Of Loss and Loot

Stalin-Era Culture, Foreign Aid, and Trophy Goods in the Soviet Union during the 1940s

   

Nathalie Moine

 

In an essay entitled “Spoils of War,”1 Joseph Brodsky, writing in exile in America, described the impact of foreign objects introduced by the war on his childhood in Leningrad. His account mixes trophies seized from the enemy—German or Japanese—with American aid goods, including canned foods, radios, and above all films. These various objects of diverse origins were invaluable in shaping his individuality and that of his generation, as they created a foreign musical, cinemato- graphic, vestimentary, and cultural presence within the otherwise hermetic Soviet environment, offering citizens the opportunity to constitute themselves as autono- mous individuals with respect to their political and social surroundings. It could be argued that the culture that Brodsky described, the outcome of indirect contact with other countries made possible by the war, contributed to uniting individuals within a socially circumscribed generation. It is also true that, taken as a whole, these objects represented unique challenges for the Soviet political system, a challenge perpetuated, as Brodsky aptly noted, by the steady stream of Western products arriving through illegal or legal means. Until the closing days of the Soviet regime, these foreign objects were the focus of deep infatuation among the Soviet population for reasons that were materialistic but that also involved evocations of a more or less mythologized culture.2

 
Objects played an important role in constructing an imaginary that influenced the development of Brodsky’s sense of identity during his youth amid the ruins of Leningrad.3 It is also noteworthy that the origins of these objects became blurred in his recollections—some were donations from the Allies and others were spoils of war. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct this pattern, but in the opposite direction, by exploring the circumstances that led these objects to be present in the martyred city of Leningrad and indeed throughout Soviet territory. The study explores the role of a wide range of actors and political events both during and after the war in this massive influx of foreign goods, while also seeking to explain the sort of indifference or amnesia among Brodsky’s former compatriots with regard to their origins. Although the image of Soviet existence as uniformly gray, rigid, and above all, closed—the war bringing with it fragments of Western civiliza- tion for the first time—needs to be taken seriously because it emanates from contemporary accounts, it should also be questioned. In fact, the war provided every level of Soviet society with an opportunity to display their prewar posses- sions, either stolen or destroyed by the enemy, in inventories that reconstitute far more varied and sophisticated tastes and imaginaries than one might expect. This is true in part because they reflect changes in official prescriptions concerning matters of taste, which, beginning in the 1930s, had rehabilitated a style inherited from the European middle class of the nineteenth century. Brodsky’s “Spoils of War” thus calls the entire material civilization to which the revolution gave birth into question, i.e. not only all of the objects that constituted it, but also the social relationships that were tied to these objects and the relationship with abundance, luxury, and tastes that were of Western origin. This interrogation cannot therefore be limited to the end of the war, but instead calls for the examination of several earlier periods in order to understand how the war and the objects associated with it influenced Soviet civilization.

 

The wider effects of the war on the status of objects were not limited to the USSR in the 1940s. In fact, over the past two decades, scholarship covering the period of World War II has gradually constructed the idea that the material world of civilian populations had become an essential feature of “total war” for every combatant nation. The goal of Nazi Germany’s systematic pillaging was not merely to acquire wealth, but to humiliate the peoples of defeated countries. This was followed by a vast attempt to inventory the losses experienced by the victims, part of a reparations policy that resulted in the organized transfer of assets of every kind as well as financial compensation,4 in addition to an unprece- dented influx of privately and publicly funded humanitarian aid.5 This three-fold phenomenon—pillaging, inventories, and reparations—required the creation of specific administrative agencies in the different countries concerned. The character and contents of the archives that they left behind provide evidence of commonali- ties across individual experiences, and allow scholarly efforts to retrace the history of the objects, including the donations that were collected by American immigrant communities and sent to the USSR, the loot gathered by Soviet dignitaries in the conquered territories, and the inventories created by Soviet citizens to declare their private losses. While the fate of art works and technologically sophisticated industrial objects made the deepest impression,6 it was above all ordinary objects that became central topics in political discussions and high-level conflicts,7 while also remaining the principal preoccupation of a large number of individuals for whom the war could be either a catastrophe or a blessing.

 

The political importance attributed to such matters merits close attention: the investigations overseen by Viacheslav Molotov following mail that he received from Solomon Mikhoels implicated the top levels of the government, while also concluding that there was a total absence of discrimination.17 Although it cannot yet be seen as a systematic policy, state-sponsored anti-Semitism had been growing from the beginning of the war, before becoming fully fledged in the late 1940s when the Anti-Fascist Committee began to be persecuted and was eventually disbanded.18 It is also conceivable that Molotov was sincere in his desire to ensure that the Jewish population of liberated regions received material assistance. Other high-level figures primarily voiced mistrust and even animosity towards the Jews, however, using arguments that had previously proven effective, including the idea that humanitarian aid was a Trojan horse for the capitalist powers. Such argu- ments had in fact been brandished since the regime’s earliest days, when aid was destined for famine victims as well as Jewish victims of the pogroms during the civil war. It was also argued that special treatment of Jews could awaken popular anti-Semitism, an argument voiced since early in the war by the advocates of silence about the fate of Soviet Jews under Nazi occupation. These arguments would soon be joined by warnings about the “Zionist menace.”19 For foreign-based Jewish organizations, the opacity of Soviet methods appeared particularly sus- pect because they were fully aware that other nationalities—such as Poles and Armenians—had succeeded in establishing their own aid networks, managed by their own representatives.20 This reasoning neglects the complicated question of the citizenship of aid recipients. It may nevertheless have encouraged Mikhoels to advocate for the creation of an organization to oversee the distribution of material aid for survivors; in 1943, he had already proposed the creation of an agency devoted to the search for Jews reported missing in Soviet territory who were being sought by their relatives both in Russia and abroad.21 It is worth observing that neither of these proposals was ever acted upon. From the perspective of foreign donors in the early 1920s, aid distribution and the search for pogrom victims were closely linked due to the opacity of the information released by the Soviet authorities.22 The Committee nevertheless paid a heavy price for this project. Its connections to foreign Jewish charitable organizations, particularly the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, were an important element in the official accusations that led to the execution of most Committee members in the early 1950s.23
 
