Reviewed by Adam Muller
On March 16th of this year, hundreds of relatives and surviving veterans of the Latvian Legion, a formation of the Waffen-SS created by the Germans in 1943 and part of one of the last armies still fighting in Eastern Europe during World War Two, staged their annual march in central Riga to the famous Freedom Monument, a towering memorial to Latvia’s war dead.
As is usual, the marchers’ route was lined with Latvian national flags and the event attracted a large crowd of well-wishers and the simply curious, young and old alike. The elderly marchers, many in uniform or else in suits and caps adorned with Nazi-era military medals and badges, carried roses to place at the base of the monument in order to honour comrades and friends who fell in the fight against Soviet forces. There were small groups of (mostly ethnically Russian) detractors on hand to witness the event and jeer at the marchers, though this time, unlike in years past, the police were not required to intervene in order to keep the two sides apart. There was one incident, however, which caught the attention of many around the world following its appearance on YouTube. In the posted video footage, a beautiful young Russian woman, perhaps in her early twenties and evidently a member of an anti-fascist organization, may be seen and heard loudly confronting an elderly woman who is marching in support of the Legion veterans. In the middle of their shouting match, the young woman strikes her antagonist violently in the head before spitting on her and abruptly departing.
The effect of the blow is shocking, both to viewers and to the old woman who was struck, but there is a sense in which it should not have been unexpected. For there remains great disagreement in Latvia over the meaning of World War Two, on Latvia’s specific role during the war, and on the status of Latvian wartime and postwar suffering. Historical matters are complicated, now as they were under occupation in the 1930s and ’40s, in Latvia and elsewhere in the nations comprising what Timothy Snyder calls the Bloodlands in his 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. The Bloodlands span territory from central Poland to western Russia, including Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. During and immediately prior to World War Two they were marked by an extreme kind of violence which Snyder argues was historically unprecedented, and which resulted in at least fourteen million deaths and unfathomable human suffering. All this, according to Snyder, was the byproduct of the convergence of two massively destructive and highly mobile and vindictive totalitarian forces: Soviet Stalinism in the East and German Nazism in the West.
Snyder’s thesis is that it was in the Bloodlands that these forces met and interacted in ways that became mutually self-reinforcing, always at the expense of indigenous populations whose suffering continues to remain under-acknowledged in the historical literature, particularly in the West. Accordingly, Snyder feels that it is important to displace the Holocaust, and especially concentration camps like Auschwitz, as the primary signifiers of twentieth-century genocidal mass murder, since privileging them unhelpfully restricts our awareness of the scale of the damage done to the people and places under Nazi and Soviet occupation. For example, over a million Jews were shot to death in the forests of Eastern Europe, almost forty thousand in two days at Babi Yar in Ukraine alone. Nearly three million more were killed on arrival at extermination centers such as Bełżec, Sobibór, Majdanek, and Treblinka, these death factories not to be confused with concentration camps which actually housed many inmates for varying periods of time, however inadequately. More than this, for Snyder the Holocaust is typically framed by exceptionalist language which serves to disconnect its particulars from larger historical and ideological currents, thus insulating its victims from others experiencing versions of the same horrors, for the same reasons, who remain no less entitled to our moral regard.
Snyder supplements the relatively well-known account of the large number of Jews destroyed in the Bloodlands with descriptions of other, less well-known atrocities committed in the same general area against groups whose members also died in appallingly large numbers. He begins with the Soviet-engineered famine directed against the kulak class of peasant farmers as part of Stalin’s attempts to collectivize agricultural production in the Soviet Union, principally in Soviet Ukraine. The effects of collectivization were disastrous, culminating in the consumption of seed stocks and a resulting famine which killed millions of people, not just in Ukraine but in neighbouring Soviet republics as well. Hundreds of thousands of others were deported to gulags (Soviet prison camps) where, malnourished and overworked, they too perished in droves.
Snyder’s descriptions of the suffering of Ukrainian peasants are particularly harrowing. Communities are shown in the process of their extinction, the remnants of their populations too exhausted to bury the dead, corpses rotting in the fields. There was nowhere for those starving to flee, and most of those attempting to do so eventually dropped dead on the railway tracks heading into cities or else hanged themselves from trees lining major transportation routes, dangling there for other travelers to see. Children who made it to cities such as Kiev starved in the streets. Cannibalism became widespread: parents nearing death offered their bodies for their children’s consumption; children were devoured by their parents or relatives; and roving bands of cannibals attacked the weak and defenseless. Smoke rising from chimneys became a sure indication of recent death and available food, and authorities learned to use this sign to zero-in on human predators, thousands of whom were prosecuted for cannibalism between 1931 and 1933 (many more of whom were not).
It is easy to become overwhelmed by Snyder’s lengthy and detailed descriptions of atrocity. He clearly wants his readers to appreciate the suffering of all of Stalin’s and Hitler’s victims. He minutely specifies victims’ experience of the violent excesses of Stalin’s purges, which in the form of the Great Terror assumed a particular murderousness when directed against Soviet Poles. Snyder argues that Poland generally bore the brunt of totalitarian violence from all sides. Its elite was decapitated by the Soviets in a massacre in the Katyn Forest, the Holocaust’s main killing sites were located on Polish soil, and both Nazis and Soviets undertook massive purges during their joint occupation of Poland following the implementation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Under their joint administration, which lasted from 1939 to 1941, between them the Soviets and the Nazis killed at least two hundred thousand Polish citizens and deported over a million more. With the start of Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the Nazis’ ill-fated invasion of the Soviet Union, the lessons learned in Poland became applied to those in the rest of the Bloodlands as the Nazis extended their reach to the gates of Moscow, before being forced back through conquered territory following their failure there, at Stalingrad, and eventually at Leningrad as well.
The effects of the German advance and subsequent retreat were catastrophic for the people of the lands through which the German armies moved, their Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) and Einsatzgruppen (Task Force) death squads in tow. Initially perceiving the Germans as liberators from Stalinist oppression, many in Ukraine and the Baltic States assisted the Nazis in hunting down and murdering local communist officials and Jews. Others joined partisan groups equipped and directed by Moscow in order to resist and redress Nazi excesses. Each movement of one side or the other through conquered territory inevitably meant disaster for hundreds of thousands of locals, as did the irregular warfare waged by communist and nationalist militias. The resulting chaos and overlapping accusations and counter-accusations of complicity, usually followed by purges and assassinations, gave rise to a “grey zone” or space of moral ambiguity coextensive with the Bloodlands, inhibiting identification and pursuit of the obviously right thing to do. The stresses associated with this grey zone remain evident today in events such as the Latvian march mentioned at the beginning of this review, as well as in debates still raging over the moral and present-political standing of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), whose nationalist guerrilla struggle for an independent Ukraine must be judged alongside its murderous anti-Semitism. Such complexities make it difficult to identify clear-cut instances of noble struggle in the Bloodlands. They also made it difficult for many of those entangled in history to find a side worth fighting for. In the fatalistic words of a soldier in the Polish Home Army, which attempted to secure Polish independence from both the Germans and the Soviets but which was destroyed by both of them working in a kind of tandem: “We await you, red plague / To deliver us from the black death.”
Snyder is especially good at describing the appalling situations confronting both Soviet and German POWs, millions of whom died in camps, often through starvation and disease. The story of life in these camps – the violence, the deprivation, the rape, and, yes, the cannibalism – has only recently begun to be told. And for all of his desire to reconfigure the Holocaust in a wider historical and geographical context (that of the Bloodlands between 1930 and 1950), Snyder spends a great deal of the latter portions of his book discussing atrocities committed against the Jews, and he ultimately concedes the singular character of the Nazis’ Final Solution. He does, though, provocatively link these atrocities to those committed by Stalinists in post-war purges of territory ceded to the Soviets by the Allies under the terms of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements. In describing the Allied responses first to Hitler at the beginning and during the war, and later to Stalin after the war, Snyder offers us the sobering thought that we in England and North America, for all our talk of a noble victory over fascism and the “last good war,” were nevertheless politically and militarily complicit in monstrosity by making a friend of Stalin.
Bloodlands is at its most successful when evoking strong responses to Snyder’s descriptions of atrocity. It offers comparatively little nuanced analysis of these atrocities and in terms of the Holocaust Snyder puts very little that is new on the table. Indeed if anything he grants a bit too much structural coherence to the destructive processes he is working to describe. He persists throughout his volume in referring to Jewishness as a nationality, though in this he is often just adopting standard Soviet bureaucratic language. Notwithstanding the criticism of historian Richard Evans that he fails to acknowledge the singularity of the Holocaust, and to some extent notwithstanding his stated desire to do precisely this, I find ample evidence in Bloodlands of Snyder acknowledging the exceptional character of the Nazis’ genocide of the Jews. The main achievement of Snyder’s history lies in its explicit demand for recognition of the suffering of those not directly caught up in the Holocaust but who found themselves nevertheless implicated in, and destroyed by, the same matrix of forces which gave rise to it. Additionally, I remain struck by the thought that Allied victory in World War Two came about because we were willing to overlook the enormous crimes perpetrated against humanity by one of the world’s most pathologically successful mass murderers. We remain, as Winston Churchill and George Orwell well knew at the time, diminished by this marriage of convenience.
