paradoxically, the most important source of help for the starving came from Soviet bureaucrats and Soviet bureaucracies. The historian Timothy Snyder has described how state institutions in Nazi-occupied Europe, when they were still functioning, could rescue Jews from the Holocaust, and a parallel story can be told about Stalin’s Soviet Union.39 While the Bolsheviks had systematically destroyed independent institutions, including churches, charities and private companies, state institutions remained—schools, hospitals, orphanages—and some of them were in a position to help. Some of them,
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