Microdoses of Power on the Eastern Front

Alan Barenberg considers Michael David-Fox’s “Crucibles of Power: Smolensk Under Stalinist and Nazi Rule.”

By Alan BarenbergSeptember 12, 2025

• History

• Politics

HOW DOES POWER operate in modern authoritarian societies? How does the top leadership coordinate its rule with lower-level authorities? What function does mass state violence serve in these systems? How do ordinary people navigate the everyday dilemmas, large and small, posed by living in such a society? These questions have long animated the study of the Stalinist USSR and Nazi Germany, two regimes that pioneered the exercise of authoritarian control and mass violence in the first half of the 20th century.

These questions are also at the center of Michael David-Fox’s ambitious new study Crucibles of Power: Smolensk Under Stalinist and Nazi Rule. David-Fox offers a sophisticated new way to study authoritarian states. In his rendering, power is not an abstract, remote concept emanating from capital cities. Instead, it is exercised in large and small amounts by central, regional, and local actors, and is felt in innumerable ways by those ordinary people caught in its grip. David-Fox complicates the usual story of life under authoritarianism. Instead of clear divisions between perpetrators and victims, or collaborators and resisters, he demonstrates how “agency, choice, and power” under Soviet and Nazi rule shaped the life trajectories of communities and individuals.

Smolensk, a predominantly rural region in western Russia, might seem an unlikely place to set a study of Soviet and Nazi power during World War II: it did not contain a large city or an abundance of natural resources, nor was it the site of some major battle. Nevertheless, it was important to German war aims, as the highway to Moscow ran through it. Further, Smolensk has seen more than its fair share of academic focus over the past several decades, largely because of an unusual prize captured by US forces at the end of the war: a cache of documents detailing the actions of the Soviet Communist Party in the 1920s and 1930s. In the summer of 1941, rapidly advancing German forces captured a substantial chunk of Communist Party records in the city of Smolensk. The Task Force of Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg, which was engaged in the looting of cultural artifacts of all kinds in Nazi-occupied territories, used the stolen documents to study the Soviet dictatorship during the remainder of the war. Most of the files were subsequently recaptured by the Red Army and returned to Smolensk; however, a small portion of the archive (538 archival folders, comprising 200,000 pages) fell into American hands. Before the collapse of the Soviet system, these records provided one of the only opportunities for scholars outside the USSR to study the inner workings of prewar Soviet power via archival documents.

Although Crucibles of Power centers on Smolensk, it is not limited to mining the pages of the captured archive. In setting out to study Smolensk under multiple regimes—the Soviets, the Nazi occupation, and also the pockets of Soviet “partisan” rule where neither regime held full sway during the war—David-Fox visited scores of libraries and archives in Russia and Germany, where he gained unprecedented access to a wide range of documents. The result is, unsurprisingly, far more comprehensive and nuanced than previous studies. Yet whereas David-Fox might have been tempted to focus on the hierarchical exercise of state power so often reflected in official state documents, what makes the study truly pathbreaking is its focus on autobiographical sources, incorporating the stories of a wide range of witnesses and participants. This allows him to examine how “microdoses of power” shaped the lives of the residents of this region.

David-Fox narrates the complex story of the region through an impressive cast of characters. While some conform to the expected categories of collaborators, loyalists, and victims, others push the boundaries of how we might conceive such labels. Even in seemingly straightforward cases, David-Fox attempts to capture the complexities brought by contingency, motivations, opportunism, and ideology. One key actor, Boris Menshagin, a former defense attorney during the Stalinist Terror of the 1930s, served as the mayor (“burgomistr”) of Smolensk during the Nazi occupation. He thus became a chief representative of Nazi power in the region, carrying out the liquidation of the Smolensk ghetto, among other crimes. Another character, Andrei Iudenkov, began fighting the Nazi occupation from behind the front lines, rising as a leader of the so-called Lazo Regiment of partisans. He became one of the de facto rulers in a part of Smolensk controlled neither by the German nor the Soviet armies (what David-Fox calls “Stalinism without Stalin”). David-Fox argues that, despite their divergent fates, both Menshagin and Iudenkov were primarily motivated by opportunities for personal gain rather than strong ideological convictions. Collaborators and leaders of the resistance alike sought to advance their personal goals within the constraints of the circumstances in which they found themselves.

