Bloodlands

"Each of the living bore a name." If there is a theme to this admirable book, that's it. "Each of the living bore a name." That's how Yale history professor Timothy Snyder starts his concluding chapter: "Conclusion: Humanity." Then he names a few: a toddler who imagined he saw wheat in the fields before he died; a Polish Jew who foresaw that he would only be reunited with his beloved wife "under the ground"; an eleven-year-old Russian girl who kept a diary as she starved to death in a besieged Leningrad in 1941; a twelve-year-old Jewish girl, Junita Vishniatskaia, who wrote to her father in Belarus in 1942 and told him about the death pits where Junita and her mother would soon be killed together. " `Farewell forever' was the last line of her last letter to him. `I kiss you, I kiss you.' " I'd never come across professor Snyder's work until I read, for review, his collaborative conversation with Tony Judt, one of my favorite contemporary historians, now, alas, dead, in Thinking the Twentieth Century (due out in February, 2012). I was intrigued by Snyder's comments in that book, by a perspective on twentieth century European history that leaned much more on what had occurred in eastern Europe than the westernized history I'd absorbed in graduate school. Judt obviously admired Snyder's book. I thought, why not?, let's read it. I'm glad I did. Bloodlands isn't easy to read. It talks of horrific deeds, horrible people. But the picture it paints differs from the picture of the Holocaust I learned, both by predating the killing and by moving the largest portion of it eastward. We think we know what happened to the victims in the Second World War but most of our knowledge, Snyder emphasizes, comes from Americans' experience of the western rim of the National Socialist world. There is little awareness of what took place in the true killing grounds of the 1930s and 40s, the zone between Germany and Russia -the Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, etc.- where fourteen million people died as first the Soviets, then the Germans, then the Soviets again, and then their puppet states, swept over the area, killing or displacing people for no other reason than that they belonged to the wrong ethnic group. Snyder is uniquely qualified to write this history. There is first of all the breadth and depth of his research: he has read widely in ten languages: German, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Yiddish, Czech, Slovak, French and English. There is also the exemplary clarity of the narrative: a tangled and complicated history, with many parties, has been presented in linear order. Furthermore, Snyder discusses fully both the ideological underpinnings that drove otherwise sane human beings to perform unspeakable deeds and the muddled actions that resulted as they attempted to bring to life despicable beliefs. A final virtue is passion. Snyder narrates the facts neutrally as a good historian should but his indignation breaks through the surface time and again, redeeming the surface dispassion of a horrific narrative. Books like this redeem history from any charge of dilettantism. History should change people, or at least inform them, so they can make more humane choices in the future. If any serious work of history can do that, it might be Snyder's. I've not read a book that moved me to think about its subject as much or as long as this one since long ago I read -and could not forget-- Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jewry (1st ed., 1961; 3rd ed., 2003)

