The New York Review of Books
The Worst of the Madness November 11, 2010
Anne Applebaum.
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
Once, in an attempt to explain the history of his country to
outsiders, the Polish poet Czes³aw Mi³osz 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 Mi³osz, 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, Mi³osz 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 Mi³osz’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 re-
treated 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 Be³z*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 Be³z*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 ovens 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 in the immediate postwar period: 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 Czes³aw Mi³osz 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.
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From: A. Papazian
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