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Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin

Article in Journal of Genocide Research · September 2011

DOI: 10.1080/14623528.2011.606703

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Journal of Genocide Research (2011), 13(3),
September 2011, 313 –352

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Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe

between Hitler and Stalin
JOHN CONNELLY, MARK ROSEMAN, ANDRIY PORTNOV,
MICHAEL DAVID-FOX and TIMOTHY SNYDER

Gentle revisionism
John Connelly
Recently, I came across a review of Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands that surprised
me. The reviewer called the book ‘revisionist history of the best kind’. ‘Of the best
kind’ was easy to accept. Bloodlands is morally informed scholarship of the
highest calibre. But ‘revisionist’ is a word one associates with works openly refut-
ing widely held interpretations. In the 1980s, Sheila Fitzpatrick and J. Arch Getty
claimed to revise work of the totalitarian school by showing how lower ranks in
the communist party benefited from purging during the Stalinist years. In the
1960s, an earlier revisionist school had questioned basic assumptions about the
Cold War, including who started it. Earlier still, perhaps the best known revisio-
nists asked whether Marxism was revolutionary or reformist, first Eduard Bern-
stein and Eduard David, then much later Wolfgang Harich, Leszek Kolakowski
and Georg Lukacs.
Maybe Snyder doesn’t seem to fit among these debunkers because he works
more subtly. Yet his challenge is fundamental: he calmly tells students
of modern Europe’s atrocities that they have produced theory at the expense
of history, crafting elaborate paradigms like ‘modernization’ to account for
Nazism and Stalinism instead of telling readers what these regimes did to the
people who lived under them. To date, he argues, no one has depicted the
single most disturbing event in Europe’s modern history: the killing of over four-
teen million men, women and children in the years 1933 to 1945 in Europe’s
eastern borderlands. Because this area lies outside the narratives that shape the

ISSN 1462-3528 print; ISSN 1469-9494 online/11/030313-40 # 2011 Taylor & Francis
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REVIEW FORUM

writing of European history in the West, the massive killing is not recognized for
the cataclysm that it was.
To consider the victims of Hitler and Stalin part of the same event was almost
unthinkable in the Cold War, when Western academia resisted the idea that the
two dictators were involved in the same kinds of projects. But Snyder argues
simply that both pursued transformative agendas with no concern for the lives
of individual human beings. As Winston Churchill wrote in 1939, they attempted
to ‘build up a society on a basis of lives which are meant to be sacrificed’.1 Hitler
and Stalin became accomplices because their instincts of ‘de-enlightenment’ were
the same.
Bloodlands recreates the life experience of the region’s inhabitants in a new
way. Existing accounts tend to delimit the region according to the boundaries of
states lying between Germany and Austria in the West and the USSR in the
East. Foremost are Joseph Rothschild’s political histories, which emphasize the
ties of dependence spun by the hegemonic states centred in Berlin and Moscow
between 1933 and 1989.2 This post-Second World War perspective misses how
people in the region experienced the horrific years 1933 to 1945, when the two
regimes pursued fantastic schemes extending from violent collectivization in
Ukraine, through Stalin’s genocides to Hitler’s ethnic cleansing of Slavs,
Gypsies and Jews.3 It did not matter, for the victims, who was doing the
transforming: terror was terror and death was death. Because of Snyder’s
reliance on secondary sources, one reviewer has criticized him for telling us
‘nothing new’, but in fact Snyder presents us with an indispensable synthesis,
a major event in combating deplorable ignorance on the part of Western reader-
ships.
I base this judgment on twenty-five years of teaching, during which students
routinely inform me they never suspected that ethnic Poles faced genocide.
Though Snyder does not set much stock in this particular word, his work makes
clear that Stalin and Hitler collaborated in genocidal policies toward the Polish
nation by crippling its cultural and political elites. Snyder shows that Soviet pol-
icies to destroy Polish ethnicity date to the Great Terror of the late 1930s, when
Poles became the group most victimized by the national operations.
Snyder credits British historian Norman Davies for drawing his attention to the
identities of the victims. In 1995, Davies asked ‘How often do you hear what I
think probable, that the largest number of civilian casualties of the war in
Europe was sustained by the Ukrainians?’4 Davies sought to correct the

1
Winston Churchill, review of the Peter Drucker, ‘The End of Economic Man’, Times Literary Sup-
plement, 27 May 1939.
2
Joseph Rothschild, Return to Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); East Central
Europe Between the World Wars (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974).
3
Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010) is the title of an important
new book by Norman Naimark.
4
Norman Davies, ‘The Misunderstood Victory in Europe’, The New York Review of Books, Vol. 42,
No. 9, 1995, p. 8.

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misperception that the war had cost 20 million Russian war dead. The broader
point seems to be that we know more about victims among some ethnicities
than others. But why is it important to count by ethnicity? For many ‘Ukrainians’,
other aspects of their identity—like being Uniate, or working class, or nationally
indifferent—may have outweighed ethnic identity. At times, Snyder likewise
stresses the ethnicity of the dead, telling us that ‘ethnic Poles suffered more
than any other group within the Soviet Union during the Great Terror’
(pp. 103– 104). The point here is presumably to alert Western audiences to
victims about whom they were ignorant. To critics who maintain that Snyder is
overly concerned with precise numbers when precision is impossible, Snyder
argues that we must try nonetheless. The difference between one million and
one million and one is infinite. Still, one might object, recapturing the humanity
of the victims—Snyder titles his book’s conclusion ‘Humanity’—does not
require labelling them by ethnicity, unless the objective is also to recreate the per-
spective of the killers and explain why they did what they did. It is here that
Snyder opens a question that has never been investigated: why, of the many
ethnic groups in the bloodlands, both Stalin and Hitler were so determined to
kill Poles?5
Regarding the Holocaust, I am unsure what revision Snyder proposes. The
larger insight Timothy Snyder takes from Davies is that the war, at least as far
as civilian casualties were concerned, was an East European war. He therefore
shifts the Anglo-American focus eastward, from Normandy and Dachau to the
killing fields of the bloodlands. For the historian of the Holocaust, two questions
emerge: first, is it true that we fail to understand this event’s East European dimen-
sion?6 And, second, what deeper insight do we gain about the Holocaust by
viewing it as an event of the bloodlands?
In fact, standard histories of Europe routinely locate the killing of Jews in
camps run by the Nazis on territory seized from the Second Polish Republic.
For example, Felix Gilbert and David Clay Large refer to Chelmno, Belsek
(sic), Majdanek, Treblinka and Auschwitz.7 One other popular work adds
Sobibor to the list while dropping Chelmno, but readers get the point: the great
majority of the victims of the Holocaust died in Nazi-controlled Poland.8
Lacking in early texts was appreciation for how many Jews were killed outside

5
For my own views and literature on the Nazi polonophobia, see John Connelly, ‘Nazis and Slavs:
From Racial Theory to Racist Practice’, Central European History, Vol. 32, No. 1, 1999, pp. 1– 33.
6
Snyder writes that Western readers have failed to recognize that most of the Jews who died during
the war did so in Eastern Europe. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 377.
7
Felix Gilbert and David Clay Large, The End of the European Era. 1890 to the Present, 5th ed.
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), p. 330.
8
James Wilkinson and H. Stuart Hughes, Contemporary Europe: A History, 10th ed. (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004), p. 320; R.R. Palmer and Joel Cotton, A History of the Modern
World, 6th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), p. 820.

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the camps in mass executions by so-called Einsatzgruppen, but in recent years

even this German word is becoming better known.9 Neither these histories, nor
Snyder’s Bloodlands, mention the shattering revision of Polish history achieved
some ten years ago by Jan T. Gross in his book Neighbors, which showed
that some of the Jews killed in Poland in 1941 had been killed by their Polish
neighbours.
To be sure, textbook data on the Holocaust’s location in Poland may not leave
much of an impression, because they are contained on one to two pages of
volumes numbering in many hundreds of pages. Even so, those with basic knowl-
edge of Europe’s history will find little novel in the call to see the Holocaust as an
event of East European history. The question for them will be: is our comprehension
of the Holocaust enhanced by emphasizing that the killing occurred in Eastern
Europe? In the ideological sense, I don’t believe the answer can be yes. The idea
about Jews in Hitler’s mind changed surprisingly little after 1919, and we have no
evidence that notions of Jews as contaminated, dangerous and in need of eradication
evolved after the fall of 1939 or the summer of 1941, that is, from the moments
Germans began occupying areas inhabited by East European Jews.10 Where Jews
originated did not matter. The Nazi regime identified, deported and killed Jews
who lived in places as varied as the Channel Islands, Saloniki, Odessa, Trondheim
or indeed Narvik. No one identified as Jewish by the Nuremberg laws was safe
the moment German troops occupied the territories where they lived. That cannot
be said for any other group under any other regime in history.
But Timothy Snyder also lays claim to the Holocaust as an event of East Euro-
pean history because—he claims—the decision to launch the killing of all Euro-
pean Jews occurred at the moment the German attack on Stalin stalled in the late
fall of 1941. He bases this argument on the early work of German historian Chris-
tian Gerlach, according to whom the Nazis came to understand their war as unwin-
nable with the US declaration of war upon Germany in December 1941. Snyder
extends this interpretation to imply that Hitler’s decision to launch a full-scale
killing of Europe’s Jews was a compensatory scheme, a ‘substitute for
triumph’. Unable to carry out his real wish of subduing Bolshevism, Hitler
vented his fury on every last Jew (p. 215).
The idea of the Holocaust as a substitute victory contrasts with a growing con-
sensus that Hitler made his decision to eliminate all Jews in mid to late summer of
1941, as reflected in the killing of Jewish men, women and children from Septem-
ber at the latest. At that point, Axis forces were advancing largely unimpeded
across Soviet territory, and Christopher Browning has attributed the decision to
kill all Jews to ‘euphoria’, the conviction among Nazi leaders that they could

9
It makes an appearance in Wilkinson and Hughes, Contemporary Europe, p. 320. Bonnie Smith
talks of the Einsatzgruppen as well as six death camps on Polish territory: Smith, Europe in the
Contemporary World: 1900 to the Present (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007), pp. 332– 334.
10
Snyder writes that ‘after the Wehrmacht was halted as Moscow and the Americans entered the
Second World War, Hitler blamed the Jews’ (p. 388). In fact, Hitler had always blamed the Jews
for the evils he felt confronted Germany.

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suddenly fulfil millennial desires without concern for world opinion. Once the
process we call the Holocaust was launched, nothing could stop it—not setbacks
on the North African or Eastern fronts, not the D-Day landings. Against this back-
ground, we see that this event had a momentum and an importance at least equal to
the war itself, and certainly far different from all the other killing processes that
Snyder discusses. With the end of collectivization came the end of the famine;
with the decline of fortunes in the east, the Nazis shelved colonization projects,
and began massive recruiting of ‘Slavs’ into formations of the German Army,
including Ukrainians and Russians (but not Poles)—something unthinkable in
1941. By contrast, the Nazi idea of the Jew was indestructibly solid. Policies
mutated, but the vision did not. What we see looking over the years 1933–45
was a gradual escalation of exclusion and terror against Jews, an unbroken
upward trajectory, reaching goals that the leaders might have dreamed of but
did not enunciate until within reach.
Contrary to Timothy Snyder’s claim that ‘when the war was lost, Hitler called
the mass murder of the Jews his victory’, Hitler never felt he had vanquished the
Jews. The more he killed, the more they troubled him.11 In his last will and testa-
ment of 29 April 1945, he remained obsessed by the threat Jews posed to
Germany. ‘Above all, I charge the leaders of the nation and those under them’,
he wrote, ‘to scrupulous observance of the racial laws and to merciless Resistance
to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry’. These were the last
words Hitler communicated to posterity before killing himself and his wife Eva
Braun. But Snyder is right: by any rational measure, Hitler should have viewed
the genocide his regime carried out against the Jews as a success. His regime
had occupied most of Europe and killed almost all the Jews in the territories it
occupied. But Hitler’s obsession with the Jews existed in an ahistorical dimension,
different from all other problems the Nazi regime believed it faced. By contrast,
Hitler portrayed the war—in the eyes of any reasonable observer a staggering
failure for Germany—in strikingly positive terms: it would ‘go down in history
despite all setbacks as the bravest and most glorious manifestation of the will to
live of a people’.
How will historians who have read Bloodlands relate the Holocaust to the other
crimes that visited the region? Snyder leaves no question in his chilling depictions
of the mass shootings and deportations to death camps that ultimately the killing of
the Jews was of a scale and completeness unlike any of the killings undertaken by
either regime. At one point, contradicting the idea that the Holocaust had the char-
acter of a substitute victory, he writes that the ‘elimination of the Jews was for
Hitler an end itself’ (p 389). Arguably, that cannot be said of any of the other

11
A week after the Wannsee Conference, on 27 January 1942, he uttered the extraordinary opinion
that the Jews were most dangerous when there were few of them (‘Dort, wo sie wenige sind, sind sie
am gefährlichsten’). At that point his regime had established control over the great majority of
Europe’s Jews, yet Hitler was concerned with the few thousand beyond his reach in Switzerland
and Sweden. Adolf Hitler, Monologe im Führerhauptquartier, ed. Werner Jochmann (Hamburg:
Knaus, 1980), p. 241.

