I read Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin because it had been recommended as a useful background to Russia's relationship with the Ukraine (what with Putin annexing Crimea and all) and it turned out to be a fascinating read for that reason and more: I can't believe that with a lifetime of WWII movies and books and documentaries surrounding me, I knew nothing at all about this time and place; the area caught between Hitler and Stalin from 1935-1947; what author Timothy Snyder justifiably labels The Bloodlands.
The American and British soldiers who liberated the dying inmates from camps in Germany believed that they had discovered the horrors of Nazism. The images their photographers and cameramen captured of the corpses and the living skeletons at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald seemed to convey the worst crimes of Hitler. As the Jews and Poles of Warsaw knew, and as Vasily Grossman and the Red Army soldiers knew, this was far from the truth. The worst was in the ruins of Warsaw, or the fields of Treblinka, or the marshes of Belarus, or the pits of Babi Yar.It's cliché to say that history is written by the victors, but it explains why the WWII images that I have in my mind are of the beaches of Normandy, and the bombing of London, and the liberations of Paris and Amsterdam, and the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima; these were the scenes that "my side" participated in. I had never considered that those horrifying images of the Holocaust survivors were the lucky ones; the ones who weren't shot, naked and terrified, over open pits in the forest or the ones who were immediately gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz. In all, Snyder recounts 14 million non-combatants who were killed in The Bloodlands: an area made up of modern-day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and the Baltic states.
Stalin famously said, "One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic". Although I watched for that quote in this book (and didn't see it), a response to it seems to be Snyder's central aim: We need to be made aware of and remember each death that occurred in The Bloodlands; not as some horrifying large, round number like 14 million people but personally, as in 14 million x 1 individuals. This is a book about 14 million tragedies. Here's a lazy copy/paste from wikipedia of that number's breakdown:
• 3.3 million victims of the Soviet Famines- Snyder uses the description "the Soviet Famines" in which the victims were "mostly Ukrainians"; he does not use the term Holodomor. According to Snyder, Stalin wanted to exterminate by famine those Ukrainians and ethnic Poles who resisted Collectivization in the Soviet Union.
• 300,000 victims in the national terror in the Soviet Union from 1937-1938- Snyder uses the term "national terror", which targeted "mostly Poles and Ukrainians", killed because of their ethnic origins (figure does not include an additional 400,000 Great Purge deaths outside of The Bloodlands). According to Snyder, Stalin considered ethnic Poles in the western USSR as potential agents of the Second Polish Republic; Ukrainian kulaks who survived the famine of 1933 were also considered hostile to the Soviet regime in a future conflict.
• 200,000 Poles were killed between 1939 and 1941 in occupied Poland, with each regime responsible for about half of those deaths. The deaths included civilians and military prisoners of war killed in the Katyn massacre. Most of the victims were the intellectual and political elite of Poland. According to Snyder, both Stalin and Hitler wanted to eliminate the leadership of the Polish nation.
• 4.2 million victims of the German Hunger Plan in the Soviet Union, "largely Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians" including 3.1 million Soviet POWs and 1.0 million civilian deaths in the Siege of Leningrad. Snyder does not include famine deaths outside of the Soviet Union. According to Snyder, Hitler eventually intended to exterminate up to 45 million Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Czechs by planned famine as part of Generalplan Ost.
• 5.4 million Jewish victims in the Holocaust (does not include an additional 300,000 deaths outside of The Bloodlands).
• 700,000 civilians, "mostly Belarusians and Poles" shot by the Germans "in reprisals" during the Occupation of Belarus by Nazi Germany and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.In this book, Snyder is relentless with his documentation: Each individual massacre is witnessed to the last victim:
On 22 and 23 September 1942, Order Police Battalion 310 was dispatched to destroy three villages for ostensible connections to the partisans. At the first village, Borki, the police apprehended the entire population, marched the men, women, and children seven hundred meters, and then handed out shovels so that people could dig their own graves. The policemen shot the Belarusian peasants without a break from 9:00 in the morning until 6:00 in the evening, killing 203 men, 372 women, and 130 children. The Order Police spared 104 people classified as "reliable", although it is hard to imagine how they could have remained so after this spectacle. The battalion reached the next village, Zabloiste, at 2:00 the next morning, and surrounded it at 5:30. They forced all of the inhabitants into the local school, and then shot 284 men, women, and children. At the third village, Borysovka, the battalion reported killing 169 men, women, and children. Four weeks later, the battalion was assigned to liquidate (461) Jews at a work camp.And just when a reader is overwhelmed with the numbers -- risking making the mental leap from tragedy to statistics -- Snyder includes very personal stories that humanise the victims:
Policemen took the old and the young to Umschlagplatz on carts. Jewish policemen took a small girl from her home when her mother was away running an errand. Her last words before deportation to Treblinka were recorded: "I know that you are a good man, sir. Be so kind as to not take me away. My mama left for just a moment. She'll be back in just a moment, and I won't be there, be so kind as to not take me away."There were so many facts that I didn't know before, including but not limited to: That Jews made up less than .5% of the pre-WWII German population (where was their threat to Hitler?) but millions became Germans as the Nazis annexed countries on their march east (2 million in Poland alone); I knew that Poland was invaded by Germany in 1939, but didn't know about Stalin's concurrent invasion of eastern Poland and that their mutual border was set by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Line beforehand; I didn't know that Warsaw was utterly destroyed by the Germans; or that Stalin rearranged Poland's borders after WWII, making the eastern lands a part of the Soviet Union but stretching the western border into German territory as compensation (and, along with Churchill and Roosevelt, approved of the deportation to within the new German borders the millions of Germans who had lived there); by the end of the war, half of the population of Belarus had been killed or removed (why had I never heard of WWII's impact on Belarus before at all?); and the extent of the starvation of the Ukrainian people (the purposefulness of it, the cannibalisation that ensued) as a result of the farm collectivization.
Snyder makes the point that we weren't supposed to know about these facts; that the Nazis and Soviets were killers first and propagandists second:
The Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers, some of which we can only estimate, some of which we can reconstruct with fair precision. It is for us as scholars to seek these numbers and to put them into perspective. It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people. If we cannot do that, then Hitler and Stalin have shaped not only our world, but our humanity.Immediately after WWII, Stalin began a campaign to make the Soviets out to be victims, and despite the fact that the war barely affected Soviet Russia, he made the Russian people out to be the greatest of the Soviet heroes and victims -- and it's interesting to wonder how this view of history has conditioned the Russian people today; how it frames Putin's actions for them. Of course in the west we have shaped our own version of events, which is evident in the fact that the history of The Bloodlands hasn't effectively reached us. Another interesting effect according to Snyder: The wars for Yugoslavia in the 1990's began, in part, because Serbs believed that far larger numbers of their fellows had been killed in the Second World War than was the case. So not knowing or understanding our true history has already had devastating effects.
This was a hard but important book to read and it has definitely filled in a small corner of my massive knowledge gaps.
As Indiana Jones said, "Nazis. I hate those guys." Part of Snyder's conclusion in this book is that neither the Nazis or the Soviets were worse than the other, and to an extent, neither could have existed without the other. And yet, it was the Nazis who left behind the record of their cruelty, here being another quote to remember. A German soldier writes to his wife:
During the first try, my hand trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets used to it. By the tenth try I aimed calmly and shot surely at the many women, children, and infants. I kept in mind that I have two infants at home, whom these hordes would treat just the same, if not ten times worse. The death that we gave them was a beautiful quick death, compared to the hellish torments of thousands and thousands in the jails of the GPU. Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to pieces in flight, before their bodies fell into the pit and into the water.
