Book Review: U.S. historian rethinks Soviet and Nazi horrors
Jan. 14, 2011, 1:30 a.m. | About Kyiv — by James Marson
None
As Hitler’s eyes turned to the east in the late 1930s, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain questioned the sense of intervening in a potential war “in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.”
Decades after the far-away lands east of Berlin and west of Moscow were soaked in blood by Soviet and Nazi terror, most people continue to know little about what happened there.
World War II’s victors spoke. For the West, the war was the story of the Allies’ heroic defeat of Nazi Germany, as well as the enemy’s persecution of victims, primarily the Jews. For the Soviet Union, the narrative described the victory of the socialist system, empowered by the rapid industrialization of the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder
Bodley Head (U.K.) / Basic Books (U.S.), £25 / $29.95. 524 pages.
But who would speak for the period’s losers – not on the battlefield, but the 14 million civilians who were shot, starved and gassed in modern-day Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, western Russia and the eastern Baltic coast, while Hitler and Stalin were in power?
Timothy Snyder’s powerful Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin takes up the challenge by seeking to force a dramatic shift in the narrative of Europe’s bloody mid-20th century.
First, when it happened. When Hitler set out to eliminate Europe’s Jews at the start of World War II in pursuit of his racial utopia, he wasn’t being original. Stalin had already wiped out at least three million Ukrainian peasants in the 1930s as part of a forced famine aimed at destroying Ukrainian nationalism, which he perceived as a threat to his Soviet utopia.
Second, where and how it happened. Most Soviet citizens weren’t killed in the gulags of Siberia, but starved in the Ukrainian countryside and German prisoner-of-war camps located in the bloodlands. By the time the gas chambers at Auschwitz came on line in 1943, most of Europe’s Jewish victims had already been killed further east. Some of them had been gassed in death camps; most had been sprayed by bullets and dumped into pits.
After the end of the war, most of the bloodlands fell behind the Iron Curtain, and the history remained buried. Snyder is meticulous in digging it up, then placing it all within a single historical frame.
For Snyder, the Soviet and Nazi killings were two parts of one whole. The bloodlands – including, significantly, Ukraine’s black earth – were central to the realization of Hitler’s and Stalin’s competing utopian visions.
Stalin wanted to use the collectivization of agriculture, particularly in Ukraine, to transform the Soviet Union into an industrial power. “For Stalin, profits from grain exports in 1933 were more important than the lives of millions of peasants. He decided that peasants would die, and he decided which peasants would die in the largest numbers: the inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine,” Snyder writes.
Hitler wanted to clear the land to be worked by German farmers to feed his hungry Reich: “Like Stalin, Hitler tended to see Ukraine itself as a geopolitical asset, and its people as instruments who tilled the soil, tools that could be exchanged with others or discarded.”
By comparing the mass slaughter carried out by the Nazi and Soviet regimes, Snyder is not looking to establish answers to the banal question of who was worse, or what similarities existed between the systems and their ideologies (although these do emerge). Instead, he is reminding us that while we can view them in isolation and choose whether to compare, hundreds of millions of Europeans who experienced their rule could not.
The focus is shifted away from German and Soviet decision-making (without ignoring them) and onto the ground where reality was forced to conform to ideology. A comparison of the two regimes should not just seek to explain the crimes, Snyder insists, but “embrace the humanity of all concerned by them.”
We see the dilemmas and horrors facing those who inhabited the bloodlands – how they survived, collaborated, resisted, loved, hoped, watched, lived and died. He tears the historical narrative from the hands of Stalin and Hitler, and places it in the hands of the victims.
This is all underscored by Snyder’s powerful prose: He is not only a skilled historian, who brings together hundreds of sources in several languages, but also a sharp and moving writer.
The book is packed with statistics, but they do not overwhelm, as the reader is continually reminded of the individual stories behind the figures.
“It is perhaps easier to think of 780,863 different people at Treblinka: where the three at the end might be Tamara and Itta Willenberg, whose clothes clung together after they were gassed, and Ruth Dorfmann, who was able to cry with the man who cut her hair before she entered the gas chamber,” he writes. If the Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers, “it is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people.”
Snyder is doing just that by giving them a voice, bringing people in “far-away” countries such as Poland, Belarus and Ukraine much closer and challenging not only how we remember what happened, but also how we view Europe today.
Kyiv Post staff writer James Marson can be reached at marson@kyivpost.com.
