Category "Collaborationism" as a Multicomponent Narrative in Wartime

Abstract

Collaborationism as a narrative during the war was and remains a multifaceted and controversial phenomenon. On the one hand, it is guilt and betrayal, and on the other hand, it is a forced measure and condition for the survival of the population in the occupied territories. In the scientific literature at different times, based on the historical experience of collaborationism in the occupied states, distinguish its types and analyze, through the prism of political expediency, various manifestations of cooperation with the occupiers.
Scholars’ interest in collaborationism was primarily related to World War II, when it became widespread in Nazi-occupied Western, Northern, and Eastern Europe. After the Second World War, in European and Soviet historiography, the category of "collaborationism" acquired a negative connotation and a greater degree of political burden and emotional coloration, which affected its content. Scientific reflections on the term "collaborationism" were mainly related to the following criteria: reference to the subjectivity of this phenomenon: individual and collective; the nature of cooperation; national, religious, ideological affiliation; economic, socio-historical conditions. A special feature of collaborationism in each state was also the fact that the ideological component was present in absolutely all occupied systems, the only difference was the nature of dominance.
The liberation of the occupied territories posed the following problem, how to establish the substantive characteristics of collaborationism in the regulatory system with the appropriate regime. European and Soviet jurisprudence formulated their national systems of punishment for collaborative activities, guided by the logic of the principles of the regime environment.