Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

New York: Basic Books, 2010

Some Comments

—not a review. There are many such, though mostly unread by me. Numerous of them are by competent students of the period, which I am not one; and they are overwhelmingly favorable. The primary goal of my remarks is to get you to read the book.

   It is hardly a cheerful subject: the approximately fourteen million people killed by Stalin and Hitler between the early 1930s—when five million people were starved to death as a consequence of Stalin’s push to collectivize agriculture, mostly in the Soviet Ukraine—to 1945, when Hitler’s defeat put an end to the Final Solution that murdered nearly six million Jews. Nevertheless, I could hardly put the book down or, rather, the Kindle on which I was reading it. In my brief post of December 19, “Concerning ‘Pure Evil,’” I called Bloodlands brilliant, which it is.  But what immediately grips one’s continuous attention is the virtually unending array of statistics-backed information that is revealed within a brilliant framework.    

   Although I had been at least superficially acquainted with most of the events Professor Snyder recounts, the specificity with which he does so and the context that he unfailingly provides made virtually all the parts and aspects of the narrative new information for me. Some of you who read these remarks are likely to know far more than I about this unprecedented nadir in the world’s history. But it is unlikely that you will be acquainted with more than a fraction of the very many components that add up to the history of those 14,000,000 of Stalin’s and Hitler’s murder victims. The sheer scholarship that brought that information from a multiplicity of sources in more than half a dozen languages—on to the pages of a book written in jargon-free English—is astonishing.

   And I say the book is brilliant because of the complex context within which those numbers appear. There are the events themselves, the location and methods of the murders—deprivation of food, assassination with rifles and pistols, asphyxiation with poison gas—and a characterization of the perpetrators and of their leaders, from Heinrich Himmler down to some of the SS heads of Einsatzgruppen. There is much information about the motives and goals of Stalin and Hitler and, most interestingly, on how they influenced each other and interacted. Remember that this period began with enmity, but not war, between Germany and the Soviet Union, went on to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between the Nazi and the Marxist-Leninist states, to be followed by a precipitous and extensive German invasion of the Soviet Union that then turned into a rout of the Germans by the Soviets, ending with the final defeat of the Germans and the end of the Second World War.

   Throughout, the author keeps the victims of the murders in sharp focus. Who they were—Kulaks, prisoners of war, Jews of Warsaw or Minsk, and, alas, many additional categories. Because attention is paid to those many other groupings of murder victims, some have claimed that Bloodlands takes away from the special character of the Holocaust. To my knowledge, however, Snyder does full justice—an odd phrase in this context—to the Shoah, nor does he undermine the view of its uniqueness by giving an account of over eight million others that were murdered during the years of the dictatorships of Stalin and Hitler.

   And while most the fourteen million of victims written about in Bloodlands are of course inevitably faceless, anonymous, the author nevertheless succeeds—efficiently, I am inclined to say—to give different classes those victims names and faces. Without cluttering a scholarly text with anecdotes, he introduces a name and an incident here, a comment in a recovered diary there that give flesh and blood, so to speak, to entire categories of the victim of the Bloodlands.

   Professor Snyder’s book is a major achievement and adds not only much of our knowledge of these major events of the twentieth century—wie es eigentlich gewesen ist—but to our understanding of the most evil events in all of human history. Read the book.

   P.S. If you have neither the time or the stomach to go from beginning to end of Bloodlands, read its “Conclusion,” subtitled “Humanity,” followed by “Numbers and Terms” and a very brief “Abstract.”