THE STUDY OF THE HOLOCAUST in the USSR has until recent years been somewhat neglected, and in the cold war years was bedevilled by politics. The Soviets downplayed the specifically Jewish features of the Holocaust, stressing the common fate of the peoples of the USSR, while Western scholarship was eager to document the long-standing hostility of Stalin to Jews and the Jewish people. It is only with the opening of the archives of the states of the former Soviet Union that the subject has been placed on a proper academic footing. Yet it is clear that it is central to a proper understanding of the Holocaust. It was the Soviets who played probably the largest role in the defeat of the Nazis, while after the annexations of 1939–40 the Jewish community of the USSR, with a population of nearly 5.3 million, was the largest in the world after that of the United States.

The attitude of the Soviet government to the anti-Jewish genocide is complex. At one level, communism was the complete antithesis of Nazism and the Nazi– Soviet conflict lay at the heart of the Second World War. Soviet foreign policy for much of the 1930s seemed to be dominated by its opposition to fascism and above all its German embodiment. There were some ambiguities in this support. Thus, Soviet backing for the Popular Front in Spain was ambivalent and half-hearted, while fear of foreigners at the height of Stalinism meant that attempts by inter - national Jewish organizations to settle Jewish refugees in Birobidzhan were rebuffed.