Russian Writer Tolstoy, Ukrainian Filmmaker Dovzhenko and Professor Nikolaev: How the Soviet Intelligentsia Shaped the Documentation of Nazi Crimes in Liberated Kharkiv

Abstract

Using the biographical method, the article follows three members of the Soviet intelligentsia whose paths crossed in liberated Kharkiv: Lev Nikolaev, a professor of medicine and resident of the city who continued to keep a diary under Nazi occupation; Alexei Tolstoy, the famous writer who visited the liberated city as a member of the Soviet Extraordinary Investigation Commission on Nazi crimes, receiving, among other things, a copy of Nikolaev's occupation diary, and the filmmaker Oleksandr Dovzhenko, whose teams filmed Professor Nikolaev for his documentary on liberated Ukraine. These three figures represent distinct socio-cultural backgrounds and political views, despite their shared public allegiance to Stalinism. As the article will show, their contributions to Soviet documentation of Nazi crimes were intertwined with their differing visions of both the Nazi occupation and the future of Soviet Ukraine, and, at the same time, overshadowed by their own positioning within Stalinist terror.