The immediate contribution of Unwelcome Memory is to dispense with the much-established conventional wisdom that claims that the Soviet Union’s totalitarian social control made any expression of Jewish Holocaust remembrance impossible. In contrast, Zeltser demonstrates that Soviet Jews actively mobilized across the country to erect memorials to their loved ones. Not only, he shows, were these monuments numerous, but they also often explicitly signaled presumably prohibited “ethnic content” by Hebrew lettering or inscriptions. While Zeltser’s analysis certainly confirms the general understanding of Holocaust memorialization in the USSR as rarely commemorating Jewish victims as Jews but instead as “noncombatant Soviet citizens” or “Soviet civilians,” many of the local monuments found creative ways to still signal that the victims were killed as Jews—by either the use of language or by visual symbols, such as the Star of David or an image of a menorah.

This finding complicates the story often told about Holocaust memory in the Soviet Union—and often the larger Eastern European space—that assumes this memory to have been absent until well into the 1980s and 1990s. Zeltser implies that the reason for this misconception was largely ideological—it fit the Western narrative of the Soviet frozen society

Zeltser carefully defines what he considers a Jewish Holocaust memorial—those that include meaningful Jewish involvement and participation and not, for example, the 1976 monument at Babi Yar, which was established with no Jewish participation or involvement at all (37). He then documents at least 733 cities, towns, or villages where Jews themselves erected a monument after the war and before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He calculates that some kind of a memorial was put up in 49 percent of locations where Jews were shot, while tens of thousands of Soviet Jews participated in some kind of memorialization during the Soviet period (26). This shows a much more vibrant culture of Holocaust memory than many of the accounts of the Soviet period allowed for.

Significantly, in documenting these grassroots memorials Zeltser further demonstrates the unique feature of memorialization in the Soviet Union: As most Soviet Jews were shot in the “Holocaust by bullets” and not deported to camps elsewhere in occupied Europe, the culture of memorialization and the aesthetic of monuments and ways of remembering developed differently than memorialization based on the experience of Western, Central, and Southern European Jews who mostly died in camps far from their homes. It is this unique feature of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union—the fact that most victims died very close to where they lived—that reflected itself in small, local monuments on locations of mass shootings, making them more directly linked to the places where the victims lived and died, and to their surviving family members, than was the case with major memorial sites at death camps that were far removed from Jews’ hometowns, their deaths more abstract, their proper burials and gravesite visits largely out of reach.

There are multiple things going on here.

Firstly, the Soviet Union didn’t agree that the Holocaust was a unique event, seeing the targeting of Jewish people as part of a set of atrocities that included the mass enslavement and murder of Slavs and others, so there was a preference to memorialize the mass suffering caused by the Nazis, eg to also memorialize the tens of millions of Slavic peoples who were killed as well as the mass murder of Jewish people. This has been interpreted or presented by some as a form of holocaust denial since it’s vaguely a denial of the uniqueness of the holocaust as a uniquely Jewish experience.

Secondly, the experience of the holocaust in the Soviet Union was different. It was more local. So there are many local memorials instead of a few large centralized memorials.

Thirdly, the west pushes a narrative of the USSR trying to “flatten” ethnic differences as a way of making the USSR seem inhuman and totalitarian. The USSR was very against ethnic nationalism but actually celebrated ethnic diversity and ensured ethnic rights in ways that you never saw in the west. The opposition to ethnic nationalism is often portrayed as opposition to ethnic diversity but this is a conflation. And after all it was the opposition to ethnic nationalism that played a large role in the Soviet hostility to the nazis.

Fourthly, if you want to judge which side opposed nazism more strongly in reality then don’t judge it by statues and monuments. Judge it by how many Nazis were still in power after the war in East Germany compared to West Germany. If the west was truly against the Holocaust then they would have cleaned house but they didn’t. In East Germany they actually removed the nazis from power.

Lastly, it’s worth remembering which side actually liberated the camps. It was the Soviet’s who actually defeated the nazis and ended the holocaust.