The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 8, Number 3, Spring 2020 | Page 63

and Scroll
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and denying the suffering of any particular
group (i.e., Jews) did not matter in
the grand scope of communist ideology.
A slew of Soviet journalists covered
the trials, but the fact remains that
they were “personally approved” 33 by
Party leadership. This meant they either
were complicit with Party directives or
the leadership knew them well enough
to expect them to keep their stories in
line. The resulting trial news regarding
the Jews was censored by the time it
reached the Soviet people. Aside from
the pervading fear surrounding prohibited
free speech, this seems to be the
only plausible reason as to why so much
attention to the Jews at Nuremberg did
not translate into Soviet media.
Stalin struggled with other Allied
leaders over Poland’s future, which
“he demanded would come under Moscow’s
rule, via communist puppets.” The
Soviet leader was prepared to see only
one narrative, “one in which the Soviet
Union had been Hitler’s victim and
the brave soldiers of the Red Army had
fought back, until victory was declared
on the roof of the Reichstag in Berlin.
Polish, and Jewish suffering was to have
no part in the Soviet narrative.” 34
In the postwar Soviet Union, we
see what [French philosopher]
Paul Ricœur called ‘organized
forgetting’ transformed into a
state policy. The Soviet cultivation
of its own interpretation
of historical memory aimed to
conceal the joint Nazi-Soviet
responsibility for instigating the
war; to hide its crimes against its
own citizens and those of other