Mr. Cerovic traces the epic of the partisan brigades during the Second World War, on the borders of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, disintegrated by the Wehrmacht before being banished from memory by the Soviet power.
Masha Cerovic takes us to the heart of a war within a war, the one waged by disjointed groups of partisans with more or less loose ties to Moscow, both politically and materially, and especially from the point of view of objectives. She does so with a worked, powerful phrasing, alternating with long and fascinating quotes. As the end of the introduction states, we will not read an “exhaustive” history of the partisan movement, but a “global” approach to the phenomenon.
Nevertheless: with its emphasis on the intersecting violence between partisans, occupiers and collaborators, with its precise studies of the physical and political territories at stake, its sensitivity to the psychological springs of certain individuals and the relationships they maintain with each other or with the surrounding communities, the work aims to be a total history. The investigation carried out in the archives of Russia, Germany, Belarus, Ukraine and Washington nourishes a substantial book: Cerovic refocuses our gaze on singular zones of borders, political and military no man’s lands, she keeps it on the Russian men and women who experience in their flesh and mind the daily experience of the choice to resist.
Brigades of resistance fighters
The book is divided into nine chapters that are both chronological and thematic; it describes not a structured movement, but groups coagulating singular personal journeys, forced to structure themselves into brigades of up to several thousand members. These are concentrated on the borders of Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, on the border between two administrations of the occupier, in areas of forests and marshes that have remained Soviet since 1921, neglected in the Blitzkrieg by the Wehrmacht Center Group between June and October 1941.
The reader follows these brigades step by step, from their formation in the blaze of the catastrophe of the summer of 1941 to their physical disintegration under the battering rams of a routed Wehrmacht and their memorial dissolution by a political power eager to re-Sovietize spaces and men, to impose its narrative of the “Great Patriotic War”.
In the meantime, these groups, united behind a charismatic leader, have protected entire areas as bases for military action, imposed their economic law on the villagers and pursued collaborators, including their families, with their hatred, while resisting second-rate operations launched against them by the occupier and its local auxiliaries.
The partisans are above all survivors whom fortune has saved from death or the inhumane treatment reserved for Soviet prisoners of war. A very oppressive occupation focused on the overexploitation of resources (especially human), the forced displacement of populations and the extermination of the “enemies” of the IIIe Reich (Jews, communists) continuously fed these spontaneous groupings. Their heterogeneous equipment consists of weapons abandoned by the Red Army, taken from the enemy (despite the incompatibility of the ammunition) or parachuted by the Soviet general staff. Despite this logistical support, neither the Party nor the NKVD fail to bring them into line: the “rail war” ordered from Moscow is cleverly redirected from the Wehrmacht to the police forces, direct adversaries of the partisans.
These formed autonomous communities, outside the social and political control of the pre-war period, where traditional discriminations were hard to break. Jews were admitted only reluctantly, despite the often precise knowledge of the atrocity of the exterminations. The latter were rejected as German and Nazi, but no one sought to hinder the adversary in his enterprise. Women remained at best confined to menial household tasks and suffered male aggression which transformed them into rural prostitutes.
In the more than precarious conditions of life in the forest, between hunger, cold and mosquitoes, a minimum health service is nevertheless maintained, even if injury often means death. But more than the sometimes repetitive picture of daily difficulties, or the tiresome one of German military operations, it is the analysis of the development by the partisans of their survival space that makes Cerovic’s book original.
The blade and the flame
Some of them were soldiers, many of them were peasants, but the partisans demonstrated a certain knowledge of graduated fortification, camouflage, and the designation of targets and places to protect – something all the more remarkable given that these men were unfamiliar with this particular terrain. They tamed it while making it their own, to the detriment less of the Germans than of ordinary citizens and collaborators.
In the strongholds where the Germans rarely penetrate, a non-Soviet law reigns, entirely personal, where arbitrariness reigns, and the violence unleashed against the enemy is boundless. Reprisals, rapes, pillaging, assassinations are the lot of the locals who suffer the law of the partisans, without being able to discuss it any more than that of the occupier. The regulated control, also accepted for lack of a better German alternative, goes from the partisan tax on crops to the political management of villages, including the forced mobilization of civilians.
It also takes the form of a fight to the death against the auxiliary police and all types of “traitors” against whom the brigades launch themselves with all their strength, without waiting for the Red Army or the NKVDThe penultimate chapter of the book explores this irrepressible desire for punishment through eradication, which stems from the experience of mass violence, Stalinist categories of designation of the enemy, and a system of supreme justice seen, despite the absence of any clear political program, as a restoration of the natural order through merciless vengeance.
The bladed weapon and the fire are the main tools, not to say the liturgical instruments, of this catharsis. It is the dark side, unspeakable at the time, inaudible today, of the partisan war. Cerovic detects the influence of the total extermination inflicted by the Nazis on Soviet territory, but recalls that it never reaches the relentlessness of the Ukrainian nationalists against the Jews and the Poles, mass victims of a political hatred transformed into a program of purification.
Supporters or resisters?
The Soviet term, partisanis distinguished from that of resistance fighter in several ways. It allows the Soviet power, which is regaining a foothold on the margins of its empire, to reduce these practices to historical examples (the First World War patriotic against Napoleon) and an auxiliary role. More deeply, the author has not detected any indication of resistance to the Stalinist regime: the partisans fought as Russians against the Germans, as Soviets against the Nazi regime imposed on the occupied territories. By designating themselves judges and executioners of traitors, and above all organizers of the economic life of their fiefdoms, did the partisans renew ties with the peasant revolution?
The idea put forward in the introduction remains a dead letter, especially since Cerovic does not refer to any research on the subject. If we can detect something peasant, or rather rural, here, it is in the ambiguous relationship to the political “center” – less the Stalin of the title, who almost never comes up in these pages, than a Party without cadres, swollen with recent members, which tries unsuccessfully to impose control, the political police which intends to maintain the monopoly of repressive violence or the general staff supplying weapons and strategic orders more or less obeyed. The author demonstrates how much the brigade leaders benefit from the distance of these authorities endowed with a strong power of legitimation, but which are criticized on the ground for their brutal dislocation with the total defeat of the summer of 1941.
The book would gain in readability with a sharper reflection on the exchanges between these two physical and symbolic spaces. Indeed, can the “partisan phenomenon” experienced from the inside, and envisaged – often with distance, sometimes with insufficiency – by the Germans be conceived without its representation on the domestic front? On several occasions, one finds oneself regretting the privilege granted to the military field – and to German sources -, to the relative detriment of the political field documented in the Russian archives. Cerovic uses sources from the inner self with art and evokes in a few solid pages the dislocated memorial heritage of the brigades, sketches an analysis of the cultural springs (memory of the Russian civil war and of Tchapaiev).
Why then not restore the perception by the Soviets in times of war? By soliciting the abundant audiovisual sources – reports of operators sent to risk their lives, such as Maria Sukhova or fiction films like This happened in Donbass Or Partisans of the Ukrainian Steppes –, it would revise with the same brilliance the partisan myth elaborated in times of war by the political authorities and would consolidate the argument of the sacrifice of ordinary citizens on the altar of the restoration of the supreme power of the State.