Knowledge of the holocaust in the USSR has been limited by the inaccessibility of Soviet archives and the refusal of most Soviet writers to acknowledge that Jews were singled out by the Nazis for 'special handling.' Moreover, the collaboration of thousands of Soviet citizens with the Germans in murdering Jews was embarrassing to a state where 'friendship of the peoples' was supposed to reign. Bitter Legacy examines how over a million Jewish civilians were murdered by the Nazis and their local collaborators in the Soviet Union, as well as the contemporary political and social consequences of this mass murder. It combines analytic studies with documentary sources to explore some of the controversial and sensitive dimensions of the holocaust in the USSR.