, the Jewish communities were of comparable size; before World War II both Kraków and Minsk had a Jewish population of about seventy thousand, roughly 30% of each city's population. Białystok had a somewhat smaller Jewish community of about fifty thousand or half of the city's population.

Because of these similarities, one might expect the resistance in these ghettos to be similar. Indeed, all three witnessed Jewish anti-Nazi mobilization and the emergence of resistance groups. But the subsequent trajectories of these resistance organizations varied. In Minsk there was a sustained communist-led underground. Kraków had both communist-led and Zionist resistance groups. There the communist underground was able to put up a sustained fight, but the Zionist one failed early on. Białystok also had both communist and Zionist undergrounds, but there both resistance movements proved to be sustainable.

Divergent paths of Zionist undergrounds in Kraków and Białystok also allow ideology and self-selection into political movements to be held constant. The Zionists in both cities had similar ideological worldviews and used identical “motivational frames” (Benford and Snow Reference Benford and Snow2000; Gamson Reference Gamson1995) to describe their situation and the required solutions. But only in Białystok was Zionist resistance sustained. This intra-community and intra-movement variation also helps control for the strength and form of “prewar politicized social networks,” which, Staniland (Reference Staniland2014, 9) argues, explain the shape and strength of armed groups (see the later discussion).

I link the variation in the three ghettos’ resistance trajectories to the different types of state repression these places experienced before Nazi rule. In the interwar period Minsk was part of the USSR and was subject to the indiscriminate repression of Stalin's Great Terror in the late 1930s. Initially targeting the Communist Party's top brass, the terror spread to the whole society, “leaving almost no one untouched” (Goldman Reference Goldman2011, 311). Kraków and Białystok from 1918 to 1939 belonged to Poland, where state repression was selective and targeted only one group in which Jews were active—the communists.Footnote ¹ Polish communists went underground in 1919; the authorities viewed the party as a subversive organization, and its members were put on trial, sentenced to long prison terms, and incarcerated in the Bereza concentration camp. Yet, communists who ceased their political activism went largely unmolested by the authorities. Those who persisted had to adopt a clandestine lifestyle to avoid arrest. In September 1939 the two cities’ histories diverged for 20 months: Kraków was occupied by Germany, whereas Białystok, a part of eastern Poland, was under Soviet rule until mid-1941. During that time Soviet authorities initiated selective repression of noncommunist political organizations. This selective repression forced several Zionist political youth movements to go underground (Levin Reference Levin1995) and continue operating clandestinely. In June 1941 Białystok and Minsk also came under Nazi rule.

In an argument that focuses on the past as an explanatory variable, it is not always possible to avoid the danger of infinite regress (Slater and Simmons Reference Slater and Simmons2010). In this case, however, the problem is mitigated by the fact that the political and social slate was substantially altered by the exogenous shock of World War I. Poland gained independence after a long period of partition and statelessness. In Russia, the 1917 revolution completely destroyed the old social and political order. Furthermore, even if long-term historical processes and legacies can help explain the variation in resistance sustainability across ghettos, their explanatory power is limited in accounting for intra-community variation, such as the differences between Zionist and communist resistance in Kraków.

DATA

This article is based on published and unpublished Holocaust-era and postwar sources, mainly diaries, memoirs, testimonies, and oral history interviews. I used primary and secondary sources in English, Hebrew, Russian, and Polish, most of which came from these archives: the Yale University Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies (HVT), the Yad Vashem Archive (YVA) in Jerusalem, and the Oral History Division of the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (OHD).

The data on the Minsk ghetto are sparser than that on other large ghettos, but still substantial. Soviet authorities suppressed Holocaust research for political reasons, and hence no survivors’ testimonies were collected in the immediate postwar period. The main, but hugely important, exception is the memoir of Hersh Smolar, the ghetto underground commander, first published in 1946. Yet, in recent years growing attention to the Minsk ghetto has led to the publication of many memoirs and testimonies, as well as several academic studies, most notably Epstein (Reference Epstein2008). Numerous living survivors have been interviewed for various oral history projects. Furthermore, after the collapse of the USSR scholars gained access to interviews with the underground members that had been conducted by the KGB in the 1960s and 1970s.

The data on the Jewish resistance in Kraków are extensive. Luckily, we have access to a unique primary source, Justyna's Narrative (Davidson Draenger Reference Davidson Draenger1996): It is a mix between a memoir and the history of the Jewish resistance, secretly written by one of its leaders, Gusta (Justyna) Davidson Draenger, in a German jail in 1943 with the help of members of both the Zionist and communist Jewish undergrounds. Davidson Draenger did not survive the war, but her narrative did. In the post-Holocaust period, the surviving members of the Zionist and communist underground groups were interviewed about their experiences; the interviews are currently a separate collection (Project 188) of the OHD.

