Drawing upon recent English-language scholarship in Russian and Soviet history, this volume pursues two strands of Holocaust history with the goal of strengthening their integration: the engagement of non-German, local perpetrators in occupied Eastern Europe, and the responses of Soviet authorities to the experience of Soviet Jews. The essays examining the behavior of local perpetrators were written as responses to Jan Gross's Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (2001) and its critics.

In her examination of perpetrator motivation, Marci Shore argues astutely for the critical use of postwar Communist investigations, but sidesteps Gross's generally uncritical approach to eyewitness testimony. Characterizing Neighbors as an “anguished … struggle of the author to come to terms with his sources” (15), Shore emphasizes Gross's two most important insights: that collaborators with one totalitarian regime can easily collaborate with another, and that genocide requires both centrally imposed inspiration and local improvisation spurred by “impulsive responses” (10) by the indigenous population. Analyzing records of postwar proceedings involving crimes perpetrated in 1941 in the Romanian provinces of Bessarabia and Bukovina, Vladimir Solonari and Diane Dumitru determine that Soviet trial records contain reliable and important information about the Holocaust that took place directly in the USSR. Unless directly steered by Romanian authorities or influenced by antisemitic regional organizations such as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in Bukovina, or Alexandru Cuza's League of National Christian Defense in Bessarabia, murderous civilian violence targeted Soviet collaborators rather than Jews as such.

Nourished by greed and envy, spontaneous violence against Jews was rooted in poverty and nurtured through the anti-Jewish stereotypes that saturated interwar daily life in Romania. Considering “active local participation … crucial” (75) to “solv[ing] the Jewish question” (81) in Bessarabia and Bukovina, Solonari notes that Romanian officials frequently offered victims' possessions to locals to incite them to kill Jews. In postwar Moldova, incriminating eyewitness testimony did not have to be manufactured in order to bolster Soviet conviction rates: the killings in wartime Bessarabia were public and the perpetrators well known to fellow villagers. Killers came from “respected centers of village society” (156) and tended to be slightly better off than the “typical” Bessarabian civilian.

Soviet responses to the Holocaust, the second major theme of this collection, were also complex. Despite the lack of interest on the part of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet elite (including Jews), information about the annihilation of Soviet Jews appeared in the Soviet media from 1941 until 1943. After Stalingrad, media managers redirected attention toward Jewish victims in German-occupied Poland, thus distracting domestic and international audiences from German and Allied reporting on Soviet crimes such as Katyn. Massive death rates among non-Jewish Soviet citizens who fell under German occupation contributed to making media references to Soviet Jews disappear altogether. Yet, attributing such silence exclusively to antisemitism discounts broader ideological considerations, including Soviet calls for Jewish assimilation, Communist reluctance to define Jews as a “nation,” Great Russian chauvinism, as well as Stalin's unwillingness to single out Jews as victims because of his concerns that Nazi antisemitic propaganda might resonate in the Soviet hinterland. According to Harvey Asher, Bolshevik internationalism and Soviet self-identification as “fighters against the enemies of social justice and national equality” (30) restrained Stalin's own antisemitism until well into the Cold War. Karol Berkhoff and Asher see parallels between Stalin's concerns and the thinking of Western Allied leaders: like them, the Soviets never prioritized rescuing Jews, had domestic reasons for playing down anti-Jewish actions, and feared creating a public misperception that Jews had unleashed the war in order to save their brethren.

Maria Sorokina examines Soviet responses to the Holocaust by drawing on the criminal investigative records of the Extraordinary State Commission, which was established in 1942. Although they presented some material from this commission at the proceedings of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg and at other postwar trials, Soviet authorities never made the commission's findings public because they intended to use them not only to prosecute Nazis but also to blame Germans for Soviet crimes in Eastern Europe. Indeed, they saw them as a “long-term tool in the ideological and political struggle for the future of postwar Europe and the USSR” (128–129). After abolishing the Commission in 1951, Soviet authorities used its findings into the 1960s to “expose” Nazi “criminals” in West Germany, and Sorokina aptly describes the commission's documentation as “the latest Soviet mass grave,” whose content was used as a “phantom public prosecutor of fascism” (141).

Using L'viv Oblast as a basis, Tarik Cyril Amar explains how Soviet silence on the Holocaust interacted with nationalist and anti-Soviet narratives to perpetuate post-1991 antisemitism in Ukraine. Suppressing the Jewish identity of victims and prosecuting local perpetrators as alleged Ukrainian nationalist traitors, Soviet contributions to Holocaust history complement an ugly present-day Ukrainian nationalist discourse that, informed by Nazi images of Judeo-Bolshevik rule and perceived Soviet annihilation policies, presents Jews as perpetrators and Ukrainian nationalists as victims of the Soviets, who had intended to annihilate Ukrainians just as the Germans had annihilated Jews. In this narrative, Jews are depicted as having died without putting up any resistance—apart from purportedly shameful attempts by individuals to survive through bribery and corruption—whereas Ukrainians resisted bravely, not only against the Nazis but also against the Soviets. The anti-Nazi, anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalist appears as a positive figure, in contrast to the nation-destroying, cowardly Jewish-Bolshevik oppressor. Such imagery renders Nazi mass murder of Jews irrelevant, allowing Ukrainian nationalists to acknowledge it without relinquishing negative stereotypes about Jewish behavior.

Despite the generally high quality of the essays, there are a few shortcomings worth noting. For instance, the editors could have been more consistent in the estimates they provide of the number of Soviet Jews killed in the Holocaust. David-Fox's estimate of 2.6 million Soviet-Jewish deaths seems too high, while the ones of Himke and Asher are too low. Furthermore, the infamous Commissar Order of June 6, 1941, did not protect from prosecution Einsatzgruppen (whose members stood under SS-police jurisdiction) but only Wehrmacht personnel who had murdered civilians and prisoners of war. But, as Zvi Gitelman remarks in conclusion, these essays successfully illustrate “how the general [Soviet] population perceived Jews and how [Soviet, German, and Romanian] authorities based … policies at least partly on… assessment of those perceptions” (185)—thus reinforcing the connection made in this volume between Holocaust history and Russian/Soviet history.