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killing processes of either regime.12 But if this killing was not an outcome of the
processes of modernization (other states modernized without committing geno-
cide), or racist imperialism (other racists made empires without mass murder),
then where did the killing energies come from? Here it seems that bloodlands
are a stage upon which the murders took place, rather than an explanation of
why. In James Sheehan’s words, they constitute ‘a geographical expression that
describes the physical site of the killing, not a geopolitical category with interpret-
ative power’.13
It is clear from Snyder’s work that the Holocaust drew upon a special kind of
energy, wellsprings of hatred different from those we see in Nazi policies toward
Slavs or Gypsies or anyone else. Yet because his goal is to map out the general
killing processes for the laudable aim of recapturing the humanity of the
victims of this period, in a few places the specificity becomes lost. Is it true, as
he claims, that the Nuremberg laws created a situation ‘not so very different’
from that established by Soviet nationality policy of the late 1930s? (p. 110).
The Nuremberg laws were racial laws that forged unbridgeable boundaries
between Jews and the rest of humanity. The most immediate result was to
forbid marriage between Jews and non-Jews. These laws only became deadlier
in their effects of segregation as time passed. The ‘situation’ the laws created
was a legal context in which the Holocaust could happen. Neither the Nazi state
nor the Soviet state ever defined another human group in terms such as the Nur-
emberg laws; for the Nazis, Germanness (‘Deutschblütigkeit’) itself was incom-
prehensible without reference to the Jews: it was nothing other than absence of
‘Jewish blood’.14
Soviet nationality laws limited travel and were used to support arrest and depor-
tation of groups through policies that can be called genocidal, according to the UN
Convention of 1948, but did not absolutely fix national identity (a point Snyder
also admits), never forbade intermarriage (i.e. were not racial) and did not have
the consequence of stigmatizing one people against all others.15 In the late
1930s and the 1940s, they made segregation and murder of certain national
groups possible, but over time the impulse to reduce the targeted groups waned.
These laws never led to the idea that all individuals, men, women or children,
of a certain group, had to be eliminated. True, from the perspective of the late
1930s, the Nuremberg laws seemed to create for German Jews a situation in
many ways like that of a persecuted Soviet national minority. Those who faced

12
The argument is developed fully in my ‘Nazis and Slavs’.
13
James Sheehan, ‘Europe’s Darkest Hours’, Commonweal, 25 February 2011, pp. 31– 32.
14
For a striking visual portrayal, see the poster made by the Reichsauschuss für Volksgesundheits-
dienst on 15 September 1935 (from the collections of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum), avail-
able at: http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Nuremberg_laws.jpg&filetimestamp=
20090507035657.
15
Snyder writes that ‘The younger generation of Jews was highly assimilated, to the point that many
had “Belarussian” or “Russian” inscribed as their nationality on their Soviet documents’: Snyder,
Bloodlands, p. 231.

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death either in Kristallnacht or the mass executions of Soviet Poles in late 1938
would not have cared to specify the ‘historical process’ that took their lives.16
But as soon as we put history into motion, and animate the static images that regis-
tered in the minds of people as they lived through single moments of the past, the
distinctions become clear. European Jews, in or outside the bloodlands, may not
have sensed it in 1938, but the Nuremberg laws had formed a cloud of extinction
above them.
Timothy Snyder does present us evidence from the time indicating that it was
possible to discern larger meanings in the snippets available to contemporaries.
Watching the final destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, the Polish poet
Czeslaw Milosz, in his poem, ‘A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto’, intuited
that more was happening than the incineration of several square miles of
Poland’s capital, or the violent deaths of the people caught there. The narrator,
a dead Christian in the rubble of Warsaw, feels horror at the approach of a ‘guar-
dian mole’, an unearthly being, eyelids swollen from reading the ‘great book of the
species’, a small red lamp attached to his forehead, grimly boring through rubble,
capable of sorting the remains of Christians and Jews. ‘What will I tell him, I, a
Jew of the New Testament’, the narrator asks nearing hysteria. ‘My broken
body will deliver me to his sight and he will count me among the helpers of
death: The uncircumcised’.
Czeslaw Milosz had no reason to feel blame for what happened in the Ghetto.
Germany had attacked and overwhelmed Poland, placed its Jews in ghettos, and
now it was killing them. Some Poles welcomed the destruction of the Jews, but
Milosz did not. In 1989 he was recognized as ‘righteous of nations’. Yet the
mole was not looking for perpetrators. Milosz sensed something transpiring that
transcended Warsaw’s ordeal, implicating an ancient tradition to which he, the
poor Christian, undeniably belonged. Behind the images visible to his eyes of
Germans killing Jews, Milosz intuited the deeper truth: the discrimination Jews
endured under the Nazis was unthinkable without centuries of discrimination
under Christian rulers, all of whom were informed by teachings dating back to
early Church fathers, according to which Jews were destined to wander the
earth in punishment to the end of time. The idea of a curse resting upon the
Jews was a substratum of belief in Europe that survived revolution and
secularization, and left Christians mostly unable to find a language to protest
the Holocaust.
Of Milosz’s poem, Timothy Snyder writes that ‘no earthly agent could sort the
Jewish ashes from the Polish ones’. That is true. Ashes are ashes. And in
Snyder’s recounting, the killings in the bloodlands appear to result from the same
kind of process, the ‘accumulation of Nazi and Soviet rule’ (p. 393).When these
two dictatorships occupied the same territory they unleashed processes of mass
killing: of Jews, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Poles. Still, I think one can argue that
the unprecedented energies behind the Holocaust signal what was evident to

16
Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 14.

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Czeslaw Milosz: that unique forces were tapped in that event. This is a relation of
the Holocaust to European history that readers can learn from reading Bloodlands.
Timothy Snyder is a gentle revisionist. He recounts atrocities, many known
only to specialists, with empathy and eloquence that are rare in history writing,
but allows readers to draw their own conclusions. Some may object to arguments
locating the origins of the Holocaust in Christianity; after all the Nazis also were
out to destroy the churches. The contingency of this event is such that it frustrates
anything like the ‘theory’ that Snyder is sceptical of. Without Hitler there would
have been no Holocaust, yet his accession to chancellorship was due not to sub-
terranean forces in European history, but to the machinations of a handful of
unscrupulous politicians operating behind the scenes in January 1933.17 All that
we can say for certain is that without Christian ideas like ‘deicide’ the Holocaust
would have been unthinkable.
Snyder alerts us to the danger that large explanations for mass killing may dis-
tract from what actually happened, thereby impeding deeper understanding.
Perhaps he shares Raul Hilberg’s belief that those who ask big questions wind
up with small answers. One might compare Snyder’s role as pioneer in the
study of the bloodlands to that of a geographer who explores and describes
exotic landforms. Some day geologists, scientists purporting to explain how
those landforms emerged, may follow in his path. Snyder urges us to question
their claims carefully while not closing our eyes to the haunting landforms in
front of our eyes, and what they tell us about totalitarian rule; it was, in Jan
T. Gross’s description, opportunities lost: careers not pursued, studies not under-
taken, books not written. But its central tragedy, Snyder reminds us, was lives
violently interrupted.

Bloodlines
Mark Roseman
Anyone reading the preface may well be initially bemused that Bloodlands has
received so much attention. In the early- to mid-1990s one could perhaps still
argue, as Snyder does, that the killing fields in the East remain concealed from
view in a literature dominated by the camps, but that is certainly not true now,
not even for the wider reading public. One would need to go even further back
in the postwar historiography to reach a time when it was true, as Snyder
claims still to be the case, that we thought the concentration camps (as opposed
to extermination camps) were at the heart of Nazis’ murder regime.18 Readers

17
Henry Ashby Turner, Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
18
Instead, the impact of new publications by Jane Caplan and Nick Wachsman or the recent special
issue of German History shows that the concentration camps proper have actually been long neg-
lected and deserve renewed attention. Jane Caplan and Nikolaus Wachsmann (eds.), Concentration
Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010). Norbert Frei et al.,
‘Forum on Nazi Teror’, German History, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2011, pp. 79 –98.

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should, however, persevere past the pages in roman numerals—for this is a

remarkable book.
The real achievement is a narrative that changes the ground one stands on, a
function as much of the way the story is told, as the story itself. The panorama
is huge, but the vista filled with telling detail, always offered without false
pathos. The prose is a new genre, a blend of statistics and an almost poetic
voice. The book returns again and again to precise body counts of terror,
weaving the figures into detailed examination of the two regimes that between
1933 and 1945 so ruthlessly asserted their will and so murderously collided
with each other in the territory Snyder dubs the ‘bloodlands’. Few books in
recent times have so relentlessly exposed and juxtaposed Nazi Germany’s and
the Soviet Union’s willingness to murder. Particularly, for readers whose expertise
lies in the Holocaust, there will be much to learn here about the Ukrainian famine
1932– 1933, the scale of Stalinist class and nationality actions in the late 1930s,
and the ruthlessness of Stalinist deportations in the post-1945 period. At times,
the Nazis look almost amateurish, though in the end the distinction of the
higher homicide count was theirs, and Snyder’s synthesis of recent work on
German killings of Soviet POWs, and the brutality of German policies in
Warsaw in 1944, provides some of the most unbearable passages of the book.
No one until now has captured the extraordinary territorial concentration and tem-
poral duration of misery in the territory of the ‘bloodlands’. On the one hand, the
Holocaust was geographically highly focused there, while on the other hand,
Snyder shows just how far the Nazis were from being the only killers within
this region. Nazi murder was preceded and paralleled by Soviet killing, but the
most brutal episodes arose from the interaction of the two regimes, and from
other inter-ethnic killings that erupted as a result of that interaction.
Why did the region stretching from Leningrad to Odessa, from Poznan to
Kharkiv, become the ‘bloodlands’? Apart from the fact that European Jewry
was concentrated here, for Snyder by far the most important answer is that
these were the ‘lands between’ the Soviet and Nazi empires, and thus destined
to be the battlefield on which their imperial reach was contested and demarcated.
This was the territory dissected in 1939 by the Molotov–Ribbentrop line, on either
side of which each regime busily set to work, lethally engineering local society in
its image. Here in 1941 Hitler crossed the line and challenged the Soviet presence,
and particularly in territory to the east of the Molotov –Ribbentrop line civilian
mass murder arose out of the interaction between the two (quite apart from the
massive human costs of battle). Few countries in history have, for example,
been subject to the destruction and dislocation that befell Byelorussia. From
1943– 45, Stalin returned, subjecting ever more Westerly regions to what for
many of them was a third consecutive foreign occupation.
A second reason for the concentration of mayhem was that in both Hitler’s and
Stalin’s plans the region’s agricultural resources were essential for future growth,
plans that would require the merciless diversion of those resources from their
current consumers. For Stalin, Ukrainian grain was the key to Soviet industrializ-
ation, either consumed in Soviet cities or sold for export revenues. This was the

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essential background, though far from the whole reason, for the Holodomar. Hitler
wanted to settle German farmers on a great swathe of land from Poland to the
Urals to provide foodstuffs and the racial seedbed for a vastly expanded Reich.
This vast project was predicated on reducing density of land settlement, ejecting
and eliminating most of the current landowners and, in the short term, allowing
tens of millions of Soviet city dwellers to starve so that food could be diverted
to Germany’s wartime needs. The plans to commandeer the Ukrainian breadbas-
ket played a direct role in triggering the truly murderous neglect of Soviet prison-
ers of war. The economics of empire did not in themselves produce the Holocaust,
but they created a flanking economic rationale and a murderous climate, which
made the ‘final solution’s’ evolution towards murder more thinkable.
If geography and grain are the ‘bloodlands’’ key characteristics highlighted
here, one other regional facet is consciously downplayed. The growth of scholarly
interest over the last ten years in collaboration in Eastern Europe, particularly
since the publication of Jan Gross’s Neighbors,19 has created a strong sense of
the role of autochthonous ethnic tensions in energizing and supporting the
Holocaust in particular regional contexts. Omer Bartov has focused much of his
recent energy on the triangular relationships that arose in border regions
between different ethnic communities.20 Beyond Holocaust scholarship, many
recent authors, notably Alexander Prusin in his excellent survey of The lands
between, have seen the region’s decisive facet as being the competition between
a variety of ethnic groups for ‘socio-economic space’ (Prusin) that was not regu-
lated or contained by clean national borders. This competition was not resolved
but exacerbated by dismantling the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, and
creating contested national boundaries after the First World War.21 For Snyder,
however, the borderlands were not so murderous because, say, in some areas,
Jews, Poles and Ukrainians lived cheek by jowl. Rather they were murderous,
he argues, because ruthless great powers committed to radical social engineering
took over and exploited or exacerbated ethnic tensions. No doubt local agency
is underplayed here, particularly the degree to which the fantasy of a Judeo-
Bolshevik conspiracy had anchored itself in many people’s heads in the interwar
period, creating fertile soil for collaboration. Yet Snyder makes some excellent
points about the moral dilemmas collaborators found themselves in, and the
frequent lack of ideological overlap between locals and the powers with whom
they nevertheless ended up collaborating.