Basic Books | 544 pages | $36 | cloth | ISBN #978-0465002399
‘Bloodlands’ by Timothy Snyder
Book Reviews
On March 16th of this year, hundreds of relatives and surviving veterans of the Latvian Legion, a formation of the Waffen-SS created by the Germans in 1943 and part of one of the last armies still fighting in Eastern Europe during World War Two, staged their annual march in central Riga to the famous Freedom Monument, a towering memorial to Latvia’s war dead.
As is usual, the marchers’ route was lined with Latvian national flags and the event attracted a large crowd of well-wishers and the simply curious, young and old alike. The elderly marchers, many in uniform or else in suits and caps adorned with Nazi-era military medals and badges, carried roses to place at the base of the monument in order to honour comrades and friends who fell in the fight against Soviet forces. There were small groups of (mostly ethnically Russian) detractors on hand to witness the event and jeer at the marchers, though this time, unlike in years past, the police were not required to intervene in order to keep the two sides apart. There was one incident, however, which caught the attention of many around the world following its appearance on YouTube. In the posted video footage, a beautiful young Russian woman, perhaps in her early twenties and evidently a member of an anti-fascist organization, may be seen and heard loudly confronting an elderly woman who is marching in support of the Legion veterans. In the middle of their shouting match, the young woman strikes her antagonist violently in the head before spitting on her and abruptly departing.
The effect of the blow is shocking, both to viewers and to the old woman who was struck, but there is a sense in which it should not have been unexpected. For there remains great disagreement in Latvia over the meaning of World War Two, on Latvia’s specific role during the war, and on the status of Latvian wartime and postwar suffering. Historical matters are complicated, now as they were under occupation in the 1930s and ’40s, in Latvia and elsewhere in the nations comprising what Timothy Snyder calls the Bloodlands in his 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. The Bloodlands span territory from central Poland to western Russia, including Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. During and immediately prior to World War Two they were marked by an extreme kind of violence which Snyder argues was historically unprecedented, and which resulted in at least fourteen million deaths and unfathomable human suffering. All this, according to Snyder, was the byproduct of the convergence of two massively destructive and highly mobile and vindictive totalitarian forces: Soviet Stalinism in the East and German Nazism in the West.
Snyder’s thesis is that it was in the Bloodlands that these forces met and interacted in ways that became mutually self-reinforcing, always at the expense of indigenous populations whose suffering continues to remain under-acknowledged in the historical literature, particularly in the West. Accordingly, Snyder feels that it is important to displace the Holocaust, and especially concentration camps like Auschwitz, as the primary signifiers of twentieth-century genocidal mass murder, since privileging them unhelpfully restricts our awareness of the scale of the damage done to the people and places under Nazi and Soviet occupation. For example, over a million Jews were shot to death in the forests of Eastern Europe, almost forty thousand in two days at Babi Yar in Ukraine alone. Nearly three million more were killed on arrival at extermination centers such as Bełżec, Sobibór, Majdanek, and Treblinka, these death factories not to be confused with concentration camps which actually housed many inmates for varying periods of time, however inadequately. More than this, for Snyder the Holocaust is typically framed by exceptionalist language which serves to disconnect its particulars from larger historical and ideological currents, thus insulating its victims from others experiencing versions of the same horrors, for the same reasons, who remain no less entitled to our moral regard.
Snyder supplements the relatively well-known account of the large number of Jews destroyed in the Bloodlands with descriptions of other, less well-known atrocities committed in the same general area against groups whose members also died in appallingly large numbers. He begins with the Soviet-engineered famine directed against the kulak class of peasant farmers as part of Stalin’s attempts to collectivize agricultural production in the Soviet Union, principally in Soviet Ukraine. The effects of collectivization were disastrous, culminating in the consumption of seed stocks and a resulting famine which killed millions of people, not just in Ukraine but in neighbouring Soviet republics as well. Hundreds of thousands of others were deported to gulags (Soviet prison camps) where, malnourished and overworked, they too perished in droves.
Snyder’s descriptions of the suffering of Ukrainian peasants are particularly harrowing. Communities are shown in the process of their extinction, the remnants of their populations too exhausted to bury the dead, corpses rotting in the fields. There was nowhere for those starving to flee, and most of those attempting to do so eventually dropped dead on the railway tracks heading into cities or else hanged themselves from trees lining major transportation routes, dangling there for other travelers to see. Children who made it to cities such as Kiev starved in the streets. Cannibalism became widespread: parents nearing death offered their bodies for their children’s consumption; children were devoured by their parents or relatives; and roving bands of cannibals attacked the weak and defenseless. Smoke rising from chimneys became a sure indication of recent death and available food, and authorities learned to use this sign to zero-in on human predators, thousands of whom were prosecuted for cannibalism between 1931 and 1933 (many more of whom were not).