World War II’s victors spoke. For the West, the war was the story of the Allies’ heroic defeat of Nazi Germany, as well as the enemy’s persecution of victims, primarily the Jews. For the Soviet Union, the narrative described the victory of the socialist system, empowered by the rapid industrialization of the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder
Bodley Head (U.K.) / Basic Books (U.S.), £25 / $29.95. 524 pages.
But who would speak for the period’s losers – not on the battlefield, but the 14 million civilians who were shot, starved and gassed in modern-day Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, western Russia and the eastern Baltic coast, while Hitler and Stalin were in power?
Timothy Snyder’s powerful Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin takes up the challenge by seeking to force a dramatic shift in the narrative of Europe’s bloody mid-20th century.
First, when it happened. When Hitler set out to eliminate Europe’s Jews at the start of World War II in pursuit of his racial utopia, he wasn’t being original. Stalin had already wiped out at least three million Ukrainian peasants in the 1930s as part of a forced famine aimed at destroying Ukrainian nationalism, which he perceived as a threat to his Soviet utopia.
Second, where and how it happened. Most Soviet citizens weren’t killed in the gulags of Siberia, but starved in the Ukrainian countryside and German prisoner-of-war camps located in the bloodlands. By the time the gas chambers at Auschwitz came on line in 1943, most of Europe’s Jewish victims had already been killed further east. Some of them had been gassed in death camps; most had been sprayed by bullets and dumped into pits.
After the end of the war, most of the bloodlands fell behind the Iron Curtain, and the history remained buried. Snyder is meticulous in digging it up, then placing it all within a single historical frame.
For Snyder, the Soviet and Nazi killings were two parts of one whole. The bloodlands – including, significantly, Ukraine’s black earth – were central to the realization of Hitler’s and Stalin’s competing utopian visions.
Stalin wanted to use the collectivization of agriculture, particularly in Ukraine, to transform the Soviet Union into an industrial power. “For Stalin, profits from grain exports in 1933 were more important than the lives of millions of peasants. He decided that peasants would die, and he decided which peasants would die in the largest numbers: the inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine,” Snyder writes.
Hitler wanted to clear the land to be worked by German farmers to feed his hungry Reich: “Like Stalin, Hitler tended to see Ukraine itself as a geopolitical asset, and its people as instruments who tilled the soil, tools that could be exchanged with others or discarded.”
By comparing the mass slaughter carried out by the Nazi and Soviet regimes, Snyder is not looking to establish answers to the banal question of who was worse, or what similarities existed between the systems and their ideologies (although these do emerge). Instead, he is reminding us that while we can view them in isolation and choose whether to compare, hundreds of millions of Europeans who experienced their rule could not.
The focus is shifted away from German and Soviet decision-making (without ignoring them) and onto the ground where reality was forced to conform to ideology. A comparison of the two regimes should not just seek to explain the crimes, Snyder insists, but “embrace the humanity of all concerned by them.”
We see the dilemmas and horrors facing those who inhabited the bloodlands – how they survived, collaborated, resisted, loved, hoped, watched, lived and died. He tears the historical narrative from the hands of Stalin and Hitler, and places it in the hands of the victims.
This is all underscored by Snyder’s powerful prose: He is not only a skilled historian, who brings together hundreds of sources in several languages, but also a sharp and moving writer.
The book is packed with statistics, but they do not overwhelm, as the reader is continually reminded of the individual stories behind the figures.
“It is perhaps easier to think of 780,863 different people at Treblinka: where the three at the end might be Tamara and Itta Willenberg, whose clothes clung together after they were gassed, and Ruth Dorfmann, who was able to cry with the man who cut her hair before she entered the gas chamber,” he writes. If the Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers, “it is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people.”
Snyder is doing just that by giving them a voice, bringing people in “far-away” countries such as Poland, Belarus and Ukraine much closer and challenging not only how we remember what happened, but also how we view Europe today.
Kyiv Post staff writer James Marson can be reached at marson@kyivpost.com.
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Христос Раждається! - Славіте Його!
Christ is Born! - Glorify Him!
Wow,
is it translated into Ukrainian?
Into Russian?
What more to say...
Христос Раждається! - Славіте Його!
Christ is Born! - Glorify Him!
I strongly recommend Mr. Snyder to read the works of David Irving, Paul Carell y recently the research done by Victor Suvorov, where we learn among other things that Stalin was going to invade Polish land occupied by Germany and Germany, but Hitler launched the first strike surprising everybody; the slaughter of Ukranians, Russians etc.. by Stalin and about the cheap myth of the gas chambers, which so far nobody has explain where the magic number of 6 million gassed jews was obtained, because it was a Russian before the end of the war who came with number; Therefore we have a wizard or magician to know in advance such number.
