CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Riabichenko, Aleksandra Sergeevna |
|---|---|
| Title | The Limits of Forgiveness in the Soviet Union: The Political, Judicial, and Cultural Reexamination of Policy towards Collaborators in the 1950-70s |
| Summary | This thesis examines the limits of forgiveness of collaborators in the Soviet Union in the 1950-1970s in political, judicial, and cultural domains. After the death of Stalin, the new government implemented significant political changes that had an impact on the judicial and cultural practices related to the issue of collaboration in the Great Patriotic War. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev ordered the organization of revision commissions to reexamine the sentences of counter-revolutionary prisoners, including collaborators, in order to assess the appropriateness of Stalinist postwar justice. In 1955, around 60,000 prisoners were released under this process. It prompts us to assume that the government of that time, while still recognizing these people as guilty, had attempted to forgive or to acknowledge the disproportionality of their punishment for those who allegedly committed a crime against the motherland by aiding the Nazis. Based on the archival documents from the Sectoral Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine that show the activities of the revision commissions in Kyiv, this thesis looks at which factors in the prisoners’ sentences were used as reasons for of reducing or annulling the term of imprisonment, and what actions were considered irredeemable. Besides the court and party meetings, cinematography, one of the most influential fields of Soviet art, also conducted its own reexamination of this issue. The relative liberalization and de-Stalinization during the Thaw and after offered the possibility for filmmakers to speak of wartime hardships and injustices. The two Soviet films, Trial on the Road (1971) and The Ascent (1977), illustrated the pangs of conscience and remorse of collaborators that experienced trauma from the war. This thesis also examines the films’ quite provocative illustration of traitors who follow or violate the political agenda in the early 1970s when the myth of the Great Patriotic War had already been strengthened. |
| Supervisor | Siefert, Marsha |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/riabichenko_aleksand.pdf |
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