Even before World War II ended, the Soviet government was taking pains to suppress the memory of the Holocaust, eliding the persecution and slaughter of Jews under the general rubric of “fascist crimes.” Lev Ginzburg (1921-1980)—a Latvian-born Jew, professional translator of German poetry, prolific writer and essayist, and for many years chairman of the translators’ section of the Moscow Branch of the Union of Soviet Writers—was one of few Soviet-Jewish writers able to write openly about the subject, even receiving permission to travel abroad to investigate Nazi war crimes. Eventually, however, the Soviet authorities turned against him. The turning point came with his book Otherworldly Encounters, as Maxim Shrayer writes:
Ginzburg [had made efforts] to meet face-to-face with some of the surviving top-tier Nazi leaders and with those who had known them intimately. Ginzburg enjoyed phenomenal freedoms . . . for a Soviet writer, and especially for a Soviet Jew. Having taken a number of trips to West Germany in the 1960s, he reported on his meetings and conversations with Albert Speer, Baldur von Schirach (former leader of the Hitler Youth), Hjalmar Schacht (Nazi minister of economics in 1934-1937), . . . and also with Eva Braun’s sisters, Himmler’s son-in-law, and others.
At the end of 1969, Otherworldly Encounters, [a book based on these interviews], was serialized in the Moscow monthly Novyi mir (New World)—then still the most progressive Soviet literary journal, where Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had been published in 1962. Excerpts were printed in newspapers and journals of the Eastern Bloc countries. On the initiative of the distinguished actor and director Oleg Efremov, a stage production was in the works at the Moscow Art Theater.
Then followed a change of fortune. In a Pravda article dated April 13, 1970, the then-deputy chief of the Propaganda Section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, A. Dmitryuk, zeroed in on Ginzburg in a defamatory passage: “In the very least, one cannot say of Otherworldly Encounters that it helps denounce the social and class nature of fascism. But it does reek of sick sensationalism.” Historians cite the party’s official verdict on Ginzburg’s book as one of the factors leading to the retirement of Alexander Tvardovsky as editor-in-chief of Novyi mir. . . .
A prominent official Jew, Ginzburg was likely targeted to send a message: only strictly Soviet versions of World War II and Nazism would be tolerated.
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/273095/lev-ginzburg-soviet-translator