I began reading this book as a tool for gaining a better understanding of what is going on in the Ukraine. There is no understanding of Ukraine's current situation without understanding the cultural, social and criminal history laid out in this groundbreaking book. The key to Bloodlands is that it is based upon STATISTICS. This book is not based upon he said she said third party accounts. That is all that German histories of the Holocaust can be since the key point is that 95% of "Holocaust" deaths did not occur in or near Germany. They occurred in Eastern Europe, and the Allies never even reached the places where the killing happened. The Nazis were meticulous record keepers and they also had plenty of help from the local populations of the countries they invaded. Timothy Snyder brings a wealth of statistical evidence to bear on the subject of Genocide. Ukrainians are begging us today to free them from the Holodomor denying Russians. I hate to admit this, but I did not even understand what the Holodomor was. The "History" books sold me on the lie that Stalin was just doing what he had to do to establish the Soviet state and the Kulaks were a resistance group who had to be "dealt with". And there is the bizarre conundrum that Stalin was right ... the Kulaks and other dissenters who were shipped to the Gulag saved the Soviets by establishing industry in Siberia. We know that Stalin's brutality saved Russia (barely) in World War 2. I have always thought that this indisputable fact justified whatever Stalin did. But I know now that Ukrainians can never forget the Holodomor genocide. And the Russians have made an inexcusable mistake in denying that the Holodomor occurred. It is crucial to understand the Historical facts presented here in light of the Ukrainian/Russian crisis. The Hitler vs. Stalin Genocide comparison quickly reveals that there was not one Holocaust, but many. The author's premise that you need to compare genocides statistically in order to understand their true nature is clearly demonstrated. I must say that the planned starvation of the Ukrainian Holodomor exceeds by far any evil that can be conceived of. Stalin's wife did the right thing in shooting herself in the heart as a response to what Stalin was doing to the Ukrainians. Bloodlands relies on statistics from documents made available since the fall of the Soviet empire to expose the reality of what actually happened. The statistical analysis is backed up by humanizing eyewitness accounts. The author reduced me to tears repeatedly with the sorrowful vignettes he selected to elucidate what the cold statistics meant. When I started reading Bloodlands I was attracted by some of the Horrific statements made in the Preface but it was not clear to me what Timothy Snyder meant when he said that in order to understand Genocide you need to compare one Genocide to other Genocides. But it very quickly became clear that the Hollywood version of the Nazi concentration camps was quite civilized compared to brutal Einsatzgruppen massacres like Babi Yar. 90% of Holocaust deaths involved the victims being rounded up, thrown in a pit and shot on the spot. It was just in your face DEATH with no death camps or sad family goodbyes. I have watched footage of the shootings and now understand why Jews were so passive and simply lay down in the pits to be slaughtered. They were completely dehumanized and facing atrocities on a scale where it was better to be shot and get it over with. Victims don't write history but Timothy Snyder has done an eloquent job of speaking for them. Anyone who wants to understand this book needs to watch the actual murder footage on the Internet. (Einsatzgruppen, Holodomor, WW2 etc, It's all out there. Sickening stuff, but inescapable.) There is no hiding behind propaganda and lies in today's world ... the footage that is out there confirms what Bloodlands says. An important aspect of Bloodlands is to bring the individuals who suffered such atrocities to life. In addition to being a great student of History Timothy Snyder is also a great writer. He has a keen sense of how spirtuality manifests itself in every day life. We clearly see the people who are being massacred in human terms. After looking at the stats we are presented with a heartbreaking story of a simple human being who was senselessly and needlessly slaughtered. Bloodlands makes it clear from the outset that the German accounts of the Holocaust represent an insignificant 2% of the victims. We are introduced to the other 98% along the way. And we are presented with many surreal scenarios that were commonplace. Eg. A Ukrainian man is captured by the invading Bolsheviks and serves in the Red Army. He runs away to join Nationalist Partisans, is captured by the Nazis and fights for them against the Bolsheviks. He is again captured by the Bolsheviks and is sent to Siberia. Seemingly bizarre examples demonstrate the ephemeral nature of survival in the Bloodlands. What is clear is that since the Bloodlands were occupied twice by the Bolsheviks and once by the Nazis the hapless victims had no chance of self determination whatsoever. And if they survived at all they were fortunate. In considering what the message of this book is, the author is clear in his intentions to avoid political intrigues and focus on the Bloodlands as a source of food that was essential for both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks. What is shown here is that when survival is on the line, there are no laws that can govern the atrocities people are forced to commit. Since we are approaching population levels where food is becoming scarce again we need to remember; Russians are not just posturing over the Ukraine, that is their breadbasket. We need to understand the history of this region and how dangerous Russian denial of Holodomor is. Ukrainians won't accept that any more than Israelis will accept Holocaust deniers. At least the Holocaust is recognized by most people. Holodomor is not. We cannot comprehend how the Ukrainians must feel. One of the greatest atrocities in history and it's not even recognized. This is what I learned from Bloodlands; The victims of these atrocities are still here with us. They are Ukrainians. World War 2 is not over. If Ukrainians feel the way I think they feel, then the current situation is a life/death struggle that cannot be settled peacefully. Russian leaders need to learn a lesson from Pope John Paul II; he was the last person who needed to apologize for the massacre of Jews in Poland. Yet he did apologize because he recognized that it was a necessary step in the healing process. Timothy Snyder has big balls as a man in taking on this subject. It is clear to me why Historians simply want nothing to do with it. Reading the facts quite simply made me sick to my stomach. I can't imagine how the author remained immersed in this material for years. As readers we are indebted to him for providing an undeniable resource regarding the Genocides in Eastern Europe. By providing statistical analysis backed up by concrete examples he refutes those who seek to replace Historical fact with Nationalist Revisionist History. Bloodlands brings to mind the old axiom: Those who cannot learn from history are destined to repeat it.

