…and preceding horrific things.  From a fair and balanced review of Timothy Snyder’s new book, by Matthew Kaminski:

Savagery in the East
How Stalin and then Hitler turned the borderlands of Eastern Europe into killing fields

The story of World War II, like that of most wars, usually gets told by the victors. Diplomatic and military accounts are set largely in the West and star the morally upright Allies—the U.S., Britain and Soviet Union—in battles against fascism. The Holocaust gets its own separate history, as a case apart in its genocidal intent and human tragedy.

Timothy Snyder’s “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” forces a dramatic shift in these perceptions. First, there is the setting: the flat and marshy eastern borderlands—inhabited by Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians and others—that Stalin and then Hitler turned into what Mr. Snyder calls the “bloodlands.” No GIs fought on or liberated this soil, so the fate of its people never entered the collective Western imagination. Yet this was the true heart of the European conflict. By Mr. Snyder’s “conservative” reckoning, 14 million people were shot, deliberately starved or gassed while Hitler and Stalin were in power. All these dead were noncombatants. Mr. Snyder puts a third of the total on Stalin’s account…

…far from minimizing Jewish suffering, “Bloodlands” gives a fuller picture of the Nazi killing machine. Auschwitz, which wasn’t purely a “death camp,” lives on in our memory due in large part to those who lived to tell the tale. Through his access to Eastern European sources, Mr. Snyder also takes the reader to places like Babi Yar, Treblinka and Belzec [more here on the latter two and other extermination camps that very few now know about; they were the essence of the massacre of the Jews outside the Soviet Union before Auschwitz]. These were Nazi mass-murder sites that left virtually no survivors.

Yet Mr. Snyder’s book does make it clear that Hitler’s “Final Solution,” the purge of European Jewry, was not a fully original idea. A decade before, Stalin had set out to annihilate the Ukrainian peasant class, whose “national” sentiments he perceived as a threat to his Soviet utopia. The collectivization of agriculture was the weapon of choice. Implemented savagely, collectivization brought famine. In the spring of 1933 people in Ukraine were dying at a rate of 10,000 per day.

Stalin then turned on other target groups in the Soviet Union…

In the grim postscript to World War II, millions of Poles, Ukrainians, Balts and Germans were ethnically cleansed from lands they had occupied for generations. Churchill and Roosevelt let Stalin redraw Europe’s borders, and all the bloodlands fell into his hands. Unlike Hitler, Stalin realized his dreams of a global empire. His last murderous act was to launch another anti-Semitic purge, in late 1952, before he himself died in early 1953.

“Bloodlands” manages to clarify as well as darken our view of this era. “To dismiss the Nazis or the Soviets as beyond . . . historical understanding is to fall into their moral trap,” Mr. Snyder writes. “The safer route is to realize that their motives for mass killing, however revolting to us, made sense to them.”

Articles by Mr Snyder in the New York Review of Books are here.

Mark
Ottawa