The forgotten killing fields of Europe

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
Timothy Snyder
Basic Books
2010 and 2022
547 pages
ISBN 978-0465031474

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Between around 1933 and 1945, in the middle of Europe, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some fourteen million people. The place where all of the victims died, which the author of this book calls the “Bloodlands”, extended from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic States.

In policies that were meant to kill civilians or prisoners of war, Nazi Germany murdered about ten million people in the Bloodlands and perhaps eleven million in total, the Soviet Union under Stalin over four million in the Bloodlands and about six million in total. If foreseeable deaths arising from famine, ethnic cleansing and long stays in camps are added, the Stalinist total rises to nine and the Nazi figure to twelve million, though these figures are necessarily imprecise.

This book aims to recover the humanity of the people slaughtered in the period, to begin with the story of each murdered person. Its focus is not on Hitler or Stalin but on Europe “between Hitler and Stalin”. The author is interested in the “belligerent encounter” between two “totalitarian” systems – and describes how the policies of the two dictators impacted on each other and on the suffering populations under their control, such as the Poles or the Ukrainians or the Baltic nations.

The author notes that both Nazis and Soviets created one-party States, where the significance of the word “party” was inverted: rather than being a group among others competing for power according to accepted rules, it became the group that determined the rules. One might add here that they were both atheistic regimes, with no sense of an ultimate accountability before God for one’s actions.

Interaction between the two systems happened in complex ways and Snyder gives many examples of such interaction. Stalin’s instruction in the early 1930s to Communists across the world of “class versus class” meant that German Communists could not cooperate with German Social Democrats – and this policy was one of the factors that helped Hitler to win elections in 1932 and 1933 and thus to rise to power in Germany.

In a broader sense, the accumulation of Nazi and Soviet rule facilitated mass murder – for example, successive Nazi and Soviet occupations of a country such as Lithuania was worse for the local population than occupation by the Nazis alone. A Lithuanian family friend lost many relatives to Stalinist persecution and was himself imprisoned by the retreating Nazis – after the war, he somehow made his way to St Patrick’s, Maynooth and later to happy priestly ministry in Manchester.

Hitler and Stalin jointly invaded Poland in 1939 but the Nazis then invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. After this invasion, death rates in the Soviet Gulag camps increased drastically, as a result of food shortages and logistical problems. The author also points to the existence of “double collaborators”: people who worked successively for both Nazi and Soviet power. He highlights overall the “common inhumanity” of the Nazi and Soviet systems, that is, their ability to deprive groups of human beings of their right to be regarded as human.

Snyder underlines the unique horror of the Holocaust and highlights the unimaginable suffering of European Jews, but here, as elsewhere, he offers some new perspectives. Previous accounts, he suggests, have tended to pass over the nearly five million Jews killed east of Auschwitz and the nearly five million non-Jews killed by the Nazis.

Of the three million Polish Jews killed in the Holocaust, only seven per cent perished at Auschwitz. Most Soviet and Polish Jews, this book maintains, had already been murdered by the time Auschwitz became the major death factory. The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp as such – being murdered in gas vans or in death facilities or in mass shootings.

As their invasion of the Soviet Union faltered and the conquest of huge Eastern lands proved impossible, the focus of the Nazis changed from their original plan of mass deportation to mass killing of the Jews.

The author also offers new perspectives on Poland. Outside that country, he argues, the extent of Polish suffering is under-appreciated. Between September 1939 and June 1941, in their time as allies, the Soviet and Nazi states killed perhaps 200,000 Polish citizens and deported about a million more. In 1940, the Soviet secret police murdered thousands of Polish prisoners of war in Katyn Forest.

Outside Poland’s State borders, Poles suffered more than any other national group within the Soviet Union itself during the “Great Terror”, which targeted diaspora nationalities among other enemies. By a conservative estimate, some 85,000 Poles were executed in 1937 and 1938, that is, one-eighth of the mortal victims of the Great Terror. This was an extremely high percentage, given that Poles were a tiny minority in the Soviet Union.

Of the more than four million Polish citizens murdered by the Germans, about three million were Jews but there were also one million non-Jews. And yet Polish suffering is possibly surpassed by that of Belarus. By the end of the war, half the population of Belarus had either been killed or moved. Prof Snyder suggests that this cannot be said of any other country.

The book does not dwell much on the Catholic or general Christian experience under Hitler and Stalin. Snyder does note at one point that Christian religious practice was dangerous – thus, a Polish Catholic could go to the Gulag for owning rosary beads. However, he doesn’t cover in depth the experience and suffering of the Christian churches as such more broadly – for example, the long calvary of the Catholic Church in Poland under both Hitler and Stalin. Prof Snyder’s classification of victims covers the Jews and different national groups, the peasants and so on but not other key constituents of the European nations such as the Christian churches.

The book includes an absorbing if harrowing chapter on the Ukrainian famine (“Holodomor”) of the early 1930s: a neglected twentieth century catastrophe. The Soviets starved more than five million people to death during agricultural collectivisation, most of them in Soviet Ukraine. In Stalin’s warped worldview, people starving in Ukraine were trying to discredit him: “A peasant slowly dying of hunger was, despite appearances, a saboteur working for the capitalist powers in their campaign to discredit the Soviet Union”. Starvation was resistance and resistance was a sign that the victory of socialism was just around the corner because “resistance to socialism increases as its successes mount”. If collectivisation had led to mass starvation, this was the fault of those who starved and the foreign intelligence agencies who somehow arranged the whole thing.

While there were major press access issues, the Western press nevertheless gave remarkably little contemporary coverage to the Ukrainian famine – Malcolm Muggeridge was one of the few Western journalists to report on the famine, for the Manchester Guardian.

According to Snyder, Stalin was responsible in Ukraine for premeditated mass murder in the sense that the policies introduced in Soviet Ukraine in late 1932 or early 1933 would foreseeably kill millions – for example, the policy that Ukrainian peasants had to return grain advances that they had previously earned by meeting grain requisition targets.

While this remarkable and prize-winning book, by the Professor of History at Yale is very well-written, and constantly thought-provoking, it is often difficult to read of the suffering and evil set out here. Snyder did extensive research in the archives of Eastern Europe, where he also accumulated the necessary linguistic competences for his study.

The book is sadly topical at a time when terrible war has returned to this part of Europe. Although originally published in 2010, this 2022 paperback edition includes a new afterword on the reaction to the book. Some critics suggested that “one can’t compare Hitler and Stalin” or “one can’t compare the Holocaust and anything else”. The author replies robustly here, and contends that the book began from a process of inclusion rather than comparison and seeks above all to document all the killings that happened. His argument is also that any taboo on comparison negates scholarship and that those Europeans who inhabited the crucial part of Europe at the crucial time were condemned to compare – for example, the Polish officers who had to decide whether to surrender to Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union.

The afterword also offers reflection on possible limitations in discussion of the Holocaust in Germany. The main victim groups at Auschwitz were Hungarian and Polish Jews and 97% of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust had nothing to do with German culture; so German coming to grips with the Holocaust is only part of the story. While this issue is not covered in depth in Snyder’s book, it could also be argued that “de-nazification” did occur quite thoroughly in Germany after the war, but that there wasn’t a similar commitment in the Soviet Union/Russia – or even in Western countries – to acknowledge Communist crimes and the impact of Communist ideology. Perhaps this important book will contribute to that necessary process.