I thought I knew a lot about this subject, but realized I only knew it from a military-historical point of view. Bloodlands looks at the conflicts in the zone between Germany and Russia from the civilian point of view, and it's astounding. The breadth and depth of Snyder's scholarship is staggering. I learned so much about what befell the Jews, Poles, Belorussians and Ukrainians. The genocidal cruelty of the Nazis was well known to me, but I learnt a lot about how the Soviets were comparably genocidal, including before the war. I learnt too that most of the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis was outside of Germany itself, and how it swung back and forth between needing Jews to work versus wanting to exterminate them. It makes for very difficult but necessary reading. Thank you, Professor Snyder.

I purchased this book (quite old now) after striking its author on YouTube. He extensively documents the suffering of large populations in Poland, (then Soviet) Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states during the period between the two World Wars and just afterwards. The detail is at times a little dry and almost boring, until one reminds oneself that these figures represents millions of individuals, rather than a mass of people that can be ignored. As Stalin said, one death is a tragedy, one million a statistic (not a direct quote), and he ought to have known, given how many of the deaths he was directly responsible for. Snyder attempts throughout his narrative to prevent this tendency by introducing vignettes of individuals whose voice has been preserved beyond their deaths by a variety of methods; a diary entry, witness testimony, final messages scratched on walls etc. Some of these were very affecting, and in several places I was on the point of weeping. All in all, this is a difficult read due to subject matter, but not due to style; any intelligent non-specialist would be able to follow the arguments and also follow the citations. Not all of these are readily available, but such as I have checked, are accurate. I was generally aware of the history of the area, but this book has deepened my understanding and introduced me to some things of which I was either unaware or had misunderstood. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

És una part de la història d'Europa que tothom hauria de coneixer, sobretot els que ara per Catalunya i Espanya creuen que els totalitarismes són "noves formes politiques"

