I was watching the documentary The Act of Killing (about the 1965 mass killings in Indonesia. As an aside I strongly recommend that movie), and it inspired me to write this piece, which looks at the Soviet Holocaust from the perpetrators' perspective (
@Bookmark1995 also did an excellent job covering this):
The Act of Killing
Excerpt from the film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann[1]
From 1952-1960 Kirill Murkov was chief of the MGB in the Kharkov Oblast.
Claude Lanzmann: How many Jews were executed under your command?
Kirill Murkov: 20,000, give or take.
CL: And how was that carried out?
KM: About 30 condemned men were loaded into a truck and taken to a secluded wood outside of the city. They were forced to kneel at the edge of a mass grave in a single-file line, and the executioners walked across the line and shot each person at the base of the skull. Anyone who survived was shot again. This process was repeated truckload by truckload until the grave was full.
CL: Was it hard killing so many people?
KM: For many of my men it was. Almost everyone drank after the job; that was our main way of relieving the stress. The MGB had various methods to help the men cope, but it takes an iron will to be able to handle executing people day in and day out. I know quite a few who simply couldn’t take it anymore.
CL: What happened to those men?
KM: If they came to us about it, or we realized that they weren’t coping, they were transferred to some other duty. Sadly, it was difficult to tell if a man was coping or not. Plenty of them would seem fine while at work, then go home and hang themselves. A couple even went insane.
CL: Do you think the difficulty came from the fact that you were killing innocent people?
KM (angry): It’s a disgusting, slanderous lie to say that we were killing innocent people. They were guilty as sin. We had a legal process, and every one of those we killed had confessed to their crimes.
CL: But weren’t many of them targeted because they were Jewish? How does being Jewish make one a criminal?
KM: The Jews are a naturally reactionary, anti-Soviet ethnicity. They are a population infected with the belief that they own the world, and they opposed Stalin because he wouldn’t bow to their demands. Had we left them alone they would have undermined the Soviet state. After all, look what happened when we stopped hunting them.
CL: So you’re saying that no innocent people were killed?
KM: Look, certainly a small number of innocent people were killed. When tens of thousands are being executed there will be some mistakes made. But what you don’t understand, what most people today don’t understand, is that we were at war. And when you’re at war you have to take extraordinary measures to ensure victory, and if the price of victory is that a few innocents must die then that’s a price I’m willing to pay.
[1] IOTL Shoah is a 10-hour documentary about the Holocaust. ITTL there's an additional 10 hours devoted to the Soviet Holocaust.
