Nathalie Moine

Loss, Gift, and Spoils

Stalinist Civilization, Foreign Aid, and Trophy Goods in the Soviet Union in the 1940s

1. In an essay entitled “Spoils of War” [1], Joseph Brodsky, writing from his American exile, described how deeply his childhood and youth in Leningrad had been marked by the presence of foreign objects brought by the war. He lumped together trophies seized from the enemy, whether German or Japanese, and American aid—canned food, radio sets, and above all films—because, regardless of their different origins and nature, all these objects had brought him and his generation something very precious: individuation. In this case that meant the creation of musical, cinematic, and sartorial cultures foreign to the Soviet world in which he felt trapped, and therefore the ability to constitute oneself as an autonomous individual in relation to one’s social and political environment. One might argue that the culture described by Brodsky, born of indirect contact with the foreign world through the war, above all helped bind together individuals who formed a socially circumscribed generation. Yet it remains true that these objects, taken as a whole, posed a challenge to the Soviet political regime—a challenge that continued, as he put it so well, in the trickle of other objects produced by Western civilization that entered the country legally or illegally. Until the end of the regime, these objects aroused an enduring enthusiasm among the Soviet population, not simply from materialist concerns, but because they carried with them a more or less mythologized culture [2].

2. It is significant that when Brodsky recalled the birth, amid the ruins of Leningrad, of an imagination that had such fundamental effects on the construction of his identity, he did so through objects [3]. It is equally telling that in his recollection their origins were largely blurred, even though some had been gifts from the Allies while others were war booty. Our purpose is precisely to retrace the path in the opposite direction and explore the circumstances under which these objects found their way into the martyred city and, more broadly, throughout Soviet territory. Such an investigation reveals the multiplicity of actors and political stakes surrounding the arrival of this foreign windfall during and immediately after the war, while also suggesting why so many of Brodsky’s former compatriots later displayed indifference or amnesia about its origins. The widespread image of a gray, uniform, rigid Soviet universe, closed in on itself and encountering fragments of Western civilization for the first time through the war, must be taken seriously because it comes from a contemporary witness, but it must also be questioned. The war gave Soviets from all walks of life the opportunity to inventory their prewar possessions stolen or destroyed by the enemy. These inventories reveal tastes and aspirations far more varied and sophisticated than might be expected, even taking into account the shift in official prescriptions of taste since the 1930s toward a style inherited from the nineteenth-century European middle class. Brodsky’s “spoils of war” therefore raise questions about the entire material civilization born of the Revolution—not only the objects themselves, but the social relations formed around them and attitudes toward abundance, luxury, and tastes imported from the Western world. The inquiry cannot be confined to the immediate postwar years; it must reach back further in order to understand the effect of war on Soviet material civilization as expressed through objects.

3. More broadly, the effect of war on the status of objects was not peculiar to the Soviet Union of the 1940s. Over the past two decades, studies of the Second World War have increasingly established the idea that the material world of civilian populations became a central stake in “total war” for all belligerent powers. Nazi Germany’s systematic plunder aimed not only at enrichment but also at humiliating the defeated. It was followed by an enormous effort to inventory victims’ losses in support of reparations policies, which led to organized transfers of property of every kind and to compensation payments [4], together with humanitarian relief on an unprecedented scale, whether private or public [5]. This triptych—plunder, inventories, reparations—required the creation of specialized administrations in the countries concerned. Their archives, whose nature and content underline the kinship of these experiences, allow us to trace a history of objects ranging from gifts collected by American immigrant communities and shipped to the USSR, to booty amassed by Soviet dignitaries in conquered territories, and the inventories drawn up by Soviet citizens required to declare their private losses. Works of art and technologically sophisticated industrial products may have captured the imagination most vividly [6], but it was above all ordinary things that became the subject of political decisions and disputes at the highest levels [7], while also remaining the main concern of countless individuals for whom the war appeared either as catastrophe or opportunity.

4. The Soviet case thus fully belongs to this process by which objects became stakes of war. Yet despite the similarities with other belligerent societies, the context of Stalin’s USSR—combining an economy of scarcity, intense politicization down to the smallest details of private material possession, and the state’s determination to control distribution [8]—had already endowed objects with a distinctive status, one that the war would transform. Brodsky’s “spoils of war” in fact touched every stratum of Soviet society, even though their most fundamental significance ultimately lies in the changing relationship among material prosperity, Western culture, and the Soviet elite’s political loyalty to the regime.

The Windfall from Abroad

5. After the immense destruction of the war, Soviet territory experienced an influx of foreign goods. Though wholly inadequate to meet the needs of a population further impoverished by war, these goods provoked intense desire despite their extraordinary heterogeneity, ranging from used clothing collected by American charities to the gold tableware of former Nazi dignitaries. These consumer goods came through two very different channels. The first, already operating by the middle of the war, consisted of aid sent in various forms to the Soviet population by the Allies and neutral countries. The second resulted from the intensive plundering carried out by Soviets as they occupied former enemy countries.

6. Jewish organizations played a leading role in the modest but important part of Western assistance represented by parcels of basic necessities. Aware that the large emigrant population originating in the former Russian Empire—organized in fraternities and associations of every persuasion—constituted a natural pool of donors, the Stalinist leadership was eager to help mobilize them on behalf of the Soviet population. Relations were never simple, however. They replayed conflicts over humanitarian aid that both sides repeatedly suspected of serving as a vehicle for propaganda, conflicts that had arisen in the earliest years of Soviet Russia when the Bolsheviks sought both to stimulate and to channel assistance to famine victims and to Jewish populations struck by the pogroms of the Civil War. Jewish donors regularly expressed doubts and dissatisfaction about the actual recipients of aid, in a climate of suspicion sustained throughout the war by anti-Communist Jewish circles. To counter such criticism, it seemed essential to verify what was happening in liberated Soviet territories. Russian War Relief, the principal organization coordinating American humanitarian assistance, a majority of which came from Jewish sources [9], therefore maintained a permanent representative in Moscow, Leo Gruliev, from late 1943 or early 1944 [10]. Despite his efforts, he was denied access to provinces that had formerly contained large Jewish minorities [11]. When the organization’s head, Edward Carter, a pro-Soviet American intellectual, visited in August 1945, the Stalinist leadership preferred to show him the hero cities of Leningrad and Stalingrad [12], with the Donbas coal basin as a highlight of the trip [13]. Carter’s itinerary thus traced a geography of wartime suffering that emphasized places symbolizing the heroic resistance of the Soviet people, the Russian national heritage, and one of the jewels of Stalinist industry, while passing over the massacre of the Jewish population.

7. Tensions surrounding the distribution of relief were repeatedly relayed by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, created by the Kremlin at the beginning of the war to mobilize Western Jewish opinion [14]. Work in the liberated territories by the Soviet Red Cross, which received the aid, became a focal point for criticism. Foreign organizations had agreed that aid would be distributed “without distinction of nationality” [15], but they had in principle obtained a commitment that it would be sent first to districts with the greatest concentrations of Jewish population. Yet, in a climate of increasingly visible antisemitism among the population and local authorities, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee received numerous letters from people complaining that they had been neglected in the distribution precisely because they were Jews—very far indeed from any idea of special compensation. A ghetto survivor returning home to Odessa denounced his fellow citizens’ excessive love of Jewish property, despite its scarcity in a city struck by the “furniture catastrophe,” that is, the wholesale looting of Jewish apartments by the Romanian occupiers three years earlier. The writer did not use the word “catastrophe,” then also used to name the genocide of the Jews, by chance: in his view the two events were “genealogically” connected. The Soviet authorities’ indifference to the destitution of Jewish survivors, including on the part of the Extraordinary State Commission responsible for documenting the occupiers’ crimes and assessing damage, amounted to denying the fate of a community almost completely destroyed by the Nazis [16].

8. The political importance attached to these questions deserves emphasis. Investigations ordered by Vyacheslav Molotov in response to letters from Solomon Mikhoels reached the highest levels of the state, while consistently concluding that no discrimination had occurred [17]. State antisemitism, before reaching full force from the late 1940s onward with the persecution and eventual destruction of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, was already germinating during the war years, although it would be anachronistic to speak at that point of a fully systematic policy [18]. Molotov may genuinely have wished to ensure that the Jewish population of the liberated regions received proper material assistance, while other senior officials voiced above all distrust or even hostility toward the Jewish world through familiar arguments: humanitarian aid as a Trojan horse of the capitalist powers, an accusation used since the early Soviet years when relief was being organized for famine victims and Jewish victims of Civil War pogroms; the danger of provoking popular antisemitism by giving Jews distinct treatment, invoked since the beginning of the war by advocates of silence regarding the specific fate of Soviet Jews under Nazi occupation; and, soon afterward, the “Zionist danger” [19]. For Jewish organizations abroad, the opacity of Soviet procedures seemed all the more suspicious because they knew that other national groups, notably Poles and Armenians, had been allowed to establish specific relief networks administered by their own representatives [20]. Such reasoning overlooked the complex issue of recipients’ citizenship. Even so, it may have encouraged Mikhoels to advocate a specific organization for material assistance to survivors, complementing his January 1943 proposal to create a bureau for locating Jews missing in Soviet territory and sought by relatives, including relatives abroad [21]. Neither institution ever came into being. The distribution of aid and the search for Jewish victims of pogroms had already been closely linked concerns for foreign donors in the early 1920s because of the opacity of information released by Soviet authorities [22]. The project would ultimately cost the Committee dearly: ties with foreign Jewish charitable organizations, above all the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint), became an integral part of the accusations that led to the execution of most of its members in the early 1950s [23].

9. The re-emerging Jewish communities of the USSR’s western regions [24], focused both on reviving religious life and on providing material solidarity to their poorest co-religionists, nevertheless succeeded in capturing part of the foreign gifts intended for them [25]. Soviet authorities therefore frequently suspected these communities of serving in reality as fronts for commercial activity partly centered on donations from Jews abroad. While reading a report on the Zhytomyr region, one official underlined in red pencil the statement that almost every community maintained contacts with religious Jews in the United States who sent them valuable parcels [26].

10. The missions of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), established in the spring of 1945 in Minsk and Kyiv, maintained more workable relations with Soviet authorities. Even though the missions were small and their movements restricted, they were unable to supervise the work carried out on the ground by Soviet republican administrations created to parallel them [27]. The aid UNRRA sent to the Ukrainian and Belorussian republics was far smaller than that provided to other liberated European countries, yet it still constituted an essential contribution for the population, especially in food [28]. According to reports from local UNRRA missions, food supplied by the United Nations, apart from bread, made up most of what was sold in shops charged with distributing rationed goods [29]. By early 1947, as the end of this assistance approached, the missions feared the worst while witnessing a deterioration in the food situation and, more generally, in public health [30].

11. Tušënka (corned beef) was certainly the emblematic product of this foreign food aid, much of it drawn from United States Army rations, and Brodsky was far from the only person to retain an indelible memory of it. Among a population desperately short of everything, however, donated clothing became an object of especially intense desire. Like corned beef, but in a more durable form, its first benefit was survival; yet these garments were also actively sought because they offered a foretaste of the simple pleasures of the West. The regime therefore referred to them ever more discreetly in public discourse as their importance grew for both the authorities and the recipients [31]. Usually called zagraničnye podarki (“gifts from abroad”) or amerikanskie podarki (“American gifts”), their precise origins remained blurred. Even so, the terminology raises the question of the prestige and recognition the West, especially the United States, might have gained from such generosity. Ordinary Soviets, however, cared less about origin than access. The very word “gifts” (podarki) described not so much why these goods were present in the Soviet Union as a particular category of objects distinguished by relative quality and abundance in contrast to the poverty of Soviet production. The same items might simply be called amerikanskie vešči, “American things”—the minimum that a materially superior civilization could offer, even when the goods were second-hand clothes, yet still worlds apart from what Soviet citizens were accustomed to enduring. In any case, the weight of these basic foreign gifts, however attractive, was negligible beside the suffering borne in the flesh by the Russian people. What could be debated was the meaning of the imbalance: for some, it was at this insulting price that Westerners concealed their cowardice; for others, the Soviet regime itself humiliated its population by reducing people to rejoicing over things of little value in the West. In a propaganda letter, a young girl marveled at a green dress with two pockets while recounting her fate as a child victim of war and the daughter of a front-line soldier [32]. Varlam Shalamov recalled American clothing with similar tenderness [33], only to describe immediately afterward the delight of starving prisoners swallowing whole barrels of American solidol, industrial grease delivered with Lend-Lease machinery that would later be used to clear the frozen mountains of corpses in the Gulag.

