Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
by Timothy Snyder
Basic Books, 524 pages, $29.95
Stalin’s Genocides
by Norman M. Naimark
Princeton University Press, 163 pp., $26.95
(nybooks.com) Once, in an attempt to explain the history of his country to
outsiders, the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz described the impact of war,
occupation, and the Holocaust on ordinary morality. Mass violence, he
explained, could shatter a man’s sense of natural justice. In normal
times,
had he stumbled upon a corpse on the street, he
would have called the police. A crowd would have gathered, and much talk
and comment would have ensued. Now he knows he must avoid the dark body
lying in the gutter, and refrain from asking unnecessary questions….
Murder
became ordinary during wartime, wrote Miłosz, and was even regarded as
legitimate if it was carried out on behalf of the resistance. In the
name of patriotism, young boys from law-abiding, middle-class families
became hardened criminals, thugs for whom “the killing of a man presents
no great moral problem.” Theft became ordinary too, as did falsehood
and fabrication. People learned to sleep through sounds that would once
have roused the whole neighborhood: the rattle of machine-gun fire, the
cries of men in agony, the cursing of the policeman dragging the
neighbors away.
For all of these reasons, Miłosz explained, “the
man of the East cannot take Americans [or other Westerners] seriously.”
Because they hadn’t undergone such experiences, they couldn’t seem to
fathom what they meant, and couldn’t seem to imagine how they had
happened either. “Their resultant lack of imagination,” he concluded,
“is appalling.”1
But
Miłosz’s bitter analysis did not go far enough. Almost sixty years
after the poet wrote those words, it is no longer enough to say that we
Westerners lack imagination. Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian whose past
work has ranged from Habsburg Vienna to Stalinist Kiev, takes the point
one step further. In Bloodlands, a brave and original history of
mass killing in the twentieth century, he argues that we still lack any
real knowledge of what happened in the eastern half of Europe in the
twentieth century. And he is right: if we are American, we think “the
war” was something that started with Pearl Harbor in 1941 and ended with
the atomic bomb in 1945. If we are British, we remember the Blitz of
1940 (and indeed are commemorating it energetically this year) and the
liberation of Belsen. If we are French, we remember Vichy and the
Resistance. If we are Dutch we think of Anne Frank. Even if we are
German we know only a part of the story.
Snyder’s ambition is to persuade the West—and the
rest of the world—to see the war in a broader perspective. He does so by
disputing popular assumptions about victims, death tolls, and killing
methods—of which more in a moment—but above all about dates and
geography. The title of this book, Bloodlands, is not a metaphor.
Snyder’s “bloodlands,” which others have called “borderlands,” run from
Poznan in the West to Smolensk in the East, encompassing modern Poland,
the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, and the edge of western Russia
(see map on page 10). This is the region that experienced not one but
two—and sometimes three—wartime occupations. This is also the region
that suffered the most casualties and endured the worst physical
destruction.
More to the point, this is the region that
experienced the worst of both Stalin’s and Hitler’s ideological madness.
During the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, the lethal armies and vicious
secret policemen of two totalitarian states marched back and forth
across these territories, each time bringing about profound ethnic and
political changes. In this period, the city of Lwów was occupied twice
by the Red Army and once by the Wehrmacht. After the war ended it was
called L’viv, not Lwów, it was no longer in eastern Poland but in
western Ukraine, and its Polish and Jewish pre-war population had been
murdered or deported and replaced by ethnic Ukrainians from the
surrounding countryside. In this same period, the Ukrainian city of
Odessa was occupied first by the Romanian army and then by the Wehrmacht
before being reoccupied by the Soviet Union. Each time power changed
hands there were battles and sieges, and each time an army retreated
from the city it blew up the harbor or massacred Jews. Similar stories
can be told about almost any place in the region.
This region was
also the site of most of the politically motivated killing in
Europe—killing that began not in 1939 with the invasion of Poland, but
in 1933, with the famine in Ukraine. Between 1933 and 1945, fourteen
million people died there, not in combat but because someone made a
deliberate decision to murder them. These deaths took place in the
bloodlands, and not accidentally so: “Hitler and Stalin rose to power in
Berlin and Moscow,” writes Snyder, “but their visions of transformation
concerned above all the lands between.”
