Late Soviet War Crimes Trials: Re-Living, Re-Litigating, and Re-Narrating the Second World War

Beginning in the late 1950s and lasting until the end of the Soviet Union, the KGB and Soviet prosecutors carried out hundreds of investigations of individuals they accused of committing crimes during the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union. Many of these prosecutions resulted in public trials that evoked the Stalinist “show trials” of the 1930s, where verdicts were foregone conclusions, and the trials served as both a didactic and repressive mechanism for Soviet society.

Though these two eras of public trials share overlaps, the late Soviet trials differed in important ways: both in the scope of the investigative process and the veracity of the underlying crimes being investigated. Also significant is the fact that the trials, while important for domestic messaging, served a crucial weapon on the moral front of the Cold War.

This talk explores the wide-ranging efforts, cultural, political, and legal, of the Soviet state to use the trials as space bolster narratives about the Nazi occupation and demonstrate a legal and moral superiority over the West when it came to the prosecution of Nazi war crimes.

Bio: Jared McBride is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at UCLA who specializes in Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe in the 20th century with a focus on nationalist movements, mass violence, interethnic conflict, and war crimes prosecution. His research has been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council, among others, and he has published in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Journal of Genocide Research, Kritika, and Slavic Review. Presently, he is completing a book manuscript concerning interethnic violence and local perpetrators in Nazi-occupied western Ukraine.

This program is co-presented with the UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies.