Bloodlands
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is a book by Yale historian Timothy D. Snyder that was first published by Basic Books on 28 October 2010. It is about mass murders committed during World War II in territories controlled by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In this book, Snyder examines the political, cultural, and ideological context tied to a specific region of Central and Eastern Europe, where Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany committed mass murders of an estimated 14 million noncombatants between 1933 and 1945, the majority outside the death camps of  the Holocaust. Snyder's thesis is that the "bloodlands", a region that now comprises Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), northeastern Romania, and the westernmost fringes of Russia, is the area that Stalin and Hitler's regimes, despite their conflicting goals, interacted to increase suffering and bloodshed many times worse than had they acted independently. Snyder draws similarities between the two totalitarian regimes and the enabling interactions that reinforced the destruction and suffering that were inflicted upon noncombatants. According to Snyder, Nazi Germany was responsible for twice as many deaths as the Soviet Union. The book  was awarded numerous prizes, including the 2013 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, and stirred up a great deal of debate among historians. Reviews ranged from highly critical to "rapturous". Synopsis. The Central and Eastern European regions that Snyder terms "the bloodlands" is the area where Hitler's vision of racial supremacy and "Lebensraum," resulting in the Final Solution and other Nazi atrocities, met, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in cooperation, with Stalin's vision of a communist ideology that resulted in the deliberate starvation, imprisonment, and murder of innocent men, women and children in Gulags and elsewhere. The combined efforts  of the two regimes resulted in the deaths of an estimated 14 million noncombatants in the Eastern Europe "Bloodlands"; Snyder documents that Nazi Germany was responsible for about two thirds of the total number of deaths. At least 5.4 million died in what has become known as the Holocaust, but many more died in more obscure circumstances. Snyder seeks to show that interaction between the Nazi and Soviet regimes is crucial to telling the story of this bloodshed. He posits that early Soviet support for the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazi occupation was followed by an unwillingness to aid the  uprising because the Soviets were willing to have the Nazis eliminate potential sources of resistance to a later Soviet occupation. Snyder states that this is an example of interaction that may have led to many more deaths than might have been the case if each regime had been acting independently. According to Jacob Mikanowski, one of the book's overarching goals is to argue that "it's wrong to focus on the camps when so much of the Holocaust was committed out in the open." To this end, Snyder documents that many Jews were killed by mass shootings in villages  or the countryside, in addition to those deaths suffered in the death camps. As commented by Anne Applebaum, "[t]he vast majority of Hitler's victims, Jewish and otherwise, never saw a concentration camp." Similarly, all of the Soviet victims discussed were killed outside the Gulag concentration camp system; within the camps, an estimated million people died. More Soviet prisoners of war died every day in Nazi camps during the Autumn of 1941 than the total number of Western Allied POWs in the entire war; over 3 million Soviet POWs died in the Nazi camps. The fate of the German prisoners  of war in the Soviet Union was little better, as more than half a million died in terrible conditions in the Soviet camps. Snyder focuses on three periods, summarized by Richard Rhodes as "deliberate mass starvation and shootings in the Soviet Union in the period from 1933 to 1938; mass shootings in occupied Poland more or less equally by Soviet and German killers in 1939 to 1941; deliberate starvation of 3.1 million Soviet prisoners of war and mass shooting and gassing of more than 5 million Jews by the Germans between 1941 and 1945." He re-examines numerous points of  the war and postwar years such as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, the rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust, and the Soviet persecution of the Polish Underground State, cursed soldiers, and their own prisoners of war after the war. The chapter covering the early 1930s famine in the Ukraine under the Soviet Union (often termed the Holodomor, a term Snyder avoids) goes into considerable detail. Snyder recounts that in an unofficial orphanage in a village in the Kharkiv region, the children were so hungry they resorted to cannibalism. One child ate parts of himself while he was  being cannibalised. 