Beginning in the 1930s,
Stalin conducted his first utopian agricultural experiment in Ukraine,
where he collectivized the land and conducted a “war” for grain with the
kulaks, the “wealthy” peasants (whose wealth sometimes consisted of a
single cow). His campaign rapidly evolved into a war against Ukrainian
peasant culture itself, culminating in a mass famine in 1933. In that
same year, Hitler came to power and began dreaming of creating Lebensraum,
living space, for German colonists in Poland and Ukraine, a project
that could only be realized by eliminating the people who lived there.2 In 1941, the Nazis also devised the Hunger Plan, a scheme to feed
German soldiers and civilians by starving Polish and Soviet citizens.
Once again, the Nazis decided, the produce of Ukraine’s collective farms
would be confiscated and redistributed: “Socialism in one country would
be supplanted by socialism for the German race.”
Not
accidentally, the fourteen million victims of these ethnic and
political schemes were mostly not Russians or Germans, but the peoples
who inhabited the lands in between. Stalin and Hitler shared a contempt
for the very notions of Polish, Ukrainian, and Baltic independence, and
jointly strove to eliminate the elites of those countries. Following
their invasion of western Poland in 1939, the Germans arrested and
murdered Polish professors, priests, intellectuals, and politicians.
Following their invasion of eastern Poland in 1939, the Soviet secret
police arrested and murdered Polish professors, priests, intellectuals,
and politicians. A few months later, Stalin ordered the murder of some
20,000 Polish officers at Katyn and in other forests nearby as well.
Stalin
and Hitler also shared a hatred for the Jews who had long flourished in
this region, and who were far more numerous there than in Germany or
anywhere else in Western Europe. Snyder points out that Jews were fewer
than one percent of the German population when Hitler came to power in
1933, and many did manage to flee. Hitler’s vision of a “Jew-free”
Europe could thus only be realized when the Wehrmacht invaded the
bloodlands, which is where most of the Jews of Europe actually lived. Of
the 5.4 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, four million were from
the bloodlands. The vast majority of the rest—including the 165,000
German Jews who did not escape—were taken to the bloodlands to be
murdered. After the war, Stalin became paranoid about those Soviet Jews
who remained, in part because they wanted to perpetuate the memory of
the Holocaust. At the end of his life he purged and arrested many
thousands of them, though he died too soon to carry out another mass
murder.
Above all, this was the region where Nazism and Soviet
communism clashed. Although they had signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact
in 1939, agreeing to divide the bloodlands between them, Stalin and
Hitler also came to hate each other. This hatred proved fatal to both
German and Soviet soldiers who had the bad luck to become prisoners of
war. Both dictators treated captured enemies with deadly utilitarianism.
For the Germans, Soviet POWs were expendable: they consumed calories
needed by others and, unlike Western POWs, were considered to be
subhuman. And so they were deliberately starved to death in hideous
“camps” in Poland, Russia, and Belarus that were not camps but death
zones. Penned behind barbed wire, often in open fields without food,
medicine, shelter, or bedding, they died in extraordinary numbers and
with great rapidity. On any given day in the autumn of 1941, as many
Soviet POWs died as did British and American POWs during the entire war.
In total more than three million perished, mostly within a period of a
few months.
In essence the Soviet attitude toward German POWs was
no different. When, following the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army
suddenly found itself with 90,000 prisoners, it also put them in open
fields without any food or shelter. Over the next few months, at least
half a million German and Axis soldiers would die in Soviet captivity.
But as the Red Army began to win the war, it tried harder to keep
captives alive, the better to deploy them as forced laborers. According
to Soviet statistics, 2.3 million German soldiers and about a million of
their allies (from Romania, Italy, Hungary, and Austria, but also
France and Holland) eventually wound up in the labor camps of the Gulag,
along with some 600,000 Japanese whose fate has been almost forgotten
in their native land.3
Some
were released after the war and others were released in the 1950s.
There wasn’t necessarily any political logic to these decisions. At one
point in 1947, at the height of the postwar famine, the NKVD
unexpectedly released several hundred thousand war prisoners. There was
no political explanation: the Soviet leadership simply hadn’t enough
food to keep them all alive. And in the postwar world there were
pressures—most of all from the USSR’s new East German client state—to
keep them alive. The Nazis had operated without such constraints.
Though
some of the anecdotes and statistics may be surprising to those who
don’t know this part of the world, scholars will find nothing in Bloodlands
that is startlingly new. Historians of the region certainly know that
three million Soviet soldiers starved to death in Nazi camps, that most
of the Holocaust took place in the East, and that Hitler’s plans for
Ukraine were no different from Stalin’s. Snyder’s original contribution
is to treat all of these episodes—the Ukrainian famine, the Holocaust,
Stalin’s mass executions, the planned starvation of Soviet POWs, postwar
ethnic cleansing—as different facets of the same phenomenon. Instead of
studying Nazi atrocities or Soviet atrocities separately, as many
others have done, he looks at them together. Yet Snyder does not exactly
compare the two systems either. His intention, rather, is to show that
the two systems committed the same kinds of crimes at the same times and
in the same places, that they aided and abetted one another, and above
all that their interaction with one another led to more mass killing
than either might have carried out alone.
He also wants to show that this interaction had consequences for the
inhabitants of the region. From a great distance in time and space, we
in the West have the luxury of discussing the two systems in isolation,
comparing and contrasting, judging and analyzing, engaging in
theoretical arguments about which was worse. But people who lived under
both of them, in Poland or in Ukraine, experienced them as part of a
single historical moment. Snyder explains:
The Nazi and
Soviet regimes were sometimes allies, as in the joint occupation of
Poland [from 1939–1941]. They sometimes held compatible goals as foes:
as when Stalin chose not to aid the rebels in Warsaw in 1944 [during the
Warsaw uprising], thereby allowing the Germans to kill people who would
later have resisted communist rule…. Often the Germans and the Soviets
goaded each other into escalations that cost more lives than the
policies of either state by itself would have.
In some
cases, the atrocities carried out by one power eased the way for the
other. When the Nazis marched into western Belarus, Ukraine, and the
Baltic states in 1941, they entered a region from which the Soviet
secret police had deported hundreds of thousands of people in the
previous few months, and shot thousands of prisoners in the previous few
days. The conquering Germans were thus welcomed by some as “liberators”
who might save the population from a genuinely murderous regime. They
were also able to mobilize popular anger at these recent atrocities, and
in some places to direct some of that anger at local Jews who had, in
the public imagination—and sometimes in reality—collaborated with the
Soviet Union. It is no accident that the acceleration of the Holocaust
occurred at precisely this moment.
To look at the
history of mid-twentieth-century Europe in this way also has
consequences for Westerners. Among other things, Snyder asks his readers
to think again about the most famous films and photographs taken at
Belsen and Buchenwald by the British and American soldiers who liberated
those camps. These pictures, which show starving, emaciated people,
walking skeletons in striped uniforms, stacks of corpses piled up like
wood, have become the most enduring images of the Holocaust. Yet the
people in these photographs were mostly not Jews: they were forced
laborers who had been kept alive because the German war machine needed
them to produce weapons and uniforms. Only when the German state began
to collapse in early 1945 did they begin to starve to death in large
numbers.
The vast majority of Hitler’s victims, Jewish and
otherwise, never saw a concentration camp. Although about a million
people died because they were sent to do forced labor in German
concentration camps, some ten million died in killing fields in Poland,
Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia—that means they were taken to the woods,
sometimes with the assistance of their neighbors, and shot—as well as in
German starvation zones and German gas chambers. These gas chambers
were not “camps,” Snyder argues, though they were sometimes adjacent to
camps, as at Auschwitz:
Under German rule, the
concentration camps and the death factories operated under different
principles. A sentence to the concentration camp Belsen was one thing, a
transport to the death factory Bełz·ec something else. The first meant
hunger and labor, but also the likelihood of survival; the second meant
immediate and certain death by asphyxiation. This, ironically, is why
people remember Belsen and forget Bełz·ec.
He makes a
similar point about Stalin’s victims, arguing that although a million
died in the Soviet Gulag between 1933 and 1945, an additional six
million died from politically induced Soviet famines and in Soviet
killing fields. I happen to think Snyder’s numbers are a little low—the
figure for Gulag deaths is certainly higher than a million—but the
proportions are probably correct. In the period between 1930 and 1953,
the number of people who died in labor camps—from hunger, overwork, and
cold, while living in wooden barracks behind barbed wire—is far lower
than the number who died violently from machine-gun fire combined with
the number who starved to death because their village was deprived of
food.
The image we have of the prisoner in wooden shoes, dragging
himself to work every morning, losing his humanity day by day—the image
also created in the brilliant writings of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and
Alexander Solzhenitsyn—is in this sense somewhat misleading. In fact,
prisoners who could work had at least a chance of staying alive.
Prisoners who were too weak to work, or for whom work could not be
organized because of war and chaos, were far more likely to die. The 5.4
million Jews murdered in the Holocaust mostly died instantly, in gas
chambers or mobile vans or in silent forests. We have no photographs of
them, or of their corpses.
The chronological and geographical arguments presented in Bloodlands
also complicate the debate over the proper use of the word “genocide.”
As not everybody now remembers, this word (from the Greek genos, tribe, and the French -cide)
was coined in 1943 by a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent, Raphael
Lemkin, who had long been trying to draw the attention of the
international community to what he at first called “the crime of
barbarity.” In 1933, inspired by news of the Armenian massacre, he had
proposed that the League of Nations treat mass murder committed “out of
hatred towards a racial, religious or social collectivity” as an
international crime. After he fled Nazi-occupied Poland in 1940, Lemkin
intensified his efforts. He persuaded the Nuremburg prosecutors to use
the word “genocide” during the trials, though not in the verdict. He
also got the new United Nations to draft a Convention on Genocide.
Finally, after much debate, the General Assembly passed this convention
in 1948.
As the Stanford historian Norman Naimark explains in Stalin’s Genocides,
the UN’s definition of genocide was deliberately narrow: “Acts
committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnical, racial or religious group.” This was because Soviet diplomats
had demanded the exclusion of any reference to social, economic, and
political groups. Had they left these categories in, prosecution of the
USSR for the murder of aristocrats (a social group), kulaks (an economic
group), or Trotskyites (a political group) would have been possible.
Although
Lemkin himself continued to advocate a broader definition of the term,
the idea that the word “genocide” can refer only to the mass murder of
an ethnic group has stuck. In fact, until recently the term was used
almost exclusively to refer to the Holocaust, the one “genocide” that is
recognized as such by almost everybody: the international community,
the former Allies, even the former perpetrators.
Perhaps because
of that unusually universal recognition, the word has more recently
acquired almost magical qualities. Nations nowadays campaign for their
historical tragedies to be recognized as “genocide,” and the term has
become a political weapon both between and within countries. The
disagreement between Armenians and Turks over whether the massacre of
Armenians after World War I was “genocide” has been the subject of a
resolution introduced in the US Congress. The leaders of the Orange
Revolution in Ukraine campaigned to have the Ukrainian famine recognized
as “genocide” in international courts (and in January 2010, a court in
Kiev did convict Stalin and other high officials of “genocide” against
the Ukrainian nation). But the campaign was deliberately dropped when
their more pro-Russian (or post-Soviet) opponents came to power. They
have since deleted a link to the genocide campaign from the presidential
website.
As the story of Lemkin’s genocide campaign well
illustrates, this discussion of the proper use of the word has also been
dogged by politics from the beginning. The reluctance of intellectuals
on the left to condemn communism; the fact that Stalin was allied with
Roosevelt and Churchill; the existence of German historians who tried to
downplay the significance of the Holocaust by comparing it to Soviet
crimes; all of that meant that, until recently, it was politically
incorrect in the West to admit that we defeated one genocidal dictator
with the help of another. Only now, with the publication of so much
material from Soviet and Central European archives, has the extent of
the Soviet Union’s mass murders become better known in the West. In
recent years, some in the former Soviet sphere of influence—most notably
in the Baltic states and Ukraine—have begun to use the word “genocide”
in legal documents to describe the Soviet Union’s mass killings too.
Naimark’s
short book is a polemical contribution to this debate. Though he
acknowledges the dubious political history of the UN convention, he goes
on to argue that even under the current definition, Stalin’s attack on
the kulaks and on the Ukrainian peasants should count as genocide. So
should Stalin’s targeted campaigns against particular ethnic groups. At
different times the Soviet secret police hunted down, arrested, and
murdered ethnic Poles, Germans, and Koreans who happened to be living in
the USSR, and of course they murdered 20,000 Polish officers within a
few weeks. A number of small nations, notably the Chechens, were also
arrested and deported en masse during the war: men, women, children, and
grandparents were put on trains, and sent to live in Central Asia,
where they were meant to die and eventually disappear as a nation. A
similar fate met the Crimean Tatars.
Like Snyder’s, Naimark’s work
has also ranged widely, from his groundbreaking book on the Soviet
occupation of East Germany to studies of ethnic cleansing. As a result
his argument is authoritative, clear, and hard to dispute. Yet if we
take the perspective offered in Bloodlands seriously, we also
have to ask whether the whole genocide debate itself—and in particular
the long-standing argument over whether Stalin’s murders “qualify”—is
not a red herring. If Stalin’s and Hitler’s mass murders were different
but not separate, and if neither would have happened in quite the same
way without the other, then how can we talk about whether one is
genocide and the other is not?