The redeveloping Jewish communities of the western regions of the USSR,24 which were focused both on religious renewal and material solidarity with impover- ished fellow Jews, did ultimately succeed in tapping a portion of the foreign aid that was intended for them.25 As a consequence, they were often suspected by Soviet authorities of providing a smokescreen for commercial activities involving gifts from foreign Jews. One reader of a report from the region of Zhytomir used red pencil to underline the claim that nearly every Jewish community had contact with religious American Jews, who sent them valuable packages.26
 
The missions of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) created in Minsk and Kiev in the spring of 1945 managed to maintain an effective working relationship with Soviet authorities, but their small size and the limits on their movement prevented them from verifying how the agencies created by Soviet authorities in the Republics were actually managing aid distribu- tion in the field.27 The volume of the aid provided by the UNRRA to Ukraine and Byelorussia was considerably less than the aid offered to other liberated European countries, but it nevertheless proved to be critical for the population, particularly food donations.28 According to reports filed by local UNRRA missions, the food sent by the United Nations, with the exception of bread, represented the majority of what was sold in the stores responsible for distributing rationed goods.29 In early 1947, the prospect that this aid source might end led the missions to fear the worst, as they saw food supplies and health conditions in the region declining before their eyes.30
 
Tushenka (corned beef) was unquestionably the most archetypal item among foreign food donations, which primarily consisted of US Army rations, and Brodsky was not alone in expressing indelible memories of this common foreign food item. Among people for whom every basic necessity was in cruelly short supply, donated clothing was also the focus of particular greed and desire. Like corned beef, but more enduringly, clothing was valued because it enabled survival, but also because it provided a small sample of simple Western pleasures. For that reason, references to clothing aid in official public discourse became less frequent as its importance among recipients grew.31 Typically referred to as zagranichnye podarki (presents from abroad), or amerikanskie podarki (American presents), the exact origin of donated clothing was rarely evident, although it does raise the question of the prestige and recognition that the West, especially the United States, derived from its largesse. Still, the primary concern for ordinary Soviets was not where these donated goods came from, but simply how to access them. The use of the term “presents” (podarki) referred less to the way in which these foreign items came to be on Soviet soil and more to a category of goods combining relative quality and abundance, in stark contrast with the scarcity and poor quality of Soviet products. In fact, these same objects were sometimes also labeled amerikanskie veshchi (American “things”). They were perceived as the very least that could be provided by a culture that was so materially superior, even where used clothes were concerned, even if it lacked Soviet endurance. These basic donations, as appealing as they may have been, were far from sufficient to alleviate the deep physical suffering of the Russian people. Indeed, this very imbalance was a source of controversy: for some, it was the insultingly low price that Westerners were willing to pay to conceal their cowardice, while for others, it was the Soviet regime that was humiliating its own people, who were reduced to rejoicing in donated items of little value in the West. In one propaganda letter, a young girl marveled at a green dress with two pockets while telling her story as a child war victim and daughter of a veteran who fought on the front.32 Varlam Shalamov referred to American clothing with similar tenderness,33 before continuing to describe the happiness of “starvers” gobbling whole barrels of American solidol, an industrial lubricant delivered at the same time as the lend-lease machines that were used to move mountains of frozen cadavers from the Gulags.  

   

The means by which these objects were appropriated by Soviet citizens also subverted their original destinations. A pyramidal system of committees was supposed to ensure their distribution, a task taken over, as we have seen, by the Soviet administration. In reality, however, aid sometimes accumulated in ware- houses where local notables were given first choice, as in the case of railway admin- istrators in the Siberia-Ural region who arrived, accompanied by their spouses, maids, and chauffeurs, and made off with the best part of what was in storage. Little remained afterwards other than clothing in poor condition, mismatched stockings, and useless or inappropriate apparel whose theoretical recipients remained a mys- tery. The American gifts that eventually did arrive were thus greeted not only with desire but also with anger, and many of the “deserving poor” expressed indignation and even refused gifts considered doubly insulting in view of their needs and what they felt they deserved, but also with respect to the officials and their families who had been given first pick. News of the scandalous condition of donated clothing became widespread and was repeated across the USSR as far as Magadan.34 Local and regional civil servants were not alone in helping themselves to the bounty that was stored in warehouses, accompanied by their households. The first secretary of the Party in Byelorussia, himself a member of the Central Committee, Panteleimon Ponomarenko, was accused of similar behavior. This cele- brated chief of the partisans during the war apparently did not hesitate to offer the best of what was carelessly stored on the grounds of the central base of Belglavsnab in Minsk to the leaders of the Republic or to keep it for himself.         

   

In reality, the wives of the top-level administrators in Byelorussia looked forward to the arrival of treasures from Germany labeled “trophies” or “reparations” far more eagerly than clothing and shoes from the UNRRA.35 The objects contained in the crates of these two distinct origins—foreign donations and “trophies”—were generally stored in the same locations but were distinguishable in two significant ways: how they had been collected and their value. In fact, arrivals of “trophy goods” are etched far more vividly in Soviet memories than aid that represented Allied solidarity. This bounty is inextricably linked to the extreme violence that accompanied the Red Army’s occupation of defeated countries. The behavior of Soviet troops towards the civilian population, particularly the systematic rape of women, has remained largely unacknowledged in the East, however,36 although it was extremely common over a vast territory. One of the first and most spectacular manifestations of these violent rampages by the occupying Soviets that culminated in Germany was the sacking of Budapest.37 Although they have received little attention in Russia, the veritable pogrom conducted in Eastern Prussia and the terrorizing of Berlin by the Soviets upon their arrival are widely known in the West, while local memories echo the archives in reporting a dangerous environment for occupied civilians that lasted for years, involving sporadic rape and depredation by isolated soldiers and bands of deserters, who requisitioned women, livestock, and every kind of food reserves at will from terrified villagers. While the Soviet narrative concerning atrocities committed by the occupiers in the 1940s had always included a close connection between assaults on property and physical violence, in this instance they became dissociated in Soviet memory and discourse. This dissociation was facilitated by the fact that the physical violence committed against defeated populations differed in scale and nature. In truth, the violence resembled material damages, not only because they occurred together but also because of the treatment of enemy women’s bodies, as the call to simply kill every representative of the German nation vanished from Soviet propaganda. The prevailing idea was that appropriating defeated civilians’ property and assets was justified because of the pillaging suffered by the Soviet population during the war, an idea of justice reinforced by the well-known shock Soviets experienced upon crossing the bor- der into defeated countries, which even in ruins were so obviously more prosper- ous than their own country. The Soviets also saw—or believed they saw—among their defeated enemies, from Romanian cities to Prussian farms, the direct outcome of plundering at the hands of the Germans on Soviet soil, from livestock38 to tramways, including the objects of value that were found in former occupants’ apartments.39