19
Jan Tomasz Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
20
See for example Omer Bartov, ‘Interethnic Relations in the Holocaust as Seen through Postwar
Testimonies: Buczacz, East Galicia, 1941–44’, in Doris L. Bergen (ed.), Lessons and Legacies:
Vol. VII: From Generation to Generation (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008),
pp. 101 –124.
21
Alexander V. Prusin, The Lands Between: Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870–1992
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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Both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, despite their very different ideologi-
cal premises, proved strikingly similar in their ruthless suppression and manipu-
lation of the ethnic groupings that fell under their control. For Stalin in the
1930s, ethnic minorities were implicitly or explicitly potential allies of foreign
powers, and needed to be quashed. The class logic of Leninist terror was increas-
ingly infused by concerns of state security in an uncertain international environ-
ment. Class terror in the Kulak operation was unrepresentatively concentrated
in Soviet Ukraine, where getting on for twenty per cent of shootings took place.
Within Soviet Ukraine it disproportionately targeted the Polish minority. Along-
side such nationally inflected class actions the Great Terror brought a new
phenomenon—the killings explicitly of ethnic groups in the various nationalities’
actions, most notable in the assault on the imaginary Polish Military Organization.
In 1939, Hitler and Stalin cooperated in Poland’s destruction. Snyder’s account
brings out with striking clarity the parallels in form, scale and brutality of the
two dictatorships’ assault on Polish elites in their zones of former Poland, in
order to destroy potential centres of national opposition. It is an unusual perspec-
tive for Holocaust scholars to see the Nazis as somewhat amateurish in terror. The
NKVD was more disciplined, the Soviet killing and deportation operations more
tightly centrally coordinated, secrecy better kept and the elimination of the edu-
cated classes more complete. Yet the overwhelming fact is the commitment of
both regimes to engineering. Each killed over 100,000 Poles before the Nazi inva-
sion of the Soviet Union, and taken together they deported a million more.
It was after 1941 that the ‘bloodlands’ truly earned their title. Far more than the
parallels between the two regimes and their ambitions, it was the clash between
them that unleashed and shaped mass killing programmes. Some of the book’s
most interesting and original insights concern this interaction. First, there was
the ‘belligerent complicity’, where the two regime’s aims reinforced each other.
Both were keen, to take one well-known example, to see the Warsaw uprising
fail, the Nazis for obvious reasons, Stalin because he did not want to be con-
strained in Poland by the élan and self-confidence that would follow a successful
uprising. Second, there was reciprocal interaction, whereby the ruthlessness and
unconcern for human life of the one dictatorship goaded or reinforced the
other’s destructiveness. In 1941, Stalin’s lack of concern for the lives of his
own troops prevented his officers from ceding ground when it was opportune, a
fact that hugely increased the number of Soviet POWs falling into German
hands. In Belarus 1942 –43, the ‘mutually assured destruction’ of Soviet-directed
partisan warfare without regard to civilian costs, on the one hand, and unbelieva-
ble brutal German reprisals, on the other, together with the accompanying German
extractions for forced labour and the later Soviet deportations to the Gulag, meant
that by the end of the war a staggering half the population had been murdered or
removed. Third, and Snyder is particularly good here, the switches in occupation
regime, particularly in the regions that had been under Soviet control 1939/40–
41, generated and shaped local involvement in killings. As is now well estab-
lished, Neighbors understated the degree to which Germans had coordinated the
wave of apparently spontaneous pogrom actions from Kovno to Jedwabne.

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At the same time it is clear that the Nazis were able to mobilize a wave of anger
following the revelations of NKVD killings in the final days before the German
invasion. Occasionally, of course the brutality of one regime could actually
protect groups from the ruthlessness of the other. Jewish refugees from Western
Poland who had flown into Soviet occupied territory in 1939 found themselves
the targets of Stalin’s paranoid resettlement policies, because they refused
Soviet passports, fearing this might bar them from return to their homeland
after the war. The result is that they were deported east. Of the 78,399 people
deported from Poland in the 1940 action, eighty-four per cent were Jewish. Yet
though the deportees suffered extraordinarily tough times in the Soviet Union,
this brutal action protected them from the Holocaust.
The Soviet Union’s tenacity denied the Nazis their prize of living space. A key
argument in Snyder’s volume is that it was this failure that pushed the Nazis to
reorient their policy towards attainable goals and maximize the assault on the
Jews. One can see the appeal of such a claim for Snyder, since it offers both an
example of entangled history—the Holocaust becomes the result of the clash
between the two powers in the bloodlands—and also of parallel history, since
Snyder argues that Stalin’s murderous refusal to feed the Ukrainians 1932– 33
was in effect also a response to failure—in this case punishing the peasants for
the failure of Stalin’s collectivization policies. As far as the Holocaust is con-
cerned, this thesis has a familiar and incontestable version, and a more distinctive,
original and yet far more questionable one. The well-established element is that
the assault on the Soviet Union was in two senses decisive for the transition to
mass murder. First, the USSR was seen as a Judeo-Bolshevik regime, and thus,
for the first time in a Nazi assault on an enemy country, Jews were defined as
part of the supporting structure of the state, and their elimination a political
goal in pursuit of removing the existing system. This had nothing to do with the
‘bloodlands’ per se, but it was in that territory that its application was felt.
Since the orders given to the killing squads were verbal, and the available
written glosses only retroactive, we do not know exactly who the Nazi squads
were tasked with eliminating, but the practice of both the Einsatzgruppen and
many army units shows that from the very beginning, Jewish men were being tar-
geted in a genocidal way. Second, once Operation Barbarossa was underway, the
inability to gain Soviet territory meant that the plans to dump Europe’s Jews there
(which had emerged after previous ‘solutions’ to the European Jewish ‘problem’
had failed) had come to naught. Thus whatever territorial solutions had remained
for the rest of European Jewry even after Soviet Jews were being shot now began
to merge into murder plans, conjoined with some or other version of using the con-
demned for labour before they died. Taken together, the invasion of the USSR and
the failure to gain territory were thus undoubtedly transformative in accelerating
the shift in Nazi thinking from punitive territorial solutions to outright murder.
The more distinctive version of the thesis—that the European Holocaust
emerged as displacement and revenge for failure in the Soviet Union—is much
less likely. As other reviewers have pointed out, there is no evidence in summer
1941 that Hitler thought he had failed. There is certainly an acceleration and a

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radicalization of killings in the summer, with Himmler playing a key role in incit-
ing his men to kill women and children too, but it is not clear that Himmler was
operating with any sense that he was compensating for failure. The indications are
that the SS had learned the army would not in any way obstruct its plans, and that
the genocidal implications of its assault on Jewish men had made the elimination
of young, elderly and female ‘useless eaters’ logical and feasible. It is certainly
true, as Snyder argues, that economic considerations began to trump politico-
security ones, so that women and children became more likely targets rather
than less. The process of osmosis and dissemination of murder in the second
half of 1941 is a complex one, and involves large swathes of the Nazi adminis-
tration in many different contexts. Regional commanders adopted policies of
mass murder of Jews outside the Soviet sphere before it was clear there was a
coordinated policy—witness the military’s genocidal response to partisan
attacks in Serbia, or the security police shootings in Galician territory that had
been attached to the General-Government. Approaches to Jews in Poland grew
steadily more murderous, as indicated for example by the new prohibitions in
freedom of movement and the shoot-on-sight orders of autumn 1941, which
was effectively a license to murder. Within Germany, pressure grew on Hitler
to license the deportation of German Jews and free up housing for deserving
Aryans, and Hitler’s acquiescence led, as Snyder points out, to murderous clear-
ings of Lodz and other ghettos to make space for German Jewish deportees.
The language of a variety of important officials in the Ministry for the Eastern ter-
ritories and in Security Police, SS and civilian administrations in Poland, shows
how the territorial solutions were being replaced by imaginations of murder.
Test gassing sites were being developed. This gradual unfolding is all much
more visible than any clear moment of decision, either a revenge moment in the
summer, or, as Snyder contends (following Christian Gerlach), a follow-up
Hitler decision in December. The evidence that the latter decision took place—
or that Hitler ever made clear, semi-public announcements on such matters—is
quite weak.
In any event, given the nature of the processes involved, to make a case like this
involves going far beyond the bloodlands, and taking a system-wide approach.
Snyder reads comprehensively and well, but such an analysis is simply beyond
the book’s scope. After all, one of the distinctive characteristics of the Nazi’s
Final Solution is indeed that it was so global, or at least so continental, in its
reach. It is true that because the killing centres were established in the areas of
highest concentration of Jews, even Jews from western and southern Europe
were brought to be killed there. The bloodlands were soaked with their blood
too. But the geography of killing centres is a lesser matter than the reach of
killing policies. The volume’s regional focus should not be allowed to obscure
the distinctive continental ambitions of the Nazis’ Jewish policy.
What then can the book tell us about the two regimes as a whole, beyond the
suggestive indications of their style, ruthlessness, utopian planning and mixture
of rationality and irrationality? Snyder quite rightly challenges the idea
that they were exemplars of modernity, even if they were just as clearly not

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anti-modern, whatever that might mean. He briefly offers, as a more fruitful con-
ceptual framework, the idea that they both exploited the possibilities for imperi-
alism, but this theme is not really explored. Clearly both thought about
developing and competing in a world in which Britain and France still controlled
colonies all over the world. De facto both acquired empires, yet I would argue that
both were in a sense ‘post-imperial’—the Soviet Union in that it legitimized its
acquisitions in the name of equality and unity, the Nazis in that their hyper-nation-
alism involved no real acceptance of heterogeneity or hierarchy. The Nazis knew
only the expanded ethnic nation, and the slaves who would serve it. Empire as
such does not seem a very satisfactory way of thinking about what either power
was doing, at least without acknowledging that these were imperialists who did
not believe in empire, in an age in which the legitimacy of empires was being
called into question. The overwhelming impression rather is of something akin
to totalitarianism, without any clear theory being offered of what accounted for
the two states’ ruthlessness and utopianism. The reduction of much of the
action to Hitler and Stalin is understandable as a space-saver, but seems a back-
ward step compared with the complexity of recent accounts of the two regimes’
dynamics. Snyder provokes us to rethink what is usable from totalitarian theory,
but a regional study like this can scarcely be expected to provide a replacement.
As befits the book’s strengths, some of the most moving apercus in the con-
clusion concern the importance of integrated narratives and of the power of
numbers in transcending selective and one-sided national or ethnic-religious
myths of victimhood. My only quibble is that this account of the historian’s
task is strangely ahistorical—somehow placing the historian’s ability to produce
a compelling narrative outside the trajectory of national and international mem-
ories. The truth surely is that ‘memory’ and historical reconstruction move in a
mysterious dance together, and that there are limits to the degree to which histor-
ians are able to stand outside the given narratives, or burst the bubble of national
mythmaking, however trenchant their prose or accurate their statistics. This book
would not have been possible a few years ago; its appearance is itself the product
of a particular conjuncture, a post-Cold War, post-Holocaust moment. But, thus
enabled, more than almost any other recent work, Bloodlands makes consideration
of totalitarianism urgent again, with its suggestive account of parallels and sym-
metries in the two regimes’ lethal clockwork. In that sense, the book’s core
achievement is indeed not exactly to tell us something different, certainly not to
offer big new answers, but to tell the story of Nazi and Soviet violence in a
way that renders that savage chapter anew, and enduringly changes what we see.

On the importance of synthesis and the productiveness of comparison

Andriy Portnov
Timothy Snyder’s book deals with the deliberate murder of fourteen million
people in the heart of Europe, carried out by both the Nazi and the Soviet
regimes. The book’s title offers up a new metaphor to cover the region where
those killings took place—’Bloodlands’, instead of the more familiar and

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fashionable ‘borderlands’—the lands ‘from central Poland to western Russia,

through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states’. Snyder stresses the fact that
the bloodlands are ‘no political territory, real or imagined, they are simply
where Europe’s most murderous regimes did their most murderous work’ (p.
xviii).
Snyder is well aware that the Holocaust, the other German mass killing policies,
and the Stalinist mass murders have become three different histories, even though
in historical fact they shared a place and time. He tries to correct this view by inte-
grating the East European experience into European history and into present-day
thinking on Europe’s past and future. This is why he demonstrates special careful-
ness and empathy to the specifics of East European experiences: the double occu-
pation, first Soviet, then German, during and after the war, which created risks and
temptations that were unknown in the West (p. 190), and that also made possible
such painfully paradoxical situations like the cases of Jews turning to ex-perpetra-
tors of the Holocaust for help (for example, the Jewish commanders of Belarusian
partisan units, who recruited amongst the twelve thousand or so former local
policemen that had left German service after the news of the Soviet victory at
Stalingrad reached Belarus [p. 243]).
The author asserts his allegiance to three imperatives: no past event should be
viewed as being beyond historical understanding; one must reflect upon the possi-
bility of alternative choices, and devote orderly chronological attention to all of
Stalinist and Nazi policies; and the focus should not be limited to any single per-
secuted group; rather, different stories and memories should be brought together
(p. xix). Snyder describes the interwar political order and geopolitical balances
in Europe, before turning to the story of Soviet famines, class and national
terror in the USSR, ‘Molotov –Ribbentrop Europe’, the Final Solution and Nazi
death factories, postwar ethnic cleansing and Stalinist antisemitism.
Snyder offers us fascinating and informative, disturbing and exciting reading.
This book is more than a scholarly monograph; it represents an excellent synthesis
based on a profound and comprehensive knowledge of the relevant languages and
literature. It goes without saying that the bibliography of such a book could never
be completely exhaustive, but Snyder has chosen his secondary literature judi-
ciously. Nevertheless, I do feel compelled to point out that the book could
benefit from drawing upon some additional sources, such as the memoirs of
Shlomo Venezia—one of the Sonderkommando members in Auschwitz (pub-
lished under the title Sonderkommando in Paris in 2007 and translated into
Polish in 2009), and the writings of Lev Kopelev, who tells a disturbing personal
story of both the Ukrainian famine and Soviet war crimes in Eastern Prussia. It
would also be interesting to read Snyder’s evaluation of Harald Welzer’s con-
clusions on the phenomena of the participation of ‘ordinary people’ in Nazi
mass crimes, or of Jacques Semelin’s comparative analysis of the political
usages of massacre and genocide.22
22
Harald Welzer, Täter: Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden (Frankfurt:
Fischer, 2005); Jacques Semelin, Purify and Destroy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