I was raised amongst survivors of the great horror that was the War in Eastern Europe. My mother endured forced labour under the Soviets in 1940 and slave labour under the Nazis after 1941. She saw some of her family being deported by the Soviets to almost certain death in Kazakhstan and discovered the rest in a mass grave, shot by the Nazis. Her best friend survived Auschwitz. My Godfather was a partizan in the forests around Lwow, fighting both Nazis and Soviets. My Godmother lived through the Stalinist regime, survived the battles for Kharkov and slave labour in Germany. I was taught chess by a White Russian whose memories of that time were horrific. Even I visited Auschwitz in 1963 - when I returned to England I was shocked to realise non of the English people I knew knew anything about the place. Until recently who, apart from the Poles, knew the truth about Katyn? So, when I started reading Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands" my first impression was "There is nothing new here". I'd heard it all in one place or another. But what Snyder does do is take all those evils and puts them together in his Pandora's Box - only one thing is missing, Hope. Because there was no hope, only fear and death. The depressing bleakness hollows out the soul. One has to pause to take stock, to look away, to absorb the evil and hear the dead cry out for justice, and an understanding that what happened there, on the "Eastern Front", in the "Bloodlands", actually exceeded anything the West could understand: "...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...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." Timothy Snyder is the conscience of us all. Snyder fills his Pandora's Box and then he reveals its contents to us. He deals with the real terrors of Stalinism; the tragedy of the Great Famine of the Ukraine, the nightmare of the Great Terror, and the cold-blooded elimination of the educated classes and all forms of potential resistance in Poland. He goes on to deal with Nazism; once more, the elimination of educated Poles, the attempts to depopulate Belarus, and the Final Solution. He looks at Post-War Cold War anti-Semitism in a very knowledgeable manner that makes the era clearly understandable. He does a wonderful job of sorting the truth out from the "false history" we have in the West by reminding us (for example) that "by the time the gas chamber and crematoria complexes came on line in spring 1943, more than three-quarters of the Jews who would be killed in the Holocaust were already dead." The name of Belzec is less well known than that of Auschwitz because it was a death camp - those who survived it were highly lucky and could be counted on the fingers of one hand. "The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp." Snyder debunks the modern attempts to "balance" out history: the Nazis and the Soviets were not inhuman beasts - they were ordinary men and women like you and me. These men and women had ideals which they tried to live up to. They saw themselves as victims of other groups and their actions were a form of self-defense. They forced others to collude in their plans by giving them a choice between that or death. He reminds us of the real atrocities carried out in the war, for example, "About as many Poles were killed in the bombing of Warsaw in 1939 as Germans were killed in the bombing of Dresden in 1945. For Poles, that bombing was just the beginning of one of the bloodiest occupations of the war... " and that "German journalists and (some) historians ... have exaggerated the number of Germans killed during wartime and postwar evacuation, flight, or deportation..." Snyder's "Bloodlands" are, for me, the lands of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth partitioned between 1772 and 1794. The horrors that took place here are just a continuation of the policies of the Germans and Russians to control those lands. Perhaps I fall into that category of historians who try to understand the horrors in nationalistic terms - he debunks the Russian myth of the "Great Patriotic war" and points out that most of the "Russian" dead were "Soviet" and came from Belarus, the Ukraine and Eastern Poland - themselves victims of Stalinism in 1939 (and earlier). I said there was nothing new here - that isn't completely true. Snyder's research is so broad as he brings the strands together that there will always be a fact that will surprise you, no matter how much you think you know the history. I never knew that the invading Germans, in 1939, tended not to treat captured Polish soldiers as prisoners-of-war but simply shot many of them as they surrendered. Snyder filled his history with facts and figures throughout. One simple fact stands in for so many in the book: "On any given day in the second half of 1941, the Germans shot more Jews than had been killed by pogroms in the entire history of the Russian Empire." There's nothing new in this book. The story and the facts have always been available. In this post-Cold war era the truth about what went on in the East has been slowly revealed to the West: all the "false" history is been revealed as another version of the West's anti-Communist propaganda, a Big brother version of history in which Polish troops, for example, were not allowed to partake in VE celebrations because the country was Communist (albeit sold out by the allies at Yalta). Snyder brings the true history of this era to the attention of the West. Everyone should read it - but then I would say that, wouldn't I, I was raised amongst survivors of the great horror that was the War in Eastern Europe.

Ce livre nous fait revivre, si l'on peut dire, le destin tragique de ces terres de l'est. On commence par la description détaillée du génocide des koulaks ukrainiens par le petit père des peuples, le dénommé staline. On poursuit avec l'extermination, par les nazis, des juifs d'Europe de l'est, avec la complicité et des natifs et de staline, en particulier l'or de l'invasion de la Pologne. Un point, assez nouveau pour moi, est le plan nazi d'obtention d'un espace vital. Ce plan était basé lui aussi sur l'extermination des paysans ukrainiens (en plus des juifs); c'était des bouches qui privaient les allemands de ressources de nourriture. Cela balaie l'argument si souvent entendu qu'hitler, s'il avait été plus avisé, aurait fait des ukrainiens des alliés contre l'URSS et aurait ainsi pu gagnr la guerre; balivernes. Ce livre est vraiment remarquable mais puissamment troublant.