Bought and sold: living and losing the good life in socialist Yugoslavia, by Patrick Hyder Patterson, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2011, xvii + 351 pp. + illustrations, US$39.95 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-8014-5004-4

Abstract

Book Reviews elsewhere in occupied Europe, the Germans treated them with suspicion. A more important impulse for collaboration, and a point Rein properly emphasizes, was the desire on the part of the collaborators to achieve specific aims, and often ones. not shared by the Germans. Perhaps most prominent was the goal of national autonomy or even independence within a German-dominated Europe, an aim that the wary Germans closely monitored. Others collaborated as a result of anti-communism, or as a consequence of their brutal treatment during the upheavals of the 1930s. The Germans even managed in 1943-44 to exploit the anti-Soviet sentiments of local Polish members of the Home Army in western Byelorussia fearful of a return of the Red Army. For others, the main goal was survival, for themselves, their families, and their communities. Finally, some joined the Germans out of anti-Semitism and an eagerness to strike a blow at the putative Jewish enemy, an execrable motive not confined to Byelorussians. Collaboration, though, was a dynamic process, swelling during the period of early German successes and likely triumph, and receding as the German wave crested, the partisan movement grew in importance, and Soviet forces approached. The most important collaboration, both in terms of numbers of Byelorussians involved and its significance for the Germans, was military, in the form of local self-defense forces, anti-partisan units, and in aiding the implementation of the so-called Final Solution. Even here, though, forced by the lack of manpower to rely on Byelorussian support, the Germans could not overcome their racist and ideological notions, ultimately undermining any hope of large-scale cooperation through the sheer brutality of their occupation measures. Still, as Rein concludes, collaboration in Byelorussia was real, more extensive than supposed, and in some areas, most notably the killing of Jews, of vital importance for the Germans. Their society disintegrated by two murderous regimes, Byelorussians were neither the lockstep resistors of Soviet myth nor the passive sub-humans of Nazi stereotypes. Rather, they sought, some willingly, others reluctantly, through the limited means available to them to carve out a distinct space within which to survive the onslaught. Leonid Rein has performed a valuable service in reminding us yet again that occupation and collaboration are complex topics that should never be depicted in simplistic terms.