     

The popularity of bicycles, which were still rare at the time in the USSR, provides an excellent illustration of the uncomplicatedness with which trophies were acquired and displayed. Even Soviets from privileged backgrounds had no idea how to ride a bicycle, but they were completely unashamed to reveal their clumsiness. Everyone knew that their acquisition may very well have been associ- ated with a rape or a murder, and the sight of Soviets learning to ride bicycles with childish delight mirrors an image often reported by defeated peoples of barbarians whose utterly naïve behavior stands in dramatic contrast to the savage acts perpe- trated by the very same soldiers.43 One Soviet diarist, however, named Vladimir Gelfand, turned this disjunction to his advantage, and the day after learning to ride a bicycle he felt sufficiently at ease to call on a German woman and her daughter, who had been raped; the woman asked him to protect them against his compatriots, an offer that he politely declined.* 44 Somewhat later, dressed in an elegant civilian suit that was probably tailored for him in Germany, he had himself photographed riding his bicycle, an action shot that was unusual among his contem- poraries. The snapshot attests to his dexterity, but above all it allowed his quest for objects to be reframed and placed on a different level.      
In fact, although they were celebrated in Soviet propaganda beginning in the 1920s, cameras were in reality very scarce, and they were an even more popular trophy item than bicycles or watches, which were seen as purely practical.45 Cameras propelled their owners into an entirely new cultural practice and were a source of great satisfaction among members of the intelligentsia with the good fortune of acquiring them.46 The young Gelfand obtained his own camera in January 1946, perhaps on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, where all sorts of goods exchanged hands more or less discreetly.47 During his extended stay in Germany, he used cameras as trade objects, but he ultimately learned to use them and attempted to accumulate the equipment needed to develop his own photographs.48 He then began making portraits of his feminine conquests, the great project of his experience of the occupation, as well as of the people he met and the cities and landscapes through which he traveled.49 This new passion even tended to replace his diary.50 

 
The radio receiver, the phonograph, and the typewriter were also sought after by Soviets who essentially shared the cultural universe of the West, a sense of common values that helped Soviets to feel less concerned by the exact circum- stances surrounding the acquisition of such objects.51 Trophy goods, in addition to functioning as a kind of compensation, thus offered access to a world that had developed a modern culture to which Soviets—both leaders and ordinary citizens— all aspired.     

 
As a consequence, the tension between the political model represented by Stalin’s USSR and these material aspirations created complications that inevitably led to restrictions on who should be allowed to have access to items seized from the enemy. Derived from the troops’ thirst for revenge and a common method of compensating a population still impoverished by the pillaging of the occupying forces and the deprivations of war, trophy goods also presented the risk of foment- ing mass insubordination and a dangerous fascination with Western civilization. Still, at least at first, Soviet leaders appear to have encouraged and, in a certain way, helped to organize this opening to Western material culture, while nevertheless attempting to ensure that access remained stratified.          

 
On December 26, 1944, as the Red Army was approaching German territory, a decree was issued authorizing soldiers to mail monthly packages back from the front. Packages’ weight varied according to rank: five kilos for rank-and-file sol- diers, ten kilos for officers, and fifteen kilos for generals.52 The decree drew atten- tion both because it was considered an open invitation to soldiers to seize what they could, and because it was also interpreted at the time as imitating the German policy allowing Wehrmacht soldiers and other German citizens in occupied territo- ries to mail postal packages. Although he expressed moral disapproval of the decree, one Soviet officer nevertheless justified it in his journal, noting that “every month, the German soldier was allowed to send home a package of sixteen kilograms from the territories they had seized.”53 The explosion in the number of packages that followed this decree inevitably outstripped the capacity of the postal service. In Kursk, for example, employees were specially assigned to handle packages sent from the front.54 The number of monthly authorized packages was later reduced, but it never matched demand, compelling soldiers to resort to different forms of subterfuge. Regular packages mailed to family members through the postal service or other channels came to be seen as a veritable duty for soldiers with the good fortune of being posted abroad. Gelfand’s mother even placed orders for adults’ and children’s clothing and other valuable items, adding, however, that he should be discreet, even if a considerable portion of their correspondence related to simi- lar requests.55             

 
This liberal policy concerning the individual transfer of property belonging to defeated peoples to Soviet homes did not change when the first great waves of returnees to the USSR repatriated former Soviet detainees and demobilized soldiers, soldiers, and civilians with permission, all of whom were exempted from customs procedures in the summer of 1945. The bags of returning soldiers in special trains indeed seem to have reached epic proportions. One account of a military veterinarian returning home to Uzbekistan in September 1945 from Vienna with nearly a ton of baggage, almost certain (like many others) to be fleeced on arrival by the local authorities, provides a singular example of this pattern.56

 
Acquiring goods in occupied zones through the black market or in a variety of different shops was made still easier by the permeability of the borders. In Gelfand’s journal, Berlin seems to be the epicenter of his desire because of the Alexanderplatz black market and an additional concentration of trade near the former Reichstag. In reality, however, the Berlin black market extended to virtually every street, house, and corridor, and every café in the city, which was filled with beggars and rife with opportunities to exchange objects and food for money and other barterable items.57 Even when Soviet authorities attempted to eradicate this trade, at least in such an emblematic location as the Alexanderplatz, their efforts apparently proved to be in vain. In November 1945, Gelfand, under the pretense of having his boots cleaned, attracted a flood of vendors concealing their wares under their clothes. In the time it took for a shoe-shine man to wax his shoes, he acquired a shirt, a leather jacket, several pairs of socks and gloves, under the nose of Soviet patrols monitoring even officers’ activities.58