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Bloodlands is an example of brilliant, convincing and moving stylistics. Snyder

has applied a number of narrative strategies in order to achieve this effect. One
such strategy is the use of numbers to disrupt our certainties and conventional nar-
ratives and images of the war. The author informs us, for example, that in the late
1930s the Soviet system of concentration camps was around twenty-five times
larger than the German one at the time, and that none of the execution statistics
in Hitler’s Germany even came close to matching the Soviet execution of
nearly four hundred thousand people in the course of eighteen months in 1937 –
38, under Order 00447 (p. 86). Likewise, in telling the story of the 1944
Warsaw Uprising, Snyder stresses the fact that more Poles were killed during
the Warsaw Uprising alone than Japanese died in the atomic bombing of Hir-
oshima and Nagasaki (p. 406), and that, almost certainly, more Jews fought in
the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944 than in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of
April 1943 (p. 302).
The second strategy employed here is the highly effective use of vivid and
unflinching descriptions of the actual crimes. Snyder tells the story of the
NKVD quotas for the number of ‘enemies of the people’ to be shot, which were
sent out in advance from the centre to all the regional branches of the NKVD,
and of the German quotas for the Jewish police to be deported to death camps.
He painstakingly reconstructs the killing in all its horrible detail to deepen the
human impact of the story. He tells us, for example, the story of the Kuropaty
mass execution site in Belarus, where the NKVD forced their victims to sit side
by side, their heads in a line, so that a single bullet could be fired through
several skulls at once (p. 99); and he provides a detailed description of the organ-
ization of the Treblinka death factory with its mock train station and ‘clinic’.
Snyder pays special attention to evoking emotional linkages to the described
events. Writing about the artificial famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932– 33, he
achieves this effect by employing a style that recalls Primo Levi’s ‘gray zone’:
‘The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves
died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died.
Those who refused to kill their fellow man died. Parents who resisted cannibalism
died before their children did’ (p. 50). Elsewhere Snyder uses individual stories to
open a window onto the past for the reader. He tells the story of the staff writer for
the party newspaper Pravda, which denied the famine, who, one day in 1933,
received a letter from his father informing him that his mother had died of star-
vation (p. 55). He quotes the message scrawled on the wall of Kovel synagogue
where Jews were imprisoned before being shot: ‘I am strangely calm, though it
is hard to die at twenty’ (p. 223). Telling the story of the deportations of
Warsaw Jews to Treblinka, Snyder retrieves for us the last words of a small girl
taken by the policemen: ‘I know that you are a good man, Sir. Be so kind as to
not take me away. My mama left for just a moment. . .’ (p. 265).
Engaged writing serves the aim of making visible the individual human beings
that comprise and are normally concealed by the tremendous numbers of those
killed, and developing the reader’s sense of the individuality of each victim.
We read the last words from the diary of Polish officer Adam Solski, shot by

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the NKVD at Katyn: ‘They asked about my wedding ring, which I. . .’ (p. 137) The
German blockade of Leningrad is portrayed from the perspective of eleven-year-
old Tania Savicheva and her diary. The horrors of Treblinka are illustrated by the
story of Chil Rajchman, forced to work as a labourer at the death factory, who
came across his own sister’s dress while sorting through the clothing of gassed
people (p. 271).
Another narrative strategy applied by the author relies on the stories of intel-
lectuals who proved capable of recognizing the crime (often against the main-
stream), and who tried to draw public attention to the mass killings. One such
figure was George Orwell, who spoke of the Ukrainian famine as a central
example of a black truth that artists of language had covered up with bright
colours, and who in February 1945 called the planned expulsion of the
Germans an ‘enormous crime’ that could not be ‘carried through’ (p. 315).
The second was Arthur Koestler, who had seen the Soviet famine with his own
eyes and who at first believed that the starving were ‘enemies of the people
who preferred begging to work’. For Koestler, it was the Stalin – Hitler pact, a
sign that the Soviet Union was no longer an ideological state, which prompted
his separation from communism. During the war, Koestler, together with
Orwell, protested the position of the British press that often echoed the Stalinist
line, presenting the Poles as reckless and wayward, rather than as British allies
seeking to take back their own capital (p. 306). The third was Vasily Grossman,
who had seen both the Ukrainian famine and the Nazi death factories with his own
eyes, and whose literary hero stated that the key to both National Socialism and
Stalinism was their ability to deprive groups of human beings of their right to be
regarded as human (p. 387).
Snyder convincingly shows the difficulties involved in telling the unpleasant
truth about historical events in interwar Western Europe, where ‘it was indeed dif-
ficult to criticize the Soviet regime without seeming to endorse fascism and Hitler’
(p. 74), or in the postwar Soviet Union, where the memory of the murder of the
Jews was incompatible with the Stalinist notion of the ‘Great Patriotic War’
(p. 345).
Those intellectuals who dared to challenge the conventional wisdom (a group
that also included figures such as Hannah Arendt and Gareth Jones) were in the
absolute minority, and sometimes even found themselves in complete isolation
after expressing such views. These were figures who were brave enough to
oppose the majority, to broaden the measures of political correctness, to risk
their own intellectual reputation.
Snyder’s admiration for such figures is clear, and he also tries to confront a
number of widespread stereotypes in his own book. In the introduction, for
example, he reminds us that despite the fact that Auschwitz is now firmly estab-
lished in popular memory as the most familiar killing site of the bloodlands, in
reality, far more Jews were gassed in other German death factories where
almost everyone died, but whose names are much less often recalled: Treblinka,
Chełmno, Sobibór, Bełżec (p. viii). Snyder underlines the erroneousness of the
concentration camp as a symbol of both Soviet and Nazi atrocities, pointing out

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that in fact ‘the tremendous majority of the mortal victims of both the German and
the Soviet regimes never saw a concentration camp’ (p. xiii).
Statements like: ‘The most persecuted European national minority in the
second half of the 1930s was not the four hundred thousand or so German Jews
but six hundred thousand or so Soviet Poles’ (p. 89), may surprise many of Blood-
lands’ readers, Western and Eastern alike—and that is precisely why the book is
so valuable. Quoting Anna Akhmatova’s words about ‘innocent Russia’, Snyder
reminds us that ‘Innocent Russia was a multinational country, Leningrad was a
cosmopolitan city, and its national minorities were people most at risk. In the
city of Leningrad in 1937 and 1938, Poles were thirty-four times more likely to
be arrested than their fellow Soviet citizens’ (p. 97).
There are other ways, too, in which Snyder highlights the need to correct the
received notions about Nazi atrocities. In particular, he points out that at the
end of 1941, the largest group of mortal victims of German rule in occupied
Poland to date was neither the native Poles nor the native Jews, but Soviet prison-
ers of war who had been deliberately starved to death in special concentration
camps (p. 180). Again, he deploys a compelling statistic to drive home his
point: as many Soviet POWs died on a single day in autumn 1941, as did
British and American prisoners of war over the course of the entire Second
World War (p. 182).
One of the most important features of Snyder’s book is his responsiveness
towards the East European experience and memory, and his willingness to
present it to Western audiences. For example, he stresses that during the years
that both Stalin and Hitler were in power, in Ukraine ‘more people were killed
than anywhere else in the bloodlands, or in Europe, or in the world’ (p. 20);
that ‘ethnic Poles suffered more than any other group within the Soviet Union
during the Great Terror’ (p. 104); and that, by the end of the war, fully half the
population of Belarus had been either killed or deported, something that ‘cannot
be said of any other European country’ (p. 251).
Snyder also demonstrates exemplary care in his terminology. Thus, for
example, he writes of Soviet, not Russian, prisoners of war (thereby avoiding a
very typical common mistake in the Western scholarship), and of Belarus, not
White Russia. He also decides to call the Soviet POWs who were trained by the
Germans to assist in their murderous politics ‘Trawniki men’, not Ukrainians,
although the latter formulation was widely used by the survivors themselves.
The fundamental question that arises from a careful reading of Bloodlands
might be formulated this way: why was it precisely those lands, in the heart of
Europe, that were turned into bloodlands? What made it possible for Stalin and
Hitler to carry out their politics? How were the Nazi and Soviet terror correlated?
And what might we learn from comparing the two political systems and two
societies?
Actually, Snyder himself poses a very similar question: how could (how can) so
many human lives be brought to a violent end? (p. 387). He also openly declares
the necessity of comparison: ‘The Nazi and the Stalinist systems must be com-
pared, not so much to understand the one or the other but to understand our

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times and ourselves’ (p. 380). He even gives some evidence and observations in
this direction throughout the book. He reminds us that in the early 1930s, the
Soviet and Nazi governments shared the appearance of a capacity to respond to
the world economic crisis. Both regimes radiated dynamism at a time when
liberal democracy seemed unable to rescue people from poverty (p. 17), and
both had in common a preoccupation with the agricultural sector. and a belief
in the efficacy of direct and violent state interventions. He illustrates the inter-
relations of some developments in both countries, explaining, for example, how
Stalin’s uncompromising stand on foreign policy during collectivization and
famine in the Soviet Union helped Hitler win the elections of both July 1932
and March 1933 (p. 62), and how, in turn, the rise of Hitler created an opportunity
to present the Soviet Union as the bulwark of European civilization (p. 66).
Snyder lists similarities (Stalin exploited the Kirov assassination in December
1934 much as Hitler had used the Reichstag fire the previous year), differences
(the German operation in Poland was less coordinated and less successful in elim-
inating Polish educated strata than the Soviet one) and continuity in policies of
terror (the former NKVD facility at Tuchinka near Minsk was later used as a
Nazi prison and execution site (p. 230), and the NKVD took over the facilities
of Warsaw concentration camp created on the ruins of the ghetto (p. 311). But
he never tries to look more closely at the question of why it was that the Soviet
repressive machine proved to be so effective? What was it that made it possible
for Stalin to kill ‘his own citizens no less efficiently than Hitler killed the citizens
of other countries’ (p. x)?
Snyder tells us that Stalin ‘had transformed the market into the plan, farmers
into slaves, and the wastes of Siberia and Kazakhstan into a chain of concentration
camps’ (p. 25). But we need to ask: how did he manage to do so? How were people
convinced to follow his vision? Why did masses of people believe Stalinist propa-
ganda? What made this civil war within Soviet society possible? The book men-
tions the fact that during the Great Famine in Ukraine 25,000 workers and 5,000
youth organization members were shipped to the countryside after being
instructed that the peasants were responsible for food shortages in the towns.
But in order to understand Stalinist terror we need to know: who were ‘Stalin’s
willing executioners’, and how were ‘ordinary’ Soviet citizens turned into perpe-
trators? This issue is of special importance because of the lack of serious research
on Soviet perpetrators and the absence of publications comparable to Christopher
Browning’s Ordinary Men or Harald Welzer’s Perpetrators.
Snyder describes both the Nazi and the Stalinist systems as transformative
utopias. But the leaders’ attitudes towards their own societies were very different.
Nazism intended to transform Europe into the living space for a master German
race that already existed. This race was supposed to be cleansed of mentally ill,
homosexual and other ‘asocial elements’, and its living space was supposed to
be cleansed of the Jews. The Soviet regime intended to create a new Soviet
man and treated its own entire population as raw material for creative social
work (through terror). This was one of the reasons why, as Snyder puts it, the
Germans generally killed people who were not Germans, whereas the Soviets

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usually killed people who were Soviet citizens (p. 391). But, despite this funda-
mental difference, both regimes relied on mass support in society and proved
their efficiency in recruiting ‘ordinary men’ for extraordinary killing work.
It seems that the analysis of regime –society relations is of crucial importance
for understanding the differences between Hitler and Stalin. Robert Gellately, who
coined the notion of ‘consensus dictatorship’, stresses that unlike Stalin, Hitler
wanted to establish a consensus on which he could move forward with his
chosen course, not against society, but with its backing.23 This consensus was
fluid, dynamic and depended heavily on the oncoming and ongoing war. At the
same time, Hitler was very circumspect when it came to public opinion; for
example, in summer 1941 he called a stop to Aktion T4—the elimination of the
mentally diseased—in response to disapproval expressed by the public and
clergy. Until the last years of the war, the members of Volksgemeinschaft experi-
enced unprecedented levels of wellbeing and profited from the highest standards
of life in Europe. In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, none of the groups
(including the NKVD staff and their families) ever experienced comparable secur-
ity and social confidence under Stalin.
In this context the disturbing question, why and how did the Germans believe in
their racial superiority, becomes especially burning. Or, as Polish historian Jerzy
Borejsza put it in his monograph on Hitler’s ‘anti-Slavism’: how were millions of
Germans convinced to share this racist doctrine? To what extent did millions of
Germans identify themselves with the notion of racial superiority?24
All of the above, and many more, problems still require further research. And
the development of such research, like the development of public debate, necess-
arily rests on masterful works of synthesis like Bloodlands, which not only sum-
marize our knowledge, but broaden our historical imagination, sensitivity and
concern.