3.3 millions died during the Ukrainian starvation of 1933. Under his Hunger Plan, Hitler starved 4.2 million persons in the Soviet Union largely Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians. The book seeks to point out similarities between the two regimes, with Snyder stating: "Hitler and Stalin thus shared a certain politics of tyranny: they brought about catastrophes, blamed the enemy of their choice, and then used the death of millions to make the case that their policies were necessary or desirable. Each of them had a transformative Utopia, a group to be blamed when its realisation proved impossible, and then  a policy of mass murder that could be proclaimed as a kind of ersatz victory." Snyder also describes how the two regimes often collaborated and aided one another, at least until the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union such as the Gestapo–NKVD Conferences. They collaborated in the killings of Poles such as Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles and Soviet repressions of Polish citizens (1939–1946); between the two of them, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union killed about 200,000 Polish citizens in the period 1939–1941. About this, Applebaum wrote: "The Nazi and Soviet regimes were sometimes allies, as in  the joint occupation of Poland [from 1939–1941]. They sometimes held compatible goals as foes: as when Stalin chose not to aid the rebels in Warsaw in 1944 [during the Warsaw uprising], thereby allowing the Germans to kill people who would later have resisted communist rule ... . Often the Germans and the Soviets goaded each other into escalations that cost more lives than the policies of either state by itself would have." Snyder stated that after the Western Allies had allied themselves with Stalin against Hitler, they did not have the will to fight the second totalitarian regime when the war ended . As American and British soldiers never entered Eastern Europe, the tragedy of those lands did not become well known to the American or British populace and led to the view of Western betrayal. Number of victims. Snyder put the total death toll in the "Bloodlands" at 14 million victims of both Stalin and Hitler, including Jewish civilians transported to German camps in occupied Poland during World War II, Polish intelligentsia killed in war crimes such as in the Katyn massacre, disarmed military personnel in occupied countries and prisoners of war. Snyder pointed out that "I am not counting soldiers who  died on the fields of battle", saying that this "is not a complete reckoning of all the death that Soviet and German power brought to the region." Snyder identifies those victims killed as a result of "deliberate policies of mass murder" by governments, such as executions, deliberate famine and death camps. Snyder said that he "generally excludes from the count" deaths due to exertion, disease, or malnutrition in concentration camps; deportations, forced labor, evacuations; people who died of hunger as a result of wartime shortfalls, and civilians killed by bombings or other acts of war. The geographic area covered by  the "Bloodlands" is limited to Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, and western Russian regions occupied by Germany. Regarding the figures, Snyder stated that his reckoning is "on the conservative side." Snyder provided a summary of the 14 million victims as follows: In February 2011, the "Ottawa Citizen" summarized the number of victims, stating that "Bloodlands" is "a chilling and instructive story of how 14 million unarmed men, women and children were murdered. The death toll includes two familiar victim groups – 5.7 million Jews in the Holocaust and 3.3 million Ukrainians during the 1932–1933 famine engineered by Soviet dictator Josef  Stalin – along with lesser-known victims that include three million Soviet prisoners of war who were deliberately starved to death." In November 2012, historian Dariusz Stola wrote: "His restrictive definition of murderous policies raises doubts. His estimate of fourteen million dead only takes into account people killed within the framework of deliberate policies of mass murder. As a consequence, he is excluding, among others, all those who died as a result of abuse, of diseases or of malnutrition in concentration camps or during the deportations, or even while fleeing form the armies (even when these armies were deliberately pushing people  into having to flee)." Reception. "Bloodlands" stirred up a great deal of debate among historians, with reviews ranging from highly critical to "rapturous". In assessing these reviews, Jacques Sémelin wrote: "While observers on the whole all join in paying tribute to Snyder's "tour de force", they nevertheless don't hold back from subjecting him to several incisive criticisms." Sémelin stated that several historians have criticized the chronological construction of events, the arbitrary geographical delimitation, Snyder's numbers on victims and violence, and a lack of focus on interactions between different actors. Despite these points, Sémelin stated that "Bloodlands" is  one of those books that "change the way we look at a period in history." The book received favourable reviews in popular press outlets like "BBC History", "The Seattle Times", and "The New York Observer", and has been described as "an impeccably researched history of mass killings in the eastern part of mid-20th-century Europe" by Robert Gerwarth in the "Irish Times". Academic reviews. The book received praise from an array of experts in the field. Tony Judt called "Bloodlands" "the