Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010)

The very title of the book and its introduction clearly identify the perspective from which the author is about to pursue his research: the role of great personalities in history. Hitler and Stalin are two agents responsible for mass killings and the overall turmoil in Europe: for instance, “German policies of mass killings came to rival Soviet ones between 1939 and 1941, after Stalin allowed Hitler to begin a war,” (xi) or “By the time the Red Army reached the remains of Warsaw in January 1945, Stalin knew what sort of Poland he wished to build.” (313) Many historians would give their left hands for the possibility to know exactly what Stalin knew or wanted to do, and there are no simple answers like these, so there’s a big deal of conventional wisdom, rather than academic scrutiny, in such assumptions, which are numerous throughout the book.

The Introduction makes clear that while Snyder promises us a combination of political, social, economic, cultural and intellectual history (Preface), this book will be about the political history. Moreover, it is not the kind of Introduction one expects to read in an academic history: it is a very brief and superficial description of the events between 1914 and late 1930s. He does not describe his methodology, criticism of sources, etc. What, for example, is his use of this geographic perspective, other than a nicely sounding name? What useful and what new can one get with the help of it?

The narrative of the book is built on numerous assumptions and presuppositions which are either commonplace or author’s opinion not justified by any references to credible sources, primary or secondary.  Just some examples: “The secret of collectivization (as Stalin had noted long before) was that it was an alternative to expansive colonization, which is to say a form of internal colonization.”  (159) “Stalin wanted the Soviets to endure the imperial stage of history, however long it lasted.” (157) Or at page 353: it is Stalin who “was trying to coordinate and control…,” “observed…,” “worried…,” “cared…,” “believed….” The agency belongs totally to Stalin, or Hitler.

The bibliography and references demonstrate that the authors did not really work with archival materials, to say nothing of other primary sources. The absolute share of his references is to other secondary sources. In a way, this is an example of what Said described in Orientalism as hermetic writing—a writing which is based on other writings on the same subject, while cares much less about its genuine subject. He, actually, confesses in this on p. xvii himself: “Although certain discussions in this book draw from my own archival work, the tremendous debt to colleagues and earlier generations of historians will be evident in its pages and the notes.” (xvii). Consequently, Bloodlands is, just as many other books about the mass murders in the 20^th century, not an academic explanation, and maybe not even understanding. It is a compilation of previously published works, which barely adds anything new to this subject.

My main problem with this book is, however, with how Snyder explains the agency behind the mass murders by the Soviet and Nazis. He defends the role of personalities in history: for him, Stalin and Hitler are two main villains, which is totally true. But were they the real agents of history behind these mass murders? I’d say that as a personality, Stalin was much of a wretched coward and a paranoid. Hitler as a personality was not really prominent, too. But what made them two of the most prominent figures of the 20^th century? What differentiated Hitler from Oswald Moseley, the leader of British fascists? Why Hitler was welcomed in the streets of Munich, while Moseley’s attempt to march through London’s East End ended with the confrontation with its poor population? I’d say that the Soviet and German societies, respectively, invested into Stalin and Hitler certain qualities of national leaders. But then, the explanation of these mass murders lies in the domain of social and cultural history, which Snyder basically ignores. And by ignoring these things, by reducing the great tragedies of Eastern and Central Europe to merely political agendas of Hitler and Stalin, he doesn’t make a good favour to historical understanding of these tragedies.

Moreover, by reiterating statements which create evil geniuses out of Stalin and Hitler, Snyder invests his academic capital into an intellectual project, which I find misleading. When he looks at the mass killings in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as something extraordinary, something unnatural, I think he turns the real problem upside down. Mass killings in the USSR and the Third Reich could happen, because they were regarded as legitimate: it was legitimate to kill “class enemies” or “Jews,” respectively. But if we look at the course of human history, we’ll see that mass killings had been always legitimate when states or some other political agents pursued their aims. Starting with the genocide of the Neanderthal man through the destruction of Troy and Carthage, the Islamic campaign against Hinduism, Mongol campaigns under Genghis Khan, inhuman exploitation of Native and Black Americans by European colonizers of the New World, mass murders during the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland and during the French Revolution, the genocide of the Zunghar people by the Chinese, the Caucasian War of the Russian Empire, the genocide of the Herero people by Germans, the Irish Famine to the mass murders of the twentieth century—all these, and much more, examples of genocide demonstrate that human society and culture provide numerous mechanisms to legitimize mass murders. In this long course of the human history, Stalin’s and Hitler’s mass murders are nothing extraordinary. Just the reverse: it is extraordinary that at some point of recent history, cultures emerged which regard mass murders as something illegitimate by definition. But even with these cultures it is not that simple, as they still have latent cultural mechanisms or strategies which allow mass murders which at some point run amok: consider such examples as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the conventional, but equally lethal, bombings of Hamburg or Dresden, the My Lai massacre, or the Finnish Civil War, if you want examples from other civilized Northern European states. My point here is that if one wants to understand the tragedy of millions of people in Central and Eastern Europe in the course of the 1930s and 1940s, it is misleading to concentrate on Stalin or Hitler as the primary agents of these mass murders. Because in this case the prescription to avoid similar tragedies in future is to prevent such people from getting to power, while in reality such people are created, or constructed, by certain social and cultural mechanisms. It is these mechanisms triggering mass murders and other acts of discrimination that we must study as historians, instead of reproducing already existing knowledge about the Soviet and Nazi crimes against humanity.