| Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Timothy D. Snyder |
| Language | English |
| Subject(s) | Genocide |
| Publisher | Basic Books |
| Publication date | 28 October 2010 |
| Pages | 544 |
| ISBN | 978-0465002399 |
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is a book written by Timothy D. Snyder, first published by Basic Books on October 28, 2010. The book is about the mass killing of an estimated 14 million non-combatants by the regimes of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany between the years 1933 and 1945 in a region which comprised what is modern-day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and the Baltic states. Snyder finds similarities between the two totalitarian regimes, and many forgotten or misremembered parts of the history, such as the fact that most of the victims of the two regimes died outside their respective concentration camps.[1]
The book has earned many positive reviews and has been called "revisionist history of the best kind".[2] One critic has claimed, incorrectly, that Snyder suggests a moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin; such a suggestion is absent from the book.[3] Snyder himself estimates, contrary to a commonly held view, that the Nazis were responsible for about twice as many noncombatant killings as Stalin's regime.[4]
Contents |
The Eastern European regions were caught between two totalitarian objectives, one being Hitler's vision of Racial supremacy and Lebensraum resulting in Final Solution and other Nazi atrocities, the other Stalin's vision of communist ideology which lead to the deliberate starvation and murder and imprisonment of innocent men, women and children in Gulags and elsewhere.[2][1] Between the two of them, they killed 13–14 million people in Eastern Europe alone, with Nazi Germany being responsible for about two thirds of the total number of deaths.[2][5][6] 5.4m died in a well known event, the Holocaust – but many more died in more obscure circumstances.[5]
The book goes against a simplistic vision of history ("Nazis bad, Soviets good"), or against the view that most deaths the regimes were responsible for occurred during World War II.[2] It also stresses many parts of the history that have been "swept under" by propaganda and realpolitik, such as the Nazi–Soviet alliance of 1939, the Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust, Soviet persecution of the Polish underground (cursed soldiers) or their own prisoners of war after the war.[2][6] Snyder addresses other misconceptions, for example pointing out that many Jews died in mass shootings rather than in concentration camps.[2] As Anne Applebaum comments, "The vast majority of Hitler’s victims, Jewish and otherwise, never saw a concentration camp".[1] Similarly, most of the Soviet victims came from outside the Gulag concentration camp system, which 'only' accounts for a little over a million deaths.[1] More Soviet prisoners died every day in Nazi camps during the Autumn of 1941 than Western Allied POWs in the entire war. Over 3 million Soviet POWs would die in the Nazi camps.[1] The fate of the German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union would be little better; more than half a million died in terrible condition in the Soviet camps.[1]
Snyder focuses on three periods, summarized by Richard Rhodes as: "deliberate mass starvation and shootings in the Soviet Union in the period from 1933 to 1938; mass shootings in occupied Poland more or less equally by Soviet and German killers in 1939 to 1941; deliberate starvation of 3.1 million Soviet prisoners of war and mass shooting and gassing of more than 5 million Jews by the Germans between 1941 and 1945". [7]
The chapter covering the Holodomor (a word Snyder himself avoids) goes into extreme detail, for example recounting one story of an unofficial orphanage in village in the Kharkiv region were the children were so hungry they resorted to cannibalism, with one child eating parts of himself even while he was himself being cannibalised.[5][8] 3.3m died during the Ukrainian starvation of 1933.[2] Hitler starved Poles and (4.2 million) Russians, too (the Hunger Plan).[5][1]
Perhaps the most controversial part of the book revolves around Snyder pointing out the similarities between the two regimes:[2]
| “ | Hitler and Stalin thus shared a certain politics of tyranny: they brought about catastrophes, blamed the enemy of their choice, and then used the death of millions to make the case that their policies were necessary or desirable. Each of them had a transformative Utopia, a group to be blamed when its realisation proved impossible, and then a policy of mass murder that could be proclaimed as a kind of ersatz victory.[2] | ” |
Snyder not only goes to show that the two regimes operated in similar manner, but that they often collaborated and aided one another, at least till the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union (see for example the Gestapo–NKVD Conferences).[1] One of the areas both totalitarian regimes collaborated was on the destruction of the Polish people (see Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles, Holocaust in Poland and Soviet repressions of Polish citizens (1939–1946)) and the Jews; between the two of them, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union killed about 200,000 Polish citizens in the period 1939–1941.[5][1][9]
| “ | 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.[1] | ” |
Snyder also points out that after the Western Allies had allied themselves with Stalin against Hitler, after the war ended they had no will to fight the second totalitarian regime; as American and British soldiers had never entered Eastern Europe, the tragedy of those lands was never well known to the American or British populace (see Western betrayal).[6][1]
Snyder concurs with a number of other sources regarding the number of noncombatants murdered by the Nazis—about 11 million according to Snyder. Snyder also estimates that Stalin's regime killed considerably fewer noncombatants than its Nazi counterpart. He attributes about six million noncombatant deaths to the Soviets, including at least three million Ukrainians.[10]
The book has received favourable reviews in various media outlets such as BBC History[11] the The Seattle Times, [12] and the New York Observer[13] and has been described as "an impeccably researched history of mass killings in the eastern part of mid-20th-century Europe" by Robert Gerwarth in the Irish Times.[14]
Guy Walters writing in the Financial Times said he found the book disturbing, writing "Some may find Snyder’s staking-out of the area of the bloodlands too arbitrary for their tastes, and might accuse him of creating a questionable geographical delineation. Agree with it or not, in a sense it does not matter, because Snyder presents material that is undeniably fresh – what’s more, it comes from sources in languages with which very few western academics are familiar. The success of Bloodlands really lies in its effective presentation of cold, hard scholarship, which is in abundance." [5]
Anne Applebaum writing for The New York Review of Books said "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."[1]
Neal Ascherson writing for The Guardian said, "In this book, he seems to have set himself three labours. The first was to bring together the enormous mass of fresh research – some of it his own – into Soviet and Nazi killing, and produce something like a final and definitive account. (Since the fall of communism, archives have continued to open and witnesses – Polish, Ukrainian, Belarussian especially – have continued to break silence.) But Snyder's second job was to limit his own scope, by subject and by place. He is not writing about the fate of soldiers or bombing victims in the second world war, and neither is he confining himself to the Jewish Holocaust. His subject is the deliberate mass murder of civilians – Jewish and non-Jewish – in a particular zone of Europe in a particular time-frame."[9]
Some historians have criticized the book for its suggestion of a moral equivalence between Soviet mass murders and the Nazi Holocaust. Cambridge professor Richard Evans, who wrote a "blistering review" of the book, commented "It seems to me that he is simply equating Nazi genocide with the mass murders carried out in the Soviet Union under Stalin ...There is nothing wrong with comparing. It’s the equation that I find highly troubling." Dovid Katz, an historian of Lithuanian Jewry, commented that "Snyder flirts with the very wrong moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin ... None of these incidents besides the Holocaust involved the willful massacre of a whole race. There is something very different going on, beyond politics, when people try to murder all the babies of a race."[3] The book has also drawn criticism from rightwing nationalists in Eastern Europe, who complain about Snyder's examination of East European collaboration in the Holocaust.[10]
Bloodlands was named a book of the year for 2010 by The Atlantic[15], The Economist[16], The Financial Times[17], The Jewish Forward[18], The Independent[19] , The New Republic,[20] New Statesman,[21] Reason,[22] The Seattle Times,[23] and The Daily Telegraph.[24]