 
The institutionalized transfer of loot seized from the enemy, which was soon to be transformed into an official reparations policy,59 also offered an opportunity for individual Soviets, or for some at least, because the authorities responsible for systematically collecting trophy assets also regulated their acquisition by ranking officers: beginning in June 1945, Red Army generals were granted a car at no cost, while rank-and-file officers could obtain either a bicycle or motorcycle. Generals were also authorized to acquire an upright or a grand piano, a radio, a hunting rifle, and a wristwatch, pocket watch, or a pendulum clock. Generals and officers could also receive, for a fee, carpets, tapestries, furs, tea services, cameras, and other valuable goods.60 The possibility of purchasing a trophy asset from the Soviet occupation constituted an obvious privilege that enabled Gelfand to acquire a radio receiver for four hundred marks that would have cost ten times that price on the open market in Berlin.61

 
The occupation of defeated countries made it possible to gain authorized access to a level of luxury that was actually organized by the government, with the effect of reinforcing social hierarchies within Soviet society. Serving in foreign territory as either a civilian or soldier was in itself an advantage, regardless of rank, but for the elite, who made no efforts to conceal their good fortune, the authorities reserved the finest items. The dissident Larisa Bogoraz relates that in the immedi- ate postwar period, the daughters of generals serving in Germany wore dresses that were dramatically different from everyone else’s because of the fabrics and patterns that their fathers sent from Berlin. She concluded: “That was the postwar taste—new dresses cut out of luxurious Western fabrics.” The privilege was all the more visible in that it involved not only the fabric but also the cut of the dress, which made them look like “young German girls,” a resemblance clearly considered highly respectable and even enviable.62 Bogoraz also recorded the fact that her uncle, a general serving in Germany, brought her back pieces of fabric.

 
The open appropriation of the fashion and culture of the conquered was a widespread phenomenon in the postwar USSR, which the projection of trophy films suggests even tended to be encouraged by the Kremlin. The cultural opening offered by the war was in fact highly eclectic, enabling aspects of American culture to rub shoulders with those of old Central Europe.63 The most remarkable aspect of this phenomenon was that it became generalized across every layer of Soviet society, particularly among the younger generations, despite the deformations and reappropriations inherent in the vast geographical, social, and cultural distances that separated the ordinary Soviet citizen from the urban locations in which most of the clothing, fashions, and music imported from the West were concentrated.64
   
The tolerance of the Soviet authorities towards the theft of enemy property, or the clearly legal possibility for individuals of a variety of ranks to import vast quantities of foreign goods, constituted only one aspect of this massive material transfer from defeated countries, particularly Germany, towards the Soviet Union. The sheer scale could only compromise the social and political order that the Stalin administration had managed to reestablish in liberated territories, and it inevitably created problems of misappropriation, the black market, and other forms of uncon- trolled circulation throughout the Soviet Union.     
This trade fueled the rise of networks that were typical of how the under- ground Soviet economy operated. Some individuals did not settle for bringing back their war-related prizes for themselves or their friends and families, extending their activity into illegal trade. In late 1946, Tambov’s militia confiscated 4,622 furs from one veteran and former officer, who had stolen them from a store in Berlin at the end of the war, and was preparing to sell them in Moscow. Another veteran, who returned from Germany by car in October 1946 with a trunkful of trophies that he later sold to his brother-in-law, was arrested in the spring of 1947.65

   
Although it had already reached unprecedented proportions, this circulation of appropriated loot attained an entirely new level at the end of the war with the beginning of deliveries that were part of the Soviet reparations policy. Arriving by land or sea, shipments were subsequently loaded onto entire trains destined for every corner of Soviet territory. Cargoes of loot were inadequately guarded, and record-keeping regarding contents was not systematic. Indeed, theft from trains and warehouses became such a serious problem that, in January 1947, the Ministry of the Interior proposed creating an inter-ministerial commission to take necessary counter-measures.66 Thefts on Soviet soil were committed by individuals and by armed bands, but also by networks of officials responsible for transport- ing and storing the spoils. These networks were also involved in the resale of goods, for example in the case of a documented network trafficking trophy goods at the depot in Novosibirsk that was dismantled in early 1947. The incident revealed that a number of grand pianos, dressers, and pendulum clocks were deco- rating the homes of a small circle of local administrators who had acquired them at bargain prices, although they were originally intended as compensation for  meri- torious civil servants.67
   
Socialist property theft was a matter of constant concern among Soviet author- ities, and in June 1947, ukases (decrees) stiffened sentences for these crimes. The Kremlin was keenly aware of the mass theft of individual and public property, even  as the nation remained deeply impoverished by the war and at risk of outbreaks of famine. The way it viewed this was no doubt greatly influenced by the misappropri- ation of massive deliveries of great value from foreign destinations, considered to be state property and therefore representing substantial loss of revenue. Further more or less related factors complicated these economic considerations, including the growth of networks at every level, the consolidation of patronage, and the lack of centralized management of how the loot was distributed. The Stalin adminis- tration found ways to take advantage of this rampant corruption, however, using periodic official anti-corruption campaigns to unseat officials seen as problematic. One probable example of such an opportunistic purge occurred in Byelorussia, where the Party first secretary, Nikolai Gusarov,68 discovered a scandal involving twenty- seven thousand trophy cows that had been delivered to the Republic in 1945. Byelo- russia had suffered more than any other Republic during the war, and the confiscation of these cows by two thousand relatively high-ranking officials was perceived as particularly blatant given that more than 150,000 impoverished kolkhozian families possessed none. Indifferent to the misery of those whom they were responsible for governing, these officials had completely lost sight of the collective livestock culture of the region and focused exclusively on developing their personal connections and networks of patronage to serve their own “middle-class” preoccupations.69