most important book to appear on this subject for decades." Other positive reviews include those from Wendy Lower, who  wrote that it was a "masterful synthesis", John Connelly, who called it "morally informed scholarship of the highest calibre", and Christopher Browning, who described it as "stunning", while Dennis Showalter stated that "Snyder has written several first-rate books ... And "Bloodlands" takes his work to a new level." Mark Roseman wrote that "the book's core achievement is ... to tell the story of Nazi and Soviet violence in a way that renders that savage chapter anew, and enduringly changes what we see." "Bloodlands" also received harsh criticism from other historians of the period, and specialists on Nazism and Joseph Stalin 's Soviet Union. In a "blistering review" on 4 November 2010 for the "London Review of Books", Richard J. Evans wrote that because of a lack of causal argument, "Snyder's book is of no use." Evans wrote that "[i]t seems to me that he is simply equating Nazi genocide with the mass murders carried out in the Soviet Union under Stalin. ... There is nothing wrong with comparing. It's the equation that I find highly troubling." Evans later conceded that Snyder's own critical review of Evans' "The Third Reich at War," published the year before in "The New  York Review of Books", was "one of the many reasons Snyder's book made [him] so cross." In a summer 2011 article for the "Slavic Review", Omer Bartov wrote that while "Bloodlands" presents an "admirable synthesis", it nonetheless "presents no new evidence and makes no new arguments", and stating that the book is "permeated by a consistent pro-Polish bias", eliding darker aspects of Polish–Jewish relations, and that Snyder's emphasis on German and Soviet occupation policies glosses over interethnic violence, commenting: "By equating partisans and occupiers, Soviet and Nazi occupation, Wehrmacht and Red Army criminality, and evading interethnic  violence, Snyder drains the war of much of its moral content and inadvertently adopts the apologists' argument that where everyone is a criminal no one can be blamed." In a January 2012 review in the "Sarmatian Review", Raymond Gawronski described "Bloodlands" as "a book that must be read and digested, a very significant book that knits together what otherwise are discordant chunks of history, many of which are totally unknown in our culture", adding that "Snyder's sensitivity to the various peoples involved, their own motivations, situations, histories, relations, is remarkable and highly praiseworthy. His reflections on subsequent inflation of  numbers by nationalist groups is sober and needed." For Gawronski, "Snyder walks a tightrope of deepening concern for the Jewish Holocaust and a most moving presentation while situating it within the suffering of other surrounding communities: I believe he accomplishes this very difficult task well." "Contemporary European History" published a special forum on the book in May 2012, featuring reviews by Jörg Baberowski, Dan Diner, Thomas Kühne, and Mark Mazower as well as an introduction and response by Snyder. Kühne stated that "Snyder is not the first to think about what Hitler and Stalin had in common and how their  murderous politics related to each other. The more provocative historians were in doing so and the more they thereby questioned the uniqueness, or the peculiarity, of the Holocaust, the more their work was met with resistance or even disgust, most prominently and controversially the German Ernst Nolte in the 1980s. Snyder's move to link Soviet and Nazi crimes is as politically tricky today as it was then." Kühne added: In the same special issue, Mazower rejected the idea of reducing Snyder's argument to that of Nolte, stating: Baberowski, a leading contemporary proponent of Nolte's views on the  Holocaust, criticized Snyder for not going far enough to connect the genocide of European Jews to "the excesses of Stalin's dictatorship." Diner expressed regret that Snyder did not discuss the legacy of Polish–Russian hostility and of the Polish–Soviet War, which would have given context for Soviet crimes in Katyn and Stalin's decision not to intervene during the Warsaw Uprising against the German occupier in 1944. A June 2012 review in "The Journal of Modern History" by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius stated that "[b]y examining the conjuncture, clashes, and perverse interrelations of extreme ideological regimes in these 'bloodlands ', Snyder presents a clearly argued, eloquently crafted and unflinching reckoning up of the human tragedy, on a scale vast beyond imagining", and posited that the book "deserves a large and engaged audience." A November 2012 review by Christian Ingrao expressed dissatisfaction with the book's "chronological starting point", positing that Snyder could have started his analysis in 1914 by integrating into it the violence committed during World War I and even to the failed 1905 Russian Revolution, when peasants revolted in ways which shook both Russia and Ukraine. In a December 2012 review for "Cahiers du Monde russe", Amir Weiner  stated that Snyder is not an expert either on Soviet or Nazi history, and wrote: "Long on promises and short on delivery, replete with equations that are often baseless