Vasilii Maslennikov provides an even more striking example of the limited choices available to those living under Nazi occupation. A history teacher in a small town, he joined the Soviet partisans after the Nazi invasion. Captured by German forces, he survived two years in POW camps, refusing to collaborate and suffering greatly because of this decision. Maslennikov’s brother, Ivan, took a very different path: he became a translator for the German military. When the Red Army returned, he was prosecuted as a collaborator. Their sister, Tonia, was recruited to work for the Soviet agency charged with rooting out collaborators and spies in the territory that had been under Nazi rule (SMERSH—literally, “death to spies”). Why did three siblings pursue such starkly different paths? None seems to have been particularly motivated by ideology. As David-Fox argues, “each of them seems to have taken a wartime stance reluctantly and for lack of perceived alternatives.” Most residents of Smolensk, especially those living in the countryside, were not particularly loyal to the Soviet system, which had crushed their way of life in the 1930s. But they were also not enamored with the Nazi occupation, which was brutally violent and did not offer any reprieve from the oppression of the Soviet collective farm system. Thus, the “vast, cautious, mass navigated in the middle,” doing their best to accommodate to occupation systems. In David-Fox’s telling, life under brutal authoritarian rule inspired caution rather than enthusiasm for any ideological system.

Crucibles of Power provides a detailed and chilling account of the extermination of the Jews in Smolensk. David-Fox examines what he calls the “Berlin-Smolensk feedback loop”—a toxic confluence of pressure from Berlin and competition among the groups sent to occupied territories to exterminate Jews. This process played a key role in determining how the Holocaust was carried out in Smolensk. Although there were relatively few Jewish victims of the Holocaust in the city (David-Fox points out that there were fewer than 100,000 Jewish Holocaust victims in the Russian Soviet Republic as a whole, in contrast to over two million in Ukraine and Belarus), the region was nevertheless part of the genocide. Plans to build extermination camps with gas chambers in Smolensk never materialized, yet the city was a site for testing mobile gas vans, and such means were indeed used in July 1942 to murder the Jews held in the Smolensk ghetto. Only two survivors remained: Evgenii Vakuliuk and Vladimir Khizver. The former survived by chance (he was the child of a mixed Jewish-Gentile couple and happened to be outside of the ghetto when it was cleared), whereas the latter was hidden by his mother in a final, desperate gambit. There was widespread antisemitism in Smolensk, and many locals assisted in the extermination. But the German authorities were shocked that the Russian population showed remarkably little enthusiasm for mass killings. David-Fox concludes that this was likely the result of having experienced over two decades of Soviet rule, which had taught the population “the importance of lying low.” Most people calculated that enthusiastic collaboration presented more risk than reward.

David-Fox argues that, while anti-Jewish violence was unique, it should be viewed within the broader framework of the “synergies of violence” during the Nazi occupation. He notes that the mass starvation of Soviet POWs by the Germans was in fact the largest-scale murder committed by Nazis on Soviet soil, with over three million victims. (Although the scale of the Holocaust was clearly larger, most of its victims were killed outside of Soviet territory.) Further, he argues that the murder of Soviet POWs should not be viewed in isolation from the Holocaust; POW camps, after all, were some of the first sites for the mass murder of Jews in the USSR. David-Fox is careful to note that while the mass murder of Soviet POWs was one of the greatest war crimes perpetrated by the Nazis, it remains unclear if it fits the postwar UN definition of genocide. “Even if it was not a genocide or genocidal,” he writes, “it was a war crime of genocidal proportions.” The POW camps established by the Germans on Soviet territory did not register the names of prisoners, sending a clear signal to camp commandants that prisoners were to be exterminated. This practice, David-Fox notes, was repeated in Nazi death camps beginning in 1942.

Overall, David-Fox’s book breaks new ground in several areas. It examines the violence of the Eastern Front as an integrated whole, in a way that captures the specific nature of the Holocaust while recognizing its close relationship with other forms of mass violence. It does not treat the Soviet and Nazi regimes as billiard balls that collided during the war; instead, it depicts the area of occupation as a complex contact zone between institutions, ideas, and people. Further, David-Fox shows that each system was replete with its own internal conflicts and inconsistencies. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Crucibles of Power offers a nuanced treatment of the choices faced by individuals, families, and social groups in authoritarian societies that constantly attempted to mobilize and engage them.

Most residents of Smolensk would have preferred to stay on the sidelines during the war; years of Stalinist violence had taught them that the risks of working closely with state authorities often outweighed the potential rewards. Yet this was rarely an option. Instead, individuals did their best to navigate the circumstances in which they found themselves. By focusing on the exercise of power and the fraught choices facing those caught within its grip, David-Fox teaches us important lessons about life in authoritarian societies. As he demonstrates, the lines between perpetrator and victim, and collaborator and resister, are rarely clear-cut and are constantly shifting. Such insight may be a cold comfort to those of us living in an age when authoritarianism is on the rise—yet it is nevertheless valuable perspective.