Spécificités soviétiques d’une épuration de guerre européenne : la répression policière de l’intimité avec l’ennemi et de la parenté avec le traître
Résumé
The paper examines various forms of extralegal punishment that the Soviet state inflicted upon civilian collaborators or so called during the WW2, and tries to determine whether this retribution resembles the socio-political cleansing that happened in other parts of freed Europe at the end of the war. The dynamics of the first type of sanction make it quite similar to its European counterparts : people being punished out of the courts for developing friendly or intimate relationships with the invader. The second case studied here – relegationof traitors’ families in distant provinces of the Soviet Union -differs markedly from the European context. If both practices originate from the Soviet 1930s or even 1920s, at least one of them clearly follows a common European logic in the symbolics and the will of national purification of the society that it entails. As for the people punished for maintaining private relationships with the enemy, it appears that the security imperative far less matters for the Soviet authorities than the moral and cultural impact on the local communities. Indeed, such a behavior aroused as much indignation in USSR that in other occupied countries and as elsewhere, there was a need to sanction these persons, even only symbolically, in order to restore the norms of the society. But notably, the State did not understand this demand right away, being focused on political deviance more than moral ones. The punishment of the family of one labelled “traitor’was not a novelty whatsoever. But in this precise case the extension of this kind of sanction to the family of collaborators came along with the creation of exceptions to the rule. That way, having a fighter in the family redeemed the presence of a traitor.