The Belarus Secret
Loftus, John
a more critical and objective analysis of the data shows that by 1980 the distribution of income had moved halfway to perfect equality from where it was in the 1950s. That truth would be a much...
...The secret police ran wild, state terror penetrated every aspect of life, the GULAG became a growth industry...
...Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has eloquently captured the essence of what motivated the "Vlasovites" to fight alongside the Wehrmacht...
...As the intelligence branch of the SS, the Sicherheitsdienst, reported on March 6, 1942: "Senitza was arrested because he sabotaged the order given him...
...he sabotaged the handling of the Jewish problem by authorizing the priest Romanskyj to baptize Jews he himself designated and to give them Christian or Russian first names...
...It has to have had a social cause...
...No wonder, then, that Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 was welcomed by the vast majority of Stalin's subjects...
...Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, and Crimean Tatars also took up arms...
...After all, so the Alexander J. Motyl is author of The Turn to the Right, a study of Ukrainian nationalism in the 1920s, and a contributor to Survey, Slavic Review, and other publications...
...Of the millions of non-Russians who greeted the Soviet Union's apparent collapse a small, primarily emigre, minority actually assisted the German invaders as translators, scouts, soldiers, and intelligence agents...
...Obviously, other collaborators had no such moral qualms: they willingly served their Nazi masters, killed their personal and political enemies, and gladly helped annihilate the Jews...
...What changes are likely to occur as the older generation of leaders passes from the scene...
...A small number were Nazis and future war criminals...
...Who were they, these collaborators...
...The non-Russians -Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Balts, and others-hoped that Hitler's promises of a "New Order" included plans for their own independence from Russia...
...THE BELARUS SECRET John Loftus, edited by Nathan Miller/The Free Press/$13.95 Alexander J. Motyl HENRY KISSINGER PRAISES ADAM U LAM'S LATEST BOOK: "Stimulating and perceptive...
...Was one to go underground and fight both the Nazis and the Soviets-a lost cause if ever there was one...
...0 thinking went, nothing could be worse than Stalin...
...The 1930s were an especially nasty time in the Soviet Union, even by Stalin's standards...
...For the non-Russians, of course, there could be no question of "treason...
...Original, lucid, and well-informed..., The need for such a book at the present moment cannot be exaggerated...
...That truth would be a much better argument for a flat tax than the false one Brookes has innocently repeated...
...Stalin's crimes made Hitler look like a benevolent despot...
...The cultural and intellectual elites were either standardized or destroyed...
...Then picture to yourself a field in which starved, neglected, crazed horses are rampaging back and forth...
...One of those who adopted the third option was the luckless mayor of the Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk, a certain Senitza...
...Ukrainians and Byelorussians enlisted in the Galicia Division and the Belarus Brigade, respectively...
...The choices before them, even with the benefit of hindsight, were not clear...
...Or was one to continue serving as mayor, administrator, or policeman and try to make the best of a bad situation...
...More fundamentally, they sought national survival: Stalin's atrocities had placed their nations' existence in jeopardy while the ravages of war and the growing Nazi disregard for the Eastern Europeans ensured that the threat of national extinction remained the order of the day...
...Were these men fighting for Hitler or against Stalin...
...As the German occupation proved increasingly brutal, the dilemmas of continued collaboration became agonizingly painful for many nonRussians...
...The goals of these nationalists were autonomous cultural development and political independence...
...Rapid industrialization reduced the workers to slavelike automatons forced to live and work in appalling conditions...
...What can the United States do to minimize the chances of armed conflict with the Soviet Union...
...Seweryn R aler, Columbia University $2500 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10015 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1983 41...
...Perhaps there is something to ponder here: Who was more to blame, those youths or the gray Fatherland...
...Russian POWs-branded traitors by Stalin simply for having become prisoners-joined General Vlasov's Russian Army of Liberation...
...Once German rule was established, numerous locals entered the civilian "self-help" administrations tolerated by the occupiers or joined the auxiliary police forces...
...It is difficult to find a perfect book in economics, if any there be...
...Because, as the old proverb says: Wellfed horses don 't rampage...
...Senitza was executed...
...most possessed authoritarian political convictions...
...Red Army soldiers refused to fight for the Soviet dictator and surrendered en masse...
...Or were they in the last analysis fighting for themselves...
...Peasants, hoping for the abolition of the hated collective-farm system, met German tanks with gifts of bread and salt...
...Few, if any, survivors of Stalin's hecatombs expected their Nazi "liberators" to be even more inhuman than their Communist oppressors...
...Although The Economy in Mind is surely not one of them, nevertheless, it is an interesting introduction to supply-side economics and a welcome testimony to the supreme value of personal freedom...
...Loftus's analysis can be easily summarized: all collaborators were Nazis, anti-Semites, and war criminals who first sold their services to the Germans and then duped the naive Americans into believing that they were anti-Soviet "freedom fighters" (Loftus's quotation marks, which, characteristically, he also applies to the Hungarians of 1956...
...The Party, bureaucracy, and military were "purged" with devastating effect...
...As a result of an immediate arrest, it was possible to prevent a larger number of Jews from slipping from German control...
...millions more, particularly Ukrainians, died of starvation in a famine tolerated, if not exactly engineered, by the central authorities...
...His insights as well as his research are original and thought-provoking:" With his customary insight and erudition, Professor Ulam analyzes the most troubling and talked-about international issues confronting American policy-makers today: What are the mainsprings of the Soviet drive for expansion...
...Was one to join the Soviet partisans and fight for Stalin's return...
...The profound moral and political ambiguity confronting many Eastern Europeans is especially evident in the case of the Russian and non-Russian military units organized by the Germans in 1943-1944, after the tide of battle had turned at Stalingrad...
...Amazingly, to the difficult questions raised by wartime realities, John Loftus, a former prosecutor for the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations and author of The Belarus Secret, has all the answers...
...Even fewer suspected what fate awaited the Jews...
...Millions of peasants were killed or exiled during the forced collectivization campaign...
...Temporary dependence on Berlin seemed a small price to pay for freedom from Moscow...
...DANGEROUS "Professor Ulam's critical review of Soviet foreign policy is of particular importance and timeliness now that a new sentinel has taken up his duties in the Kremlin" -- Walter Laqucur, Georgetown Un,versty LATIONS The Soviet Union in World Politics, 1970-1982 by Adam B. Ulam Author of Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917.1973...
...This was a phenomenon totally unheard of in all world history: that several hundred thousand young men, aged twenty to thirty, took up arms against their Fatherland as allies of its most evil enemy...
...One cannot explain this treason biologically...
...almost all were nationalists who saw the German invasion as an opportunity to free their nations from the Stalinist yoke...
...It was not their Fatherland that they were fighting, but a foreign oppressor...
Vol. 16 • April 1983 • No. 4