and at times tasteless, "Bloodlands" ends up as a bloody nose to history." A December 2016 article in "Reviews in History" by Tom Lawson evaluated Snyder's scholarly success in hindsight. It stated that the bloodlands concept was influential in its attempt to assert the wider contexts for Nazi violence, genocide, and imperialism, without reducing it to antisemitism in Germany. Lawson commented that on its own terms ""Bloodlands" was at best  partially successful", but its substantive influence can be seen in the more recent "steady stream of scholars attempting to assert the wider contexts for Nazi violence – in terms of the history of imperialism; the wider history of genocide or of inter-ethnic tensions beyond simply a history of German antisemitism. As such while Snyder did not provide many of the answers in "Bloodlands", he did begin to ask the questions." In an April 2017 article in "Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine", Jean Solchany wrote that the proposed concept of the Bloodlands "does not lead to a productive spatial decentering but , on the contrary, offers a dated and simplified reading of German and Soviet history based on a comparative stance that exaggerates similarities and a hypothetical interactionist paradigm." In the "New Directions in the History of the Jews in the Polish Lands" (2018), Dan Michman wrote: Earlier in 2012, Michman wrote that ""Bloodlands" has not convinced me that there was a territory of 'bloodlands' which provides a historical explanation for murder, least of all for the Holocaust." Popular press reviews. In a September–October 2010 public debate in "The Guardian", Efraim Zuroff criticized what he described as the book's suggestion  of a moral equivalence between Soviet mass murders and the Nazi Holocaust, and accused Snyder of providing a scholarly basis for the double genocide theory by emphasizing the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Dovid Katz commented that Snyder, while a "truly great historian", had stumbled into "a meticulously laid trap" set up by Baltic nationalists –– appearing to provide fodder for their excuse-making surrounding local participation in the Holocaust –– but that he had also included "almost as if by a higher inspired intuition, the key to unlock the very trap he may on a rare occasion be failing to avoid." In Snyder 's response, he stated: "I coincide with Zuroff and Katz on the centrality of the Holocaust, but we must not overlook how Stalin enabled Hitler's crimes." Writing for "The Guardian" in October 2010, Neal Ascherson said: Writing in the "Financial Times" in November 2010, Guy Walters stated that he found the book disturbing, commenting: "Some may find Snyder's staking-out of the area of the bloodlands too arbitrary for their tastes, and might accuse him of creating a questionable geographical delineation. Agree with it or not, in a sense it does not matter, because Snyder presents material that  is undeniably fresh – what's more, it comes from sources in languages with which very few western academics are familiar. The success of "Bloodlands" really lies in its effective presentation of cold, hard scholarship, which is in abundance." Writing for "The New York Review of Books" in November 2010, Anne Applebaum commented: For Applebaum, "Snyder's book has a lot of information that people who know these subjects know very well. But what it does that is different and wholly original is show the ways that Hitler and Stalin echoed one another, at times working together and other times fighting  one another. The way in which they egged each other on, acting as two facets of what was really the same phenomenon." Writing for "Jacobin" in September 2014, Daniel Lazare described Snyder's "Bloodlands" as simplistic shoehorning of mass death in Eastern Europe into the crimes of Hitler and Stalin plus side-effects, and stated that the interactive one-upmanship of Nazi–Soviet crimes proposed by Snyder has the whiff of Ernst Nolte. Lazare also called attention to Snyder's suggestion that it was the Home Army's fear of communism that made it hesitant to help the Jewish Combat  Organization, which also included communists, in the Warsaw Ghetto. Awards. "Bloodlands" won a number of awards, including the Cundill Prize Recognition of Excellence, Le Prix du livre d'Histoire de l'Europe 2013, Moczarski Prize in History, Literature Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding, Phi Beta Kappa Society Emerson Book Award, Gustav Ranis International History Prize, Prakhina Foundation International Book Prize (honorable mention), Jean-Charles Velge Prize, Tadeusz Walendowski Book Prize, and Wacław Jędrzejewicz History Medal, and was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize, the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize (ASEEES), the Austrian Scholarly Book of  the Year, the NDR Kultur Sachbuchpreis 2011, and the Jury commendation Bristol Festival of Ideas. The book was also awarded the 2013 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. "Bloodlands" was named a book of the year for 2010 by "The Atlantic", "The Daily Telegraph", "The Economist", the "Financial Times", "The Independent", "The Jewish Daily Forward", "The New Republic", "New Statesman", "Reason", and "The Seattle Times".