Saying that Snyder book is the perfect book for the garbage can!
Hitler must have been aware of Stalin's brutal treatment of Ukrainian kulaks and understood that Germany was next in line to be starved into submission. History is always written by the victors. To fully understand history, the vanquished must be heard from, as well.
http://www.kyivpost.com/news/ukraine/detail/88330/ The Financial Times:
Bloodlands
This is how the Jewish Holocaust lost credibility--one storyteller piling on stories more hyperbolic than the last, until it became obvious to anyone but a true believer that the stories had entered the realm of fantasy. The above story of eating a child still alive is bullshit. Any writer who repeats it is a Stephen King and not a historian.
I have just finished reading BLOODLANDS Europe between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder. The following is a very brief review and critique of this very unique and valuable work.
Mr. Snyder, an American historian of Polish extraction has done a great service by documenting the enormous crime visited upon the land and peoples of Central Europe from both the West and the East. Snyder presents three operations of mass killing, the Holodomor, the extermination of Red Army prisoners of war, and the Holocaust in the context of the nearly continuous killing on the lands of Poland, Belorussian SSR, Ukrainian SSR, and the Baltics, - lands that he calls the Bloodlands. This approach tends to avoid the epistemological errors endemic to the study of each genocide on its own, in a vacuum, taken out of geographical and historical context.
Having praised this book, I must also note that it has some weaknesses. Understandably, Mr. Snyder's work is somewhat polonocentric. I would have hoped for such a text to include a chapter or two by a historian with better access to Soviet documentation and Ukrainian material.
BLOODLANDS is short on both documentary and anecdotal material with regard to the Holodomor genocide of Ukrainians. Snyder readily falls into the semantic trap of talking of "kulaks and Ukrainians" with these terms placed in parallel. (This is akin to referring to "shysters and Jews" when talking about victims of the Holocaust.)
He seems to have totally overlooked the ongoing genocide of Ukrainians by the Red Army's practice of throwing recently drafted men, unarmed untrained and without uniform into the front lines. (This practice is best illustrated by Marshall Zhukov's statement "Why, dear friends, must we worry. Why the heck give arms and uniforms to these Khokhly (Ukrainians)? They are all traitors! The more of them we drown in the Dnipro, the fewer we'll have to send to Siberia after the war.")
Snyder has also dismissed the war of the UPA against both the Germans and the Soviets, and has considered only their anti-Polish actions.
In all, this is a text that is an important addition to anyone's library of European history. Although valuable, it is still far from an all-encompassing reference work.
Mr. Timothy Snyder assures me that he is NOT of Polish extraction, although he knows Polish, Ukrainian and Russian quite well. The following, taken from the New York Observer may shed some light on how such errors can come about.
http://www.observer.com/2010/culture/body-count-timothy-snyder-strips-holocaust-theory
Body Count: Timothy Snyder Strips the Holocaust of Theory
By Christopher Glazek
November 2, 2010 | 7:42 p.m
How does one become a celebrity historian? Let's consult the trajectory followed by Timothy Snyder. First, learn Russian, German, French, Polish, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Czech and Yiddish. Get tenure at Yale. (If you can manage, it helps to befriend Tony Judt, become his protégé and co-write his autobiography.) Then sign a contract with a trade press to write a 400-page revisionist history of the Holocaust. Make sure the book is about much more than the Holocaust, and call it Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Steer clear of grand theory; let numbers and geography do the talking. Be careful not to exceed the age of 40. Complete these steps, and you're no longer an anonymous academic star—you're a public intellectual.
Between 1930 and 1945, 14 million civilians were murdered in a swath of territory covering Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltics and a slice of western Russia. These are Mr. Snyder's "Bloodlands"—a nightmare realm squeezed between two empires and subject to recurring invasions from each. Its most famous victims were the 5.4 million Jews who perished in Hitler's Holocaust, but there were others, too: more than 3 million Ukrainains, several hundred thousand Poles and 3 million Soviet prisoners of war. [...]
Христос Раждається! - Славіте Його!
Christ is Born! - Glorify Him!
Was the Polish ethnic cleansing genocide Akcja Wisla mentioned?
Although it may be another story pilled on,
that is how veneers are made which outlasts solids.
Христос Раждається! - Славіте Його!
Christ is Born! - Glorify Him!
Respectfully, may I be bold and inquire,
any relation to Otaman Symon Petliura?