Preface to the 1957 RAND Report

From mid-October,1941, to the early April 1944, the city of Odessa and its hinterland were under foreign occupation. One of the largest Soviet cities to fall into enemy hands during the second World War, Odessa's experience was unique also for another reason: during almost the entire period it was under Romanian, rather than German rule. As capital of the improvised, ad hoc province of "Trasnistria,", it became the object of Romanian policy disputes, experiments, efforts as self-enrichment, and exploitation. At the same time, it was the object of acute Soviet attention, including agents and partisans, while foreign observers-newspapermen and officials-and local residents intently watched the large and once flourishing city respond and adjust to a new and challenging situation.

In the study of the Second World War, the story of Transnistria has been well-nigh neglected. While scattered material is abundant, there exists no secondary study of any substantial value. Thus the first aim of this paper is to provide an historical reconstruction of wartime Transnistria. The paper also seeks to analyze Transnistrian experience and see what lessons can be drawn from it. A comparison of Romanian rule with the German occupation in other parts of USSR during the same years reveal s much of significance about the problems of occupation. Odessa under the Romanian s also sheds a curious light on Soviet society: one can here study what happens-what aspirations and responses are disclosed - when Soviet controls are removed.

There are various limitations inherent in the subject-matter. Any post facto reconstruction, especially of attitudes and values, must be viewed with some skepticism. The sources contradict each other repeatedly. Contemporary observers were often in no position to have special insight into the subjects they dealt with; and memories inevitably tend to err when relied upon several traumatic years later, under drastically different material and political conditions. To mention but one major methodological hindrance, the refugee informants-who proved quite valuable -were exclusively urban intellectual ( in the broader Soviet sense of this term). This tenders impossible a thorough study of workers' attitudes and behavior during the occupation. Because some work has already been done on peasant attitudes, however, the fact that informants were urban is less important. In some respects it is fortunate to have so much of the material deal with the white-collar and intellectual strata under foreign rule; material on those groups in German-controlled areas is strikingly poor.

It should perhaps be added that the contrast between what happened in Odessa and in German-occupied areas proved somewhat less dramatic and less extreme than the stereotypes and myths among Soviet emigres (typified by the popular images of "German rule-bad; Odessa-good") would have led one to believe. Nonetheless, in many crucial areas the differences were substantial - and where they were not, the reasons for these were significant - so that the author, at least, feels the investigation to have been justified, even though the evidence proved to be considerably poorer than had been hoped.

This study was produced for the Social Science Division of The RAND Corporation. The author owes particular thanks to Messrs. Melville J. Ruggles, Emmanuel G. Methene, Herbert S. Dinerstein, and Leon Goure for their advice, assistance, and criticism. Appreciation must be expressed to the informants-Soviet refugees and Romanian ex-officers-who prefers to remain unnamed, and to individuals and libraries that helped survey the available materials or draw attention to obscure information: Professor John A. Armstrong, University of Wisconsin; Bibliothek des Instituts fur Weltwirtschaft, Kiel; Maurilio Coppini Italian Ambassador to Switzerland ; Institute for the Study of the History and Culture of the USSR Munich (which , thanks to the assistance of the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism, commissioned two manuscripts on wartime Odessa); Institut fur Zeitgeschichte, Munich; Mr. Lev F. Magerovsky, Curator of the Archive of East European History and Culture, Columbia University; Mr. Ivan Maistrenko, Munich; Osteuropa-Institut , Munich; Dr. Joseph Schechtman, New York; Dr. Werner Stephany; Mr. Paul Sweet, German Documents Branch, Department of State ; Professor Witold Sworakowski, Curator of the East European Collection. Hoover Library Stanford University; and YIVO Library, New York.

Alexander Dallin

Preface to the 1998 Edition

As the original preface to the manuscript indicates, it was written in 1956, on the basis of research an interviews conducted during the preceding several years. This explain some of its limitations. The author had access to some captured German army records and was able to interview some former residents of Odessa who after World War II found themselves in Western Europe, and a few officers who had served in the East during the war. Also available were some, though rather incomplete, sets of newspapers published during the war. But this was a time when American scholars had virtually no scholarly contact with, or access to, the Soviet Union or Romania.

What was manifestly lacking in this manuscript were , first of all, uncensored Soviet memoirs and archival sources, and second, virtually all accounts-official and unofficial -from the Romanian side.

Perhaps this publication will stimulate others to fill some of these gaps. Such additional sources-and others that have become available in the past forty years-would surely make it in many regards a far more precise account than the present manuscript. I would be delighted if this were to be one effect of its present publication. And yet, everything I have seen or heard since then suggests to me that the basic themes of what is described above and the general conclusions I reached at the time will apparently stand the test of time. Regrettably, not many survivors-either on the Romanian or the Soviet side-remain alive to round out or correct this picture.

