Issue 81 (2023): Focus on Contemporary Ukrainian Documentary |
Sergei Loznitsa: The Kiev Trial (2022) reviewed by Jacob Richey © 2023 |
Ever since the camps were liberated, the question of how to discuss the Holocaust has remained unresolved in Europe. Shaped by years of Soviet dominance, conventional Eastern European portrayals have historically discussed the Holocaust as a single aspect of the broader war that the Nazis waged against the Soviet Union. While the Nazis undoubtedly did wage a brutal war of extermination on the Eastern Front, such narratives have often had the effect of reducing the Holocaust to a geopolitical event and making it out to be more a crime against the Soviet Union than a crime against humanity. With his film The Kiev Trial, Sergei Loznitsa explores the origins of the Soviet narrative surrounding World War II and the Holocaust. Using previously unseen footage from a war crimes trial held in Kiev in January 1946, the film presents a series of defendants and witnesses describing massacres they witnessed across Ukraine followed by the Soviet prosecution’s response. Although the film concludes with the execution of the Nazi war criminals, it leaves the viewer with the sense that justice has not been served but appropriated.
The presentation of the defense and the witnesses highlights a simple fact about genocide: it is a crime perpetrated by a state against individual human beings. The Nazis who take the stand all look and behave in a similar way. Dressed in plain military tunics and sporting identical buzzcuts, they answer questions factually and without expressing feeling. They downplay their individual role in atrocities and, when asked why they participated, stick to the same defense as their comrades in Nuremburg: their government gave them orders they had to follow. As time elapses the film cuts between defendants more and more quickly, and the scale of the horrors grows at such a pace the viewer can hardly keep track. We hear stories of atrocities from all over Ukraine: Lviv, Raska, Melitopol, Artemevsk (now Bakhmut), and Stalino (now Donetsk). The sheer amount and breadth of the violence reminds us that the Holocaust was an act of state violence committed on an industrial scale. When the witnesses testify, they tell their stories in a similar manner to the defendants, avoiding any sort of feeling or passion when describing the atrocities that they witnessed. In this case, their lack of emotion points to a certain impossibility of describing the Holocaust in anything other than purely factual terms. For example, at one point an elderly professor recalls watching an elderly Jewish woman about to be murdered. He says that “her whole body expressed such wild terror, such depths of despair, that I couldn’t imagine anything more expressive” and that her expression “cannot be put into words, it cannot be described…her torment and suffering were unimaginable.” The witness testimonies highlight how, despite its massive scale and impersonality, genocide is ultimately a crime against individuals and produces suffering of an intensely personal nature.
Unimaginably horrifying as it all is, the film’s presentation of the defense and witnesses does not stray very far from other postwar accounts of Nazi atrocities. Only after their testimonies conclude, when Deputy Chief Military Prosecutor Alexander Cheptsov announces the sentencing of the defendants, does Loznitsa bring a subtle but profound reversal to the viewer’s attention. In this moment, after insisting that we “swear to do our utmost to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again,” Cheptsov starts to describe how “through the efforts of our great people (narod), we will re-establish industry, transport, and agriculture. We will raise our culture, science, and art to great heights.” He adds, “We will further strengthen the might of our state.” A distinct shift has occurred: after listening to over an hour of testimony about defenseless individuals being killed at the hand of the Nazi state, the prosecutor now speaks as if the primary victim of the Holocaust is the Soviet state. Even when Cheptsov speaks of those Ukrainian Holocaust victims, he declares, “We bow our heads over the dust of our compatriots (sootechestvenikov).” Evidently, the most notable feature of those massacred was their Soviet citizenship. He further goes on to declare, “Those who brought (prichinili) great disasters upon our nation are sitting in the dock.” The Nazis we saw before are no longer simply guilty of these atrocities, but the cause of them as well. The viewer has just watched 80 minutes of testimony highlighting the way in which the Holocaust was the crime of a state against defenseless individuals, but now Cheptsov, on behalf of the Soviet government, is framing the Holocaust as a crime against the state committed by a band of individuals.
Before the defendants are executed, we hear their last words. Many, even while accepting responsibility for their crimes, emphasize the fact that they were just following orders. “I ask you to take into consideration, one says, “that I occupied the lowest rung in the intelligence service, and if I had disobeyed orders I could have been executed. And perhaps others, in my place, would have done this task better than me.” Regardless of their intentions behind such statements, the defendants’ words remind the viewer of a detail which Cheptsov conveniently omits: the crimes in which these men participated extended far beyond them as individuals. After all, part of the reason they’re sitting in the dock in Kyiv is because they’re not important enough for Nuremburg. While their personal insignificance certainly does not excuse their crimes, it highlights once more that the Holocaust was not an act of individual malice, but a collective and coordinated effort. This sense of impersonality lingers as the film moves to its final scene: the defendants’ execution. Having just been reminded of their relative insignificance in the broader machinery of genocide, the hanging in the center of Kyiv feels less like the ultimate vanquishing of fascism and more like a mere demonstration of the state’s power against a handful of individuals, albeit ones who deserve their fate.
Although the footage in The Kiev Trial draws exclusively from the 1946 Soviet archives, it nonetheless directly addresses the present day. Released only six months after the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War, Loznitsa’s film offers an origin story for the Russian Federation’s manipulation of the narrative surrounding the Great Patriotic War. Instead of being a crime against humanity organized by a state, the trial paints the Holocaust as a crime against a state perpetrated by a group of individuals. It concludes that the only proper way to stop this crime from happening again is for the victimized Soviet state to strengthen itself and destroy those individuals who seek to harm it. Decades of Soviet and Russian official discourse have naturalized this narrative, and today it forms the bedrock for much of the Russian Federation’s contemporary rhetoric about genocide in the Donbas and the mission to denazify Ukraine. Once again, the story goes, the state is under attack and must defend itself. With such an understanding of history, it is hardly a surprise that the Kremlin fails to care about the irony of razing cities like Bakhmut and Donetsk in the name of liberation. After all, the victims are only individuals.
Jacob Richey
University of Pittsburgh
The Kiev Trial, Ukraine/Netherlands, 2022
Black and White, 106 minutes
Writer and director: Sergei Loznitsa
Sound design: Vladimir Golovnitski
Editing: Sergei Loznitsa, Tomasz Wolski, Danielius Kokanauskis
Archive research: Victor Belyakov
Producers: Sergei Loznitsa and Maria Choustova
Production: Atoms & Void
Sergei Loznitsa: The Kiev Trial (2022) reviewed by Jacob Richey © 2023 |