The data on the Jewish resistance in the Białystok ghetto are also rich. First, there is the ghetto underground archive, which includes the wartime diary and letters of Mordechai Tenenbaum, the commander of the ghetto uprising, as well as many other resistance-related documents. One of the underground's leaders, Chajka Grosman, wrote a testimony immediately after the liberation in 1944, published a detailed memoir in 1965, and gave an extensive, 300-page oral history interview in 1992. In addition, both Zionist and communist underground activists wrote memoirs (e.g., Berkner Reference Berkner2001; Bornstein-Bielicka Reference Bornstein-Bielicka2003; Klibanski Reference Klibanski2002). Many surviving members of the underground were interviewed; the interviews are currently a separate collection (Project 110) of the OHD. Several historians have also analyzed the Białystok ghetto (Bender Reference Bender2008; Datner Reference Datner1946).

Both the Holocaust-era and later documents have their strengths and limitations. The most obvious limitations of later testimonies and memoirs are their distance from the events and the memoirists’ personal biases and potential desire to present their actions and decisions in a favorable light. To overcome these problems, when possible I prioritized Holocaust-era materials and sources not written for public consumption, such as personal diaries. However, in terms of accuracy of descriptions, scholars have demonstrated that post-Holocaust accounts are stable and consistent over time; the conformity between early and late testimonies is remarkable (Greenspan Reference Greenspan2001)—a pattern that I also noted in my data while comparing recollections of individuals who gave multiple testimonies decades apart.

The Holocaust-era documents are also not without problems. The underground members were often political activists who, at the time of writing, tended to aggrandize the actions of their movements and minimize those of rival political groups. The passage of time and cooling of passions were often required for more even-handed accounts to emerge. As Browning (Reference Browning2010) shows, in later testimonies and interviews survivors are more likely to openly discuss topics that were taboo in the immediate post-Holocaust period. Indeed, many resisters’ postwar testimonies were remarkably candid about their underground groups’ problems, shortcomings, and failures. A possible explanation is that in the Holocaust context there is no expectation for resistance to be successful; given the gargantuan power differentials between the Germans and the Jewish undergrounds, the mere attempt to resist is lauded as heroic, thus lessening the need to hide or whitewash one's incompetence and mistakes.

LEADERSHIP, TIMING, AND POTENTIAL ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATIONS

This analysis of Jewish undergrounds in Minsk, Kraków, and Białystok demonstrates a clear linkage between possession of the resister's toolkit and the underground's ability to put up a sustained fight. It also highlights the importance of previous cases of selective repression for the skills’ acquisition. In the Online Appendix I present an econometric analysis of a large-N dataset of Jewish ghettos and test an observable implication of my argument on a much larger universe of cases. The findings support my theory, but their validity might be potentially hampered by substantial missing data—an unavoidable problem because numerous crucial and unique demographic and electoral data sources were destroyed during World War II.

This first attempt to introduce the skills variable into the conflict-repression nexus scholarship also raises important questions that cannot be fully answered based on my data. In this section I present several of these questions (and potential future research agendas) and address them to the extent made possible by the available data. The first question deals with the role of leadership and leaders’ skills. Although international security scholars are paying growing attention to leaders, their backgrounds, and conduct in the international arena (e.g., Chiozza and Goemans 2011; Saunders Reference Saunders2011), the topic remains understudied in the contentious politics (Nepstad and Bob Reference Nepstad and Bob2006, 1) and intrastate violence research (but see Johnston Reference Johnston2012; Lawrence Reference Lawrence2010). Thus, analysis of resistance leaders’ skills would be an important addition to the literature. Among the underground organizations analyzed in this article, all groups that managed to put up a sustained fight had skilled leaders, whereas the level of skills possessed by the rank and file varied. This suggests that skilled leadership is a sufficient condition for sustained resistance, but it is impossible to say whether it is a necessary one. To determine that we would need to examine underground groups that had skilled rank and file but no skilled leadership. Unfortunately, there are no such groups in my data. It is possible that this cell is empty and skilled leadership is indeed a necessary condition, but more research is required to provide a definitive answer.