12. The ways these goods were appropriated also subverted their original purpose. A pyramidal system of commissions was supposed to ensure distribution, a task that, as we have seen, the Soviet leadership had taken into its own hands. In practice, however, relief supplies could pile up in warehouses first visited by local privileged groups—for example railway officials from the Siberia–Urals region who arrived with their wives, maids, and drivers and helped themselves to the best goods. The intended recipients were left with scraps: clothing in poor condition, unmatched stockings, and useless garments. American gifts therefore aroused not only envy but anger. Many of these “deserving poor” indignantly refused donations that could only seem insulting in light of their needs and merits, and in light of the higher-ups who had been able to serve themselves first—a fact that eventually became widely known. The same banal scandal was repeated across the Soviet Union, as far as Magadan [34]. Nor were local and regional officials the only people arriving at depots with their households in tow. Panteleimon Ponomarenko himself, first secretary of the Belorussian Communist Party and a member of the Central Committee, was accused of the same behavior. The celebrated wartime partisan leader was said to have distributed to the republic’s leaders, and reserved for himself, the best of the goods stored rather carelessly at the central Belglavsnab base in Minsk.

13. In reality, what the wives of Belorussia’s top officials were waiting for, much more eagerly than UNRRA clothing and shoes, were the riches arriving from Germany, described as “trophies” or “reparations” [35]. Two essential things distinguished the objects in these crates, even when they were stored in the same place: the way they had been collected and their value. The arrival of “trophy goods” is far better preserved in Soviet memory than acts of solidarity by Allied populations. In fact this windfall cannot be separated from the extreme violence that accompanied the Red Army’s occupation of defeated countries. Yet the behavior of Soviet troops toward civilians, above all the systematic rape of women, remained largely ignored in the East [36], even though such violence extended over a vast area, with one of its first spectacular manifestations in the sack of Budapest and its culmination in Germany [37]. Conversely, the virtual pogrom carried out in East Prussia and the terror spread in Berlin by the arrival of Soviet troops are widely known in the West. Local memories echo archival reports showing that insecurity for occupied civilians persisted for years: rape and looting by individual soldiers occurred more sporadically, but there were also genuine bands made up of deserters who requisitioned women, livestock, and every kind of provision from terrified villagers. Soviet accounts of Nazi atrocities had always emphasized how violence against property and violence against bodies were intertwined. In the Soviet discourse and memory of Soviet behavior in the defeated countries, however, the two were separated, all the more easily because physical violence against the defeated populations differed greatly in scale and nature. In truth, the latter resembled material damage even more closely—not only because the two occurred together, but because of the treatment of enemy women’s bodies—while calls simply to kill every representative of the German nation disappeared from Soviet propaganda. The prevailing idea was that taking the property of defeated civilians was only just compensation for the plunder the Soviet population had suffered during the war. That conviction was reinforced by the well-known shock experienced by Soviets crossing the frontier and seeing defeated, ruined countries that were nevertheless still far more prosperous than their own homeland. More than that, from Romanian towns to Prussian farms, Soviets saw—or believed they saw—in the homes of their defeated enemies the direct fruits of robbery committed on Soviet soil, from livestock [38] and tramcars to valuable objects discovered in the apartments of former occupiers [39].

14. Helping oneself could therefore be understood as justice rather than blind revenge, just as the destruction of enemy property could also be justified [40]. Acts of destruction and physical violence against civilians, especially women, were never made the subject of public discourse in the USSR and continue to be passed over in silence. The seizure of the defeated population’s property, including personal belongings, was different. At the time, as today, the appropriation of trophy goods appeared both legitimate and trivial [41]. The wristwatch was an emblematic example of such booty for the ordinary Soviet soldier: testimony consistently indicates that it was common to wear several watches on one arm. Tolerance for this ostentatious manifestation of theft from the enemy says much about the meaning attached to it. The point was not simply that watches were rare in the USSR and could easily be passed on when the soldier returned home, but also that a compulsive attitude toward enemy possessions had become normalized [42]. Behind the apparently harmless sight of several watches—even broken ones—worn on one arm or both, one can discern a parallel with the fate of German women, whose age, physical condition, and other personal characteristics appear to have mattered little to their rapists.

15. The almost good-natured appearance of acquiring trophy goods is likewise illustrated by the popularity of bicycles, still rare in the USSR, among Soviets who often did not know how to ride them—even people from privileged backgrounds—and who nevertheless did not hesitate to display their clumsiness. Everyone knew that obtaining a bicycle might have been accompanied by rape or murder, and the scene of Soviets learning to ride with childlike delight matched an image frequently reported by the defeated: barbarians behaving with complete naïveté, in striking contrast to savage scenes perpetrated by the same people [43]. Soviet diarist Vladimir Gelfand, by contrast, casts himself in a favorable light. By the day after learning to ride, he is sufficiently comfortable on a bicycle to travel easily to a German woman and her raped daughter, who press him to protect them from his own compatriots—an offer he politely declines [44]. A little later, wearing civilian clothes and an elegant suit probably made for him in Germany, he has himself photographed while cycling, an action shot still unusual among his contemporaries. The photograph attests to his skill and, more importantly, shifts his quest for objects into another register.

16. The camera, celebrated in Soviet propaganda since the 1920s yet in reality very rare [45], was another highly popular trophy. More than a watch or bicycle—purely practical objects—it admitted its new owner into a new cultural practice. This helps explain the satisfaction displayed by members of the intelligentsia who had the opportunity to make such a capture [46]. Young Gelfand acquired a camera in January 1946, perhaps on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, where all sorts of goods were traded more or less discreetly [47]. During his stay in Germany, cameras served him as barter objects among others, but he eventually learned to use one himself and began searching for the equipment needed to develop his photographs [48]. He then photographed his female conquests—the central preoccupation of his occupation experience—people he happened to meet, and the cities and landscapes through which he traveled [49]. This new passion even tended to replace keeping his diary [50].

17. Similarly, radio receivers, phonographs, and typewriters were particularly sought after by certain Soviets who already shared a cultural universe with the West and for whom the more or less avowable circumstances of acquisition receded into the background [51]. Trophy goods thus did more than compensate for loss: they gave access to a world that had achieved a modern material culture to which Soviets, rulers and ruled alike, could only aspire.

18. The tension between the political model represented by Stalin’s USSR and these material aspirations made access to the spoils of war a complicated matter. Trophy goods could channel soldiers’ desire for revenge and conveniently compensate a population impoverished still further by occupation plunder and wartime destruction, but they also threatened to produce generalized indiscipline and a dangerous fascination with Western civilization. At least initially, however, Soviet leaders seem to have encouraged and in some measure organized this opening toward the material civilization of the West, while trying to preserve a stratified hierarchy of access.

19. On 26 December 1944, as the Red Army reached German territory, a decree authorized soldiers to send monthly parcels from the front to the rear, with weight limits determined by military rank: five kilograms for enlisted men, ten for officers, and fifteen for generals [52]. The decree did not go unnoticed. It was treated as an explicit invitation to loot and was also read, even at the time, as a direct mirror of the parcel policy available to Wehrmacht soldiers and other German nationals in occupied territories during the war. A rank-and-file Soviet soldier who disapproved of the decree on moral grounds nevertheless wrote in his diary by way of justification: “Every month the German soldier was permitted to send home a sixteen-kilogram parcel from the territories they had conquered” [53]. The explosion in the number of parcels following the decree badly congested the postal service. In Kursk, for example, additional staff had to be brought in specifically to handle parcels sent from the front by soldiers [54]. The permitted number of monthly parcels seems later to have been reduced and in any case was not always sufficient, forcing those most generous toward their relatives to resort to stratagems. Sending regular parcels home, through the postal system or other channels, became a genuine duty for those fortunate enough to be serving abroad. Gelfand, for instance, received what amounted to orders from his mother for clothing for adults and children as well as other valuables, although she asked him to be discreet. A substantial part of their correspondence was in fact devoted to such matters [55].

20. This liberal policy toward private transfers of the defeated population’s property into Soviet homes continued during the first major waves of return to the USSR by repatriated former Soviet deportees and demobilized soldiers, as well as soldiers and civilians on leave, all of whom were exempted from customs inspection in the summer of 1945. The baggage carried by demobilized soldiers returning on special trains appears to have reached extraordinary proportions. One military veterinarian, for example, returned from Vienna in September 1945 on his way to Uzbekistan with almost a metric ton of luggage. Some returnees were promptly shaken down by local authorities as soon as they arrived [56].

21. The ease with which Soviets could cross the frontier was matched by the ease with which virtually anyone could obtain goods in the occupied zone, whether on the black market or in various kinds of shops. In Gelfand’s diary Berlin, far more than the other German cities he frequented, appears as the epicenter of his acquisitive desire: the black market on Alexanderplatz or around the former Reichstag in reality extended into every street, every house, every corridor, and every café in the capital, an entire city begging and exchanging objects and food for money or barter [57]. Even when Soviet authorities tried to eradicate the phenomenon, at least in a symbolic location such as Alexanderplatz, their efforts were visibly futile. In November 1945, under the pretext of having his boots cleaned, Gelfand attracted a crowd of sellers hiding merchandise beneath their clothes. In the time it took the shoeshiner to finish, he managed to obtain a shirt, a leather jacket, several pairs of socks, and gloves under the very noses of Soviet patrols that were supposedly checking even officers [58].

22. The institutionalized transfer of booty seized from the enemy, soon to become an official reparations policy [59], also created opportunities for Soviet individuals—at least for some of them. The authorities responsible for the systematic collection of trophy property regulated its acquisition by senior personnel. From June 1945, Red Army generals could receive a car free of charge, while officers could receive a bicycle or motorcycle. Generals were also permitted to acquire from these depots a piano or grand piano, a radio, a hunting rifle, and a wristwatch, pocket watch, or clock. Generals and officers could also purchase carpets, tapestries, furs, tea services, cameras, and other valuable goods [60]. The ability to buy trophy property from the Soviet occupation administration was an obvious privilege. Through this channel Gelfand bought a radio receiver for 400 marks, whereas similar sets offered for sale in Berlin might cost him ten times as much [61].

23. Occupation of the defeated countries thus made it possible to enjoy luxuries whose access was permitted, and even organized, in ways that reinforced social hierarchies within Soviet society. Serving abroad in a military or civilian capacity was itself an advantage regardless of rank, but among these fortunate people the authorities took care to reserve the finest goods for the elite, who displayed their good fortune without embarrassment. Dissident Larisa Bogoraz recalled how, in the immediate postwar years, daughters of generals serving in Germany wore dresses that clearly stood out from the rest because of the fabrics and patterns their fathers sent from Berlin. She concluded: “That too was the taste of the postwar period: new dresses cut from luxurious Western fabrics.” The privilege was all the more visible because it lay not only in the cloth but also in the cut, which made the girls look “like young German women”—a resemblance evidently considered entirely respectable and even enviable [62]. Bogoraz likewise remembered that her uncle, a general in Germany, brought her lengths of fabric.

24. The conspicuous appropriation of the defeated enemy’s fashion and culture was a broader phenomenon in the immediate postwar Soviet Union. The screening of “trophy films” seized from the enemy shows that the Kremlin even tended to encourage it. The opening created by the war was in fact highly eclectic, combining elements of American culture with those of old Central Europe [63]. Remarkably, it became a general phenomenon across all strata of Soviet society, especially among younger people, despite the distortions and reappropriations caused by the geographical, social, and cultural distance separating ordinary Soviet citizens from the places where most of the objects carrying Western fashions and musical tastes were concentrated [64].

25. Soviet tolerance toward soldiers’ pilfering of enemy property, and the explicitly legalized right granted to people of different ranks to bring large quantities of foreign goods home, represented only one aspect of the enormous transfer from defeated countries—Germany above all—to the Soviet Union. The sheer scale of that transfer inevitably threatened the social and political order that the Stalinist leadership had been compelled to restore in the liberated territories. Once these goods spread throughout Soviet territory, diversion, an exploding black market, and other uncontrolled forms of circulation became unavoidable problems.

26. This traffic fed the formation of the networks characteristic of the Soviet underground economy. Some people did not merely bring home their war acquisitions for themselves or their relatives but turned them into an illegal business. At the end of 1946, police in Tambov confiscated 4,622 furs from a veteran and former officer who had stolen them from a Berlin shop 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 the trunk full of trophy goods subsequently resold by his brother-in-law, was arrested in the spring of 1947 [65].

27. The traffic could, however, reach an entirely different scale. The booty seized at the end of the war was followed by deliveries arising from the Soviet reparations policy, arriving by land or sea and then moving in whole trainloads across the country without adequate guards and without their contents being properly inventoried or valued. The theft of goods from trains and warehouses reached such proportions that in January 1947 the Ministry of Internal Affairs proposed creating an interministerial commission to take the necessary measures [66]. Theft on Soviet soil was committed by individuals, but also by armed gangs and, above all, by networks formed by people responsible for the goods themselves, especially their sale. One such trafficking network centered on a trophy-goods depot in Novosibirsk was broken up in early 1947. Grand pianos, chests of drawers, and clocks from the depot had found their way into the homes of a narrow circle of local leaders who acquired them cheaply even though the goods were intended to reward deserving officials [67].