   
Misappropriating cows, a critical necessity for the survival of millions of Soviet families, was both very common and very revealing of these officials’ lack of consid- eration for the suffering of their fellow citizens. Although the logic behind their indifference can be understood as stemming from the profit motive and a desire to maintain their political base of support, it is also interesting to consider their actions as a form of protest, in some cases at least, against the reasoning behind the priorities set by the central authorities. Such defiance of the official hierarchy on the part of heroes and victims of the war was sometimes reinforced at the most local level by the profound, intimate acquaintance that flows from sharing such an experience as the war. The case of a certain Gryn illustrates this hypothesis. The president of a sel’sovet in the Ukrainian region of Nikolaev, Gryn had reclaimed a trophy cow from a family to whom it had been awarded specifically because two family members were serving on the front. The pretext was that the Germans had confiscated his own cow during the occupation. He also confiscated from demobilized soldiers—whom he accused of being former police collaborators—the decorations and documents that gave them access to certain privileges.70
     
An entirely different kind of criticism arose from particular cases in which the immorality of misappropriated loot did not stem from injustice towards war victims but rather from an excessive appetite for luxury. Such accusations reveal a fantasized vision of what could be perceived as limitless possibilities for accumu- lating wealth belonging to the defeated enemy. The case of two highly placed officials in the administration of occupied Germany is illustrative of this zeal for luxury. The men were removed from their posts after confessions extracted by Viktor Abakumov, former counter-espionage chief and head of state security, who was eager to discredit his rivals with Stalin.71 One remarkable aspect of the case is that the information collected through the operation appeared valid to Abakumov, or to Stalin himself. The quantity of objects of German origin “discov- ered” when the apartments of the two accused men were raided is even more astounding, however. Just as a single example, one of these civil servants’ Moscow apartments was found to contain over 3,000 meters of fabric, 8 tea services and other sets of household dishware amounting to approximately 1,470 pieces, 315 valuable antique objects such as statuettes and vases, 90 silver items, 41 carpets (including long hall carpets), 15 paintings, 359 pieces of feminine lingerie, more than 150 pairs of shoes and other leather goods, nearly 60 dresses, 17 suits, 22 overcoats and furs, 323 pairs of stockings, 6 radios and phonograph-radios, and 4 accordions. Such mind-boggling, never-ending lists give the distinct impression of a warehouse rather than a luxuriously furnished apartment, but the ultimate destination of these goods was never fully explained. The idea of a resale operation is scarcely men- tioned, and only in an ironic tone, in the documents. A central element of the accusations, once again, was the exchange value of the stolen property, but this does not fully explain the sheer volume of the loot, even if it does showcase certain highly suspect practices. Ivan Serov allegedly offered a radio-phonograph to his superior, Marshal Zhukov, gold watches to the wife of a highly placed American general in Berlin, and two tea services and a hunting rifle to his subordinate Sidnev, but this represented only a tiny fraction of the misappropriated loot.

   
The logistics required to transport this volume of bounty to the Soviet Union were equally spectacular. The aircraft chartered by Zhukov for this sole purpose are widely recalled, as are other similar scams, although they were never proven or avowed. Serov allegedly organized for his own benefit a veritable merry-go-round of trains and automobiles, as well as an airplane that apparently shuttled back and forth between Berlin and Moscow loaded with furs, carpets, paintings, and other valuable items.72
   
With a few notable exceptions, the descriptions of the objects remain largely laconic and repetitive concerning the time wasted, instead of serving the country, in the futile personal use of the very items that represented Germany’s diabolical superiority, such as the radio-phonographs that Serov allegedly had custom-made by a renowned German artisan using cabinetry from Hitler’s personal office in the Chancellery. Little is consequently known about Soviet thieves’ specific tastes, in particular which paintings high-ranking Soviets chose to steal from 1940s German magnates, competing with the specialized brigades that crisscrossed the defeated countries.73 Nor do we know for what ultimate purpose the thefts were conducted, whether for personal use or resale of art works on the black market on Soviet soil. The answers to these questions remain completely unexplored to this day. Similarly, it is not known what style was being referenced specifically in a report denouncing the widespread habit among Soviet generals and officers in the occupied zone of ordering “stylish furniture” from German luxury firms to decorate their Moscow apartments or dachas, although this practice does enable us to understand that the relationship maintained by the top administrators with the material world of the enemy was not limited to predation but also offered freedom from the asceticism and lack of esthetic choices or personalization imposed by the Soviet value sys- tem.74 The lifestyle for which they were criticized is scarcely legible to us now, except for the elegant private receptions and hunting parties, which we know were not strictly forbidden because of the authorization granted to high-ranking officers to use tea services and hunting weapons. These habits, while not prohibited out- right, could risk leading officers into dangerous territory. Those accused allegedly adopted what was described as a “seignorial” lifestyle in occupied Germany that was in blatant contradiction to Soviet morality. The exact origins of the goods is frequently not indicated because they had helped themselves in warehouses, which were veritable Ali Baba’s caves and were distributed throughout Berlin and the Soviet zone. When former owners were referred to, they did not inspire pity because they were the former “big shots” (bogachi) of the Nazi regime. The sin of those Soviets who were accused was precisely that of having slipped into the lifestyle of the previous owners by occupying their requisitioned villas, and not of having absconded with with their contents. The accusations are also mute regarding the individuals to whom appropriated luxury goods were officially destined. One of the interrogators even exclaimed, referring to tapestries by Flemish and French masters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that had belonged to wealthy Germans and that Sidnev had appropriated for his Leningrad apartment: “but the only place for these tapestries is a museum.” The boundaries of acceptable luxury, even in the Soviet interior of a member of the elite, had apparently been crossed.
   
Serov, although directly incriminated in depositions by his collaborators, was not the subject of investigation and continued to occupy his high position. At least two of his collaborators, however, were arrested in late 1947 and early 1948 and sentenced to ten years in a labor camp in October 1951.75 Rapidly rehabilitated after Stalin’s death, they revealed a different truth. In explaining how the invento- ries came to be falsified, they clearly conveyed between the lines the inferiority of national products. During raids, Abakumov’s men included objects actually of Soviet fabrication, objects made of nickel and alloy or platinum instead of gold and silver (materials that were simultaneously seen as noble and contemptible) in the inventory of goods allegedly misappropriated from Germany. The rehabilitated men did not deny possessing numerous unused items, however, confessing to frenzied buying sprees while posted in Germany. More specifically, it was their wives (and by extension a niece or daughter) who scoured various locations in the occupied zone, where for modest prices vast quantities of goods that were not particularly valuable (although clearly impossible to find or hugely expensive in the USSR) were for sale, including stockings, linens and lingerie (for men and women), inexpensive decorative objects, and “bric-a-brac.” There were ample opportunities to find fully legal bargains, from the “Voentorg” stores (where valuable objects and second-hand furniture were exchanged), which were reserved for high-ranking Soviets, to the direct sale to German and Soviet individuals of the possessions of the former Nazis.

