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Review Author: Truman O. Anderson

The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 72, No.3. (Sep., 2000), pp. 857-859.

Odessa, 1941-1944: A Case Study of Soviet Territory under Foreign Rule. By Alexander Dallin. Foreword by Larry L. Watts.

Center for Romanian Studies, 1998. pp. 296. $48.00.

The historical literature dealing with the German-Soviet war of 1941-45 is enormous and is becoming larger every year. For evidence of this, one need only glance at a recent critical bibliography, nearly four hundred pages in length, produced by Rolf Dieter Muller and Gerd Ueberschar (Hitler's War in the East, 1941-1945 [Providence, R.I., 1997]). Access to Soviet and German documents held in former Soviet archives has reinvigorated the field, which prior to 1989 relied chiefly on German sources held in American archives or in those of the Federal Republic. Provided that Russia's archival network remains open to foreign scholars, we can look forward to many years of fruitful research on a broad range of topics. For the time being, however, there are some significant gaps in the literature, despite its great size. This is perhaps especially true where the role of Germany's East European satellite states is concerned. The reprinting of Alexander Dallin's pioneering study of Odessa under Romanian rule is therefore most welcome.

Odessa, 1941-1944: A Case Study of Soviet Territory under Foreign Rule was first published in 1957 by the RAND Corporation. Like many other early works on the German-Soviet war, its impetus was provided by the U.S. defense establishment (in this case the U.S. Air Force), which was keen to glean as much practical information as possible from the German experience of war with Stalin's empire. Ultimately, the American national security apparatus hoped to understand how the Soviet regime and its people had behaved under the stresses of war and thereby predict how they might react in a future conflict. Despite this ulterior motive, some of the cold war era studies had considerable historical value. The best of them, including Dallin's own German Rule in Russia (London, 1957) and John Armstrong, ed., Soviet Partisans in World War 1 (Madison, Wis., 1964), are still useful in many respects, despite certain critical shortcomings brought to light by more recent works, which have benefited from better source material. This is perhaps particularly true of Odessa, 1941-1945, for, as Larry Watts explains in his introduction to the 1998 edition, no equivalent studies have emerged to replace it. Romanian rule in "Transnistria" remains a major void.

It is certainly not by default alone that this book should attract an audience, however. Dallin's stated aims are "to provide an historical reconstruction of wartime Transnistria" and to "analyze Transnistrian experience and see what lessons can be drawn from it." He does an admirable job of achieving both. Working with an odd assortment of captured German and Romanian documents, period newspapers produced throughout central and Eastern Europe, Soviet and Romanian secondary sources, emigre memoirs, and eleven interviews with emigres, he produces a clear and thorough tour of the horizon. His sources certainly impose a number of limitations. There is little information in the book on rural Transnistria, and most of his materials deal with the life of the "new elite" in occupied Odessa, but Dallin's characteristic common sense and circumspection prevent him from overstating his case in areas where he simply lacks information. He covers a wide range of topics, including the withdrawal of Soviet authority in 1941, the place of Transnistria in Romanian diplomacy and domestic politics, life in the countryside, culture, daily life, politics, the Soviet underground, and the collapse of the Romanian occupation. As always, his writing is clear and often entertaining.

Dallin's basic argument about Transnistria is a comparative one: the Romanian approach to occupation is contrasted explicitly with that of Germany at a variety of levels. Although he is careful to illustrate the wanton brutality of Romanian occupation forces during 1941, Romanian complicity in the extermination of Transnistria's large Jewish population, and the tremendous corruption of Romanian officials, overall he characterizes Romanian rule as far more humane and rational than that imposed by Germany in areas of either political or military jurisdiction. His emigre evidence very strongly suggests that the inhabitants were well aware of how much better off they were than their countrymen living in Dnipropetrovsk or Kiev. Despite the vagueness of Ion Antonescu's long-term objectives in the region, the Romanian government of Transnistria took less and invested more than the Germans, and it allowed the non-Jewish inhabitants much greater freedom, especially in commerce. The results were marked, even according to German observers. While the rest of occupied Ukraine languished, Odessa thrived by comparison. Perhaps the best evidence of this is the fact that the flight to rural areas noted throughout the German-occupied Soviet Union did not occur in Odessa. Instead, people came into the city from the countryside to take advantage of commercial opportunities. Although Romanian occupation authorities retained the collective farm system, their requisitions of kolkhoz production were, according to Dallin, lower than those of the Soviet regime. This gave the rural population some reason to work and something to exchange with the city dwellers of Odessa. Enterprising residents (chiefly technicians and professionals not evacuated by the Soviets) established a "service" economy adequate to the population's basic needs. Dallin is careful to point out, however, that this tenuous economic revival (which he likens to a second NEP) was only possible thanks to the population losses Odessa sustained through Soviet evacuations and the German-Romanian extermination of resident Jews. Overall, Dallin persuasively depicts the inhabitants as simply making the best of their situation, eschewing both active collaboration and pro-Soviet resistance.

The weakest aspect of this book is, as Watts notes, its exposition of Romanian policy toward Transnistria. It is here that Dallin's sources are most inadequate, but as Dallin suggests in the foreword to the new edition, this is perhaps the best reason for having the study reprinted at this time, that is, in order to draw attention to this persistent gap in the historiography. Important records are now available to scholars in the Bucharest State Archives and the Archives of the (Hungarian) Ministry for National Defense that could potentially shed much light on the Antonescu regime's objectives. Until these records are looked at seriously, we will benefit from the reissue of Odessa, 1941-1945.

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