Friday, June 22, 2012

Just Finished: Bloodlands--Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

Bloodlands:  Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder, is, in the author's words, "a history of political mass murder."  In a region that includes eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States, and western Russia, which the author calls the bloodlands, the Nazi and the Soviet regimes between them murdered fourteen million people.  This number does not include deaths in battle;  these people were murdered as a result of either Soviet or Nazi government killing policies between 1933 and 1945.

The bulk of the book is taken up with outlining this history.  It's worth outlining, as separate from the battle deaths of World War II, because over the course of twelve years, "...mass violence of a sort never before seen in history was visited upon this region."  Snyder further contends,

Today there is widespread agreement that the mass killing of the twentieth century is of the greatest moral significance for the tweny-first.  How striking, then, that there is no history of the bloodlands. 

Stalin's plan to turn the Soviet Union into a modern industrial state in the early 1930s led to the decision to wipe out the peasants of the Ukraine and nearby regions.  When agriculture was collectivized and peasants deported to labor camps (the Gulag system), food production dropped, and grain quotas were not met.  The farming class as a whole was blamed, and all farm produce was seized, causing the death by starvation of over five million people.

In 1937 and 1938, in the Great Terror, another nearly 700,000 peasants and ethnic minorities who had survived the collectivization disaster were were blamed for it and executed by shooting. 

In 1939 the Germans and the Soviets simultaneously invaded Poland.  Between them they murdered about 200,000 Polish civilians, mainly the educated classes, in an effort to prevent organized resistance.  They also deported one million Polish citizens to the Gulag and to German labor camps, and put Polish Jews into ghettos in Poland.  Tens of thousands more died in these camps and ghettos.

In 1941 the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, intending to starve or work to death its peasant class and colonize the land with German farmers.  They were not successful in this aim, but they did starve to death several million prisoners of war and civilians.

Hitler's desire to remove all Jews from Europe evolved from plans to resettle them in Siberia or Africa, to deportations eastward, to mass executions.  Beginning with mass shootings, then using mobile gas vans, and finally dedicated gassing facilities, the Germans killed between five and six million Jews.  They also killed between 100,000 and 300,000 gypsies by the same methods.

These are numbers that are really too big to comprehend, and Snyder knows this:  "The sheer numbers of the victims can blunt our sense of the individuality of each one."  A strength of the book is his extensive use of victims' diaries and survivors' memoirs in an effort to convey lives and personalities that were lost--the real suffering behind the numbers. 

In the final chapter, "Humanity," Snyder examines theories of cause and effect.  He compares the Nazi and Stalinist systems, and how they separately and together destroyed so many lives.  He discusses Hannah Arendt's theory of modern alienation resulting in totalitarian systems, but doesn't accept it as a complete explanation for what happened in the bloodlands.  He reaches no ultimate conclusion about causes, but frames his history of the bloodlands as a necessary and overdue first step in understanding.  Before we can understand why, we must accurately understand what happened:

But before we draw such theoretical conclusions, about modernity or anything else, we must understand what actually happened, in the Holocaust and in the bloodlands generally.  For the time being, Europe's epoch of mass killing is overtheorized and misunderstood.

Mixing It Up

8 comments:

  1. Wow, this sounds like an intense book to say the least. Horrifying and necessary. Definitely going on my list.

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    1. Oh yes. After reading it, I realized how much about that time & place I didn't understand. I already knew a lot about the Holocaust, but didn't realize the extent of Stalin's atrocities, and how the two systems (Nazi & Soviet) affected each other's killing policies. And too,it was emotionally hard to get through.

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  2. Wonderful review and I must but this book on my "to read list". I am facinatied with history and I hope I will see more history reviews on your site! Reading Ravensbruck in french is a challenge but getting easier by the day. I write daily comments on www.goodreads.com. Can I find you there as a "friend"?

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    1. I read a fair amount of history, but the novels often tempt me away from it. History books need to be pretty engagingly written to keep my interest, and this one was. I'm open to recommendations definitely--I'd particularly like to read about the French-Algerian conflict if you can recommend anything in English. I've never been on Goodreads, but I will go check it out today or tomorrow!

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  3. The book I just read was Algeria, France's Undeclared War by Martin Evans. It's hardcover published 2012, so very up to date. Just read about Hitler's en Stalin's secret pact about the invasion/division of Poland in the book Ravensbruck!

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  4. Thank you, I am off to find this on Amazon.

    And I also learned a fair amount of Polish history that I had no idea of. Poland has for centuries been the object of a tug-of-war between Germany (or Prussia) and Russia. For long periods it hasn't existed on maps at all, being absorbed by one or the other. The Poles didn't know who to look at as conqueror and who as liberator at the time of the double invasion. And at the end of the war, their suffering wasn't over with the defeat of the Germans, as they were now under the control of Stalin.

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  5. I bought this book last month acting on sheer impulse and haven't regretted the decision since.i'm fairly new here so when I saw you listed this as one of your favourite reads this year,I had a rather mortifying "me-too!" moment.while reading this masterpiece I was shocked at my own ignorance since I knew next to nothing about the Ukraine famine,the mechanics of the double invasion of Poland,the role certain important spies played in saving lives,the fact that forests were used as sites for pre-meditated mass murder and the ilk.this is a book I will have to read at least thrice to completely wrap my head around the scale of the atrocities and the inhuman "policies" but the line at the end where the author says that we need to consider the individuals instead of looking at them as numbers like Stalin and hitler to even have a chance at redeeming our humanity is something I will carry with me forever.

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    1. Yes, I also thought I knew a lot about the area, because I have read extensively about the Holocaust. But I learned so much more from reading Bloodlands--unbelievably, the Holocaust in all its horror wasn't even the majority of the killings.

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