   
It is worth recalling that these “moochers” were vydvizhentsy, high-ranking officers who had enrolled in the Party long ago and had been mobilized to defend the nation and the revolution, including in occupied Germany. They claimed that they had been corrupted by money, a reference to the fact that they received exceptionally large pay supplements befitting distinguished servants of the Soviet government during their service in the Soviet zone. The combination of sudden wealth (which, although common practice, was not mentioned in the Stalin-era accusations) and easy access to Western goods had thus resulted in a true shock to the values and practices of this layer of Soviet society. This had translated into a small internal revolution, although the difficulty of untangling truth from falsehood in the texts of accusations makes it difficult to determine with any certainty their precise nature and implications in the moral terms of the period.

 

   

Hidden Prewar Soviet Treasures

The primitive character of the accusations filed against Soviet civil servants who displayed compulsive behavior concerning the products of capitalism, whether it can be understood with reference to an imaginary shaped by the Party’s ascetic morality or by the realities of an impoverished society, ultimately stems from the very dichotomy proposed by Brodsky. On one side was the uniformly grey Soviet Union, and on the other, foreign objects—from the most basic to the most sophisticated—that opened a previously unknown world to Soviet postwar society, whether that world was associated with a liberating culture, abundance, or guilty luxury.

 
The problem with this narrative is that it obscures the existence of the “unknown” world of the prewar USSR and the complex matter of the objects that it incarnated. They were available to a restricted circle of privileged members of society at the end of the tsarist period. Their prominence was renewed due to the uneven production of Soviet manufactured goods or foreign imports, and they circulated prolifically at different levels of urbanized Soviet society. The Soviet authorities had naturally played a key role in this circulation by expropriating and redistributing the property of the former elite, before public authorities siphoned off on a massive scale anything seen as valuable that was possessed by individual Soviet citizens. The central authorities were particularly avid for gold, then silver and gemstones, and eventually any valuable object that could be converted into foreign currency that would provide access to the Western materials that were useful to Soviet efforts to rapidly industrialize. Elena Osokina’s study of the found- ing of the Torgsin, stores created on the eve of the great famine of 1933 in order to acquire foreign currency, demonstrates the extent to which the quest for valuable goods outstripped the fire sales of imperial collections and church possessions abroad that had begun in the 1920s. Old coins dating from the tsarist period or Kerenskii’s government hoarded by the peasants, and the silver teaspoons and family jewels of the middle classes, were exchanged for bread as hurriedly as possible over the counters of the Torgsin stores, a process made easier by the fact that they could be melted down into ingots or disassembled for sale abroad. Destroying material patrimony, independently of any question of class-based social justice, was seen as unimportant, and the sole value attached to these objects from the past was whatever foreign buyers were willing to pay for the finest items.77 The vast operation of pillaging Soviet wealth engaged in by the occupying forces, from museum collections to individuals’ domestic possessions, was thus denounced by the very same forces that had conducted a similar operation less than ten years earlier.

 
The quest for items in individuals’ homes, that would always be perceived as suspect in the Soviet context, and its corollary, the rabid hunger for objects developed by a population denuded of material possessions and brutally affected by shortages, can be seen in the magic shows of the magician Woland on the stage of a Moscow theater in the 1930s, as imagined by Mikhail Bulgakov in his novel The Master and Margarita. His incarnation of the Devil of foreign origin (his German identity is alluded to) literally laid bare a public who had “scarcely changed,” despite the appearance of buses, telephones, and other indications of technical progress that made it difficult to recognize the capital. His assistant Fahoth, creat- ing a lady’s fashion boutique on stage, announces that the old dresses and out- moded shoes worn by the women in the audience would be graciously exchanged for the latest Parisian creations, triggering a tidal wave of women rushing onto the stage, with no pretense of restraint, for these miraculous luxury products to take advantage of this unexpected, fleeting godsend.78 Somewhat later in the story, a character dreams of an equally nightmarish spectacle during which an artist in a tuxedo invites him to move into the glare of the stage-lights to reveal, under hoots from the audience, the presence of dollars concealed in his honorable Soviet citizen’s apartment. They then attack a different spectator, a certain Sergei Gerardovich Dunchil, for “stubbornly refusing to turn over currency [he] still [has], while the country is in need of it, and [he has] no use for it whatsoever.” His mistress, Ida Kherkulanovna Wors—the repetition of these names, forenames, and patronymics with foreign resonances was not random—appears in turn on the stage bearing a bundle of eighteen thousand dollars and a diamond necklace worth forty thousand gold rubles on a golden platter that the unfaithful husband had hidden in her apartment in Kharkov. The spectators are invited in an increasingly threatening tone to surrender their foreign currency, which they should not have possessed in the first place, as an army of cooks bring in a vast cauldron of soup and a platter loaded with black bread.79 When the novel was finally published in the Soviet Union in 1966, well after Stalin’s death, these two passages were censored, perhaps because of their commentary on Soviet humanity beyond the vagaries of Stalinism, a humanity rendered grotesque by fear of their masters—obsessed with finding hidden treasure in provincial apartments—and by an undying attraction to every- thing foreign and therefore inherently, diabolically desirable. The Soviets of the 1930s depicted by Bulgakov were not ignorant of Western culture, quite the con- trary, but they were incorrigibly driven by material desires that were ultimately labeled as a sin by the regime and thereby ineluctably transformed into torments. 

