Navigating Survival: Economic Exploitation and Everyday Local Practices in Occupied Transnistria (1941–1944)

Project leader: apl. Prof. Dr. Svetlana Suveica
Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (2025–2028)

This research project explores localized survival practices in Transnistria under Romania’s occupation between 1941 and 1944. The territory between the Rivers Dniester and Buh (today Southwestern Ukraine) was awarded to Romania, an Axis partner, yet it was heavily influenced by the presence of Nazi Germany’s troops and military command. Transnistria was a key site of the Holocaust and the only part of Ukraine that endured dual economic exploitation, carried out alongside the mass destruction of Jews. I argue that the inhabitants had more opportunities to survive, navigate constraints, and capitalize on available resources and everyday opportunities in areas with entangled Romanian and Nazi Germany’s economic interests, which has not been explored so far. I investigate social experiences of both Jews and non-Jews in economically driven spaces, characterised by fluidity, continuity, and entanglement of two competing systems of power and violence, which both constrained and enabled local agency. These spaces were rural areas, where agricultural exploitation was rampant; urban areas, where conflicts over Jewish belongings and cultural assets occurred, and areas along the regional and “internal” borders with fluid administrative boundaries. By employing the spatial-temporal perspective alongside a socio-economic lens, I analyse how local inhabitants adapted to and exploited wartime economic changes and navigated daily restrictions and constraints imposed by war and the economic politicization of survival. The investigation of the interplay between the economic dimensions of occupation, space, and human agency in an East European borderland will offer an alternative to the collaboration-resistance approach in historiography and enhance the understanding of the resilience and resourcefulness, displayed by the population in Ukraine during World War Two, a topic with enduring relevance today.