It is easy to become overwhelmed by Snyder’s lengthy and detailed descriptions of atrocity. He clearly wants his readers to appreciate the suffering of all of Stalin’s and Hitler’s victims. He minutely specifies victims’ experience of the violent excesses of Stalin’s purges, which in the form of the Great Terror assumed a particular murderousness when directed against Soviet Poles. Snyder argues that Poland generally bore the brunt of totalitarian violence from all sides. Its elite was decapitated by the Soviets in a massacre in the Katyn Forest, the Holocaust’s main killing sites were located on Polish soil, and both Nazis and Soviets undertook massive purges during their joint occupation of Poland following the implementation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Under their joint administration, which lasted from 1939 to 1941, between them the Soviets and the Nazis killed at least two hundred thousand Polish citizens and deported over a million more. With the start of Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the Nazis’ ill-fated invasion of the Soviet Union, the lessons learned in Poland became applied to those in the rest of the Bloodlands as the Nazis extended their reach to the gates of Moscow, before being forced back through conquered territory following their failure there, at Stalingrad, and eventually at Leningrad as well.
The effects of the German advance and subsequent retreat were catastrophic for the people of the lands through which the German armies moved, their Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) and Einsatzgruppen (Task Force) death squads in tow. Initially perceiving the Germans as liberators from Stalinist oppression, many in Ukraine and the Baltic States assisted the Nazis in hunting down and murdering local communist officials and Jews. Others joined partisan groups equipped and directed by Moscow in order to resist and redress Nazi excesses. Each movement of one side or the other through conquered territory inevitably meant disaster for hundreds of thousands of locals, as did the irregular warfare waged by communist and nationalist militias. The resulting chaos and overlapping accusations and counter-accusations of complicity, usually followed by purges and assassinations, gave rise to a “grey zone” or space of moral ambiguity coextensive with the Bloodlands, inhibiting identification and pursuit of the obviously right thing to do. The stresses associated with this grey zone remain evident today in events such as the Latvian march mentioned at the beginning of this review, as well as in debates still raging over the moral and present-political standing of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), whose nationalist guerrilla struggle for an independent Ukraine must be judged alongside its murderous anti-Semitism. Such complexities make it difficult to identify clear-cut instances of noble struggle in the Bloodlands. They also made it difficult for many of those entangled in history to find a side worth fighting for. In the fatalistic words of a soldier in the Polish Home Army, which attempted to secure Polish independence from both the Germans and the Soviets but which was destroyed by both of them working in a kind of tandem: “We await you, red plague / To deliver us from the black death.”
Snyder is especially good at describing the appalling situations confronting both Soviet and German POWs, millions of whom died in camps, often through starvation and disease. The story of life in these camps – the violence, the deprivation, the rape, and, yes, the cannibalism – has only recently begun to be told. And for all of his desire to reconfigure the Holocaust in a wider historical and geographical context (that of the Bloodlands between 1930 and 1950), Snyder spends a great deal of the latter portions of his book discussing atrocities committed against the Jews, and he ultimately concedes the singular character of the Nazis’ Final Solution. He does, though, provocatively link these atrocities to those committed by Stalinists in post-war purges of territory ceded to the Soviets by the Allies under the terms of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements. In describing the Allied responses first to Hitler at the beginning and during the war, and later to Stalin after the war, Snyder offers us the sobering thought that we in England and North America, for all our talk of a noble victory over fascism and the “last good war,” were nevertheless politically and militarily complicit in monstrosity by making a friend of Stalin.
Bloodlands is at its most successful when evoking strong responses to Snyder’s descriptions of atrocity. It offers comparatively little nuanced analysis of these atrocities and in terms of the Holocaust Snyder puts very little that is new on the table. Indeed if anything he grants a bit too much structural coherence to the destructive processes he is working to describe. He persists throughout his volume in referring to Jewishness as a nationality, though in this he is often just adopting standard Soviet bureaucratic language. Notwithstanding the criticism of historian Richard Evans that he fails to acknowledge the singularity of the Holocaust, and to some extent notwithstanding his stated desire to do precisely this, I find ample evidence in Bloodlands of Snyder acknowledging the exceptional character of the Nazis’ genocide of the Jews. The main achievement of Snyder’s history lies in its explicit demand for recognition of the suffering of those not directly caught up in the Holocaust but who found themselves nevertheless implicated in, and destroyed by, the same matrix of forces which gave rise to it. Additionally, I remain struck by the thought that Allied victory in World War Two came about because we were willing to overlook the enormous crimes perpetrated against humanity by one of the world’s most pathologically successful mass murderers. We remain, as Winston Churchill and George Orwell well knew at the time, diminished by this marriage of convenience.
Basic Books | 544 pages | $36 | cloth | ISBN #978-0465002399