   

Analyzing the inventories that Soviets in occupied territories, whether they remained at home or were evacuated,80 were invited to submit from the end of 1943 in order to assess the losses caused by the enemy, confirms that on the eve of the war and after twenty years of Soviet government, the material universe of some citizens was distinctly tainted with the philistine tastes described by Bulgakov. It also indicates that they had not awaited the flood of foreign goods borne by the war to subscribe to Western cultural practices. Most surprising is the fact that they offered such detailed descriptions in the first place. In an apparent paradox, the destruction and theft of the property of millions of Soviet households by the enemy accentuated the rehabilitation of material comfort and, in the process, of individual property, that Stalin initiated during the 1930s. The Soviet government, within the framework of a broad investigation of crimes by the occupying forces in the 1940s and the material losses for which they were responsible, invited the inhabit- ants of occupied regions to declare the entirety of their possessions that had been stolen or destroyed.81 The normative discourse concerning objects that had pre- vailed before the war was sufficiently weakened in this new context for some of those declaring their losses to reveal, despite the immense poverty of the vast major- ity of their fellow citizens, ownership of property and possessions such as furniture, clothing, and musical instruments that revealed tastes diverging considerably from official ethics, however fluctuating they had proven during the interwar period.

 
However, for the most part, it is the sobriety of the lists that is ultimately—and perhaps predictably—their most striking feature. In this regard, rural and urban inventories must be differentiated. In the case of rural declarations, the most signif- icant value was attached to buildings (a house, and sometimes adjoining buildings like barns or warehouses), livestock, and above all full individual ownership of a cow, as well as food stores. On the other hand, nothing, or almost nothing, was declared in terms of furniture, dishware, or clothing, although there are occasional references to a chest or bolts of fabric. This absence of common consumer goods can be explained in several ways, but in most cases it should probably be inter- preted as revealing the extreme material poverty of rural Soviet citizens. This has been suggested in several reports without ever having been the focus of systematic study, and it relates to behaviors in the context of the war whose exact meaning is at the heart of major historiographical debates. The extremely rudimentary nature of rural interiors was reported, for example, by the dissident Bogoraz, who recalled how as a young but very poor Muscovite she had left the city to teach in the Kaluga region in the early 1950s. Bogoraz recorded that she had frequently excused her young nanny for stealing spoons or cups because for her, as for the other village residents, an aluminum spoon or a glass represented a truly foreign luxury.82 While her account reveals the nature of postwar Stalin-era life, it could also be readily applied to earlier decades. In the late 1920s, humorously invoking the Soviet mania for inventorying the slightest consumer object, the satirists Ilya Ilf and Evgeni Petrov remarked that the number of chairs in the Soviet Union was missing from the statistics. They crudely calculated this figure by taking the total population and subtracting the peasants who in fact made up its major- ity, thereby expressing a truth that was no doubt well-known at the time: the vast material and cultural gap between peasantry and urban civilization.83 Refer- enced in a comic way, the coexistence of these two distinct worlds would have a dramatic effect ten years later, when rural poverty would express itself in the war-era hunger for objects. In particular, the relatively active participation of the local populations in the massacre of the Jews under the occupation could be seen as stemming from a desire to appropriate their possessions, from clothing to furnishings.

     
Urban residents also participated in redistributing the meager possessions of the Jews, to the point that it became a literary trope that can be seen in the letter written by Victor Strum’s mother. Strum was the central character in Life and Fate, and the letter was written to her son, just before she was assassinated. It recounted the behavior of her neighbors from Berdichev during the early days of the occupa- tion, when they chased her from the room that she occupied and stole her settee, predicting that her time was soon to come.84 In fact, while Strum’s mother, a doctor, possessed this element of relative comfort, many city-dwellers only declared own- ing a table or a few chairs, one or several beds, and sometimes an armoire. Anna Fedorovna Chudova, an evacuee employed in a candy factory in Kuibyshev (the present-day city of Samara) who had worked washing dishes at the Mogilev hospital before the war for the modest monthly salary of one hundred rubles,85 declared an armoire, an “English bed,” five chairs, and a table. Her clothing included an overcoat, three dresses, a pair of high-heeled shoes, and lingerie that she did not trouble to describe in detail. Valued at fifteen thousand rubles, her overcoat was by far the most valuable item in her possession, while the armoire itself was only estimated to be worth one thousand rubles. Possessing a bicycle, which was valued at the same price as an overcoat, was apparently a luxury that as a single person she was able to afford.86

 
Still, as the value of lost national heritage grew, descriptions became increas- ingly precise and began to include the materials of which items were made and to display a wider range of furniture, domestic items, clothing, linens, and items connected to cultural practices. It is possible to perceive in this tendency a reflec- tion of kul’turnost’, a commonplace in Stalin-era discourse relating to the lifestyle of the 1930s. This untranslatable term designated anything related to German Kultur, in other words, to different fields of knowledge and lifestyles, whose acqui- sition was necessary in order to leave the state of backwardness typically associated with peasants. Kul’turnost’ often expressed itself through clothing and the rehabili- tation of bourgeois manners, and it was also reflected in interiors resembling those of the European middle classes in the nineteenth century.87 Gaining access to a lifestyle consistent with kul’turnost’ could be measured by the possession of objects that denoted both the modern spirit and the cultural appetite of their owners, such as a bicycle, a camera, a radio or a gramophone. This was true in both visual representations for the wider public and for the very sober statisticians who investi- gated Soviet households’ budgets.

 
Other, more classical items were also reintroduced into the material horizon of the Soviets in a positive way, such as the piano. The origins of such items came up in the case of older objects, however, because of the problematic question of  inheritance in Stalin-era society, where bourgeois origins remained an impedi- ment, and very rapid social promotion was widespread among the new elites and a fundamental value of the regime. Within the inventories, by limiting the scope to these markers designated as indicators of an individual’s level of kul’turnost’, one paradoxically encounters social spheres that are absent from the official description of Soviet society. Far from the Stakhanovites in factories who were in principle the intended audience of this kind of production, one can imagine professional strata characterized by specialization but also, more hypothetically because of the nature of available sources, by family heritage, both in terms of practices and material transmission.88

 
Although it is difficult to fully reconstruct the specific social characteristics of their owners, the inventories do allow these “cultural items” to be seen within the context of other components of their owners’ material existences, providing enough information to imagine their actual lives separately from the representa- tions in propaganda on which historians have been obliged to rely until recently. The possibility of an ideological filter regarding what was recorded in the invento- ries should nonetheless be kept in mind. The normative framework surrounding those composing the inventories was far from uniform, however, and it is not possible to confirm whether this stems from the sincerity of the authors or from overlapping normative models, of which Stalin-era kul’turnost’ was only one aspect.