Another important question is that of timing. What is the lifespan of resistance skills, and how far back in time can t ‒ 1 extend? J. Bowyer Bell, a prominent historian of underground organizations, argues that once acquired, operational security skills tend to be sticky to the point of becoming “second nature” (Reference Bell1989, 18), and many underground activists still keep them long after moving above the ground. Thus, if the key is previous personal involvement in sustained underground, then t ‒ 1 is determined by the age in which a skilled actor perceives him- or herself and is viewed by others as sufficiently young and fit to be involved in such a high-risk enterprise. If we assume that people generally do not get involved in underground activism before their mid-teens and after the age of 40 (especially true for the mid-twentieth-century context, when life expectancy was substantially shorter), then the maximum distance between t and t ‒ 1 should not be more than 20 to 25 years. My data offer a preliminary plausibility test of such an assertion.

During the 1903–06 wave of anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia and Poland, the main driving force behind Jewish self-defense was the socialist anti-Zionist Bund party (Lambroza Reference Lambroza1981). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Bund, a revolutionary Marxist movement, was targeted by the tsarist security services. This selective repression forced the party underground, and when the indiscriminate, state-sanctioned violence of the pogroms broke out, the Bund could capitalize on its members’ resistance skills to establish local-level self-defense units. During the Holocaust, however, the Bund played a much smaller role in the resistance. It was the first Jewish party to engage in political and community work in occupied Warsaw and its members were active in the underground in a number of ghettos, but almost nowhere did the Bund take the lead in organizing armed resistance (Blatman Reference Blatman2003, 9, 92; for an opposing view see Zeitlin Reference Zeitlin, Baber and Bryant2010). The reason seems to be the lack of personal underground experience by the party's younger members. In the USSR the Bund had ceased to exist in the 1920s; in interwar Poland it was a legal political party that embraced parliamentary politics. During the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, the Bund disbanded and did not join the Zionists in the underground. Thus, although the Bund as an organization had a storied underground history, few of its members under the age of 40–45 had underground experience. Those who did work in the underground in the past were either too old to engage in such a demanding, high-risk enterprise or were “biographically unavailable” (McAdam Reference McAdam1986) because they had to provide for their families. One hopes that future research will provide more precise time boundaries of t ‒ 1.

In the context of the Holocaust, collaboration with the repressive authorities was not a viable long-term strategy for the repression's targets. In other contexts, however, the collaboration option might be available in addition to the inaction and resistance strategies. The availability of the collaboration strategy will more likely affect the likelihood of resistance onset, rather than its sustainability, but further research in different contexts is needed to clarify how the availability of collaboration might affect resistance groups’ trajectories.

This article's research design takes advantage of inter-community, intra-community, and intra-movement variation and thus controls for numerous potential alternative explanations at the community (i.e., historical legacies, terrain, levels of perpetrators’ territorial control, demography, ethnic diversity, levels of repression) and political movement (i.e. ideology, self-selection) levels. Yet, additional alternative explanations require further consideration.

Can it be that past selective repression does contribute to the development of skills, but that those skills—for instance, para- and quasi-military skills or charisma—are different from those highlighted by the article? There is no evidence that Smolar and Mire's experience in the communist underground in Poland included military-type training, but we cannot entirely rule this out. What is clear, however, is that the Zionist underground in eastern Poland under the Soviet rule did not engage in any sort of military-like training—its goal was to preserve the Zionist youth movements’ structures and ideology, not to fight against the Soviets. Among the underground organizations discussed earlier, the only one that had a substantial number of members with military skills—the Minsk city underground—was the clearest case of failure. Furthermore, available pre- and post-Holocaust materials emphasize exceptional charisma, leadership, and organizational skills of the Akiva leaders in Kraków. Yet, an underground movement they led failed to put up a sustained fight. Smolar from the Minsk ghetto underground, in contrast, was not perceived by his comrades as a charismatic leader.

The strength, type, and degree of overlap of pre–World War II social networks in the community and among the resisters might be an additional alternative explanation (Petersen Reference Petersen2001). Two recent studies argue that the nature of prewar politicized networks (Staniland Reference Staniland2014) and the interaction between social network structure and the type of wartime targeting (Parkinson Reference Parkinson2013) explain the conduct of militant groups. The information on pre-Holocaust social networks is too scant to fully test these network-based explanations, but available data strongly suggest that the strength and the nature of pre–World War II Zionist networks were similar in Kraków and Białystok; hence, according to Staniland's argument, they should have led to similar organizational outcomes. This clearly was not the case. Furthermore, no network-based argument can explain why people like Mire and Tenenbaum knew how to effectively use aliases and identify infiltrators, whereas Mire's cousin and Tenenbaum's comrades in the HH leadership did not. Yet, I believe that the skills- and networks-focused arguments are complementary, rather than contradictory. Networks and skills interact, and combining these two approaches to the study of armed groups opens venues for further innovative and fruitful research.