28. Theft of socialist property was a constant concern of the Soviet leadership, and the decrees of June 1947 marked a clear hardening of repression in this field. The Kremlin perceived theft of property belonging both to the state and to private individuals as a mass phenomenon at a time when the country remained impoverished by war and afflicted by famine. The diversion of large deliveries from abroad, and therefore treated as state property, undoubtedly played a major role because of their monetary value and the significant revenues their loss denied the state. Yet other issues, more or less connected to the economic one, were also involved: the formation of networks even at high levels, the consolidation of patron-client relationships, and the central government’s lack of control over distribution of these riches during reconstruction. The Stalinist leadership also knew how to exploit this generalized corruption. Selective denunciation could be used to bring down senior officials who had become inconvenient, as was probably the case in Belorussia, where the party’s first secretary, Nikolai Gusarov [68], exposed the scandal of 27,000 trophy cows delivered in 1945 to the Soviet republic most devastated by the war. The cattle had been appropriated by some 2,000 officials of varying rank while more than 150,000 collective-farm families possessed no cow at all. Indifferent to the misery of those they governed, these officials had lost sight of the promotion of collective livestock farming and were concerned only with building networks of solidarity and patronage in the service of their “petty-bourgeois” preoccupations [69].

29. The diversion of a cow—an essential means of survival for millions of Soviet households—was as common as it was emblematic of officials’ lack of concern for the destitution of their fellow citizens. This indifference can be explained by greed and the desire to maintain a clientele, but in some cases it may also have reflected challenges to the validity of the priority categories established by the central authorities. At the most local level, personal wartime experience and close acquaintance could reinforce resistance to the official hierarchy of heroes and victims. One example was a certain Gryn, chairman of a village soviet in the Ukrainian region of Nikolaev, who took back from a family with two sons serving at the front the trophy cow granted to them for that reason, arguing that the Germans had confiscated a similar animal from him during the occupation. He also seized decorations and documents from demobilized soldiers whom he accused of having been former collaborationist policemen, thereby depriving them of access to privileges [70].

30. In other cases a very different criticism appeared: the immorality of diverting war booty lay not in injustice toward wartime victims but in an excessive taste for luxury. Such accusations reveal a fantasy of apparently limitless opportunities to accumulate the wealth of a defeated enemy. This is particularly clear in confessions extracted from senior officials of the administration of the Soviet occupation zone in Germany by the services of Viktor Abakumov, the former counterintelligence chief and head of state security, who was intent on compromising rivals before Stalin [71]. What is most striking is that the information collected in this operation could have seemed plausible to Abakumov, if not to Stalin. The sheer quantity of objects from Germany supposedly “discovered” in searches of the accused officials’ apartments is itself astonishing. One Moscow apartment, for example, was said to contain more than 3,000 meters of fabric; eight tea and table services totaling 1,470 pieces; 315 valuable antique objects such as statuettes and vases; ninety silver objects; forty-one carpets and runners; fifteen paintings; 359 items of women’s underwear; more than 150 pairs of shoes and other leather goods; nearly sixty dresses; seventeen suits; twenty-two coats and other furs; 323 pairs of stockings; six radios and radio-phonographs; and four accordions. These impressive, seemingly endless lists suggest not luxuriously furnished apartments so much as warehouses. Yet the ultimate destination of these luxury goods was never clearly explained. Resale was mentioned only marginally and often ironically. Exchange value, though central to the accusations, does not by itself explain the abundance, even if it highlights dubious practices. Ivan Serov, for instance, was said to have given a radio-phonograph to his superior Marshal Zhukov, women’s gold watches to a high-ranking American general in Berlin, and two tea services and a hunting rifle to his subordinate Sidnev—gifts representing only a minute fraction of the property allegedly diverted.

31. Equally spectacular was the logistics allegedly mobilized to transport booty to the Soviet Union. Aircraft said to have been chartered by Zhukov for this sole purpose remained in collective memory even though the factual basis is uncertain, and similar accusations were made against others. Serov was said to have organized an entire shuttle system of trains and automobiles for his personal needs, while an aircraft regularly flew between Berlin and Moscow carrying furs, carpets, paintings, and other valuables [72].

32. Descriptions of the objects themselves are generally terse and repetitive, with a few exceptions—for example when the accusations emphasize time squandered, instead of service to the fatherland, on appropriating for frivolous personal use the very products that had embodied Germany’s sinister superiority. Serov was said to have had custom radio-phonographs made from the wood paneling of Hitler’s former private office in the Reich Chancellery, employing a well-known German technician. We therefore know little about the precise tastes of these thieves: which paintings Soviet senior officers chose to take from Nazi magnates while competing with specialized trophy brigades roaming the defeated countries [73], or whether the works were intended for personal use or resale in a Soviet black market for art that remains almost entirely unexplored. Nor do we know exactly what style was meant in a report denouncing the widespread practice among Soviet generals and officers in the occupation zone of ordering “period furniture” from German luxury firms for their Moscow apartments and dachas. Yet the report makes clear that the high command’s relationship to the enemy’s material world was not only predatory; it offered a form of emancipation from asceticism and from the lack of aesthetic choice and personalization imposed by the Soviet environment [74]. The lifestyle held against them is scarcely more legible, except perhaps for lavish private receptions or hunting parties. Such activities were not strictly forbidden—senior officers had, after all, been authorized to acquire tea services and hunting rifles—but they pushed them into a dangerous zone. The accused were also said to have adopted a “seigneurial” way of life in occupied Germany, clearly violating Soviet morality. Most of the time the exact origin of the goods was not specified, since officials helped themselves from warehouses that functioned like Ali Baba’s caves scattered through Berlin and the Soviet zone. When former owners were mentioned they inspired little pity, being described as wealthy beneficiaries of the Nazi regime. The offense was not that the accused had stripped them of their property, but that they had slipped into their way of life by occupying requisitioned villas. The accusations likewise left obscure the people for whom the state had intended the diverted luxury goods. One interrogator exclaimed of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Flemish and French master tapestries, allegedly once owned by wealthy Germans and appropriated by Sidnev for his Leningrad apartment, that “the only proper place for these tapestries is a museum.” The boundary of acceptable luxury in a Soviet interior—even that of the elite—had apparently been crossed.

33. Serov, although directly implicated in his subordinates’ depositions, was not prosecuted and continued to hold important posts. At least two of his associates, however, arrested in late 1947 and early 1948, were sentenced in October 1951 to ten years in labor camps [75]. Rehabilitated very soon after Stalin’s death, they revealed another truth. In explaining how inventories had been falsified, they implicitly emphasized the inferiority of Soviet domestic production: during searches, Abakumov’s men had not hesitated to classify objects actually made in the USSR as German booty and to list nickel, alloy, or platinum as gold or silver—materials at once noble and morally suspect. The rehabilitated men did not deny owning unusually large quantities of goods; on the contrary, they admitted to frantic purchasing during their stay in Germany. More precisely, they claimed that their wives—and occasionally a niece or daughter—had scoured the various places in the occupation zone where enormous quantities of inexpensive goods were sold: stockings, men’s and women’s linen, trinkets, an entire “bric-a-brac” of objects that were of little intrinsic value but unavailable in the USSR or sold there at prohibitive prices. There were in fact many opportunities to buy such goods legally: Voentorg shops reserved for senior Soviet personnel, where valuable second-hand furniture and objects were sold, as well as sales to German and Soviet private buyers of property formerly belonging to Nazis.

34. The illegal shipment to Moscow of goods from a villa occupied by one of the accused in Germany was likewise blamed on his wife. This behavior toward the resources of occupied Germany was generalized to the women and female relatives of the command, portrayed as lacking the Soviet morality supposedly embodied by their husbands—husbands too overworked to remind them of it. Both men expressed the same disgust at the frantic accumulation, speaking of the mire into which they had been dragged by wives insufficiently educated to resist the “pernicious bourgeois environment” of conquered Germany [76]. There was probably some truth in these images, all the easier to invoke because Soviet discourse, in accord with ordinary common sense, had long associated “survivals” of the old world—including attraction to superfluous material wealth—with women. Yet men were hardly absent from the use of power to remove goods or place direct orders with prestigious German manufacturers, even if many of the objects were indeed intended for women, wives, or mistresses—another recurring association between a thirst for objects and violations of socialist morality. The fact that the rehabilitated men in this affair were not readmitted to the Party, despite repeated appeals, may be explained not only by the twists of de-Stalinization but also by the renewed Khrushchev-era rigorism toward personal enrichment and philistine behavior.

35. Crucially, these “profiteers” were vydvizhentsy—promoted men who had joined the Party early and had long been mobilized in defense of the revolutionary homeland, including during their service in occupied Germany. In their own accounts it was money that corrupted them. While serving in the Soviet zone they received exceptionally high and largely superfluous cash salaries, in addition to the payments in kind customarily enjoyed by senior servants of the Soviet state. The combination of this sudden influx of cash—conspicuously absent from Stalin-era accusations but very real in practice—and privileged access to Western goods thus constituted a shock for this stratum of Soviet society. It produced a small revolution in their domestic interiors, even though the exact contours and implications for everyday morals cannot be established with certainty because truth and fabrication are so difficult to disentangle in the accusations.

The Hidden Treasures of Prewar Soviets

36. The primitive character of the accusations leveled at Soviet officials supposedly seized by compulsive behavior toward capitalist objects—whether one attributes this to an imagination shaped by the Party’s ascetic morality or to the reality of an impoverished society—ultimately returns us to the dichotomy proposed by Brodsky: on one side Soviet grayness; on the other, foreign objects, from the most basic to the most sophisticated, opening an unknown world to postwar Soviet society, whether that world represented liberating culture, abundance, or guilty luxury.

37. The problem with this narrative is that it obscures the presence of this supposedly “unknown” world in the prewar USSR and the complex trajectories of the objects through which it was embodied. Such things had existed among the narrow circle of privileged people at the end of the tsarist period; they were replenished through the still tentative Soviet production of consumer goods and through imports from abroad; and they circulated widely through different strata of urbanized Soviet society. Soviet authorities themselves had played a decisive role, expropriating and redistributing the property of former elites before carrying out a massive siphoning-off of anything privately owned that the state considered valuable. The authorities hungered first for gold, then silver and precious stones, and finally any object that could be converted into foreign currency, which in turn bought the Western equipment required for forced industrialization. Elena Osokina’s study of Torgsin—the stores created on the eve of the great famine of 1933 to obtain hard currency—shows that the search for valuables went far beyond the sale abroad of imperial collections and Church property begun in the 1920s. Gold coins dating from the tsars or Kerensky’s provisional government and kept by peasants, small silver spoons, and the family jewelry of the lower middle classes were exchanged for bread at Torgsin counters, all the more eagerly because such objects could easily be melted down or dismantled and sold abroad. The literal destruction of an entire patrimony, by then no longer justified even by class justice, mattered little; the only value attached to objects from the past was the price foreign buyers were willing to pay for the most remarkable pieces [77]. Less than ten years later, the great plunder of Soviet wealth by the occupier—from museum collections to the household goods of the poorest private citizens—would be condemned by the same state that had itself carried out a comparable operation in the name of modernization.

38. The rage to uncover among private citizens whatever retained a suspicious status in the Soviet context, and its corollary—the supposedly shameful thirst for objects among a population stripped of possessions and afflicted by shortages—appears vividly in the conjuring scenes performed by Woland in a Moscow theater of the 1930s in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. This incarnation of the devil from abroad—his German identity is suggested—literally strips bare an audience that has “hardly changed” despite buses, telephones, and other manifestations of technical progress that have transformed the capital. His assistant Fagott conjures a ladies’ shop onto the stage and announces that the spectators’ old-fashioned dresses and shoes will be exchanged free of charge for the “latest Paris fashions.” A tide of women rushes at these miraculous luxury products, losing all modesty and reason in order to profit from an opportunity as unexpected as it is fleeting [78]. Later, another character dreams of an equally nightmarish performance in which a tuxedoed entertainer invites him into the spotlight and, amid the audience’s whistles, exposes dollars hidden in the apartment of an honorable Soviet citizen. The entertainer then turns on another spectator, Sergei Gerardovich Dunchil, who “stubbornly refuses to hand over the foreign currency remaining to him at a time when the country needs it, even though it is entirely useless to him.” His mistress, Ida Gerkulanovna Vors—the repeated foreign-sounding names and patronymics are no accident—appears on stage carrying on a gold tray a bundle of 18,000 dollars and a diamond necklace worth 40,000 gold rubles, which the unfaithful husband had hidden in her Kharkov apartment. The audience is urged in ever more threatening tones to surrender foreign currency that has no business in private hands, while an army of cooks brings them an enormous basin of soup and a tray piled with black bread [79]. When the novel finally appeared in the Soviet Union in 1966, long after Stalin’s death, both passages were censored, perhaps because of what they said about Soviet humanity beyond the contingencies of Stalinism: a humanity rendered grotesque both by fear of masters obsessed with uncovering hidden treasure in provincial apartments and by its own enduring attraction to everything foreign and diabolically desirable. Bulgakov’s Soviets of the 1930s are not ignorant of Western culture—quite the opposite—but eternally animated by material desires that the regime, by eventually defining them as sins, inevitably turns into torment.

