Timothy Snyder: Bloodlands. Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. NY: Basic Books, 2010. 524 pp.
Innumerable books have dealt with starvation in the Ukraine, Nazi death camps, the Warsaw ghetto, Stalin’s purges and so on. What makes Snyder’s approach ground-breaking is his relentless broadening of the focus beyond “incidental” civilian deaths, whether resulting from flight, evacuation, forced labor, or indeed any source other than deliberate, premeditated murder for ideological reasons: “the Holocaust, the other German mass killing policies, and the Stalinist mass murders” have become “three different histories, even though in historical fact they shared a place and time.” (pg. 377)
In other words, what is new here is not so much the archival work, for Snyder uncovers relatively little information that has been neglected or hidden. Rather it is the point of view, the prism through which these largely familiar facts are viewed. What he foregrounds is this: The physical elimination of whole classes (in Stalin’s case) and ethnicities (in Hitler’s) was not some unfortunate byproduct of their misguided policies; it was rather the intended goal of those policies.
In Hitler’s case, looked at from a military point of view his obsession with eliminating the Jews was counterproductive – at times it actually interfered with the achievement of the Wehrmacht’s battlefield objectives. Looked at from an ideological viewpoint, though, things become much clearer. Among all of Hitler’s war aims, after the late summer of 1941 the so-called “Final Solution” was the only one he could achieve.
Snyder is fully cognizant of a real danger when dealing with large numbers: The victims inevitably tend to become statistics rather than individuals. Unremitting, industrial-scale murder threatens to lose its power to shock after a few hundred pages or so – this is simply part of human psychology. To counter this, he occasionally mentions the fate of this or that person, and invites us to imagine it being multiplied over and over again. Snyder also attempts to counteract death-count fatigue, as other reviewers have pointed out, by refusing where possible to round off the numbers. While these stratagems may not be wholly satisfactory, it is unclear, given his topic, what other options he had.
Along the way, he makes many interesting points. For instance, he reminds us of something that experts already know but the general public tends to forget: There is an important distinction to be made between concentration and extermination camps. Auschwitz has become a misleading symbol insofar as its actual purpose was two-fold: a place where victims – chiefly Jews – faced one of two alternative fates: either they were killed immediately or they could be selected to be worked to death. This second option did not exist at the more typical but less well-known sites such as Treblinka and Majdanek, which were among the half-dozen pure death camps. Snyder also claims that after the war’s end, Stalin was as bloodthirsty as ever but the mass killing within the USSR stopped, allegedly because Soviet society had changed; given Stalin’s total control over that society, this argument perhaps could have been treated in more depth.
One of the most interesting subsections of the book goes somewhat beyond its main theme to cover Stalin’s initial support for UN recognition of Israel in May 1948, and the reasons why by the end of that same year his policy had already “veered toward anti-Semitism.” (pg. 348) Here we get away from talking about thousands and millions of mostly anonymous victims and instead follow personal tragedies involving the great Shakespearean actor Solomon Mikhoels and Molotov’s wife Polina Zhemchuzhina. At least for a few pages, identifiable individuals become the norm instead of the exception. When Snyder continues with Gomulka and the Polish unrest in 1968, this part feels like it belongs to a different book entirely.
Postscript: Those particularly interested in the mass starvation in the Ukraine may also want to consult Lev Kopelev’s excellent memoir from 1980, The Education of a True Believer (reviewed elsewhere on this site; not listed in Snyder’s otherwise exhaustive bibliography). As an idealistic youth, Kopelev helped try to convince the peasants that collectivization would be good for them, before becoming disgusted by the cruelty and starvation he witnessed.
Update: In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Feb. 7, 2016), Snyder said: “Most Americans are exceptionalists, we think we live outside of history…. I got an early hint of that when I was touring the United States for my book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. This was in 2011 and I realized that Americans had really forgotten about the crimes of Stalin – which is strange because we were educated during the Cold War about Stalinist terror. I thought that Americans would be surprised because I was saying that the number of Soviet citizens killed (although still horrifyingly large) was much smaller than we had been taught. Instead I realized that Americans had simply forgotten that there was Stalinism and terror. That struck me: What else could we forget?…If a terror attack happens in the United States, that is simply the Trump administration failing to keep its most basic promise. It is not a reason to suspend the rights of Americans or declare have a state of emergency. History teaches us the tricks of authoritarians. We can’t allow ourselves to fall for them.”
© Hamilton Beck
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