To the people who actually
experienced both tyrannies, such definitions hardly mattered. Did the
Polish merchant care whether he died because he was a Jew or because he
was a capitalist? Did the starving Ukrainian child care whether she had
been deprived of food in order to create a Communist paradise or in
order to provide calories for the soldiers of the German Reich? Perhaps
we need a new word, one that is broader than the current definition of
genocide and means, simply, “mass murder carried out for political
reasons.” Or perhaps we should simply agree that the word “genocide”
includes within its definition the notions of deliberate starvation as
well as gas chambers and concentration camps, that it includes the mass
murder of social groups as well as ethnic groups and be done with it.
Finally, the arguments of Bloodlands
also complicate the modern notion of memory—memory, that is, as opposed
to history. It is true, for example, that the modern German state
“remembers” the Holocaust—in official documents, in public debates, in
monuments, in school textbooks—and is often rightly lauded for doing so.
But how comprehensive is this memory? How many Germans “remember” the
deaths of three million Soviet POWs? How many know or care that the
secret treaty signed between Hitler and Stalin not only condemned the
inhabitants of western Poland to deportation, hunger, and often death in
slave labor camps, but also condemned the inhabitants of eastern Poland
to deportation, hunger, and often death in Soviet exile? The Katyn
massacre really is, in this sense, partially Germany’s responsibility:
without Germany’s collusion with the Soviet Union, it would not have
happened. Yet modern Germany’s very real sense of guilt about the
Holocaust does not often extend to Soviet soldiers or even to Poles.
If
we remember the twentieth century for what it actually was, and not for
what we imagine it to have been, the misuse of history for national
political purposes also becomes more difficult. The modern Russian state
often talks about the “twenty million Soviet dead” during World War II
as a way of emphasizing its victimhood and martyrdom. But even if we
accept that suspiciously large round number, it is still important to
acknowledge that the majority of those were not Russians, did not live
in modern Russia, and did not necessarily die because of German
aggression. It is also important to acknowledge that Soviet citizens
were just as likely to die during the war years because of decisions
made by Stalin, or because of the interaction between Stalin and Hitler,
as they were from the commands of Hitler alone.
For different
reasons, the American popular memory of World War II is also due for
some revision. In the past, we have sometimes described this as the
“good war,” at least when contrasted to the morally ambiguous wars that
followed. At some level this is understandable: we did fight for human
rights in Germany and Japan, we did leave democratic German and Japanese
regimes in our wake, and we should be proud of having done so. But it
is also true that while we were fighting for democracy and human rights
in the lands of Western Europe, we ignored and then forgot what happened
further east.
As a result, we liberated one half of Europe at
the cost of enslaving the other half for fifty years. We really did win
the war against one genocidal dictator with the help of another. There
was a happy end for us, but not for everybody. This does not make us
bad—there were limitations, reasons, legitimate explanations for what
happened. But it does make us less exceptional. And it does make World
War II less exceptional, more morally ambiguous, and thus more similar
to the wars that followed.
If nothing else, a reassessment of
what we know about Europe in the years between 1933 and 1953 could
finally cure us of that “lack of imagination” that so appalled Czesław
Miłosz almost sixty years ago. When considered in isolation, Auschwitz
can be easily compartmentalized, characterized as belonging to a
specific place and time, or explained away as the result of Germany’s
unique history or particular culture. But if Auschwitz was not the only
mass atrocity, if mass murder was simultaneously taking place across a
multinational landscape and with the support of many different kinds of
people, then it is not so easy to compartmentalize or explain away. The
more we learn about the twentieth century, the harder it will be to draw
easy lessons or make simple judgments about the people who lived
through it—and the easier it will be to empathize with and understand
them.
Letters
'The Worst of the Madness' December 23, 2010
1 Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind (1953; Penguin, 2001), pp. 26–29.
2 Typical is the story of a house I own in northwest
Poland: intending to "Germanize" the region, the Nazis evicted the
Polish owners in 1939 and installed a German family from Lithuania in
their place. These Germans were evicted again in 1944, and the house
became state property.
3 These figures come from Richard Overy, Russia's War (Penguin, 1997), p. 297, and from Voennoplennye v SSSR, 1939–1956: dokumenty i materialy, edited by M.M. Zagorul'ko (Moscow: Logos, 2000), pp. 331–333.