39. Examination of inventories submitted from late 1943 onward by Soviets from occupied territories—whether they had remained in place or left in evacuation [80]—to assess private losses caused by the enemy confirms that on the eve of the war, after twenty years of Soviet rule, the material world of some citizens bore the mark of the “philistine” tastes described by Bulgakov. They had not waited for the wartime foreign windfall to take part in a Western cultural space. Perhaps most surprising is that they offered detailed descriptions of those possessions. In an apparent paradox, the destruction and theft by the enemy of the property of millions of Soviet households accelerated the rehabilitation of material well-being and therefore of individual property, a process Stalin had begun in the 1930s. As part of a vast investigation into the crimes of the Nazi occupier and the material losses it had caused, the Soviet government invited inhabitants of occupied regions to declare all privately owned possessions that had been stolen or destroyed [81]. The prewar normative discourse surrounding objects was weakened sufficiently by this new context that some victims, against the background of the extreme poverty of the overwhelming majority of their fellow citizens, revealed ownership of furniture, wardrobes, musical instruments, and other goods whose display exposed tastes not entirely compatible with official ethics, however much those ethics had fluctuated during the interwar period.

40. Unsurprisingly, most of these property lists are striking for their austerity. Rural inventories must be distinguished immediately from urban ones. In the countryside, the main value often lay in personally owned buildings—the house and sometimes outbuildings such as a barn or shed—livestock, above all a privately owned cow, and food reserves. By contrast there was little or nothing in the way of furniture, tableware, or clothing; declarations more often mention a chest or lengths of cloth. The absence of ordinary consumer goods from such inventories can be explained in several ways, but in most cases it should probably be taken at face value. The extreme material poverty of Soviet rural people is suggested by many testimonies, although it has rarely been studied systematically, and it points to wartime behavior whose precise meaning lies at the center of important historiographical debates. The extremely basic character of rural interiors, for example, was recalled by dissident Larisa Bogoraz. As a very poor young Muscovite sent to teach in the Kaluga region in the early 1950s, she regularly forgave her young nanny for stealing spoons and cups because for the girl, as for other villagers, an aluminum spoon or a drinking glass represented a wholly unfamiliar luxury [82]. This testimony concerns postwar Stalinism but could apply even more strongly to earlier decades. At the end of the 1920s, satirists Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov mocked the Soviet mania for counting every consumer object, noting nevertheless that the number of chairs had somehow escaped statistical knowledge. They roughly reconstructed the figure by relating it to the total Soviet population while subtracting the majority—the peasantry—thereby expressing a truth probably obvious at the time: the material and cultural gulf separating the countryside from urban civilization [83]. Treated comically here, the coexistence of these worlds would have dramatic effects little more than a decade later, when rural poverty found expression in the wartime hunger for objects. In particular, the more or less active participation of local populations in the murder of Jews under occupation has been linked to the desire to seize Jewish property, from clothing to furniture.

41. Urban residents also took part in the division of the Jews’ meager possessions, to the point that it became a literary trope. It appears in the letter written by the mother of Viktor Shtrum, the central character of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, shortly before she is murdered. She tells her son how, in the first days of the occupation in Berdichev, her neighbors drove her out of the room she occupied, took her sofa, and predicted that she would soon be dead [84]. In reality, while Shtrum’s mother, a physician, possessed this modest element of relative comfort, many urban residents declared only a table and a few chairs, one or more beds, and perhaps a wardrobe. Anna Fedorovna Chudova, an evacuee employed at a confectionery factory in Kuibyshev (today Samara), who before the war had worked as a dishwasher in the Mogilev hospital for the modest wage of 100 rubles a month [85], reported the loss of a wardrobe, an “English bed,” five chairs, and a table. Her wardrobe consisted of one coat, three dresses, a pair of pumps, and small items of linen she did not bother to itemize. The coat was by far the most valuable possession, assessed at 15,000 rubles, whereas the wardrobe was worth no more than 1,000. Ownership of a bicycle, valued at the same price as the coat, thus represented a luxury that this unmarried woman had managed to afford [86].

42. As the value of lost property rises, however, the descriptions become more precise in naming the materials from which objects were made, while the range of furniture, household objects, clothing, linen, and goods connected to cultural practices expands considerably. One may see here the reflection of kul’turnost’, which during the 1930s became a watchword of Stalinist discourse about lifestyle. The term, difficult to translate, refers to what belongs to German Kultur: a body of knowledge as well as cultivated manners whose acquisition was necessary in order to leave behind the state of backwardness most often associated with the peasant world. In clothing, kul’turnost’ entailed a rehabilitation of bourgeois manners, while in domestic interiors it encouraged tastes close to those of the nineteenth-century European middle class [87]. In visual representations aimed at the general public, as well as in the serious household-budget studies carried out by Soviet statisticians, advancement toward a lifestyle conforming to kul’turnost’ was measured by the presence of objects that signaled both modernity and the owner’s cultural aspirations: a bicycle, camera, radio set, or gramophone.

43. Other, more traditional objects were likewise reintroduced positively into the Soviet material horizon, such as the piano. With older objects, however, the question of provenance arose because inheritance remained problematic in Stalinist society: bourgeois origins were still a stigma, while rapid social promotion was both a mass reality among the new elites and an essential value of the regime. If we limit ourselves in these inventories to objects identified as markers of kul’turnost’, we paradoxically enter social worlds absent from the official description of Soviet society. Far from the factory Stakhanovites who were supposedly the intended consumers of such production, one glimpses professional groups characterized by high specialization and, more tentatively because of the nature of the sources, family inheritances involving both practices and material transmission [88].

44. Even when the precise social characteristics of the owners cannot be reconstructed, the inventories make something else possible: they allow these “cultural objects” to be placed alongside other elements of their owners’ material lives, sketching real social worlds distinct from the propaganda images on which historians have often had to rely. The ideological filter cannot be ignored, since it must have influenced what declarants chose to list. Yet the normative framework acting upon these victims was itself far from unambiguous, and it is impossible to say whether this reflects the sincerity of the declarants or the interweaving of different normative models, of which Stalinist kul’turnost’ was only one element.

45. To begin with, although owners of “cultural objects” were almost certainly members of intellectual professions rather than manual workers, the boundary between urban and rural ways of life can be surprisingly uncertain. This reflects a provincial world that allowed inhabitants from very different social backgrounds to circumvent the rigors of the Soviet economy by keeping a little livestock, a vegetable garden, or an orchard. A certain Yakov Pavlovich Kozlov, who lived in Kalinin (today Tver) before being evacuated to the Kuibyshev region, carefully calculated the substantial loss he suffered because occupation prevented him from selling the produce of his cherry orchard, vegetable garden, and beehives, presumably attached to a privately owned house, perhaps on the outskirts of the city. Among an impressive list of lost possessions, this “gardener” owned a “Wolfram Grossmann” piano and a library of 300 volumes, including an encyclopedia, literary classics, and books on Russian language and mathematics. The fact that his inventory was certified by a secondary-school teacher from the same town suggests that the “gardener” was primarily a teacher himself. He paid close attention to his furnishings—walnut and mahogany furniture, a mirror—to his table—a samovar, silver cutlery, a twenty-four-piece tea set, porcelain—and to his wardrobe: a cloth coat with an astrakhan collar, another wool coat with a fur collar, while his wife reported, among other losses, two crêpe-de-chine dresses, perhaps sewn at home on their Singer machine [89].

46. The occupation of Efim Savelievich Savin is unknown. We know only that he was evacuated from Slantsevye Rudniki, a new industrial settlement in the Leningrad region. Like the other members of his family, he divided his free time between caring for livestock—one cow, one pig, two sheep, two goats, fifteen chickens, and seven beehives—and using objects associated with modern urban life: a bicycle, two sewing machines, a gramophone and several records. His privately owned house also contained a clock and two mirrors [90].

47. Searching these inventories for “cultural” objects—whether they belonged to prerevolutionary culture, like the piano and other musical instruments, or to newer interwar practices such as owning a camera, radio receiver, or gramophone—most clearly reveals the comfortable interiors of people one might call the “bourgeoisie of socialism.” They differed from the regime’s highest officials, whose comfort was entirely supplied by the state and could therefore be withdrawn just as easily with purges and disgrace, and whose official ethic remained austere because they were expected to devote all their energies to building socialism and therefore, in principle, to have little leisure. The people visible in these inventories instead belonged to professions whose high pay gave access to a material world distinguished by stylistic variety, the use of noble materials, and an overall refinement that the inventories allow us only to glimpse. Their possessions outline the complex social universe of the spetsy, highly qualified specialists whom the regime alternately vilified as a “nest of byvshie”—former people, survivors of prerevolutionary elites—and then incorporated through the recruitment of people trained in new Soviet institutions, while always leaving them vulnerable to another ideological reversal.

48. The detailed inventory submitted by Evdokia Samoilovna Yantovskaya, who lived in Dnepropetrovsk before the war, offers a striking example of the uninhibited display of her former prosperity. She states that on the eve of the war she earned a comfortable monthly income of 2,000 rubles as a teacher of German at an institute of foreign languages, supplemented by several hours of teaching at other institutes in the city. Her husband, then a workshop manager at the Koksokhim industrial combine, must also have earned well, although she does not specify his exact salary. Her mother, who taught embroidery, likewise contributed to the household. This industrious family therefore had the means, in Yantovskaya’s words, “to live well and in a civilized way”—she uses the fashionable term kul’turno, even though her long enumeration of possessions “looted by the Germans” departs in many respects from Stalinist norms. Music appears to have occupied a prominent place in the household. A luxurious piano made in Dresden was clearly not merely decorative: a bamboo shelf imported from Japan held scores of operas such as Carmen, Faust, Eugene Onegin, and Rusalka, waltzes and mazurkas by Frédéric Chopin, rhapsodies by Franz Liszt, sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven, as well as albums of songs by contemporary composers, Gypsy romances, and other repertoire. The English-made gramophone had only eight records, but some had come from abroad. The family read widely: the library allegedly contained complete works of Alexander Pushkin [92], Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Gogol, Nikolai Nekrasov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexander Kuprin, Leo Tolstoy, Heinrich Heine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Guy de Maupassant [93], together with textbooks and technical literature. There were no old masters on the walls, but a reproduction of a famous painting by Ivan Shishkin confirmed relatively conventional tastes [94]. The numerous and bulky pieces of furniture suggest a fairly large dwelling: a walnut wardrobe with mirrors and carving, another in oak, two bookcases, a luxurious oak sofa upholstered in leather, a mirror-backed piece, and another sofa covered in plush fabric. The living-room table was carved mahogany; the oak dining table was accompanied by twelve chairs covered in imitation leather, and another twelve combined oak and ebony.

49. By mentioning this set of twelve chairs, Evdokia Samoilovna unintentionally seems to wink at the celebrated satirical novel by Ilf and Petrov published in 1929 [95], and thereby at the famous “Gambs furniture.” Produced by a renowned nineteenth-century Russian firm that supplied both the imperial court and wealthy families, the term came to be used generically—despite considerable stylistic variety—for furniture close to the Biedermeier style. The firm’s founder was himself of German origin. Like Biedermeier furniture generally, it came to embody an elite attached to bourgeois comfort and solidity rather than stylistic daring. Here the twelve chairs form a complete set, whereas in the novel they were scattered after the Revolution. They therefore sharpen the vague impression that this is an interior belonging to representatives of the high society of another century, while also placing it firmly in a Russian context [96]. A porcelain dinner service and tea service for twenty-four people—another seemingly trivial detail that is in fact significant [97]—suggest the possibility of entertaining many guests, eating from crystal dishes with silver cutlery. No fewer than seven carpets covered walls or floors. One was French, while the most luxurious were described as Ukrainian and Greek. A French clock was another element in a furnishing scheme clearly not entirely Soviet in manufacture and probably partly inherited from the prerevolutionary period. The household even reveals forms of sociability that sat somewhat awkwardly with Soviet orthodoxy, such as a small carved walnut card table covered in green cloth [98].

