Those Who Pay the Price of War

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 118
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

Although Germany performed the Holocaust, as we all know, iconic sites like Auschwitz and Sobibor are actually in Poland. Most victims of Hitler’s terror didn’t speak German. Most history students broadly know this, but seldom think about it. American historian Timothy Snyder made a connection that most Western scholars couldn’t have investigated before 1991: Germany conducted its purges on territory already softened by Stalin’s Great Terror.

Timothy Snyder specializes in Twentieth Century European history, focusing on the why strongman states like Germany and the Soviet Union turned into totalitarian dystopias. Commencing his career during the Soviet collapse, he had access to primary sources which prior historians never dreamed of. But he discovered something jarring: the worst Soviet and National Socialist excesses happened not at home, but in satellite states like Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine.

Because both the Great Terror and most of the Holocaust took place in the bumper states between Russia and Germany, a thorough history wasn’t possible for decades. Both the physical artifacts and the necessary documents resided in Warsaw Pact nations. Western historians had only limited access, while Soviet-bloc historians were censored from a through history. Therefore an unvarnished history languished, waiting for someone to tell it thoroughly.

Stalin believed a combination of state-sponsored propaganda and force could collectivize peasant farming in a matter of weeks. Therefore he generated “othering language,” creating the social class of “kulaks,” enemies of Soviet economics whose supposed resource hoarding made them social criminals. This served greater Soviet aims of attempting to abolish national identities, remaking everyone into transnational Soviet citizens.

Whatever the ideological motivations, the consequence was famine. In the early 1930s, rural Ukrainian and Belorussian civilians died in Biblical numbers, even as Stalinist functionaries stole their grain and resold it on export markets. Starvation happened amid perfectly robust harvests, because famine isn’t a product of shortage, but usually of policy. Stalinists were simply okay if the “lumpenproletariat” were so hungry, they were reduced to grave-robbing and cannibalism.

Timothy Snyder

Although Westerners have long known about Stalin’s “Great Terror” in general terms, lack of press freedom kept outsiders from discovering the details at the time, and censorship concealed the worst from history for decades. Stalin claimed victory over his hated kulaks after approximately two years and rescinded his cruelest policies. Indeed, he did succeed at his deepest goals: shattering farmers’ ties to land and community, and driving national minorities into industrialized cities.

In Snyder’s painfully detailed telling, the Great Terror provided the blueprints Hitler used to perpetrate the Holocaust. Snyder carefully states that the two aren’t interchangeable events in history. Stalin inflicted his Terror upon his own citizens during peacetime, for instance, while Hitler inflicted the Holocaust upon conquered nations during war. Also, Stalin at least nominally served an ideological goal, while Hitler ruled according to his strongman whimsy.

Despite the differences, in Snyder’s telling, the similarities are glaring. The punitive conditions Stalin created in his gulags, Hitler copied in his labor camps. But Hitler exceeded Stalin, because he wasn’t circumscribed by Marxist doctrine. Where Stalin simply didn’t care if “superfluous workers” simply died, Hitler skipped the middleman of chance, and started killing. And the peoples he killed were mostly Polish, Lithuanian, and citizens of occupied Soviet territories.

Snyder takes an approach he admits is academically risky and impolitic. The accepted Holocaust narrative of the first half-century after World War II, he claims, needs revision. Our accepted narrative was written by internees at National Socialist labor camps like Auschwitz, and the prisoners held there, Snyder writes, had a disproportionate likelihood to survive. The reality, which Snyder describes in heartrending detail, is considerably worse and more gruesome.

This isn’t casual reading. Besides his historically dense and painful subject, Snyder’s style requires a strong constitution. He writes in long chapters that, despite their physical heft, have no discernable flab; his storytelling is dense, and provides few clear places to pause and ruminate. We must simply keep moving, much like the terror victims his story describes. He also mostly eschews interpretation until his conclusion, preferring specific details over synoptic morality.

Despite this difficulty, Snyder’s writing is eye-opening and emotionally moving. He rejects the standard Holocaust historiography, which is frequently as abstracted as a medieval morality play. Instead, he places the Holocaust in a historical context of strongman leaders who considere themselves scientists, and therefore unbound by conventional morality. He presents Stalin and Hitler as allies turned rivals, and history as a movement of forces that divulge their lessons only slowly, painfully, and at great human cost.

Also by Timothy Snyder:
A Short Handbook for Confronting Dictators