The Soviet Jewish mortality toll during World War II was over 2 million, including over 200,000 soldiers killed at the front. Yet the total number of Soviet citizens who perished during the war was over 20 million. This proportion made it possible for Soviet literature to downplay the specificity of the Holocaust, representing the slaughter of the Jews mainly in terms of the Nazi murder of civilian populations in occupied areas. The subject of the Holocaust was taboo for long stretches of Soviet history; the transliterated word itself came into use only after perestroika.

In fact, the Soviet blocking of information about the Nazi persecution of the Jews following the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 was one of the reasons for the insufficiently strenuous efforts of Jewish civilians to evacuate eastwards during the first days of the war. As if by inertia, news of the massacres of Jews on the Soviet territories in late summer of 1941 likewise received little or no media coverage.