50. Inventories rich in furniture imply homes whose size likewise bore little resemblance to the especially precarious living conditions of most Soviet citizens, including well-paid ones. Yet the exact spatial organization of these dwellings is almost impossible to reconstruct. One exception is the declaration of Samuil Moiseevich Ekmekchi. A lawyer and legal consultant, before the war he occupied an apartment in Mykolaiv with his wife, director of the social and legal affairs bureau of the maternal and child welfare service, and their two children. The apartment comprised a living room that also served as a study, a bedroom, a children’s room, a bathroom, and a kitchen. This couple of legal professionals practiced a more modern cultural lifestyle than the previous household. In addition to a Milbach piano and an oak bookcase containing 500 literary and legal volumes, the living room contained no fewer than two Soviet-made radio receivers, a Pioneer and an SI-235, as well as a gramophone and eighty records. The study was equipped with an Underwood typewriter, and a telephone connected the apartment to the outside world. The couple also owned a FED camera, allowing them to photograph their children in poses and settings less artificial than professional studio portraits, which still constituted the principal—and much prized—source of Soviet family albums. A pair of binoculars suggests visits to theaters or other performance venues. The rest of the apartment displayed the same carefully arranged, weighty comfort: a suite consisting of a sofa, two armchairs, six tapestry-covered semi-armchairs, and a matching round mahogany table; a bronze chandelier; a bronze lamp on a malachite base with a silk lampshade; and a Persian carpet. Five paintings and a tapestry hung on the walls. Doors were covered in plush fabric, curtains were tulle, and vases were crystal. A small cabinet made of mahogany with bronze and crystal inlays was described as a “museum piece,” probably indicating that it had come from an antique shop. The dining room must also have been spacious. Besides a table and the familiar twelve oak chairs upholstered in leather, it contained an oak sideboard with crystal inlays, a sofa with a leather-covered back, and an old clock with a musical chime. Another bronze chandelier hung from the ceiling, while seven manufactured porcelain plates decorated the walls. The samovar was embellished with crystal, the tea service was porcelain, and the curtains again were tulle. The bedroom furniture was worlds away from the experience of most Soviets, who simply did not have a separate room for sleeping and at best converted a sofa into a bed. Here the bed was surrounded by a dressing table, a mirrored wardrobe of Karelian birch, a sofa, two armchairs, and four matching velvet poufs. Another sofa was covered with a Turkmen carpet. A third chandelier hung from the ceiling and two more paintings decorated the walls. A dedicated children’s room was itself an obvious rarity, although nothing indicates that its furniture was specifically designed for children [99]. A bathroom equipped with both shower and enamel bathtub completes the impression of luxury, naturally reflected in clothing as well. The family’s garments must have been especially elegant because they were made to measure, as indicated by several meters of cheviot, Boston cloth, and of course silk, along with a splendid fur coat, a kimono, and men’s silk pajamas [100].

51. The Ekmekchi interior, exposed in such intimate detail, resembles the set of a Western bourgeois vaudeville more than a Soviet home, even an elite one. It is therefore surprising that Samuil Moiseevich, like others, thought it prudent to reveal its existence to Soviet authorities, since discretion might be assumed to have been the rule in such circles during the 1930s. The Soviet system, with its stratified commercial networks, made this lifestyle possible—one of the first lessons of these inventories—but it was hardly something to celebrate openly, since everything had been acquired through high expenditure, useful connections that provided access to bargains, or inheritance from the prerevolutionary bourgeoisie. The new sense of impunity can be explained by the war, which made the display of wealth legitimate because the enemy had looted it, thereby adding to the enemy’s guilt and financial account. In the examples above, that legitimization seems to have been sufficient: declarants made no special effort to signal political loyalty when describing their lost possessions.

52. Others, however, took pains to demonstrate allegiance, whether real or imagined. Petr Stepanovich Davidenko, evacuated from Sumy and employed at a factory in Chirchiq, seems to have enjoyed a prewar standard of living well above that of an ordinary worker: excellent pairs of boots, a leather coat, an expensive cheviot suit, a silk scarf, and an Omega pocket watch. He projected a sporting profile, notably through ownership of a Ukraina bicycle, and displayed an interest in modern technology, claiming to have possessed both a gramophone and a patefon with records. This did not prevent him from presenting himself as an austere reader: of roughly one hundred books, no fewer than a quarter were said to have been works by Lenin [101]. The reading of Salomon Mikhailovich Mochkovich, an evacuee from Rostov-on-Don, was supposedly no less edifying. Nineteenth-century Russian classics stood alongside works by the country’s two ideological masters since the Revolution: he declared the loss of two volumes of Lermontov, twelve volumes of Pushkin, and the complete works of Lenin and Stalin, the last three groups being assigned the same value. More restrained than the previous example, the interior of this Rostselmash employee—a white-collar worker from the flagship Soviet industrial enterprise evacuated to Tashkent—was one in which a framed portrait of Lenin apparently stood beside one of Stalin. An engineer from Voronezh likewise took care to conform to ideological expectations, even while listing his wife’s silk dresses and slips, several pieces of gold jewelry, a silver pocket watch, crystal vases, and a large tea service. Of the 368 books in his collection, political works allegedly formed the largest group, 143 volumes, followed closely by books connected with his profession; literature, including Maxim Gorky and Tolstoy, came far behind, together with several medical manuals [102]. In this he followed Stalinist precepts that allowed engineers and technicians to distinguish themselves from workers through a lifestyle inherited from the bourgeoisie, while requiring them to devote most of their leisure to reading that would make them good technical and ideological guides for the workers under their authority.

53. In general, the inventories say little about the literary, artistic, or musical tastes of their former owners. Occasional references emerge to nineteenth-century Russian painting already fully assimilated into official culture, and literature follows the same pattern. Maria Markovna German, evacuated from Moscow to Syzran in the summer of 1941, probably belonged to one of the government administrations preemptively moved to Kuibyshev and its surrounding region. She stated that she had left behind three reproductions of works by Ivan Aivazovsky and Arkhip Kuindzhi, as well as the complete works of Pushkin and Tolstoy [103]. Conversely, it is unclear what to make of the frequent failure to identify the artists of paintings reported lost. Was that “detail” genuinely considered unimportant? Were the pictures by obscure artists? Or, on the contrary, did claimants fear revealing uncertain or ideologically questionable tastes? Were they therefore understating the paintings’ value [104]? Despite the luxury openly listed, a sense of constraint must nevertheless have been internalized, as shown by the complete absence of religious objects from the inventories, whether icons or other ritual items [105].

54. Another question raised by reading these inventories through the lens of “cultural objects” concerns the place among them of foreign-made goods, examples of which have already appeared in pianos as well as in more modern technical objects. The inventory of Zinovy Efimovich and Tatiana Lvovna Feiman, a couple from Odessa evacuated to Tashkent, illustrates the intrusion of recently manufactured foreign technical goods into an established Soviet household: a Steer racing bicycle valued at a price incomparably higher than the other bicycles encountered; an Underwood typewriter and another Remington machine; an electric phonograph whose brand is not given but whose description suggests something distinct from Soviet production, together with about fifty records; and foreign professional equipment, perhaps including a mechanical calculator and a cabinet full of measuring instruments. Their T/b/I radio and its equipment, by contrast, were Soviet-made. Yet their cultural universe was that of the educated Russian bourgeoisie since the beginning of the century. A library of 300 volumes included the celebrated Brockhaus and Efron encyclopedia, translated from German and published in the Russian Empire between 1890 and 1906, together with works issued by the Soviet Academy of Sciences and Russian classics. We do not know the artists responsible for the five paintings and watercolors, nor the composers of the scores kept with a “high-quality” violin. The couple owned a dacha whose furnishings were also listed. Other items confirm their concern with distinction: an expensive suit described as “English” and a glass-fronted bookcase called “American,” though it is unclear whether the adjectives referred to style rather than provenance; a Japanese-wood wardrobe; an antique side table explicitly described as a genuine museum piece; a carved ebony medicine cabinet inlaid with ivory; and a custom-made oak mirrored wardrobe. All suggest an effort to escape a standardized Soviet material environment [106].

55. Wartime inventories thus reveal a lost world in which the prerevolutionary past mingled with the adoption of modern practices, including through foreign objects: an openly expressed taste for the nineteenth century, preferably Russian, sometimes accompanied by cultural references that were not revolutionary but canonical, only part of which had recently been reincorporated into the official heritage. These tastes can therefore be reduced neither to official prescriptions nor to social position. The inventories also raise a multitude of questions that the source unfortunately cannot answer. Where had these objects come from? How, by what means, and at what time had the victims acquired them? And how could they have assumed that listing such possessions would not cause them more trouble than benefit? In carefully preparing their inventories they could hardly have avoided recalling the lists of property seized from “former people” after the Revolution, so brilliantly staged by Ilf and Petrov in The Twelve Chairs, which had enjoyed extraordinary popularity from the late 1920s onward [107]. The inventories of the Soviet investigative commission unmistakably echo the files imagined by the two satirists, themselves reflecting very real registers [108] that recorded both confiscated property and the institutions to which it was allocated, and occasionally the rare private individuals who received fragments of it. Officially, the Revolution did not permit the simple reconstitution of former elites’ property in the homes of its new protégés, however deserving they might be.

56. Reading the Commission’s inventories, one cannot tell whether their owners before the war belonged to the category of “former people” who had escaped the redistributive justice of early Bolshevism, to the fortunate beneficiaries of that redistribution, or perhaps to both at once. The circulation of confiscated goods could be extraordinarily complex, passing from hand to hand through official allocations, informal exchanges, humiliating sales at flea markets [109], or through an illegal “reseller” [110], as well as auction rooms such as the Petrovka Passage, once a center of Moscow elegance. Ilf and Petrov set the auction of their famous set of chairs in just such a context: a bureaucratic body, the Directorate of Scientific Affairs, sells them in order to clear the cellars of the Moscow Furniture Museum, to which the chairs had been assigned after the Revolution. Sold separately, they become bargains for buyers as different as the vulgar wife of an engineer wishing to elevate her interior, a penniless satirist [111], and a theater company. In the latter case the chair retained the vague status of public property decreed after the Revolution [112]. Most importantly, one chair went to a railway workers’ union which, without knowing it, acquired the chair stuffed with diamonds and transformed the wealth of the old nobility into a club equipped with the latest cultural amenities for the people. That supplied the moral of the story, one that no educated Soviet citizen of the 1930s could have failed to understand [113]. Stalinist prescriptions of taste had modified the situation somewhat. These inventories—whose luxury was no doubt exaggerated in accordance with the logic of compensation claims—must therefore be read both as the reflection of a new tolerance for real private prosperity, born from the relegitimation during the 1930s of material comfort inherited from the prerevolutionary era or inspired by bourgeois societies, and as a precise, varied representation of forms of wealth now considered admissible for a “good Soviet.”

57. Stalinist morality had not, however, changed the rules entirely. Precisely in their divergence from the norm, these inventories also reflect real strategies of preservation and acquisition quietly pursued in private spaces before the war and now recorded because of wartime circumstances. In Ilf and Petrov’s fictional Stargorod—the quintessence of the Russian provinces—the archivist responsible for the property of “former people” marvels that his files contain “the whole city,” a “true mirror of life”: an entire world not destroyed but transubstantiated by the Revolution [114]. Similarly, the ambivalent emotions provoked by the inventories of Stargorod’s former high society—nostalgia for a destroyed past, though feigned by one of its false descendants; the Soviet archivist’s jubilation at the overthrow of a social order; and the greed of almost all the protagonists—were probably replayed in a different form in the 1940s. There was openly expressed pain in declaring the loss of objects embodying the many facets of a destroyed prewar life; pride in a patrimony demonstrating culture and merit; and perhaps, for some, a secret bitterness at having the war confiscate permanently what they had managed to preserve from revolutionary fury and the vicissitudes of Soviet daily life. Finally, for those of Jewish origin, the atmosphere of antisemitism developing both in evacuation areas and in their home localities may have encouraged them to place on official Soviet record a list of possessions whose ownership they suspected would be especially difficult to assert if they ever returned to a hypothetical home.

58. Writing forty years after the war, Brodsky sought to recover the impressions produced by his first encounters with foreign objects, but he also echoed a private memory shared by many Soviets and constructed over time, in which the exact and differing circumstances by which those objects had entered their world had faded, if they had ever been known. The touching image of a little boy—himself of Jewish origin—discovering the smell of corned beef in the martyred city of Leningrad just after the siege conceals the Holocaust survivors who never received all the aid collected by American charities. The poet’s enthusiasm for Zarah Leander, star of the Nazi film industry, whom he discovered when trophy films were screened in Soviet cinemas in the 1940s, says nothing about the fate of German women when the Red Army conquerors arrived. And as for the Shanghai records that opened famous operas, foxtrots, and tangos to the Brodsky household, one may wonder how different their repertoire really was from what evacuees from Odessa and other Soviet cities had listened to on their own gramophones before the war.

59. It is striking how closely the lists of objects correspond to one another: inventories drawn up by Soviet war victims and lists of foreign goods, from the humblest to the most precious, reveal a shared cultural space. The difference, obviously, lay in abundance and quality, even if the sources only imperfectly disclose it. Equally striking is the way this immersion in wartime objects brings several figures of Soviet Jewish experience to the foreground: destitute Holocaust survivors, behind whom stand more than two million victims mercilessly stripped even of the humblest possessions by occupiers and sometimes by their own neighbors before being murdered; representatives of prosperous circles who enjoyed the privilege, though not without hardship, of evacuation; and finally a younger generation that did not regard Jewishness as central and sought foreign goods frenetically less as revenge than as vehicles of personal fulfillment. Their prominence can be explained in several ways: by the nature of the sources, including the overrepresentation of Jews among educated people who wrote and a better familiarity with foreign logics of compensation, but perhaps also by cultural difference. Yet these figures also give voice to experiences shared by Soviet society as a whole under the impact of war.

60. The wartime obsession with objects and their intense circulation created a problem for the Stalinist leadership. On the one hand, the state emphasized the patrimony of Soviet private citizens, encouraged their desire for compensation, and showed considerable indulgence toward the appropriation of foreign goods. On the other hand, it never entirely abandoned a rigorist morality whose consequences could descend upon Soviet citizens at any moment. Depending on context, the same luxury objects could thus serve as markers of the merit and talent of a Soviet specialist, rewards for the military elite, or signs of corruption. This reveals an ambivalence toward abundance and comfort that remained integral to the regime until its collapse.