In the passage of time has reduced the seeming saliency of the experience, it has also crystallized some intriguing new questions. Those regarding Romanian policy and behavior I am hardly qualified to discuss.

Others, however, deal with the wartime experience of Odessa in the context of both Odessa's specific culture and tradition, and the broader Soviet experience, from the New Economic Policy of the 1920s to the post-Soviet transition of the 1990s.

Now to explain the experience of Odessa under the Romanian rule? One element was of course the greater permissiveness of the Romanian administration compared to the German regime to the north. It was, it appears, not a matter of Romanian compassion but rather a matter of laxness and inefficiency, perhaps a broader attitude toward authority and discipline, although there were many instances of terror , panic, and atrocities as well. There was also a slight element of political guide among probably a minority of the Romanians who hoped to annex "Transnistria" to a future Greater Romania and did not wish to antagonize potential subjects of "fellow-citizens."1*

The behavior of the occupying administration is a significant variable, and the experience of the Odessa region prompts a comparison with the German regime in Northern Caucasus, which was likewise comparatively lenient (for a combination of reasons: "Transnistria and the Northern Caucasus, and to some extent Baltic areas, stand out by contrast with all other of the former Soviet Union in the attitudes of the population toward the occupiers and toward forging a non-Soviet way of life). However, Romanian practice differed greatly from the German -including a popular sense that anything was possible, that anything could be bought or sold, and that there were exceptions to all rules. In any event, Romanian behavior was a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the emergence of the embryonic "civil society" ( and to the some extent, a "civil economy") that we observe in Odessa during the war.

What we find difficult to evaluate is the question to what extent Odessa-with its particular spirit, the values of its citizens, the tradition of humor, spunk, and enterprise, defiance of convention, on the threshold of criminality-represented a unique phenomenon even after 25 years of Soviet rule. In many ways its tradition places it in a line closer to Marseilles and Naples than in row with Leningrad and Sverdlovsk. But if this is, it also implies that there lingered a flame more reminiscent of the years of the NEP (the New Economic Policy of the 1920s) than of the Stalin era-more Isaac Babel' and Il'f and Petrov than even Kataev and Fadeev. Recent observers have confirmed the survival of this "something special" in Odessa.2*

A different explanation (had these need not be mutually exclusive) would suggest that-from the perspective of the 1990s-Odessa was a remarkable forerunner of what we would now characterize as the values and attitudes of post-Soviet urban life, part of the tradition to a non-communist society and economy. The flourishing of private e enterprise, especially in the service sector, the remarkable growth of corruption and banditry; the ambivalence about politics; the search for creature comforts; the emergence of a (small ) elite of nouveaux riches; and much else resonate with what in the Soviet Union beginning with the years of perestroika and since. If Odessa was unique during the war, it was also because the development here was permitted, by default, to be more authentic than under the German in Kiev, Pskov, Smolensk, or Minsk.

In the end, both things may have been true. Odessa was and is unique, and that uniqueness showed during the war. But quite apart, from its special flair, in a variety of ways that could not have been foreseen, the abortive experience under the Romanian occupation foreshadowed something of a pattern of post-communist development that has been observed, since 1989, in a variety of East European and post-Soviet settings.

The wartime experience must not be idealized by any means. Moreover, the popular mood to change rather dramatically in 1943-44, as military fortunes reversed after Stalingrad, as economic conditions deteriorated and prices began to rise "astronomically," and as partisan activity reminded people of potential Soviet presence. If, at the start, many residents of "Transnistria seemed prepared to adapt to the new system, two years later, under conditions of war-weariness, Romanian rule was widely perceived as futile, unjust, or antiquated, while an upsurge of patriotism and wishful thinking led more people to think of the Red Army as the People-under-Arms, bearers of a new message.

The war years in Odessa remain a significant yet neglected experience, which prompts provocative questions and deserves further study and reflection.

Alexander Dallin
Stanford California
August, 1997
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1* The Romanian wartime label of Transnistria, must be carefully distinguished from post-Soviet usage of Transnistria. While the Romanian reference was to the area beyond the Denser River-i. e. in the Ukrainian SSR-the post-Soviet (Russian)usage refers to the area beyond the Denser within Moldova-i.e. the slice of territory centered on Tiraspol.

It is similarly important to bear in mind the charges in nomenclature and spelling for a number of locations introduced since 1991. Thus the references in the text to Moldova of course mean the current Moldova: the city of Nikolaev is now (in Ukrainian) Mykolaiv, and so forth.

2* See, e.g., Maurice-Friedberg, How Things Were Done in Odessa (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1991)