Entanglements, dictators and systems

Michael David-Fox
Someone recently joked that academic books have become like the general popu-
lation: either anorexic or obese. While Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands by design
belongs to the genre of blockbuster, it has no excess poundage. It represents a
broad-based synthesis, a work of breadth and erudition that ‘connects the dots’
in East European, German and Soviet fields in numerous ways. It puts together dis-
parate national historiographies in various languages; it sets both the Holocaust
and the Great Terror into a broader context of mass killing from the early
1930s to the late 1940s; it links the world of policy to implementation and
victims’ experience. As a synthesis aiming to capture the broadest possible

23
Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2001).
24
Jerzy Borejsza, Śmieszne sto milionów Słowian. Wokół światopogla˛du Hitlera (Warszawa:
Neriton, 2006).

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educated audience and a scholarly intervention intended to overcome the parochi-

alisms dividing specialists in German, East European, Soviet and Holocaust
history, Bloodlands pursues a grand strategy of narrative ‘show’ over analytical
‘tell’, reinforced by the book’s message about not placing the theoretical cart in
front of the empirical horse. ‘Before we draw such theoretical conclusions,
about modernity or anything else, we must understand what actually happened’,
Snyder insists in a Rankean turn of phrase in the conclusion. ‘For the time
being, Europe’s epoch of mass killing is overtheorized and misunderstood’
(p. 383).
This strategy remains in place for perhaps the most consequential linkage the
book presents, what might be termed the entanglements between Nazism and Sta-
linism. Although this is one of the master themes of the book, this major dimen-
sion of the work appears to have remained all but unexamined in the flood of non-
academic reviews. Far more attention has been paid to the regional or territorial
thesis embodied in the title. But in my view perhaps the most significant feature
of the book for scholars in the field is its move beyond the traditional comparative
mode of considering the two regimes, toward treating them throughout in tandem
and in terms of how they responded to one another.
This type of analysis begins with the opening chapter on the Ukrainian famine
of 1932 –33. Hitler ‘used the Ukrainian famine in his election campaign, making
the event a matter of furious ideological politics before it was established as his-
torical fact’. Hitler’s stump speech thus made the Stalinist man-made atrocity into
a potent argument against all ‘Marxism in practice’ (p. 61). The book goes on to
discuss broader ways in which the two dictators and their murderous regimes were
intertwined, all of them relating to the book’s specific focus on deliberate mass
killings. First, the Nazi plan to deindustrialize the Soviet Union and turn it into
a vast agrarian colony of the Reich, so crucial to the unfolding of the Holocaust
and mass murder of Soviet POWs, and so many others on the Eastern Front,
was a direct attempt to play Stalinism in reverse and invert the forced industrial-
ization of the Stalin revolution. Second, the book’s treatment of the collusions
between the two regimes, most notably during the carving up of Poland in
‘Molotov-Ribbentrop Europe’ and later during the Warsaw Uprising, leads to
the conclusion that many victims of mass killing in the territories between
Germany and the USSR can or should be counted as victims of both fascism
and communism. Third, the terror and radically unconventional warfare of
‘revenge’—notably, the tight link between Nazi anti-partisan hysteria, mass
murder and genocide but also including Soviet responses during and after the
war—is depicted in terms of a dynamic of escalation and interacting barbarization
on the ground. Finally, the book is in key places throughout structured around nar-
rating the mutual political logics of both regimes, frequently through the minds of
Hitler and Stalin. In this sense, the book’s subtitle is appropriate. I will have more
to say about this below.
The English term ‘entanglements’, originally a translation of the French
croisée, has become unencumbered by the sometimes opaque desiderata of his-
toire croisée; rather, the term has come to imply not a simple borrowing or

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interaction but a persistent and deep-seated reflexivity. Indeed, the entire con-
ception of the ‘bloodlands’ is predicated on a kind of entanglement of place, in
which the actions and perceptions of both regimes worked in tandem and in suc-
cession on specific locales. Snyder does not use the word in the book. Nor does he
systematically analyze or reflect upon (with the exception of his discussion of
Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism) the rich vein of literature on Stalin-
ism and Nazism. With the exception of a few endnotes, he chooses not to directly
engage the recent work on entangled histories as an approach in the manner begun
by the pieces by Michael Geyer, Karl Schlögel and Katerina Clark in the book
Beyond Totalitarianism or in the special issue of Kritika on ‘Russia and
Germany as Entangled Histories’.25 The book’s introduction, where scholarly
works traditionally situate themselves in the historiography, makes no reference
to the existing literature in any area.
Snyder’s contribution to Stalinism and Nazism as entangled histories thus
remains implicit, and its place in the literature needs to be assessed. But what is
implicit is no less significant. There is no archival file one can open that is labelled
entanglements. Much of the mutual observation between Nazism and Stalinism
was covert or for obvious reasons taboo. Developing this mode of historical analy-
sis therefore involves deep immersion into both sides and the logics of both
systems and their intersection in specific areas. Bloodlands is a distinct step
forward in furthering this approach, which supersedes the ‘lesser evil’ debate.
In my view, one of the most important of the book’s contributions is to give
impetus to this mode of analyzing the two regimes.
That said, I would argue that the book’s treatment of Nazi –Soviet entangle-
ments is at once too broad and too narrow. It is too broad in that the narrative
stands above most of the actual mechanisms by which the regimes interacted
with one another over time. To be sure, there is still much more to be done to
research the two regimes’ variegated contacts, mutual perceptions and operational
analyses and information-gathering—particularly as they were connected (or
not) to ideological understandings and misunderstandings.26 Nevertheless, any
deep investigation of entanglements must grapple with the dynamics of how
they worked historically. Snyder’s handling of this question is too narrow in the
sense that those Nazi –Soviet interactions he identifies most explicitly in the
work—such as the joint actions in Poland after 1939 and reprisal campaigns

25
Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (eds), Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Com-
pared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); ‘Fascination and enmity: Russia and
Germany as entangled histories, 1914– 45’, special issue of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and
Eurasian History, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Summer 2009), pp. 415– 745.
26
See, for example, Gerd Koenen, Der Russland-Komplex: Die Deutschen und der Osten 1900–
1945 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005). On influence through repudiation, see Francine Hirsch, Empire
of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 2005), Chapters 6–7; for a biographical mode, see the monumental study of Stalin’s
chief German advisor in the early 1930s by Jean-François Fayet, Karl Radek: Biographie politique
(Bern: Peter Lang, 2004).

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during the war—centre on the act of killing itself. This is of course logical given
the focus of the work, but more needs to be done to pursue the deep-seated if often
elusive ideological entanglements that ultimately generate killings. For example,
Hitler’s stump speech about the Ukrainian famine is in and of itself not a full-
fledged entanglement; it is merely suggestive of more deep-seated ways in
which Nazism and the German conservative revolution more broadly were,
from the outset, enmeshed with Bolshevism and Stalinism. The National Socialist
use of Stalin-era atrocities went far beyond Hitler and this one instance, and pro-
ceeded throughout the 1930s.27 On the other hand, the way the narrative under-
scores the synergies of the two regimes’ actions on the territories in between, at
work on multiple levels, both when they were cooperating and attacking one
another, is at the heart of the book’s achievement and encapsulates the potential-
ities of this line of investigation.
What are the implications of opening the book in 1932–33 with the Ukrainian
famine? The book’s structure, in this respect as elsewhere, is logically dictated by
the focus on deliberate mass killings in the lands between Stalin and Hitler.
However, this framing has interpretive implications. It creates a framework for
explaining political violence that not just primarily but exclusively revolves
around the two dictators and their post-1929 and post-1933 regimes.28 Crucial
additional elements—the interpretive inclusion of the radical post-1914 cata-
clysms that launched the regimes, the diffusion of ideology and practices on a
mass scale, and ultimately the systemic or totalizing dimensions of Stalinism
and Nazism—are in danger of falling by the wayside.
In terms of the central theme of entanglements, moreover, understanding of the
radical break after the First World War in generating Bolshevism in practice and
Nazism’s trajectory has now been complemented by a very suggestive body of
work on how the two movements were intertwined. The ferocious anti-Bolshe-
vism that came to the fore in Nazism after 1933 and 1941, for example, must
be balanced against ideological fascination among conservative revolutionaries
with aspects of Bolshevism and Stalinism. These were most explicit in pre-
1933 German fascism—the entire tradition of German ‘National Bolshevism’—
but they left traces even after.29 To begin with 1932–33 is also to cut Stalinism
off from Leninism and Bolshevism, and to sever the ‘Great Break’ policies that

27
Jan C. Behrends, ‘Back from the USSR: the Anti-Comintern’s publications on Soviet Russia in
Nazi Germany (1935–41)’, Kritika, Vol. 10, No. 3, 2009, pp. 527–556.
28
For a complementary history that begins, by contrast, with the idea of Greater Germany in the
nineteenth century and the First World War in the East, see Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire:
How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin Books, 2008).
29
Michael Kellogg, The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National
Socialism, 1917–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Otto-Ernst Schüddenkopf,
National-bolschewismus in Deutschland 1918–1933, rev. ed. (Frankfurt: Verlag Ullstein, 1972,
original 1960); Louis Dupeux, ‘“National-bolchevisme”: Strategie communiste et dynamique con-
servatrice. Essai sur les different sens de L’Expression en Allegmagne, sous la Republique de
Weimar (1919–1933)’ (PhD thesis, University of Paris I, 1974; Lille: Atelier reproduction des

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led to famine from the anti-peasant ‘war communist’ policies, which helped
produce famine in the early 1920s.30 In what ways did the ideological Civil
War of 1918–20 and the anti-Jewish pogroms in 1918 –19 in the ‘bloodlands’
leave legacies for Stalinism and for the Holocaust in the East?31
The interpretive absence of these earlier cataclysms is not just a matter of
leaving something out. They point to a more profound issue: an implicit stress
on the two dictators and their apparatuses of power to the exclusion of the way
movements, generations, groups of perpetrators and entire societies were caught
up with the extreme new regimes of left and right. In other words, I am suggesting
that the study of entanglements must encompass the intersection and clash of these
two unprecedented, violent, utopian and evolving systems—not just leaders, not
just states and not just ideologies.
Could Bloodlands have been subtitled not Europe between Hitler and Stalin,
but Europe between Nazism and Stalinism? Could the introduction, similarly
entitled ‘Hitler and Stalin’, have been similarly renamed? Snyder deserves
credit for making a concerted effort to connect the mindsets and perceptions of
Stalin and Hitler to their top lieutenants and the mid-level and local perpetrators,
to chart the implications for the local states and societies in between Germany and
the Soviet Union, and at the same time to include consideration of the experience
of individual victims. Here once again Snyder’s contribution is implicit in the
book, and once again it is an achievement of breadth and synthesis. There is
also an elegant and powerful comparison of the two systems in the conclusion.
On the other hand, there are many passages in the book where the implicit logic
of actions is linked to the mindset and psychology of Stalin or Hitler, and this
drives the narrative.
The contrast between the two systems in the conclusion is preceded by a section
on a fundamental homology between the two murderous dictators:
. . . utopias were advanced, compromised by reality, and then implemented as mass murder
. . . Stalin’s utopia was to collectivize the Soviet Union in nine to twelve weeks; Hitler’s was
to conquer the Soviet Union in the same span of time . . . 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 necess-
ary or desirable.
There is a profound insight here. But it could be, and I think needs to be,
extended, if we think about, for example, both collectivization and Barbarossa
as products of the two systems, which escalated both by the will and calculation
of the leaders but also by so powerfully engaging core and fundamental aspirations

theses, 1976); Erik van Ree, ‘The concept of “National Bolshevism”: an Interpretative essay’,
Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol. 6, No. 3, 2001, pp. 289–307.
30
Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914– 1921
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).
31
Here see Oleg Budnitskii, Rossiiskie evrei mezhdu krasnymi i belymi, 1917–1920 (Moscow:
ROSSPEN, 2005).