61. In the Soviet context, then, the “war of objects” significantly shifted the boundaries of what was permissible in personal appropriation, access to comfort, quality of materials, and aesthetic choice. Yet the rigorism inherent in the Bolshevik project meant that these boundaries could move but could never be abolished. Deeply marking Soviet mentalities, this Soviet material civilization—a term encompassing both the objects themselves, including imported ones, and the relationship individuals maintained with them through the particular ways they searched for and consumed them, as well as the state’s determination to control their distribution—remained comparatively stable for several decades and disappeared only with the end of communism [115].

Notes

[*] I thank Juliette Cadiot, François-Xavier Nérard, Gábor Rittersporn, Brandon Schechter, and Paul Schor for their decisive help.

[1] Joseph BRODSKY, “Spoils of War,” On Grief and Reason: Essays, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995, pp. 3–21.

[2] On the penetration of post-Stalin Soviet society by Western production, see Larissa ZAKHAROVA, S’habiller à la soviétique. La mode et le Dégel en URSS, Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2011; Alexei YURCHAK, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, Princeton/Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2006; Sergei I. ZHUK, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985, Washington/Baltimore, Woodrow Wilson Center Press/The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

[3] On objects arriving from abroad “thanks to” the war, see Vera S. DUNHAM, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1976. Through a reading of fiction published in the 1940s, Dunham showed how, after the war, the Stalinist leadership created a genuine pact with a broad stratum of Soviet society by rehabilitating the pursuit of material comfort as the just reward for sacrifice and effort, but also for political loyalty. Our approach differs substantially, however: literary texts, often unsurpassed testimony to the realities of an era and to their shared perception, must also be understood as constitutive elements in the imagination of authors and of the actors who produced “primary” sources that do not themselves form a narrative.

[4] Among the extensive literature on the spoliation of Jewish property and on restitution and compensation, see Martin DEAN, Robbing the Jews: The Confiscation of Jewish Property in the Holocaust, 1933–1945, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008; Constantin GOSCHLER and Philipp THER (eds.), Raub und Restitution. “Arisierung” und Rückerstattung des jüdischen Eigentums in Europa, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003; special issue “Spoliations en Europe,” Revue d’histoire de la Shoah, 186, 2007. On Jews in France, among the many publications following the work of the Mattéoli Commission (Antoine PROST, Rémi SKOUTELSKY and Sonia ÉTIENNE, Aryanisation économique et restitutions, Paris, La Documentation française, 2000), see Tal BRUTTMANN, Aryanisation économique et spoliations en Isère, 1940–1944, Grenoble, Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 2010; Laurent DOUZOU, Voler les juifs. Lyon, 1940–1944, Paris, Hachette Littératures, 2002; Florent LE BOT, La fabrique réactionnaire. Antisémitisme, spoliations et corporatisme dans le cuir, 1930–1950, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 2007. Compensation received by victims has been studied far less. For reference points, see especially Danièle VOLDMAN, La reconstruction des villes françaises de 1940 à 1954. Histoire d’une politique, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1997.

[5] Jessica REINISCH, “Internationalism in Relief: The Birth (and Death) of UNRRA,” in M. MAZOWER, J. REINISCH and D. FELDMAN (eds.), special issue “Post-War Reconstruction in Europe: International Perspectives, 1945–1949,” Past and Present Special Supplement, 6, 2011, pp. 258–289; Laura HOBSON FAURE, “Un ‘plan Marshall juif’: la présence juive américaine en France après la Shoah, 1944–1954,” dissertation, EHESS, Paris, 2009.

[6] Sophie COEURÉ, La mémoire spoliée. Les archives des Français, butin de guerre nazi puis soviétique, de 1940 à nos jours, Paris, Payot, 2007; Alexandre SUMPF and Vincent LANIOL (eds.), Saisies, spoliations et restitutions. Archives et bibliothèques au XXe siècle, Rennes, PUR, 2012.

[7] Jean Marc DREYFUS and Sarah GENSBURGER, Des camps dans Paris. Austerlitz, Lévitan, Bassano, juillet 1943–août 1944, Paris, Fayard, 2003; Annette WIEVIORKA, Le pillage des appartements et son indemnisation, Paris, La Documentation française, 2000.

[8] Julie HESSLER, A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917–1953, Princeton/Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2004; Lewis H. SIEGELBAUM, Borders of Socialism: Private Spheres of Soviet Russia, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006; Marina BALINA and Evgeny DOBRENKO (eds.), Petrified Utopia: Happiness Soviet Style, London, Anthem Press, 2009; David CROWLEY and Susan E. REID (eds.), Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2010.

[9] Sixty percent in 1943 according to Edward C. Carter, State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, hereafter GARF), fond 8581, inventory 2, file 59, fol. 75.

[10] GARF, f. 5283, op. 2a, d. 21, fols. 81, 86, 95, and d. 44, fol. 127v. Gruliev’s partly Russian and Jewish family background suggests that he possessed enough linguistic knowledge to navigate Soviet realities at least minimally, and a particular sensitivity to the fate of Jews in Soviet territory. His overly persistent manner, however, permanently irritated Soviet officials.

[11] GARF, f. 5283, op. 2a, d. 21, fols. 79–79v, 86, and 92–93. Jewish evacuees were also the subject of inquiries by Gruliev, who asked about their situation in Saratov region, for which Russian War Relief was preparing an aid program; ibid., fols. 79–79v (July 1944).

[12] In an August 1945 proposal, Vladimir Kemenov, president of the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS), suggested to the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs that Carter be shown, in addition to local Russian War Relief warehouses and orphanages receiving its aid, the places that at the time embodied the official representation of the city’s martyrdom: the reconstruction plan presented by the chief architect, the exhibition “Defense of Leningrad,” and the devastated imperial palaces outside the city. A further indication of the importance attached to the American guest, and of the role of this official visit in staging the Soviet image of Leningrad’s fate, was the planned meeting with party first secretary Petr Popkov, who had led the city during the siege: GARF, f. 5283, op. 2a, d. 44, fol. 126. On Stalinist construction of the official memory of the siege, see Lisa A. KIRSCHENBAUM, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

[13] GARF, f. 5283, op. 2a, d. 44, fols. 148–152.

[14] Shimon REDLICH, Propaganda and Nationalism in Wartime Russia: The Jewish Antifascist Committee in the USSR, 1941–1948, Boulder, East European Quarterly, 1982; Karel C. BERKHOFF, Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda During World War II, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2012.

[15] That is, without distinction of ethnic affiliation, in Soviet vocabulary and categories.

[16] Mordehaj ALTŠULER, Ichak ARAD and Šmuel KRAKOWSKI, Sovetskie evrei pišut Il’e Erenburgu 1943–1966, Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, 1993, pp. 140–142 and 222, letter of 22 July 1944. The letter writer himself speaks of the specific fate of Jews under occupation only indirectly, through still uncertain victim figures: of 200,000 prewar Jews he estimated that only 200, like himself, had been able to return. On discrimination against survivors of the Odessa ghettos in the distribution of American gifts, see also Tat’jana Mironovna Šapiro’s letter of July 1944, ibid., pp. 143–144.

[17] Gennadij Vasil’evič KOSTYRČENKO, Gosudarstvennyj antisemitizm v SSSR ot načala do kul’minacii, 1938–1953, Moscow, Meždunarodnyj fond “Demokratija”/Materik, 2005, pp. 52–57 (June 1944); Šimon REDLIH, Evrejskij antifašistskij komitet v SSSR 1941–1948. Dokumentirovannaja istorija, Moscow, Meždunarodnye otnošenija, 1996, pp. 123–125 (Nov. 1944).

[18] On the renewed discussion of this old and still disputed question following the opening of archives, see Gennadij Vasil’evič KOSTYRČENKO, Tajnaja politika Stalina. Vlast’ i antisemitizm, Moscow, Meždunaronye otnošenija, 2003, and David BRANDENBERGER, “Stalin’s Last Crime? Recent Scholarship on Postwar Soviet Anti-Semitism and the Doctors’ Plot,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 6-1, 2005, pp. 187–204.

[19] Georgii Fedorovich Aleksandrov, head of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee, October 1945: Š. REDLIH, Evrejskij antifašistskij komitet..., op. cit., p. 130. He authored a memorandum on the Soviet artistic world dated 17 August 1942 that is regarded as one of the first explicit manifestations of state antisemitism in the Soviet Union. See also the 19 February 1947 memorandum by Grigorii Shumeiko, head of the Central Committee’s foreign policy sector, to Andrei Zhdanov concerning a request from Jewish emigrants of Ukrainian origin to establish direct ties with Jewish communities in Ukraine, ibid., p. 135. See G. V. KOSTYRČENKO, Tajnaja politika Stalina..., op. cit., and Laurent RUCKER, Staline, Israël et les juifs, Paris, PUF, 2001.

[20] Š. REDLIH, Evrejskij antifašistskij komitet..., op. cit., p. 120. On the Poles, see Catherine GOUSSEFF, “‘Kto naš, kto ne naš’. Théorie et pratiques de la citoyenneté à l’égard des populations conquises. Le cas des Polonais en URSS, 1939–1946,” Cahiers du monde russe, 44-2/3, 2003, pp. 519–558; on Armenians, see Claire MOURADIAN, “L’immigration des Arméniens de la diaspora dans la RSS d’Arménie, 1946–1962,” Cahiers du monde russe, 20-1, 1979, pp. 79–110.

[21] S. REDLIH, Evrejskij antifasistskij komitet..., op. cit., pp. 115-116.

[22] On the attempts of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to respond to the expectations of its foreign correspondents, see in particular the named lists of Soviet Jewish survivors in various localities that the Committee sent abroad in 1944. These later figured among the accusations brought against it after the war: GARF, f. 8114, op. 1, d. 973.

[23] This explains the presence of numerous documents concerning aid in the Committee's archival collection at GARF. The files were carefully selected by the Ministry of State Security (Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti), and many documents were translated (notably from Yiddish) and/or recopied. Abakumov described this at length in a memorandum of 4 December 1950, in which he cited in particular Mikhoels's letter of 28 October 1944 denouncing the Soviet Red Cross's indifference toward Jews in distributing aid from abroad: G. V. KOSTYRCENKO, Gosudarstvennyj antisemitizm..., op. cit., pp. 139-147. Curiously, this famous Mikhoels letter, described as a draft in Abakumov's memorandum, is available in the Committee archive in its final version, received by Molotov and annotated in his hand on 29 October 1944 - more precisely, as a "certified copy": S. REDLIH, Evrejskij antifasistskij komitet..., op. cit., p. 122.

[24] This revival was facilitated by new legislation and a climate of greater tolerance from which the religious denominations represented on Soviet territory generally benefited. Yaacov RO'I (ed.), Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union, Ilford/Portland, F. Cass, 1995.

[25] Yaacov RO'I, "The Reconstruction of Jewish Communities in the USSR, 1944-1947," in D. BANKIER (ed.), The Jews Are Coming Back: The Return of the Jews to their Countries of Origin after WWII, Jerusalem/New York, Yad Vashem/Berghahn Books, 2005, pp. 186-205, especially pp. 196-197.

[26] GARF, f. 6991, op. 3, d. 28, fol. 227.

[27] Veniamin Fedorovich ZIMA, Golod v SSSR 1946-1947 godov. Proishozdenie i posledstvija, Lewiston, The Edwin Mellen Press, 1999, p. 146. See also George WOODBRIDGE (ed.), UNRRA: The History of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, New York, Columbia University Press, 1950, 3 vols.

[28] J. REINISCH, "Internationalism in Relief...," cited article. Food aid to the republics of Belorussia and Ukraine accounted respectively for 49% and 53% of UNRRA aid in US-dollar equivalent, followed by equipment for industrial reconstruction (29% and 28%), clothing, textiles, and footwear (11.5% and 9%), equipment for agricultural reconstruction (9%), and medical supplies (1.6% and 1.3%): G. WOODBRIDGE (ed.), UNRRA..., op. cit., vol. 2, p. 250.

[29] UNRRA, Economic Rehabilitation in the Ukraine, Operational Analysis Papers, 39, 1947, pp. 68 and 72; idem, Economic Rehabilitation in Byelorussia, Operational Analysis Papers, 48, 1947, pp. 42 and 49, n. 2. According to the latter report, 70% of the foodstuffs sold in these shops in Belorussia in the spring and summer of 1946 came from UNRRA, although the Soviet government had not confirmed the figure. Other sources of supply, where UNRRA goods were not sold, were the famous gastronom food stores, which sold unrationed luxury goods at prices affordable only to the privileged strata of Soviet society, and the collective-farm markets, patronized by a far broader public but with prices likewise incomparably higher than those of rationed goods sold in state stores. On the postwar Soviet distribution system, see J. HESSLER, A Social History of Soviet Trade..., op. cit.

