Political mass murder and ethnic cleansing were two of the ugly leitmotifs of the dictatorships established by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler in Germany in the 20th century.
These ideologically driven regimes murdered 14 million civilians, mainly Jews, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, Russians and Balts, in a blood-soaked area extending from Poland and the Baltic states to Ukraine and Russia.
Timothy Snyder, a Yale University professor of history, presents a sweeping chronology and stinging indictment of this man-made demographic catastrophic in an important book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books). He’s not, of course, the first scholar to deal with this immense and highly troubling topic. But he may be the first to synthesize these events in an impressively coherent narrative under the cover of a single volume.
The killings he examines in such meticulous fashion began with Stalin’s scheme to collectivize the lands of Ukrainian farmers, which resulted in the deaths of three million lives, and continued with the Great Terror, during which time about 700,000 dissidents were shot and killed.
More deaths followed as German and Soviet armies occupied Poland in 1939 and as Germany invaded the Soviet Union some two years later.
In occupied Poland and the Soviet Union, the Nazis killed millions of Jewish men, women and children. He cites a death toll of 5.4 million Jews, though the commonly acceptable figure is six million.
Snyder starts with the Soviets’ 1928 Five-Year Plan under which farms would be seized, peasants would be forced to work in shifts and crops would be treated as state property. To Stalin, collectivization would allow the state to control agricultural output, feed its workers and earn hard currency for investment in industry.
Stalin’s Jewish associate, Lazar Kaganovich, was placed in charge of the project. When peasants resisted and staged a grain strike, he reacted ruthlessly, imposing mass starvation on them. Stalin, in 1933, announced that they would be “liquidated as a class.”
Apart from being starved, they were resettled in remote camps, known as gulags. Rafal (Raphael) Lemkin, the Polish Jewish lawyer who coined the term genocide, would describe the oppression of Ukrainian peasants as “the classic example of Soviet genocide.”
Snyder compares collectivization to the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany, but the comparison is misleading, since Stalin’s policy was not based on race or forced emigration.
He is on firmer ground when discussing Soviet and German concentration camps. By 1938, more than one million Soviet citizens had been sent to dreaded gulags. By contrast, 20,000 Germans had been dispatched to such camps as Dachau and Buchenwald. “Soviet terror, at this point, was not only on a far greater scale,” Snyder writes. “It was incomparably more lethal.”
He claims that the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938, when Stalin wiped out political opponents, was essentially based on ethnic grounds. The Polish national minority in the Soviet Union, along with Ukrainian farmers, were scapegoated for the failure of collectivization, he says. Ethnic Poles were deported to the wilds of Siberia and Kazakhstan. In 1940, 4,400 Polish army officers were executed in Katyn.
Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union ushered in “a calamity that defies description,” Snyder notes. As war raged, the Germans killed more than 10 million people.
In Snyder’s assessment, Hitler and Stalin were arch social Darwinists, with both fervently believing that progress was only possible after violent struggle between races and classes.
Hitler, he observes, treated the Slavs much as North Americans dealt with the indigenous Indians. The Nazis used food as a weapon, subjecting Soviet citizens to starvation on a grand scale.
By his estimate, Germany shot and starved to death more than two million Soviet prisoners of war. Conversely, about 600,000 German PoWs and labourers died in Soviet camps.
Snyder reminds us that the Nazis associated Soviet brutality with Jews, thereby fanning antisemitism among Ukrainians in particular.
Poland was a Nazi killing ground. From 1941 to 1944, Jews were exterminated at six major facilities: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz. Still other Jews were shot en masse, with the German army aiding and abetting such operations.
Germany’s ally, Romania, was complicit in the Holocaust, murdering 300,000 Jews, mainly in Transnistria, seized from the Soviet Union.
During the war, Stalin targeted Soviet minorities. Aside from ethnic Poles, he deported 89,000 Finns, 900,000 ethnic Germans and a host of Muslims in the Caucasus and Crimea, including Kalmyks, Chechens, Balkars and Tatars.
The Soviet leadership, he writes, was not particularly concerned with the plight of Jews. After 1941, Stalin never singled out Jews as Hitler’s victims, and in the wake of the war, Moscow distanced itself from Jewish suffering. “In the Communist worldview, it was not the Jews but the Slavs who were the central figures, as victors and victims, in the Second World War.”
For Soviet Jews, the postwar era was an utter disaster. With the emergence of state antisemitism in 1948, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was formally dissolved and Jews were dismissed from their positions, accused of being both “Jewish nationalists” and “rootless cosmopolitans.” It hardly mattered that these glib categories cancelled each other out.
As Snyder correctly points out, Soviet-style antisemitism spread its tentacles into eastern Europe. “It was rarely a tool of governance, but it was always available in moments of political stress.” Show trials in Czechoslovakia and antisemitic purges in Poland completed the picture.
Past and present mingled as assimilated Jews were hounded out of Poland after 1967. Snyder’s capsule comment is telling: “Residents of Warsaw could not help but notice that they left from a railway station not far from the Umschlagplatz, whence the Jews of Warsaw had been deported by train to Teblinka only 20 years earlier.”