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of the two regimes and their adherents. Much of the most influential literature on
political violence of the last decade or so has been trying to grapple in one way or
another with this systemic element. Despite, for example, Mark Mazower’s
attempt to displace Stalinism and Nazism as state-driven violence from their para-
digmatic place, by focusing on other examples where weak states or no states
determined outcomes, the best literature on Nazism and Stalinism of the last
decade has in fact attempted to move beyond consideration of the state per se.
Nicolas Werth and Christian Gerlach wrote about ‘extremely violent societies’;
Michael Geyer and Mark Edele spoke of the ‘violent prehistories’ going back
in the Russian –Soviet case to the ‘totalitarian’ civil war of 1918 –21, which
both led into the experience of the Eastern Front in the Second World War and
shaped its cadres of totalitarian violence; Michael Wildt in the context of the
German radicals of the right talked about an ‘uncompromising generation’.32
All these and other formulations advance explanatory frameworks that attempt
to capture the disturbingly intertwined dynamics between regime and society
and to show how ideology was internalized in the mentalities of cohorts of perpe-
trators.
At the present historiographical moment, the systemic element is harder to distil
for Stalinism. Not only is Stalin the cipher notoriously hard to read definitively on
the basis of the sources, but Soviet ideology and politics was in significant flux in
the 1930s, shifting in complicated and disputed ways from class to nationality and
from revolutionary destruction to a defence of the new establishment. Snyder fre-
quently uses the term ‘retreat’ when it comes to Stalinism, and he contrasts these
with the younger, as yet unsated genocidal – imperial drives of the Nazi Revolu-
tion. But investing so much into the concept of retreat (e.g., pp. 388, 415)
appears to align him with that wing of the historiography operating in the basic
framework of Nicholas Timasheff’s Great Retreat, even though he emphasizes
no continuities with or reversions to tsarism, as opposed to those inclined to
emphasize still-radical gyrations of revolutionary and modernist statism in
prewar Stalinism.33 The adherents of the retreat model have been sceptical
about notions of Soviet modernity, whether it is conceived in terms of general
modern phenomena or as a particular (and ultimately failed) variation of moder-
nity. But the debate about Soviet modernity is perhaps the most important discus-
sion in the historiography of Stalinism today.34 Needless to say, discussions of

32
Mark Mazower, ‘Violence and the state in the twentieth century’, American Historical Review,
Vol. 107, No. 4, 2002, pp. 1158 –1178; Christian Gerlach and Nicolas Werth, ‘State violence –
violent societies’, and Mark Edele and Michael Geyer, ‘States of exception: the Nazi–Soviet war
as a system of violence, 1939–1945’, in Fitzpatrick and Geyer, Beyond Totalitarianism, pp. 133–
179 and pp. 345 –395 respectively, quotation p. 394; Michael Wildt, Generation der Unbedingten:
Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherhietshauptamtes (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003).
33
See the four articles published in the discussion of ‘Stalinism and the “Great Retreat”‘, Kritika,
Vol. 5, No. 4, 2004, pp. 651 –734.
34
Michael David-Fox, ‘Multiple modernities vs. neo-traditionalism: on recent debates in Russian
and Soviet history’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Vol. 55, No. 4, 2006, pp. 535–555;

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modernity are fundamental to contemporary history and social science debates

about political violence; even the historical engagement with modernity in the
Nazi context is far different from the philosophical reflections offered by
Hannah Arendt circa 1951, on which Snyder focuses in his passage on the mis-
match between theory and empirical research.
Any synthesis must rely on the literatures that it brings together, and while
Snyder ranges across a huge terrain in a masterful manner the occasional slips
are illuminating. For example, the description of French Radical Party leader
and three-time Prime Minister Édouard Herriot’s visit to starving Ukraine from
26 August to 9 September 1933 relies heavily on Robert Conquest’s Harvest of
Sorrow. To read these passages is to become astonished and outraged by the
obese Frenchman’s naiveté, set up by the contrast with the zealotry of Arthur
Koestler’s ideological justification of the famine as historically inevitable
(pp. 54, 57–58, 468). The dichotomy between Westerners such as Koestler
(who did in fact become versed in ‘thinking’ as well as ‘speaking Bolshevik’)
and naı̈ve dupes gives a misleading impression, in that it leaves out the reactions
of the vast majority of Western intellectual and political observers who fell some-
where in between.35 But in the case of Herriot there is no mention of his long
history of making positive statements about the Soviet order in order to pursue
diplomatic priorities. These revolved around his ‘idée fixe on Franco-Soviet
relations’ from the early 1920s onward: the need for French rapprochement
with the USSR to counter a resurgent Germany. Thus Herriot played the
leading role in securing French diplomatic recognition of the USSR in 1924.
Again in 1933, he visited Moscow before Kiev in order to pursue a rapprochement
that led into the Franco-Soviet Pact of 1935.36 Herriot was a politician who had a
great incentive in not going off the beaten track to find evidence of famine during
his guided tour of Ukraine.
One wonders whether this inclination to emphasize unwitting dupes of Stalin-
ism in this context is at all connected with a similar stress on duplicitous manipu-
lation (rather than mentality, ideology or worldview) in an important, analytical

David-Fox, ‘The masses, the intelligentsia, and the West: particularities of Russian-Soviet moder-
nity’, in David-Fox, Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Soviet Russia (Pitts-
burgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming).
35
Eva Oberloskamp, Fremde neue Welten: Reisen deutscher und französischer Linksintellektueller
in die Sowjetunion 1917–1939 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011); David Engerman, Modernization from
the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Economic Development (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment:
Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941 (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, forthcoming 2011).
36
Michael Jabara Carley, ‘A Soviet eye on France from the rue de Grenelle in Paris, 1924– 1940’,
Diplomacy and Statecraft, Vol. 17, 2006, pp. 298 –299, 315, quotation p. 314; Ludmila Stern, ‘Iz
predistorii sozdaniia frantsuzskogo obshchestva kul’turnogo sblizheniia Novaia Rossiia’, Australian
Slavonic and East European Studies, Vol. 11, Nos. 1– 2, 1997, p. 146.

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passage about the years of the Popular Front. Note how it proceeds from Stalinism
writ large to Stalin’s mind:
In those years, Stalinism thus involved a kind of double bluff. The success of the Popular
Front depended on a record of progress toward socialism that was largely a matter of propa-
ganda. Meanwhile, the explanation of famine and misery at home depended on the idea of
foreign subversion, which was essentially without merit. Atop the Soviet party apparatus and
atop the Communist International, Stalin was making these two bluffs simultaneously, and
he knew just how they could be called: by a foreign military intervention by a state crafty
enough to enlist Soviet citizens who had suffered under his policies (p. 71).
This passage may be plausible, but it is speculative. Soviet sources do not speak
openly about bluffs and manipulation, although in the history of the presentation
of Soviet socialism it is not hard to find overt traces of the maxim that whatever
serves the cause of the revolution is justified. Nor do they speak about Stalin’s
mental calculations on this scale—although so many love to write history based
on his thoughts and intentions. Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands has given a strong
boost to scholars wishing to study Stalinism and Nazism as transnational rather
than as comparative history. What future scholars can do to build on his monu-
mental work is to develop the systemic dimension to the mode of inquiry he
has done so much to promote.

Collaboration in the bloodlands

Timothy Snyder
What do we mean when we speak of ‘collaboration’ and ‘local agency’? When
and how should the narration of ‘collaboration’ begin? What would we have to
know about the history of Eastern Europe before we spoke of the ‘local agency’
of East Europeans? Given that it would be impossible to respond to all of the
various issues raised in these fine essays, I will focus the issue of collaboration
here, and will focus on other single issues in forthcoming discussions. I have
learned much from all four of these scholars, and am humbled that they have
devoted themselves to thoughtful consideration and critique. The best way to
express my appreciation is to myself try to contribute something that aims at
coherence rather than coverage.37
Most histories of the Holocaust follow German power, through German
sources, through Europe, encountering Jews and other Europeans when the
Germans do.38 The people denoted by the term ‘collaborator’ are defined by the

37
This discussion must inevitably draw us away rather than toward the book, and I do hope that
readers who wish to understand my position will consult it.
38
For important and creative counter-examples of the use of carefully chosen German-language
documentation to see the position of non-Germans, see Christian Hartmann, Massensterben oder
Massenvernichtung? Sowjetische Kriegsgefangene im ‘Unternehmen Barbarossa. Aus dem Tage-
buch eines deutschen Lagerkommandanten’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Vol. 49, No. 1,
2001, pp. 97 –158, and M.F. Shumejko, ‘Die NS-Kriegsgefangenenlager in Weißrussland in den
Augen des Militärarztes der Roten Armee, L. Atanasyan’, in V. Selemenev et al. (eds.), Sowjetische

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act in which they are caught, by the (often ethnic) way that they are described, and
by the ideational association (often barbarism or antisemitism) that they prompt in
the mind of Germans, Jews and the historians reading German and Jewish
sources.39 Scholarly historians, when they reach local collaborators in their narra-
tives, have usually themselves been formed by the German historical narrative to
which they contribute. They believe, and quite rightly, that antisemitism is the
central element of the Nazi worldview. At a time when the Stalinist regime is
killing millions of people on the terrains that Hitler dreamed of gaining,
between 1933 and 1938, their accounts follow instead with great care the interpe-
netration of Nazi antisemitism and German institutions. When they encounter
other, non-German, participants in the Holocaust, they apply the explanation of
antisemitism (in many cases correctly). The problem is that there is generally
no prior argument that would make this plausible. If people only appear over
the edge of the epistemic horizon just as they are killing Jews, then all we
really know about them is that they are killing Jews. When we are shocked, and
when we operate within a historical vacuum, we are likely to invoke the categories
of explanation that are most comfortable to our own sentiments. Ironically, these
seem to be ethnic categories.
In a typical history of the Third Reich the word ‘Ukrainian’ appears as a
description of death facility guards. Sometimes that is the chief setting in which
the word or the people thus described appear at all.40 And yet: many of the
people customarily referred to as ‘Ukrainians’ in that setting were not Ukrainians
at all, though all of the early recruits to the death facilities and most armed collab-
orators of Germany generally were citizens of the USSR. The default option seems
to be to imagine such people ethnically, as the Germans of course did when they
prioritized (with very uneven success) ethnic Germans and Ukrainians over other
Soviet citizens when they began to recruit from the their starvation camps.
What message is conveyed by that ethnic labelling, which prevails over the see-
mingly more pertinent political (Soviet citizen) and economic (hungry) descrip-
tions? What impressions are confirmed, what work is done that is never
undone? In how many books about the Holocaust is it made clear that far more
Ukrainians fought against the Axis than fought for it? Or that far more Ukrainians
died fighting the Germans than did Americans, British and French—taken
together? Or that far more Ukrainians were killed by the Nazi regime than

und deutsche Kriegsgefangene in den Jahren des Zweiten Weltkriegs (Dresden-Minsk, 2004). The
most important (in my opinion) collections on the Jewish experience of the Holocaust, in the
Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, remain startlingly underused, for reasons of language. On
the creation of the Ringelblum archive see Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Redis-
covering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto (New York: Vintage, 2009).
39
This critique does not apply to the better specialist histories of collaboration, such as the exemp-
lary Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and
Ukraine (London: Macmillan, 2000).
40
The most influential example at present is perhaps the impressive study by Richard J. Evans, The
Third Reich at War (New York: Penguin, 2009).

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collaborated with its murderous policies? If, implicitly, a collaborator is a Ukrai-

nian and a Ukrainian is a collaborator, because no other associations are made
explicit, then the problem of collaboration is also implicitly solved. If Ukrainians
were collaborators then surely they were not liberators, and the simple reality that
they were hugely overrepresented in the army that liberated the sites of Treblinka,
Bełżec, Sobibor, Chełmno and Auschwitz will never be mentioned. Yes, it does
sound strange to refer to triumphant Red Army soldiers by their ethnicity. But
why exactly doesn’t it sound strange to us begin to refer to the very same
people by ethnicity after they been taken prisoner and recruited by the Germans?
My book is not a history of collaboration, and I will not claim that it has solved
this important problem of historicization, only that it has treated the issue in an
unconventional way, one which will perhaps prove fruitful as discussions of
this crucial subject continue. Because my account of the deliberate mass murder
of fourteen million people between 1933 and 1945 is structured differently than
all previous histories of the Holocaust, it permits us to see collaboration in a differ-
ent light. Interestingly, it is not geography itself that makes the difference: my
book treats precisely the terrains where the Holocaust took place. Nor indeed is
chronology as such the major difference. My account, like many histories of the
Third Reich, begins in 1933, although perhaps for a different reason: because
this is the beginning of an utterly unprecedented moment of mass killing. What
is different is the relationship between time and geography. Whereas histories
of the Holocaust always remain within the bounds of German history until
German power is extended, at which point the narrative (and explanation) flows
eastward to the places where the Germans killed in large numbers, my account
stays close the concrete times and places where mass murder took place, regard-
less of who was doing the killing.
Bloodlands thus begins with Soviet policies, because it was the Soviets rather
than the Germans who first killed on a massive scale in the time and place. Soviet
policies killed roughly three million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine, and then about
300,000 victims of the Great Terror, at a time when the Germans were killing on
the scale of hundreds and then thousands. We are unaccustomed to speaking of
collaboration within the Soviet Union, although most of the same historical and
existential issues arise. The Soviets generally killed within the Soviet Union
and the Germans generally beyond Germany (although in geographic rather
than political terms these were predominantly the same places, which I call the
bloodlands). This is a significant difference between the two systems, as I argue
in the book. Yet I could not permit myself, as historians of Germany can, to
exclude the problem of cooperation in Soviet policies of determined mass
killing ex definitio. Since my subject was mass killing as such, I had no such
quiet escape. In the Soviet, testimonial, diplomatic and espionage sources that I
used in Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, German and other languages to try to under-
stand the deliberate famine of 1933, I was confronted with the quite horribly spec-
tacular image of local party activists forcing starvation upon their neighbours in
Soviet Ukraine over the course of long months. The mass starvation is not