[30] UNRRA, Economic Rehabilitation in the Ukraine, op. cit., pp. 77-78; idem, Economic Rehabilitation in Byelorussia, op. cit., pp. 53-54.

[31] Timothy JOHNSTON, Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life under Stalin, 1939-1953, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 95-97, although he overlooks the omnipresence of zagranichnye podarki (foreign gifts) in Soviet reports of the 1940s.

[32] GARF, f. 9501, op. 5, d. 315, fols. 2-2v.

[33] "We prisoners had heard about those overseas gifts that had thrown the camp authorities' emotions into turmoil [...]. In the lists, these woollen marvels were designated 'second hand,' which, as one can understand, was far more expressive than 'used' or obscure initials such as b/u ('previously used'), comprehensible only to a camp man": Varlam SHALAMOV, "Lend-Lease," Kolyma Tales, Lagrasse, Verdier, 2003, p. 506.

[34] Sovetskaja zizn', 1945-1953, Moscow, ROSSPEN, 2003, pp. 83-88. Apparently Gulag prisoners were also aware that they were victims of the rapacity of local leaders: "Worn knitted suits, second-hand pullovers and jumpers collected on the other side of the ocean for the Kolyma prisoners had been snapped up by the wives of Magadan generals, who had almost come to blows over them": V. SHALAMOV, "Lend-Lease," op. cit., p. 507.

[35] Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii, hereafter RGASPI), f. 17, op. 122, d. 139, fols. 83-92.

[36] On the lack of acknowledgment in Russian historiography and, more broadly, Russian society concerning the conduct of Red Army soldiers in Germany, see Oleg BUDNITSKII, "The Intelligentsia Meets the Enemy: Educated Soviet Officers in Defeated Germany, 1945," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 10-3, 2009, pp. 629-682, especially p. 635 ff.

[37] Norman M. NAIMARK, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1995; Krisztian UNGVARY, The Siege of Budapest: 100 Days in World War II, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2005.

[38] See the letter of a Red Army soldier, a former collective farmer who had reached East Prussia: "They took the livestock from the best farms in Europe. Their sheep are the best Russian merinos, and their shops are bursting with goods from all the shops and factories of Europe. In the near future these goods will appear in Russian shops, and they will be our trophies": Catherine MERRIDALE, Les guerriers du froid. Vie et mort des soldats de l'Armee rouge, 1939-1945, Paris, Fayard, [2006] 2012, p. 345.

[39] RGVA, f. 32900, op. 1, d. 458, fols. 42-42v, 94-95, 98, and 112-116.

[40] O. BUDNITSKII, "The Intelligentsia Meets the Enemy...," cited article, p. 633.

[41] "There was no room for scruples. Even today former servicemen talk about it without the slightest embarrassment, as if they were describing a particularly interesting jumble sale. Getting the best things proved that a man was resourceful, cared about his family, and was able to cope with the new monster, capitalism": C. MERRIDALE, Les guerriers du froid..., op. cit., p. 370.

[42] The retouching of Yevgeny Khaldei's famous photograph showing a Red Army soldier on top of the Reichstag - the arm holding the Soviet flag originally displayed several watches - does not contradict this idea of tolerance. On the contrary, it shows that the practice was so widespread that Khaldei, after choosing his model, noticed the detail only afterward.

[43] Emerging from the cellar where she had taken refuge when the Russians arrived, a Berlin woman described one of her first sights of the invaders, before being subjected to repeated rapes a few hours later: "In the street, Russians have mounted freshly stolen bicycles. They are teaching one another to ride, sitting as stiffly in the saddle as Susi, the female chimpanzee at the zoo, crashing into trees and then giggling like children": A Woman in Berlin. Diary, 20 April-22 June 1945, [2002] 2006. The author repeatedly stresses this ambivalence. See also Sandor MARAI's autobiographical account of the beginning of the Soviet occupation of Hungary, Memoirs of Hungary, Paris, Albin Michel, [1972] 2004, and his novel Liberation, written at the end of the siege of Budapest but published posthumously, Paris, Albin Michel, [2000] 2007.

[44] Wladimir GELFAND, Deutschland-Tagebuch, 1945-1946. Aufzeichnungen eines Rotarmisten, Berlin, Aufbau-Verlag, 2005, pp. 78-82. This kind of scene became a topos in portrayals of the "good Soviet" in relation to German women who had become less guarded.

[45] The first Soviet cameras were as rare as they were legendary, having been produced in the model colony for homeless orphans (besprizorniki) named after Felix Dzerzhinsky. The FED-1 appeared in 1934 and by 1937 was being produced at a rate of one camera per 500 inhabitants. Photographic supplies were equally scarce and expensive, making amateur photography especially limited before the 1950s: I. NARSKIJ, Fotokartochka na pamjat': semejnye istorii, fotograficheskie poslanija i sovetskoe detstvo (avtobio-istoriograficheskij roman), Chelyabinsk, Enciklopedija, 2008, pp. 317-318.

[46] Revealing of the way contemporary Russian society, including its intelligentsia, views this aspect of the war is a scene in a recent novel: the first group photograph of the three child protagonists is taken by an elderly patriotic military doctor who owns a "splendid trophy camera" and privately displays charming prerevolutionary manners. Ljudmila ULICKAJA, Zelenyj shater, Moscow, Eksmo, 2011, pp. 22-25.

[47] W. GELFAND, Deutschland-Tagebuch..., op. cit., p. 205, 14 January 1946.

[48] Ibid., p. 267, 22 May 1946, and p. 302, 27 August 1946. Paradoxically, it was probably in May 1946, while associating with a cultivated Polish family from territories annexed by the USSR, that he acquired this knowledge; ibid., p. 308, 11 September 1946.

[49] W. GELFAND, Deutschland-Tagebuch..., op. cit., p. 306, 6 September 1946, and p. 308, 7 September 1946. These occupation photographs echo the better-known, and probably far more widespread, practice of German soldiers in occupied territory, who photographed both young women and scenes of atrocities. Yet his diary does not suggest that W. Gelfand sought to photograph traces of the war.

[50] Ibid., p. 269, letter to his mother of 27 May 1946. W. Gelfand may have had a predisposition toward photography: he frequently had professional portraits taken and sent many photographs to his mother and other women correspondents. He likewise covered the walls of his room in Germany with photographs he had bought or acquired.

[51] In addition to practical clothing, W. Gelfand's mother asked him to obtain a radio receiver; ibid., p. 181, letter of 15 November 1945.

[52] Pawel N. KNYSHEWSKIJ, Moskaus Beute. Wie Vermogen, Kulturguter und Intelligenz nach 1945 aus Deutschland geraubt wurden, Munich, Olzog Verlag, 1995.

[53] O. BUDNITSKII, "The Intelligentsia Meets the Enemy...," cited article, p. 655. On the frenzy of parcel-sending by Germans under occupation, including from the USSR and especially Ukraine, see Gotz ALY, Comment Hitler a achete les Allemands. Le IIIe Reich, une dictature au service du peuple, Paris, Flammarion, 1995.

[54] C. MERRIDALE, Les guerriers du froid..., op. cit., p. 372.

[55] W. GELFAND, Deutschland-Tagebuch..., op. cit., p. 180, letter from W. Gelfand's mother of 15 November 1945, in which she asks him not to send mail to her workplace any longer, especially when parcels are involved.

[56] Mark EDELE, Soviet Veterans of the Second World War: A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society, 1941-1991, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 30. More modestly, W. Gelfand left Germany with ten "small but heavy" suitcases and two bags: W. GELFAND, Deutschland-Tagebuch..., op. cit., p. 312, 26 September 1946.

[57] W. GELFAND, Deutschland-Tagebuch..., op. cit., pp. 204-205, 14 January 1946, and p. 211, 21 January 1946.

[58] Ibid., pp. 176-177, 6 November 1945.

[59] P. N. KNYSHEWSKIJ, Moskaus Beute..., op. cit.

[60] Pavel N. KNYSHEWSKIJ, Dobycha: Tajny germanskih reparacii, Moscow, Soratnik, 1994, pp. 120-121.

[61] W. GELFAND, Deutschland-Tagebuch..., op. cit., p. 218, letter to his mother of 26 January 1946: purchase of a "good" five-tube Rohren receiver for 4,000 marks; p. 280, 23 June 1946: a radio valued at 2,000 marks that he exchanged for two suits; p. 300, certificate of 28 August 1946.

[62] Cecile VAISSIE, Russie: une femme en dissidence. Larissa Bogoraz, Paris, Plon, 2000, p. 39.

[63] Valerie POZNER, "Le sort des films trophees saisis par les Sovietiques au cours de la Seconde Guerre mondiale," in A. SUMPF and V. LANIOL (eds.), Saisies, spoliations et restitutions..., op. cit., pp. 147-164.

[64] Juliane FURST, Stalin's Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, especially pp. 200-249.

[65] M. EDELE, Soviet Veterans of the Second World War..., op. cit., p. 91.

[66] GARF, f. 5446, op. 49a, d. 467, fols. 12-18. On reparations policy, see Jorg FISCH, Reparationen nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, Munich, C.H. Beck, 1992.

[67] GARF, f. 5446, op. 49a, d. 2848, fols. 1-3; I thank Juliette Cadiot for drawing my attention to this file. On the participation of state-trade officials in the black market as a recurring feature of the Soviet economy, see Tamara KONDRATIEVA, "Les personnes materiellement responsables sous le regime de propriete socialiste," in T. KONDRATIEVA (ed.), Les Sovietiques. Un pouvoir, des regimes, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2011, pp. 113-130.

[68] On Stalin's personal role in reducing Ponomarenko's power at the head of Belorussia through the appointment of Gusarov one year earlier, on 27 February 1947, see Oleg V. HLEVNJUK et al., Politbjuro CK VKP(b) i Sovet ministrov SSSR, 1945-1953, Moscow, ROSSPEN, 2002, p. 47, n. 1.

[69] Belorussian leaders were also denounced for diverting public resources to build private houses for themselves, thereby displaying the same indifference to the misery of their constituents - many of whom were forced to live in dugouts - and the same appetite for profit, with some renting or reselling the houses at "speculative" prices.

[70] GARF, f. 8131, op. 37, d. 3187, fol. 17, report of the prosecutor's office of Nikolaev region (present-day Mykolaiv), April 1946.

[71] On this "war between services," see Nikita PETROV, Pervyj predsedatel' KGB Ivan Serov, Moscow, Materik, 2005. Unless otherwise stated, all information concerning this affair comes from this work.

[72] In defending himself, Serov in turn accused Abakumov of having twenty railway cars of loot delivered to Moscow while the war was still raging and of chartering an aircraft loaded with trophy goods for recently liberated Crimea. Sidnev, although lower-ranking, admitted using aircraft of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SVAG), or Serov's aircraft, to transport his abundant acquisitions and furnish his Leningrad apartment. See also the repeated use of regular Belorussian airline aircraft and Ponomarenko's personal plane to bring several tons of carpets and other valuables back to Minsk: RGASPI, f. 17, op. 122, d. 308, fol. 92.

[73] Konstantin AKINSHA and Grigorii KOZLOV, Beautiful Loot: The Soviet Plunder of Europe's Art Treasures, New York, Random House, 1995; P. N. KNYSHEWSKIJ, Moskaus Beute..., op. cit.; Margarita S. ZINIC, Pohiscennye sokrovisca: vyvoz nacistami rossijskih kul'turnyh cennostej, Moscow, Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences, 2003.

[74] GARF, f. 5446, op. 49a, d. 243, fols. 38-39 and 51.

[75] By contrast, three people arrested in connection with the same case were acquitted at their trial in October 1951, after more than three and a half years in detention, which had sent one of them to the prison psychiatric wards.

[76] The fact that the two men used the same line of argument may be explained by their closeness, but the theme of the "petty-bourgeois swamp" (obyvatel'skoe boloto) was a trope of Bolshevik moralizing discourse.

[77] Elena OSOKINA, Zoloto dlja industrializacii: "TORGSIN", Moscow, ROSSPEN, 2009, especially pp. 83-102 and 118-146.

[78] "Exactly one minute later a pistol shot cracked: the mirrors disappeared, the display cases and stools vanished, the carpet dissolved into thin air, along with the curtain. The last thing to disappear was the enormous heap of old dresses and old shoes, and the stage once again became austere, empty, and bare": Mikhail BULGAKOV, The Master and Margarita, trans. C. Ligny, Paris, R. Laffont, [1968] 2012, p. 242.

[79] Ibid., pp. 291-305.

[80] Many of the inventories analyzed here were drawn up by people evacuated at the beginning of the war to the Urals or Central Asia. Their particular relationship to the property they had left behind had several causes. Having abandoned most of their possessions, they could only imagine the worst - their complete disappearance, and not necessarily solely at the hands of the enemy. From the beginning of the war, the inventorying and safeguarding of evacuees' property had prompted a series of decrees intended to protect it from appropriation by unscrupulous neighbors: GARF, f. 5446, op. 43a, d. 6328. In practice the situation was much more confused. Many evacuees belonged to the Soviet elite, and among them people of Jewish origin had double reason to fear for the fate of their property. On the social profile of evacuees and their wartime experience, see Rebecca MANLEY, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2009.

