Bloodlands

"Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin offers the best account of the most important and terrible years of the last century, when Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler jointly consigned the territories and people between their two empires to the meat-grinder. Western readers will find the book thought-provoking; some may feel uneasily that this is a part of history, and an angle on it, that is less familiar than it ought to be. But in Russia, Bloodlands counts as heresy. The Ukrainians, Poles, Belarussians and others – Jews and Gentiles alike – murdered in their millions are all but forgotten. But their ghosts are not laid."

"In Bloodlands , Timothy Snyder has painted an impressive and veracious historical canvas of murderous ideologies and mass killing in Eastern Europe between the Ukrainian famine in 1932-33 and the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign after World War II. The perpetrators are chiefly the Soviets and the Nazis. The victims, in addition to the Jews, are Ukrainians, Poles, Belarusians, Balts and Russians. Snyder links historically the Nazi depredations with the Soviet without sacrificing the differences between them, and makes clear that the peoples who lived in that ill-starred neighborhood had to deal with repeated occupations, repressions and mass killings on the part of their totalitarian neighbours to the west and east. Snyder, in this book, is not interested in the question of genocide per se. But he is very systematic about presenting the numbers killed, usually choosing the most conservative estimates. This is an effective way – not unlike his avoidance of the question of what and what is not genocide – of keeping himself and his readers focused on the narrative of the bloodletting itself, the actions and motivations of the perpetrators and the strategies of resistance and horrible suffering of the victims. There is considerable disagreement about how many were killed as a result of Stalin’s policies and actions. This depends a great deal on what one counts as “mass killing”. Do we include, for example, the Ukrainian famine – the Holodomor – which took the lives of some three to five million Ukrainian peasants? Or the deaths by disease, hunger and exposure in the special settlements, which took the lives of millions more? Do we believe the recently available, and by now thoroughly analysed, NKVD [Soviet secret police] figures for the numbers killed and who died? There are some historians, myself included, who think that these figures do not represent the real numbers of those killed or who died as a consequence of Stalin’s policies in the Gulag and other internment facilities. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In Stalin’s Genocides , I used the fairly standard figure of up to 15 to 20 million dead as a result of Stalin’s policies from 1928 to 1953. Others use higher figures; Snyder estimates fewer. In the end, we need to go beyond the NKVD data to understand better the murderous character of the Stalinist regime. For that we need better access to the secret police archives and a deeper understanding of the processes of arrest, internment, interrogation, torture, exile, resettlement and forced labour – each of which had murderous dimensions, sometimes reported, sometimes not."

"This book is about not just World War II but it is also about the Stalinist repression of the areas known as the borderlands, which Snyder has termed the ‘bloodlands.’ Snyder is looking at the deliberate mass murder of civilians in a particular zone of Europe between about 1930, at the start of the second Ukraine famine, and 1945. The zone is the territory that lies between central Poland and, roughly, the Russian border, covering eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic republics. It is a remarkable work, not just of scholarship and research but, above all, of a fresh angle on the way that the inter-reaction between Nazism and Stalinism actually caused such appalling levels of hatred and murder in this particular area. For example, the great famine in the Ukraine in the early 1930s was blamed on the Jews by the communists. They created rumours to indicate that it was the Jews who had been responsible for the famine when it had been the communist authorities themselves. And this fuelled a sort of latent anti-Semitism within the Ukraine. So, of course, when the Germans arrived, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, who actually served the Germans both as volunteers in the army but also as concentration camp guards, gave the extra impetus to the terrible massacres that took place. Yes, and even from before. I think that Goebbels was a diabolical genius. He saw that hatred was not enough and you had to combine hatred with fear if you were going to get the maximum killing potential out of your followers. Snyder, in this extraordinary book, shows how some 14 million people were killed in this particular region, which basically runs from Eastern Germany all the way though to Eastern Belarus and the Ukraine as well as the Baltic States, Poland and Hungary into the Balkans. These were the areas where most of the Jews lived who had suffered in the Holocaust but also where the Nazis positioned their extermination camps. The borderlands were the most blood-soaked regions of World War II. In a way the book has not a very admirable genesis. I became more and more conscious that I had concentrated on certain areas of World War II and I always felt a bit of a fraud being billed as the great expert because I knew perfectly well that there were certain areas of which I knew nothing! And I also realised how important it was to bring the whole thing together. For example, I start with the Battle of Khalkhyn Gol on the Manchurian Mongolian border in 1939. This was a battle between the Soviets and Japan and it was one of the most influential battles in the whole of World War II. You have all of these knock-on effects between the Pacific War and the European War and that was what prompted me to write the book."