If there is one single fact that underscores the reality of the passing of World War II from living memory, it is this: the current participants in all oral histories of that conflict were children or teenagers in the early 1940s. In an interesting but only partly useful way, our narrative of the war is collapsing to some degree into the naïve and blinkered view of those who were young at the time. A lifetime of retelling lived experiences and hearing and rehearing local and national myths of that period has produced interviewees whose material for historians is problematic at best. Laurie Cohen, who conducted her interviews in Smolensk in 2000, confronts these methodological challenges to some extent, but is understandably reluctant to admit just how narrow the purview of her subjects actually was. Despite these limitations, she offers a rich and fascinating panorama of life under the Nazis that is well worth reading by specialists and non-specialists alike.

The most fundamental way in which her book contributes to the vast literature on the Nazi occupation of the East is Cohen's choice of locale: a Russian city. One of the most powerful tropes in the historiography of the Occupied East is that of one occupier replacing another: either the Russian oppressor of Ukraine is supplanted by a new German overlord, or the momentarily independent Poland or Latvia is occupied first by the Germans and then by the Soviets. These tangled histories have resulted in narratives in which the locals were—and remained—victims, and, since 1991, national histories have simply placed the Nazi period as one phase in the history of the so-called Bloodlands, the name of Timothy Snyder's popular 2010 study of the region. Cohen's focus on a Russian city in which the liberators were of the same ethnicity as the liberated disrupts this type of narrative of the East. Smolensk's liberators were Soviets as well, of course, who imposed an ideological “colonization” (141) of Smolensk while treating Russians who had collaborated with the Nazis not much differently from the way they had treated non-Russians.

The use of the term colonization in Cohen's book represents a missed opportunity of major import. One of the most significant recent developments in the historiography of the Occupied East is the lively debate about whether one can invoke the ideas and practices associated with classic nineteenth-century overseas colonialism to describe what the Nazis built in the East from 1939 to 1944. Seemingly oblivious to the historiographical debate, Cohen uses this language without ever qualifying or explaining what she means. What are “colonial interests” (104)? What is the “transitional stage to colonization” (141)? What does this qualifier mean: “As colonialists … the German authorities … terrorized the local populations” (143)? Finally, in her conclusion, Cohen mysteriously states that “colonial occupation never leads to long-term and stable governance in any context” (267). If colonial occupation is based primarily on ethnic difference, of course, the same judgment applies to the Soviet Russian occupation of Ukraine before and after the Nazi occupation, but not to Soviet control of Smolensk (even though both Soviet occupations ended in 1991). This is not to say that Cohen's job was to deal with Soviet “colonialism.” Rather, it should have been paramount for her to explain exactly what she meant by Nazi colonialism, particularly because there were ethnic Germans in Smolensk under both Russians and Germans.

Drawing on the accounts of her interviewees, Cohen paints a vivid picture of the difficult daily life of hunger and occasional atrocity in the city: the struggle for shelter, elements of the barter or black-market economy, Germans who were both friendly and hostile. For the most part, these are the memories of people who were very young at the time—of teenagers who did not understand propaganda or organized resistance—and thus had little to say about such things. Only one of the interviewees supposedly worked for the partisans (though how exactly is unclear), and did not seem especially interested in exploring this theme. One may criticize Cohen's reliance on this narrow base of oral sources, but the oral histories of the immediate postwar decades—which involved adult participants—had little to say about the equally important experiences of Smolensk's younger inhabitants. Had Cohen's interlocutors been interviewed in the 1950s, i.e., before they had experienced a half-century of repeatedly hearing the official story of what had happened under the Nazis, their memories would likely have been much different—an important if obvious point that many practicioners of oral history emphasize. Still, Cohen's research provides us—better late than never—with a grassroots view of this period from the perspective of a different generation.