     
First, while the owners of cultural objects unquestionably belonged to more cerebral professions, the boundary between urban and rural lifestyles can at times be blurred. This is the reflection of a provincial climate that authorized its inhabit- ants, including those of diverse backgrounds, to circumvent the Socialist rigors of the Soviet economy by keeping a few head of livestock, a vegetable garden or an orchard. For example, before being evacuated to the Kuibyshev region, a certain Iakov Pavlovich Kozlov, a resident of Kalinin (the present-day city of Tver) scrupu- lously recorded his significant losses from not being able to sell the products of his cherry orchard, vegetable garden, and beehives during the occupation. These resources were probably situated close to the house that he owned outright, perhaps on the city outskirts. Included in the list of lost property, this “gardener” owned a piano whose brand was recorded as “Vol’fram Grosman” as well as a three-hundred- volume library, which included an encyclopedia, a number of classics, and works devoted to the Russian language and mathematics. The fact that the witness to his inventory was a secondary school teacher from the same city suggests that this “gardener” was primarily a professor who cared very much about his mirrored walnut and mahogany furnishings, his table with its samovar, his silver cutlery, twenty-four piece tea service, and porcelain dishes, and his clothing, which included an overcoat with an astrakhan collar and another fur-collared wool coat, while his wife deplored the loss of two crêpe de chine dresses, possibly sewn at home on their “Zinger” sewing machine.89
     
On the other hand, the profession of Efim Savelievich Savin is unstated, although we do know that he was evacuated from a new industrial suburb of Leningrad, Slantsevye rudniki. He spent his free time keeping a few head of live- stock, including a cow, two sheep, two goats, fifteen laying hens, and seven bee- hives, and he also owned assets more typical of a modern urban lifestyle, including a bicycle, two sewing machines, and a gramophone with a few albums, while his house, of which he was full owner, contained a clock and two mirrors.90

   
The search for “cultural” items in Soviet citizens’ inventories, whether they dated from prerevolutionary culture—including pianos and other musical instru- ments—or from the more pioneering practices of the interwar period—cameras, radios, or gramophones—primarily reveals the comforts of interiors that could be called “Socialist bourgeois.” They can be distinguished from those of high-ranking civil servants, whose comforts were entirely provided by the government (and were therefore easily reversible at the whim of purges and official disfavor) and corre- sponded to an austere esthetic. This was all the more true in that such officials were required to devote themselves entirely to the cause of Socialism and in principle had no free time or leisure activities. In fact, they represented professions whose higher incomes provided access to a material environment distinguished by multiple styles, noble materials, and, especially, a level of refinement of which a between-the-lines reading of their inventories provides some understanding. Their possessions reveal the complex contours of the social environment of spetsy, highly qualified specialists, who were alternately vilified by the regime for being “refer- ences for byvshie” (survivors of prerevolutionary elites) and wooed as members of the class of recruits trained in new Soviet institutions but perpetually at the mercy of ideological shifts.

 
The detailed inventory of Evdokia Samoilovna Iantovskaia, a prewar resi- dent of the city of Dniepropetrovsk, offers a good illustration of such a shift in its unvarnished display of her (prior) wealth. She admitted to having earned a comfortable monthly income of two thousand rubles as a salaried German professor in a foreign language institute before the war, supplemented by teaching at other institutes around the city. Her husband, a workshop supervisor in the Koksokhim Combine at the time, apparently also earned a good living, although she did not specify his income. Her mother also contributed to the household income by teach- ing embroidery. As a result, this industrious household had the means, in her words, to “live well and in a civilized manner” (she used the term in fashion at the time, kul’turno, although the extensive list of her possessions “pillaged by the Germans” later diverges from Stalin-era norms in a number of ways). Music appears to have played an important role in her household in the form of a high-end piano made in Dresden that was probably not entirely decorative, since a set of Japanese bamboo shelves held the scores of operas such as Carmen, Faust, Eugene Onegin, and Rusalka, waltzes and mazurkas by Chopin, rhapsodies by Franz Liszt, sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven, and albums of songs by contemporary composers, along with Gypsy romances and songs from other repertoires. The family owned only eight albums, some foreign, for their gramophone, which was English-made. They were also a family of readers, with a library that held the complete works of Alexander Pushkin,91 Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Gogol, Nikolay Nekrasov, Feodor Dostoyevsky, Alexander Kuprin, Leo Tolstoy, Heinrich Heine, Johann Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and Guy de Maupassant,92 as well as textbooks and technical literature. There were no paintings by great masters, but there was a reproduction of a celebrated painting by Ivan Shishkin that is indicative of rather unadventurous tastes.93 The list of furniture was as long as the items were impressive in size, an indication of a relatively spacious apartment. There was a carved and mirrored armoire of walnut, and another of oak, as well as two bookcases, a luxurious leather-covered oak sofa with a mirrored back, and an additional sofa upholstered in plush fabric. The living room table was of carved mahogany, and the oak dining room table was surrounded by twelve oak and ebony chairs covered in imitation leather.

 
Iantovskaia’s mention of her twelve chairs involuntarily echoes Ilf and Petrov’s satirical novel of 1929 and, through it, the cultural significance of Gambs furniture (Gambsova mebel’). This nineteenth-century Russian firm, whose founder was of German origin, had become well-known for manufacturing furnishings for the imperial family and other wealthy groups; despite the variety of its designs, it was identified with a generic style resembling that of Biedermeier, and was especially favoured among the bourgeois elite who valued robust comfort over stylistic audacity. In the novel, the twelve matching chairs became separated after the revolution, providing a hint of the high-society interiors of an earlier century while also resituating it within the Russian context.94 A table service and a porcelain tea service for twenty-four people—again, a seemingly minor but in fact significant detail95— invoke scenes of numerous guests dining on crystal plates and using silver cutlery. The walls and floors were embellished by no fewer than seven carpets, one of which was French, while the most handsome were described as Ukrainian and Greek. A French clock constitutes a further element of these furnishings clearly not all of Soviet manufacture and very probably dating from before the revolution and revealing an unorthodox social milieu, along with a small, carved walnut card- table covered in green baize.96