Alexander Nekrich, a Soviet historian and specialist in 20th century-history, was born in 1920 in Baku, Azerbaijan. His parents, Moisey and Fanny, were both journalists, and he had an older brother. Moisey Nekrich, who had studied at the Department of History and Geography of Sorbonne University in Paris before World War I, was proficient in several foreign languages, and had a keen interest in politics and history.
In 1937, Alexander enrolled in Moscow State University, and graduated from it in 1941. Following the outbreak of the Soviet-German War in June that year, he volunteered to enlist in the People's Militia, which existed for several months. He was drafted into the Red Army in April 1942. Nekrich was initially an officer in a special unit of the Political Department, which disseminated German-language radio propaganda. He was later tasked with translating intercepted German documents, and also served as an interpreter at interrogations of German POWs. In March 1943, Nekrich joined the Communist Party. He saw action on various fronts, fought in the Battle of Stalingrad, and was awarded two Orders of the Red Star. Captain Nekrich witnessed the Soviet victory in the Battle of Königsberg in April 1945.
After being discharged from the military later that year, Nekrich returned to Moscow. He initially lived with his wife, but their relationship deteriorated over time, and he moved back into his parents' small apartment. Since his brother had been killed in action during the war, he was now their only surviving child. Nekrich eventually became a postgraduate student, and earned a Ph.D. from the Moscow Institute of History of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, despite the late Stalinist antisemitic campaign and the discrimination against Jewish historians. In 1963, he received a postdoctoral degree, and held the title of senior scholar at the Institute of History in 1956-1976.
Nekrich's monograph June 22, 1941, which was published in 1965 and translated in the West, gave a factual account of Stalin's actions on the eve of the war. He recalled:
"The idea for a book about the beginning of the war in June 1941 came to me when I was returning from East Prussia to Moscow in a freight car. However, I would not be able to make this plan reality until much later. It took almost twenty years of studying history for me to be ready to write such a book."
Alexander Nekrich, Renounce Fear! London, 1979, pp. 211-212.
The monograph drew on narrative sources, including valuable information gleaned from interviews with direct participants in the events, and it also contained an analysis of reports by TASS, the Soviet Union's news agency. The historical picture presented in the book clashed sharply with the official Soviet narrative of the "Great Patriotic War." Dr. Nekrich's documentation of Stalin's mistakes and of the Soviet unpreparedness for the German invasion caused controversy in Moscow. As he would later write in his memoir Renounce Fear!, he was expelled from the Party "for deliberately distorting the policies of the Communist Party and the Soviet state in the lead-up to and during the initial period of the Great Patriotic War… [His distortions] have been exploited by foreign reactionary propaganda for anti-Soviet purposes" (Alexander Nekrich.Renounce Fear!, London, 1979, pp. 320-321). The book was removed from Soviet libraries and bookstores, and its copies were destroyed.
In the spring of 1975, he completed the monograph The Punished Peoples, which detailed the mass deportations of ethnic groups in the USSR. Nekrich had personally witnessed the deportation of the Crimean Tatars during the war, and his book attempted to trace the fate of this and other affected groups. Realizing that he would never be able to get this manuscript past the Soviet censors, Nekrich sent it for publication abroad.
In 1976, Dr. Nekrich was allowed to leave the Soviet Union. For several years prior to that, his academic freedom and ability to write and publish had been curtailed by the academic establishment, which was subservient to the Communist Party ideologues. After his emigration, he initially lived and worked in London, and later joined Harvard University as a research fellow, attaining the rank of senior fellow in 1987. He worked at the Russian Research Center of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts – one of the United States' premier centers for the study of Russia. He also served as the editor of Review, a political and historical supplement to the well-known Russian émigré periodical Russkaya mysl' ("Russian Thought").
This period saw the publication of new books by Nekrich on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition to The Punished Peoples, he co-authored (with Michael Heller) Utopia in Power (Summit Books, 1986), which received widespread acclaim as a history of the Soviet Union. Thanks to his fluency in German, he completed a study of Soviet-German relations between the two World Wars.
Dr. Aleksandr Nekrich passed away in 1993 in Cambridge, USA, aged seventy-three.
Related Resources
Nekrich's memoirs
In his book of memoirs Renounce Fear! (written in the USSR in 1972, and published in London in 1979), Nekrich reminisced about his attitudes and experiences in the postwar period:
"The Soviet Army entered Europe, bringing liberation to its peoples, which had been enslaved by the Hitlerites. These Hitlerites, the fascists, were obvious enemies. They had committed atrocities, brutalizing, burning, and murdering the local population. The Soviet liberators beheld the death camps: Treblinka, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Dachau. It was hard to breath in — let alone see — this hell... The Allied soldiers returned home, feeling firm in their (justified) conviction that they had saved the world from barbarism and the fascist plague. However, apart from the fascist atrocities, thousands upon thousands of Soviet soldiers and officers beheld something else, of which they had been ignorant. Reality did not always correspond to their image of this alien world, which had been collated from hearsay, radio broadcasts, newspapers, school textbooks, and movies. This world turned out to be much more diverse. It was not black-and-white, but multihued."
"Immediately after my demobilization, I decided to become a postgraduate student…. As a child, I used to dream of being a diplomat, but this dream eventually went away. I remembered that, back in 1940, my older brother, then a student at the Faculty of Geography of Moscow State University, had wished to enroll in the Academy of Foreign Trade. However, the secretary of the Komsomol organization, whom he'd asked for help, explained to him, in a comradely tone, that the Academy admitted only Party members – and Russian ones, at that, as he took care to emphasize. When I came to receive a recommendation from V. M. Khvostov (who had just been appointed principal of the Higher Diplomatic School), I was kept waiting in his anteroom for 1.5 hours, becoming very irritated. I was summoned to his office last, even though I had arrived first! Prof. Khvostov had different priorities, receiving his visitors in the order of their importance, and the importance of the matters they wished to discuss. Needless to say, I came in last, according to both criteria. Still, he received me cordially, wrote a glowing recommendation, and even expressed regret at the fact that he could not enroll me in the Higher Diplomatic School, since the "enrollment is already closed." "The Jews are asked not to bother themselves," — these words, from Mikhail Romm's movie Dream, came to mind then. To this, I mentally retorted with another phrase from the same movie: "And they are quite unbothered!" — and walked away merrily."
From: Alexander Nekrich. Renounce Fear! London, 1979, pp. 8-9, 19-20.
