Neal Ascherson, “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and
Stalin by Timothy Snyder – review”, The Guardian, October 9, 2010.
Neal Ascherson on why Auschwitz and Siberia are only half the story
The history of modern Europe, and
especially of its fearsome 20th century, is like that field: unsteady under the
scholar's foot. Forgotten stuff works its way to the surface. Some historians
use metal-detectors to snatch out something flashy. Others do patient
archaeology, relating the tiniest object in each stratum to its context. Snyder
is the second kind.
In this book, he seems to have
set himself three labours. The first was to bring together the enormous mass of
fresh research – some of it his own – into Soviet and Nazi killing, and produce
something like a final and definitive account. (Since the fall of communism,
archives have continued to open and witnesses – Polish, Ukrainian, Belarussian especially
– have continued to break silence.) But Snyder's second job was to limit his
own scope, by subject and by place. He is not writing about the fate of
soldiers or bombing victims in the second world war, and
neither is he confining himself to the Jewish Holocaust. His
subject is the deliberate mass murder of civilians – Jewish and non-Jewish – in
a particular zone of Europe in a particular time-frame.
The time is between about 1930
– 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. Snyder's
"Bloodlands" label is jarring, a title those beautiful lands and
those who now live there do not deserve. But it's true that in those years and
in those places, the unimaginable total of 14 million innocent human beings,
most of them women and children, were shot, gassed or intentionally starved
to death.
Snyder's third aim is to
correct, radically, the way we remember what happened. To start with, the
public in western countries still tends to associate mass killing with
"Nazi concentration camps", and with Auschwitz in particular. Stalin
is thought to have killed far more people than the Nazis by consigning millions
to the gulag. But neither assumption is accurate.
In the Soviet Union, it now
appears that, although about a million men and women perished in the labour
camps, nine out of 10 gulag prisoners survived. Stalin's great killing took
place not in Siberia, but in the western Soviet republics, above all in Ukraine
where in the 30s at least four million people died in man-made famines and in
the slaughter of the "kulak"
peasantry.
In the concentration camps of
the Third Reich, a million prisoners died miserable deaths during the Nazi
period. But 10 million others who never entered those camps were shot (mostly
Jews), deliberately starved to death (mostly Soviet prisoners of war) or gassed
in special "killing centres" which were not holding camps at all. At
Auschwitz, the overwhelming majority of Jews were taken straight to the gas
chambers on arrival. And Auschwitz, terrible as it was, formed a sort of coda
to the Jewish Holocaust. By the time the main gas chambers came on line in
1943, most of Europe's Jewish victims were already dead.
Some – the Polish Jews
especially – had been gassed in the three killing centres set up on Polish
territory: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. But most had been shot and pitched
into mass graves by German police units operating far to the east in Ukraine,
the Baltics and Belarus, the Einsatzgruppen who moved from village to
village behind the front lines of war.
Snyder shows convincingly how
the Holocaust emerged. Up to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June
1941, Hitler's thinking was still about deportation: when the USSR was
conquered, all Jews would be driven into its vast wildernesses to labour and
die of hunger and disease. But Himmler, impatient, sent in the Einsatzgruppen
on the heels of the advancing army to begin the slaughter. By the end of 1941,
they had shot a million Soviet Jews.
In December 1941, when the Red
Army finally halted the Wehrmacht outside Moscow, Nazi policy changed. Without
the conquest of Soviet space, deportation was impossible. So the decision was
taken to solve the whole remaining "Jewish problem" by mass murder.
As Snyder puts it, "the final solution as mass killing 'was spreading to
the west.'" But there more "modern" methods were adopted. The
three gassing centres built in occupied Poland, followed by another at
Auschwitz-Birkenau, were designed to exterminate the entire Jewish population
of Europe west of the old Polish-Soviet frontier. East of that line, in the
lands where most of Europe's Jews had once lived, the job had already been done
by the firing-squads.
All this modifies our view of
this appalling period. The British, who liberated Belsen, at first located the
slaughter in "the concentration camps". Later, as knowledge of
Auschwitz spread, came the image of "impersonal" industrialised
killing. Now it becomes clearer that at least half the killing was anything but
industrialised; it was done by individual human beings aiming their guns at
other naked and helpless human beings.
Snyder reinforces this by
aligning the Holocaust with the fate of the Soviet prisoners of war. Herded
into enormous wired enclosures with little or no food or shelter, they were
intentionally left to die. In German-occupied Poland alone, half a million
Soviet prisoners starved to death. Counting the hunger victims in besieged
Leningrad, this most primitive method of mass killing took something like four
million lives in the course of the war.
Snyder insists that the
colossal atrocities in his "bloodlands" have to be set inside a
single historical frame. To look at them separately – for instance, to see
Hitler's crimes as "so great as to stand outside history", or
Stalin's as a monstrous device to achieve modernisation – is to let the two
dictators "define their own works for us". This, too, is quaggy
ground for historians. In the cold war and afterwards, claims that "Stalin
was worse than Hitler", or that "communism and fascism come to the
same thing", generated more heat than light. But Snyder doesn't fall into
such holes. He is saying that both tyrants identified this luckless strip of
Europe as the place where, above all, they must impose their will or see their
gigantic visions falter.
For Stalin, it was in Ukraine
that "Soviet construction" would succeed or fail; its food supplies
must be wrested from the peasantry by collectivisation and terror. And foreign
influence – which meant above all Polish – must be flamed out of the western
borderlands. (Snyder reveals the little-known fact that the Polish minority
were the main ethnic victims of the great terror between 1937 and 1938: well
over 100,000 were shot for fictitious "espionage".)
This book's unforgettable
account of the Ukraine famine shows conclusively that Stalin knew what was
happening in the countryside and chose to let it run its course (some 3 million
died). For Hitler, too, seizing Ukraine and its produce for Germany was crucial
for his new empire. So was smashing Polish identity. Between them, Germany and
the Soviet Union tried to behead the nation's elite by murdering 200,000 Poles
in the first 21 months of the war.
The figures are so huge and so
awful that grief could grow numb. But Snyder, who is a noble writer as well as
a great researcher, knows that. He asks us not to think in those round numbers.
"It is perhaps easier to think of 780,863 different people at Treblinka: where the
three at the end might be Tamara and Itta Willenberg, whose clothes clung
together after they were gassed, and Ruth Dorfmann, who was able to cry with
the man who cut her hair before she entered the gas chamber." The Nazi and
Soviet regimes turned people into numbers. "It is for us as humanists to
turn the numbers back into people."