[81] Nathalie MOINE, "La commission d'enquete sovietique sur les crimes de guerre nazis: entre reconquete du territoire, ecriture du recit de la guerre et usages justiciers," Le Mouvement social, 222-1, 2008, pp. 81-109.

[82] C. VAISSIE, Russie: une femme en dissidence..., op. cit., pp. 61-62.

[83] "If one leaves aside ninety million peasants who prefer wooden or earthen benches and roof-supporting beams to chairs - and, in the east, worn carpets and rugs - there still remain fifty-three million people who regard chairs as necessities": Ilia ILF and Ievgeni PETROV, The Twelve Chairs, trans. A. Prechac, Paris, Parangon, [1929] 2002, p. 148.

[84] Vasili GROSSMAN, Life and Fate, in Oeuvres, Paris, R. Laffont, 2006, pp. 58-59.

[85] The average wage of a worker in the 1930s was 300 rubles.

[86] GARF, f. 7021, op. 28, d. 68, act 133. Obviously, valuation at market prices at the moment when the commission drew up the record considerably distorts the picture: the coat was probably purchased for much less, depending on the date and above all on the method of acquisition. See Nathalie MOINE, "Evaluer les pertes materielles des civils pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale en URSS: vers la legitimation de la propriete privee?", Histoire et Mesure (forthcoming).

[87] Among the extensive literature on this point, see Catriona KELLY and Vadim VOLKOV, "Directed Desires: Kul'turnost' and Consumption," in C. KELLY and D. SHEPHERD (eds.), Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution, 1881-1940, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 291-313.

[88] It should be recalled that the records only very rarely indicate the occupations of those who suffered losses.

[89] GARF, f. 7021, op. 28, d. 68, act 121.

[90] GARF, f. 7021, op. 28, d. 31, fol. 142.

[92] On the official cult devoted to Pushkin, notably during his 1937 jubilee, see Kevin M. F. PLATT and David BRANDENBERGER (eds.), Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist Propaganda, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.

[93] This author also appears among the intellectual provisions Strum's mother takes with her when she enters the Berdichev ghetto. They consist mainly of the books dearest to her, alongside photographs, letters, and the bare necessities for sleeping, eating, and continuing to practice medicine. Their description links Anna Semenovna to a Russian-cultured intelligentsia intimately familiar with nineteenth-century Russian-language authors but also acquainted with some French literature (she will still give a few French lessons in the ghetto), whereas the Ukrainian plebeians remind her of "what [she] had managed to forget during the years of Soviet power: [she] was a Jew." V. GROSSMAN, Life and Fate..., op. cit., p. 59. One can imagine the same kind of self-representation operating in these rather dry book lists. Yet unlike Anna Semenovna, a representative of an intelligentsia disdainful of material possessions, the people recording their losses placed these cultural references within a form of material comfort that was probably just as meaningful to them, beyond the issue of possible financial compensation.

[94] This is Morning in a Pine Forest by the painter Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin (1832-1898), displayed in Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery and reproduced countless times to the present day, notably on boxes of chocolates from the famous Krasnyi Oktiabr factory.

[95] I. ILF and I. PETROV, The Twelve Chairs, op. cit.

[96] In I. Ilf and I. Petrov's novel, the twelve chairs had belonged to a certain Vorobianinov, a marshal of the nobility who became a civil-registry employee after the revolution. On learning that one of them contained a priceless treasure - the starting point of the novel's plot - he recalls the vanished drawing room of his former provincial mansion: "He could clearly see the drawing room of his townhouse, the symmetrical arrangement of the curved-legged walnut furniture, the waxed parquet shining like a mirror, the old brown grand piano, and on the walls the daguerreotypes of the most illustrious of his ancestors in their little black oval frames": I. ILF and I. PETROV, The Twelve Chairs, op. cit., p. 26. These were hackneyed memories for the two satirists, yet such nostalgia probably did not seem quite so ridiculous to some of their readers.

[97] The ambitious reconceptualization of everyday life in the 1920s remained highly theoretical, yet every detail mattered. It went so far, for example, as to condemn the production of tea sets for a fixed number of guests (six or twelve by convention), since these tended to preserve a form of sociability centered on the private domestic sphere rather than promote exclusive use of the collective space of the canteen. V.S., "Oformlenie byta. Proizvodstvennye organizacii ne raskacalis'," Iskusstvo v massy, 4, 1930, pp. 22-23, quoted in Karen KETTERING, "'Ever More Cosy and Comfortable': Stalinism and the Soviet Domestic Interior, 1928-1938," Journal of Design History, 10-2, 1997, pp. 119-135, here p. 126. The fact that Evdokia Samoilovna listed a tea set made of an expensive material but also intended for many guests shows both how limited the effect of such prescriptions was and how the wartime context allowed values concerning material possession to be reversed.

[98] GARF, f. 7021, op. 100, d. 71, act 184. When she wrote her declaration, E. Iantovskaia was living in a barrack in Chirchiq, a new town in Uzbekistan about thirty kilometers from Tashkent, separated from her husband, whom she had lost track of after the first stage of evacuation in the Urals. Like so many evacuees, her standard of living had fallen, although she stated that she earned 1,200 rubles a month. Her letter is marked by virulent Soviet "anti-German" patriotism, but her main motivation was probably her fierce determination to obtain compensation, to the point of entering six gold teeth and six crowns in the inventory between cutlery and saucepans. One should not react anachronistically to this last entry, even though it was made by an evacuee of Jewish nationality. The market value of gold teeth was not, after all, a discovery made by desecrators of corpses. In time of need a person might consider having them extracted and selling them, or exchanging them for bread and other necessities; see "Svershilos'. Prishli nemtsy!" Ideinyi kollaboratsionizm v SSSR v period Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, Moscow, ROSSPEN, 2012, p. 98 (26 November and 2 December 1941 respectively).

[99] Children's furniture is extremely rare in the inventories. An evacuee from Kharkov, Iakov Moiseevich Gurevich, mentions a child's divan, a small table, and three chairs for his two daughters. He belonged to a prosperous milieu oriented toward modernity in several areas: an expensive piano stood alongside a collection of 200 records and electrical household appliances (oven, hotplates, iron, etc.): GARF, f. 7021, op. 100, d. 53, act 171. Toys are likewise almost absent from the inventories. Dmitri Nikolaevich Golovastikov, an engineer at a machine-building plant in Voronezh, presents a somewhat similar profile: 250 records, a radio set, very serious reading material (technology, politics, some literature), but also two porcelain dolls with closing eyes, two "Ded Moroz" figures, and even an electric Christmas-tree garland - no trivial detail, since Christmas trees were permitted again only from 1936: GARF, f. 7021, op. 100, d. 71, act 194. Children's bicycles appear somewhat more often. On the scarcity of toys in Stalinist USSR, see Catriona KELLY, Children's World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2007.

[100] GARF, f. 7021, op. 100, d. 53, act 158.

[101] GARF, f. 7021, op. 100, d. 71, act 166.

[102] GARF, f. 7021, op. 100, d. 71, act 194.

[103] GARF, f. 7021, op. 28, d. 31, fol. 20. Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky (1817-1900), a great painter of seascapes and a Russian Romantic artist, was as popular before the revolution as in the 1930s. He was, for example, cited among the painters whose reproduced works were best suited to beautifying a Soviet interior, provided that the amateur acquired a high-quality reproduction of the kind then published by IZOGIZ, in a late-1930s article characteristic of the extremely rigid lessons in good taste prescribed by the magazine for Soviet middle-class women: K. KRAVCHENKO, "O kartinah i reprodukcijah," Obshchestvennitsa, 15, 1937, pp. 17-19. Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi (1842-1910) was a Russian landscape painter.

[104] For its part, the Soviet state does not appear ever to have considered including in the list of works of art taken by the enemy and potentially subject to restitution or compensation anything other than works originating from museums and other public institutions. See Konstantin AKINSHA, "Stalin's Decrees and Soviet Trophy Brigades: Compensation, Restitution in Kind, or 'Trophies' of War?", International Journal of Cultural Property, 17-2, 2010, pp. 195-216.

[105] It was probably still too early for these ordinary Soviet citizens to have grasped the Kremlin's change of direction in religious policy. Tatiana A. CHUMACHENKO, Church and State in Soviet Russia: Russian Orthodoxy from World War II to the Khrushchev Years, ed. and trans. E. E. Roslof, Armonk, M. E. Sharpe, 2002.

[106] GARF, f. 7021, op. 100, d. 53, act 243.

[107] "What furniture do you want? That of the merchant Angelov, first-guild merchant? P-l-e-a-s-e. [...]" Seized from Angelov, 18 December 1918: one Becker grand piano no. 97012 with upholstered stool; desks, two; wardrobes, four, including two mahogany; one chiffonier... etc. [...] "We also have a letter V [...] Right away, Vm, Vn, Voritsky, no. 48238. Vorobianinov, Ippolit Matveyevich, your Papa, God rest his soul, was a man with a big heart..." Becker grand piano no. 54809; Chinese vases from the French Sevres manufactory, four; Aubusson tapestries, eight, of various sizes; Gobelins tapestries, two: Shepherdess and Shepherd; Turkmen carpets, two, and one Khorasan; one stuffed bear with tray; complete bedroom suite, twelve pieces; dining room, sixteen pieces; drawing room, fourteen walnut pieces signed Gambs: I. ILF and I. PETROV, The Twelve Chairs, op. cit., pp. 106-107.

[108] On the seizure of furniture in the aftermath of the revolution, see Larissa ZAKHAROVA's admirable reconstruction of the history of an affluent Petrograd apartment building: "Le 26-28 Kamennoostrovski. Les tribulations d'un immeuble en revolution," in L. de MEAUX (ed.), Saint-Petersbourg. Histoire, promenades, anthologie et dictionnaire, Paris, R. Laffont, 2003, pp. 473-505.

[109] In addition to written accounts and testimonies, there are famous photographs showing representatives of the former elites standing on sidewalks waiting for buyers, forced during the Civil War to part with their remaining possessions in order to obtain the bare necessities of life.

[110] The director of the old people's home to which one of the twelve chairs had been allocated resells it to one of the novel's characters, who poses as a perekupshchik - in Soviet legal terms, a speculator acting as middleman by illegally purchasing an item, whether or not state-owned, in order to resell it to a customer and pocket the difference. I. ILF and I. PETROV, The Twelve Chairs, op. cit., p. 84.

[111] The novel also tells us what happened to another set of Gambs chairs, mistakenly sought by a greedy priest. Seized from a general's wife in Stargorod, they were allocated to a private individual, "Comrade Bruns, engineer," who left the city in 1923 for Kharkov, taking all his furniture, "to which he seemed greatly attached," then moved to Rostov, where he placed his "high qualifications" at the service of a large cement works, before being recruited by the Baku refineries. The general's furniture thus ended up furnishing his comfortable dacha, immersed in tropical vegetation on a hill overlooking Batumi, turning Bruns into an avatar of the colonial elite: ibid., pp. 110, 183, 246, and 341-345.

[112] This did not prevent the stage manager of the theater in question from trafficking in the chairs by secretly reselling them to private individuals - in this case, the heroes desperately searching for the set: ibid., pp. 169, 196-200, and 334.

[113] The Russian version of L. ZAKHAROVA's article "Le 26-28 Kamennoostrovski...", cited article, is likewise entitled "The Twelve Chairs," so inseparably linked in Soviet and post-Soviet consciousness - from the time the novel appeared to the present day - are the novel, and therefore its moral, with the fate of the property of the former tsarist elites.

[114] "It's all here! All of Stargorod! All the furniture! Seized from so-and-so, on such-and-such a date, given to so-and-so, on such-and-such a day. And here is the alphabetical register, a true mirror of life. [...] Everything is here, the whole town. Pianos, armchairs, ottomans, poufs, sofas, chandeliers, mirrors... We even have the tableware": I. ILF and I. PETROV, The Twelve Chairs, op. cit., p. 106.

[115] The speed of this disappearance obviously varies according to social milieu, age, and other factors. The nostalgia that has developed for the Soviet material world has by no means halted it, since that nostalgia itself forms part of a Western mode of commercialization.

Abstract

This article focuses on the influx and circulation of foreign objects in the Soviet Union during the 1940s in order to investigate the specific role of these objects during World War II. It reveals how the distribution of humanitarian aid intersected with both the (non-)acknowledgment of the genocide of Soviet Jews during the Nazi occupation and Stalinist social hierarchies. It explains why effacing the origins and precise circumstances through which these objects entered Soviet homes served to hide the abuses the Red Army perpetrated against defeated populations. Finally, it revises the image of a Soviet society that discovered luxury and Western modernity for the first time during the war by reconsidering the place and trajectory of such objects in Stalinist material culture of the interwar period.

Article outline

1. The Windfall from Abroad
2. The Hidden Treasures of Prewar Soviets

Suggested citation: Nathalie Moine, “Loss, Gift, and Spoils,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 2013/2 (68th year), pp. 317-355.