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simply a tragedy, it is also the crucial instance when to begin an answer to Andrei
Portnov’s question: ‘who were Stalin’s willing executioners?’
As I argue in the book, Stalin, Kaganovich and Molotov were the main actors,
and could rely upon central instruments of power already in existence, such as the
state police and the disciplines communist party; but the local party activists who
actually enforced the famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1933 were generally Ukrainians
by nationality. Some were formerly poor peasants who thought that they would be
better off in the new system; some were students and graduates who believed that
the new system would be their new world; some were coerced by quite justified
fear of hunger and the Gulag. Together they created the frightful local conditions
that killed three million people amidst madness, cannibalism and other horrors
that defy description. When Stalin decided to blame failures of collective agricul-
ture on the Ukraine nation, and decided to punish the inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine
by starvation, it was they who had to carry out the requisitions, lead away the last
cow, report peasants who tried to leave starving villages. It was they who wit-
nessed the madness and the cannibalism and the corpses in the fields. Some of
them mocked the victims, urinated on food, forced the hungry to fight each
other, or kneel and pray to God for help. Some of them traded flour for sex, or
raped solitary women whose husbands had starved. The significance of the
Soviet Ukrainian hecatomb was noted by both Hannah Arendt and Leszek Kola-
kowski, who regarded it, respectively, as a crucial example of modern alienation
and the moment of the establishment of Stalinist ethics.41
Despite the visibility of mass local participation in the famine in Soviet Ukraine
of 1933 to the leading political thinkers of the last century, it rarely enters into
(non-polemical) discussions of collaboration in the time and place. At the very
least, the historian of Europe must be aware of the relationship between food
supplies and obedience, so powerfully established by Soviet collectivization.42

41
The same point can be made about other regions of the USSR: see Sarah Cameron, ‘The Hungry
Steppe: Soviet Kazakhstan and the Kazakh Famine, 1921–1934’ (PhD dissertation, Yale University,
2010). One recent study from beyond Ukraine takes this issue seriously: Robert Kuśnierz, Ukraina w
latach kolektywizacji i wielkiego głodu (Toruń: Grado, 2005). A study of local involvement in the
famine must include the documentation in I. Zelenin et al. (eds.), Tragediia sovetskoi derevni: Kol-
lektivizatsiia i raskulachivanie, Vol. 3 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2001). Recruitment as a general matter is
a major subject of Terry Martin, Affirmative Action Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2001); there are also useful discussions in in Karl Schlögel, Terror und Traum: Moskau 1937
(Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2008); T.S. Prot’ko, Stanovlenie sovetskoi totalitarnoi sistemy v
Belarusi: 1917–1941 gg: (1917–1941) (Minsk: Tesei, 2002); Nicolas Werth, La terreur et le désar-
roi: Staline et son système (Paris: Perrin, 2007); Stephen G. Wheatcroft, ‘Agency and Terror: Evdo-
kimov and Mass Killing in Stalin’s Great Terror’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol.
53, No. 1, 2007, pp. 20–43.
42
A point stressed by the Italian historian Andrea Graziosi. Sometimes historians of the Holocaust
are aware of this as an issue for Berlin or Wehrmacht commanders, but rarely is the general regional
obsession with the issue made clear. Exemplary on the German side are Christian Gerlach, Kalku-
lierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland 1941 bis 1944
(Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999) and Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making

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The historian of the war who does not have the 1933 famine in mind cannot under-
stand why some Ukrainians thought that German invasion would be a liberation,
nor for that matter the terrible irony of this hope: that German planners, aware of
the famine, meant to keep Stalin’s collective farms operative in order to use them
to direct their own policy of starving Slavs. But perhaps the fundamental lesson of
mass local cooperation in the starvation campaign of 1933 is the simple awareness
that people will indeed kill their neighbours in large numbers, and by utterly hor-
rible methods in certain circumstances. This makes the issue of collaboration no
less important, but it perhaps makes collaboration itself less shocking for the
researcher. After all, mass participation in the murder of millions of people was
already an everyday reality in Eastern Europe at the moment when the Nazis
were building their first concentration camp.43
The famine of 1933 introduces the feasibility and moral self-destruction of col-
laboration, the possibility and indeed reality of overwhelming state power, and the
unavoidable relevance of material issues like food. It also suggests a hypothesis
that perhaps future researchers will explore: the killing policies that require sig-
nificant local cooperation are those that have not been well planned in advance,
but rather those that are improvisations on the basis of other plans that cannot
be implemented as intended. The more precise and realistic the advance planning
is, it seems, the less likely it would be that it would require the cooperation of
people whose identities and motivations cannot be known fully in advance.
Local cooperation, after all, is not always particularly necessary for policies of
mass killing. The Great Terror in the Soviet Union, which took about 700,000
lives, was planned quite precisely. Although it required a massive bureaucratic
effort, the actual killing was done by just a few hundred trusted NKVD officers.
The German starvation of Soviet citizens in 1941 and 1942, in the POW camps
and in besieged Leningrad, was fully consistent with, although less ambitious
than, the quite explicit plan to starve thirty million Soviet citizens. Putting

and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Viking, 2007). See also Alex J. Kay, Exploitation,
Resettlement, Mass Murder: Political and Economic Planning for German Occupation Policy in the
Soviet Union, 1940 –1941 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006); Susanne Heim, ‘Kalorien – Agrar-
forschung, Ernährungswirtschaft und Krieg: Herbert Backe als Wissenschaftspolitiker’, in idem
(ed.), Kalorien, Kautschuk, Karrieren: Pflanzenzüchtung und landwirtschaftliche Forschung in
Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituten, 1933–1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003); and generally Ben Kiernan,
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).
43
Even as historians of the Soviet Union undertake a debate about whether or not agency in the
liberal sense of the term even applies to the Soviet Union, historians of the Holocaust apply the
liberal nomenclature to Soviet citizens without giving the matter a second thought. For some
instances of the Soviet debate see Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Hiroaki Kuromiya, The Voices of the Dead:
Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s (London: Yale University Press, 2007); Igal Halfin, ‘From Dark-
ness to Light: Student Communist Autobiography During NEP’, Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteur-
opas, Vol. 45, 1997, pp. 210 –236; Jürgen Hellbeck, ‘Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of
Stepan Podlubnyi’, Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas, Vol. 44, 1996, pp. 456–463.

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prisoners of war behind barbed wire and allowing them to starve requires local
help; it requires a few men with guns and clear orders.
In the case of the Holocaust itself, when viewed as a totality from the lands
where it took place, one sees a trend away from collaboration, especially
from uncontrolled collaboration, as clarity about the modus operandi spread
about the final goal of German policy spread. The period between June 1941,
when the policy to Jews was still murderous deportation, and December 1941,
when it became clear that physical extermination of all Jews was to be the rule,
is the crucial one.44 This is the period of policy uncertainty, and also the period
when recruitment of locals was the rule. At the very beginning, in the pogroms
of summer 1941, the Germans provoked pogroms in the lands where their auth-
ority replaced the Soviet rule that had itself been recently installed. Immediately
thereafter, the Germans were killing Jewish males themselves, systematically, and
as they shifted to killing women and children as well they recruited local people to
help. Local Slavs, Balts, ethnic Germans, Tatars and others—Soviet citizens—
served as policemen, performing a range of tasks that included rounding up and
killing Jews. They were subject to all of the arguments from authority with
which we are familiar, from discussions of German motivations, as well as
others, to which I will return. With local help, the Germans killed about a
million Jews on the territory of the occupied Soviet Union in 1941.

44
Since I limit myself to one question, I cannot engage Mark Roseman’s informed critique on the
issues of the global character of the Holocaust and the timing of the realization by Hitler’s closest
collaborators that German policy was to murder all Jews under German power. I would note that
Bloodlands does actually take a global view, focusing on two projects of global political –economic
transformation that for reasons their authors regarded as contingent were focused, for the time being,
on Eurasia, and most intensely on the same part of Eurasia: the bloodlands. The revolution was sup-
posed to be international and the war was supposed to be of the continents, but in the middle term
there is overlapping attention to the same places. Mine is thus a truly global argument—not the same
thing as portraying how the Germans saw the world, which is where most of the Holocaust histor-
iography stops. (A major exception is Gerhard L. Weinberg, most recently in A World at Arms: A
Global History of World War II [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005]). It is quite true
that the Germans envisioned the elimination of Jews wherever their power reached, but this is not
sufficient as an explanation as to why they in fact killed 5.4 million Jews in Eastern Europe. In
some ways it simply makes the question of why the killing started more important, and thus the
urgency of attention to the territories where it began all the more obvious. On the issue of timing,
I would point out here that there is no consensus on this issue among leading scholars of the Holo-
caust. Several different reviewers have now claimed that there is a consensus that my book defies, but
each of them has described the consensus in a different way. Note for example the very different
perspectives of Roseman and Connelly in this collection alone. For what it’s worth, I see my own
argument about timing as close to those of Peter Longerich and Saul Friedländer, although in my
discussion actual events on the Eastern Front complement German perceptions of them (a crucial
difference between my work and both intentionalist and functionalist approaches, which in this
key respect are alike in that both are psychological). See Chapters 5 and 6 of my book and my
review of Longerich’s work in ‘A new approach to the Holocaust’, The New York Review of
Books, 23 June 2011, pp. 54– 56. The New York Review of Books.

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The Final Solution was unlike any Soviet policy in that it began from the inten-
tion to eliminate an entire people. In the massive but unplanned reliance on local
help, however, the beginnings of the Holocaust as a policy of deliberate mass
murder resemble the starvation of Ukraine of 1933, with the same unexpected
but successful reliance on massive local help. In both cases, a massive campaign,
requiring a certain amount of local assistance, was supposed to bring radical pol-
itical change and then complete stability. Stalin was not counting on Ukrainians to
starve one another massively, but faced with a crisis chose this as his policy rather
than withdrawing from the project of collectivization. Hitler was also not counting
on locals to shoot Jews on the scale of hundreds of thousands; indeed initially he
was opposed to Slavs bearing arms in any capacity. When the Soviet Union did not
collapse, he changed his mind about this. In 1942, a new killing technique came to
dominate in the prosecution of the Final Solution: gassing in enclosed facilities in
occupied Poland (in the territories inspirited into the Reich, Chełmno and Ausch-
witz, in the General Government, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Majdanek). It is
often noted that the gassing spared Germans from shooting; it also dramatically
reduced the need for direct collaborators in the killing. The non-German personnel
at the death facilities were unforgettable to the victims, but they were very few in
number. Ghettos had already been established in occupied Poland as holding tanks
for anticipated deportations before the shooting began farther east. Emptying them
required very little manpower: a few Germans, sometimes assisted by Soviet citi-
zens, with the bulk of the work being done by the ghetto police. Polish policemen
helped form the cordons around the ghettos.
In most of occupied Poland (the incorporated territories and the General Gov-
ernment), the notion of ‘collaboration’, with its ethnic and voluntarist overtones,
diverts our attention from a fundamental issue that no student of Soviet Ukraine in
1933 would overlook: the prospects for relative social advancement during econ-
omic collapse. Between 1939 and 1942, between the invasion of Poland and the
emptying of the ghettos, German power profoundly altered the Polish social
and economic order. Polish elites, often people belonging to or descending from
the old nobility, were killed or sent to concentration camps. Jews were forced
to move from one part of cities to the districts designated as ghettos, or from
towns in the countryside to the ghettos in the large cities. Jewish men were
thereby removed from their traditional occupations as artisans, traders and pro-
fessionals, and very often placed instead in German arms factories. In a situation
of growing pauperization, this created a significant opportunity for social advance-
ment for non-Jews. Poles took over Jewish apartments, and Poles moved into pre-
viously highly Jewish economic niches. As requisitions increased in the
countryside, Poles who had taken up traditional Jewish trades made a vital contri-
bution to family incomes; means of subsistence in the cities were increasingly
valuable as ever more Poles were deported to Germany as forced labourers.
This was not collaboration in the Holocaust in any simple sense. But as Jan
Gross and numerous observers at the time noticed, it did create a dominant senti-
ment among Poles that a return of Jews to their homes and workplaces would be
unwelcome and indeed resisted. It of course has nothing to do with the German

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decision to send Polish Jews in the ghettos to their deaths at Chełmno, Bełżec,
Sobibór or Treblinka in 1942. But it cast an enormous pall over attempts to
rescue Jews, above and beyond the significant issues of prewar antisemitism
and German power (Poles who aided Jews of course faced the death penalty).
The brute force of Nazi racism seems to compel us to prefer ethnic over social
categories. Yet we know, of course, that social advancement in difficult times is a
universal tendency. During the war, Jews moved into houses of Poles deported by
the Soviets, Poles moved into houses of Poles killed by the Germans, and so on. If
a house or property was empty, someone took it; everyone was aware that if they
did not take it someone else would. The heroic exceptions of people who pre-
served property for friends were so few that we simply cannot afford to be
blind to this overwhelming sociological reality. No doubt people became more
ethnic or racial in their own thinking as they took part in this sort of theft, since
they had to find some way to justify the wrong that they were obviously doing.
Prewar antisemitism provided some of the tropes: Jews were to blame for the
Soviet invasion or for killing Christ, but the general transformation that enabled
this moral economy was of course German in its origins. It seems very likely to
me (though all this should be investigated) that the very act of profiting from
the disappearance of Jews likely made Poles antisemitic or more antisemitic
than they had been before. You don’t have to be a racist to take an empty
house, but once you have done so racism helps to explain why you could have
done so. All of this, it goes without saying, is utterly deplorable; but I fear that
this is a much more plausible moral economy than the thoroughly naive expec-
tation that people would collectively respect property in such a situation.
In this as in a number of other cases, an immediate leap to voluntarism and eth-
nicity without political and moral economy stays too close to the Nazi script, and
is also simply unconvincing. Ukrainian nationalists killed more Ukrainians than
they did Poles or Jews. Were they acting from anti-Ukrainianism? Poles turned
in Jews to the Germans; they also turned in other Poles. The same Polish police-
men who sealed ghettos also followed orders to capture and kill Poles defined by
the Germans as bandits. Were they acting from anti-Polonism? The same point can
obviously be made about the Jewish police. Were Revisionist Zionists in the
Jewish police (as documented by Isaiah Trunk) acting from antisemitism?45 Of
course not. Historians sometimes distance the reader from the Warsaw ghetto
police chief Józef Szeryński by noting that he was a convert to Christianity—
surely that is pushing the ideological point much too far. There were police
forces in every ghetto, and it would be absurd to attach too much importance to
ideological explanations of this fact.
What would a history of collaboration look like if it were approached with the
same earnestness with which we approach German motivation? Consider all of the
effort that has been spent to understand the reasons why Germans participated in
the Holocaust. Here we have an undertaking that has attracted the minds of some
45
Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation
(New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 490.

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of the best historians of the age, generated a number of long and serious debates,
and provided the themes for some of the best books in the field.46 How much atten-
tion have we paid, comparatively, to the motives of the collaborators? Are the
shortcomings not perhaps in some measure because many historians believe
that the Germans are on some civilizational level where they deserve careful con-
sideration, and the East European collaborators are not? Or is collaboration useful
as a flexible explicator, there to be used when schema of explanation rooted only
in German realities exhaust themselves? No doubt part of the explanation is banal:
until recently, many of the crucial sources were missing, and the leading Holo-
caust historians (with exceptions of course such as Yitzhak Arad) do not know
the languages necessary to read them.47 Within Eastern Europe, with some laud-
able exceptions, local historians do not produce historiography on the subject that
is accessible to colleagues in the West.
Unlike my critics on this point, I have devoted a great deal of attention to pre-
cisely the issue of East European collaboration with occupying forces, using East
European languages, as well as German and Russian, to do so. I was among those
who introduced into the Western historiography the single major example of non-
state-led ethnic cleansing, the mass murder of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists,
most of them former German policemen, in Volhynia in 1943. This event can
be seen, as readers of Volhynian Jewish testimony materials know, as an integral
part of the Holocaust, since among those murdered were Jews taking shelter with
Poles. I also introduced into the literature an argument that is now taken for
granted: that the participation of Ukrainians in German police forces and their
active part in the Holocaust in Volhynia in 1942 enabled the mass murder of
Poles the following year.48 Although I began that decade-long project from the
assumption that ideology would be the crucial explicator of what happened, and
continue to see it as an indispensible element of the explanation, I came to under-
stand that the chain of events required a whole series of preconditions that
involved not one or two but three different occupations. I also noticed, as I took
part in Polish– Ukrainian discussions, that Polish and Ukrainian historians alike
understated the structural significance of the occupations. There was an unstated
but manifest desire to imagine that one’s own nation had, in Mark Roseman’s

46
Consider the masterful Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and
the Final Solution in Poland, rev. ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998), and then try to remember
how the collaborators appear in the book.
47
Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press and Jer-
usalem: Yad Vashem, 2009), p. 311.
48
See especially ‘The Causes of Ukrainian –Polish Ethnic Cleansing, 1943’, Past and Present, No.
179, 2003, pp. 197– 234; ‘The Life and Death of West Volhynian Jews, 1921 –1945’, in Ray
Brandon and Wendy Lower (eds.), The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, and Memorialization
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), pp. 77–113; and relevant chapters in The Recon-
struction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2003), and Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet
Ukraine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

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term, ‘agency’. I believe that the Holocaust literature, like the Polish –Ukrainian
literature, suffers from agency inflation.
Let me try to explain what I have in mind by addressing Roseman and Con-
nelly’s critique that I understate the importance of the work of Jan Gross. As I
make clear in the notes, much of the book is in fact a discussion with Hannah
Arendt and with Jan Gross’s Arendtian trajectory. Gross’ work, which has been
extremely important to me for twenty years, involves a striking shift from a tota-
litarian framework, which tends to reduce individual responsibility by presuming
the destruction of the individual as such, to a moralizing framework in which the
structural power of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union is marginalized. I stand
somewhere in between: I reject the totalitarian framework, but I also believe
that a coherent account of structural power must precede any factual or moral
account of the possibilities for individual choice.
In Poland, to be sure, the implications of Neighbors were enormous.49 The myth
that Poles were only innocent victims in the war was demonstrated in irresistible
terms to be false. But for how many of us beyond that particular moral forcefield is
that really a surprise? This debate only really makes sense when one accepts the
kind of totalizing and ahistorical national frameworks (nations of perpetrators,
nations of victims) that most of us claim to have rejected. The stakes in my
book were not national innocence or guilt, but rather the causes and course of
the Holocaust and other policies of mass killing. In these terms, Jedwabne is prop-
erly seen as one incident of one phase of one policy of mass killing. A few hundred
people died at Jedwabne; it was one of several dozen of pogroms on doubly occu-
pied territory in summer 1941 that killed some 24,000 Jews. That is a dreadfully
high number; but it is less than one-half of one per cent of the Holocaust. Jed-
wabne did not alert us to this phase of German policy; it brought to light that
Poles took part in some of these pogroms.
Deep research into the interwar press and church (like that carried out by Anna
Bikont) can suggest why Jedwabne rather than other Polish towns (though without
a clear record of German policy from town to town it is only a suggestion), but it
does not explain the larger phenomenon of regional pogroms.50 The phenomenon
of local pogroms is limited to the areas first occupied by the Soviets in 1939, and
then occupied by the Germans in 1941 where the Germans applied the policy of
‘self-cleansing’ by encouraging locals to kill Jews. I do indeed write about
these pogroms, incorporating what we have learned about Jedwabne (citing Jan
Gross’s pioneering work and other sources, and discussing the debates about Jed-
wabne in the notes). In Western historiography about local collaboration, the con-
sequences of Neighbors have been highly conservative. Neighbors (although its
own argument is much more sophisticated and in places highly influential upon

49
Polish historiography on the wave of pogroms was fairly well advanced. What was missing were
the cases where Poles rather than Ukrainians took part. See Andrzej Żbikowski, ‘Lokalne pogromy
Żydów w czerwcu i lipcu 1941 r. na wschodnich rubieżach II Rzeczypospolitej’, Biuletyn Żydows-
kiego Instytutu Historycznego, Nos. 162– 163, 1992, pp. 3– 18.
50
Anna Bikont, My z Jedwabnego (Warsaw: Proszyński i S-ka, 2004).

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me) is generally read beyond Poland to prove what we knew all along, namely that
Poles and East Europeans took part in the Holocaust because they were antisemi-
tic. Beyond Poland, Gross figures as the scholar with local knowledge and a local
language, who legitimates this perspective. For me, this is not a very logical
reading. Once we know that members of yet another national group took part in
the same actions in the same time and the same place as members of several
other national groups, shouldn’t this weaken rather than strengthen the idea that
the key factor was enduring local antisemitism? Doesn’t it beggar belief to
argue that Ukrainian, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian and Romanian antisemitism
all existed for centuries as parallel cultural forces only to generate pogroms on
the same few days in summer 1941?51
Necessary and valuable though it has proven, microhistory permits certain eli-
sions. A microhistory that invokes local tradition as an explanation for a few days
of killing, to be persuasive, must also explain how that tradition allowed the
locality in question to be part of the world homeland of Jews for half a millennium.
Microhistory allows us to neglect the state or, in the case of Jedwabne, the
destruction of one state (prewar Poland) and the presence of the two of the
most destructive states in the history of the world (the Soviet Union and then
Nazi Germany).
With collaboration, in these pogroms and generally, the crucial analytical ques-
tion must always be: collaboration with what? It makes no sense to speak of ‘col-
laborators’ as a category of person without this basic reference. What form of state
power is present, and how did it come to be present? One need not idealize the
interwar Polish state to note that it did provide a sort of stability for their citizens,
including their Jewish ones (even accounting for growing official antisemitism).
The destruction of the Polish state by a joint German – Soviet effort opened the
question of the sources of political authority for everyone involved. This is no
simple affair at all: think for a moment about what happens when the state disap-
pears briefly from Louisiana or Iraq. I resort to these contemporary examples
because statelessness and the destruction of the state simply do not figure as a cat-
egory of modern experience in much of Western Europe and North America.
Whether histories of the war are based in London, Washington or even Berlin,
the existence of robust state power can be taken for granted. In the late summer
of 1939, two powerful and ideologically defined states cooperated to destroy
four independent states in Eastern Europe: Poland was jointly invaded and

51
Gross might have been a link between the Arendtian conversation among Soviet scholars and the
liberal epistemics that historians of the Holocaust conventionally apply when discussing people who
are not Germans or Jews. But this was a connection not quite made, perhaps because Gross moved
away from Arendt just at the moment when an important segment of the Soviet field began to follow
his example (actually the example of Stephen Kotkin). The best discussion of Neighbors is Marci
Shore, ‘Conversing with Ghosts: Jedwabne, Żydokomuna, and Totalitarianism’, Kritika: Explora-
tions of Russian and Eurasian History, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2005, pp. 345–374.

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destroyed, whereas the Soviets themselves annexed Lithuania, Latvia and

Estonia.52
The destruction of a state by armed force is a great shock, one generating
emotions and scapegoating. When Poland was invaded by both the Wehrmacht
and the Red Army in September 1939, its citizens had no real hope of victory.
Nevertheless, they condemned the prewar political elite. Poles sometimes also
blamed national minorities, Jews, Ukrainians and Belarusians, for welcoming
the Red Army in eastern Poland. Thus, in a moment of strain, arrive the ethnic cat-
egories against which political analysis must contend. (The second eastern
German invasion of July 1941 had a very similar effect, augmented by the fact
that the Germans themselves provided and enacted the ethnic explanation of suf-
fering.)
In Poland the invasions of September 1939 were followed for twenty-two
months by two different but simultaneous occupation regimes, each of them far
more violent than any prior regime in the area, each of them using ethnicity to
divide the population. In the Baltic lands, the prewar state was destroyed by
one power (the USSR) rather than by two, but then totally occupied by the
other (Nazi Germany). In eastern Poland as in the Baltic States, elites were
deported to the Gulag or shot by the Soviet NKVD, the shooting sometimes con-
tinuing until the moment that German troops arrived. In both cases, the policies
were designed to remove people who had been the bulwark of the prewar state.
In both the Polish (simultaneous double occupation) and the Baltic (successive
double occupation) scenarios, the Germans tried in summer 1941 to encapsulate
prior local experience in their own antisemitic categories, providing a way for
some people to express their hatred of Soviet rule or of Jews, or just their accep-
tance of whatever the Germans did. The German antisemitic definition of Soviet
rule, although it harmonized with some local political traditions, was by no means
a return to the norms of prewar politics. It provided a useful exit for the large
numbers of non-Jewish collaborators with Soviet power in 1939 –41 who, accord-
ing to German Judeo-Bolshevism, were presumptively innocent by ethnicity (just
as Jews were presumptively guilty).53 Here we see one of the reasons for double
collaboration, a mass phenomenon that defies our assumption that antisemitism or
other political ideologies organized political behaviour at the mass level.

52
To use Michael David-Fox’s instructive terminology, the German and Soviet states were
entangled in this process of state destruction, as they were in some respects in cases of mass
killing. However useful this category may be, I can only respond that a total history of Soviet–
German entanglement would have to include the central case that I provide, and that an attempt
by me to write a total history of entanglement would have generated a book with different concerns
than my own: which was to describe and explain the greatest episode of mass murder in the history of
the West.
53
In fact, far more Ukrainians collaborated with the Soviets in western Ukraine in 1939–41 than did
Jews, which is not surprising given that the prewar Communist Party of West Ukraine (in Poland)
was a mass party with a strong Ukrainian base. Since this is a fact that fits no established narrative,
it has never to my knowledge been mentioned except in my own work, cited above.

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In the Baltic States, where the Soviet– German double occupation was succes-
sive rather than simultaneous, there was a possibility for political collaboration
absent in Poland. Berlin could take under its wing right-wing politicians, who
could then help to organize not only pogroms but shooting campaigns in their
home countries when the time came. The participation of Lithuanians and Lat-
vians in mass shooting of Jews in summer and fall 1941 is important not only
as an important episode in the mass murder of Jews, but in the argument of Blood-
lands as an enabling factor in the escalation of the Holocaust itself. The Germans
had to learn that mass shooting was more feasible in the situation in which they
found themselves than mass deportation. The collaboration of locals, and
especially the early collaboration of Balts in shooting campaigns, helped (I
argue) to make this case. Collaboration would not have been so early and so orga-
nized, however, without the prior destruction of the Baltic States by the Soviet
Union. This is not to exclude the significance of collaboration but to emphasize
it; as we take it seriously we must analyze it seriously, with basic categories
such as the state. Within what is today western Ukraine (interwar southeastern
Poland), it seems that nationalists were also participants in German planning for
the invasion of 1941, although their goals were more radical: not to reestablish
states (as in the Baltics) but to establish a new one (Ukraine).54
Everywhere local people took direct part in the mass shooting of Jews, we have
to consider three factors that are essentially unknown in Western Europe and
North America: German occupation in its harsh eastern form, Soviet power and
the destruction of the prewar state. In the case of citizens of the prewar Soviet
Union, the state destroyed is the Soviet one, which had been present for just
over two decades. In the prewar Soviet Union, we find repressive collaboration
rather than pogroms as in doubly occupied eastern Poland, or political collabor-
ation as in the doubly occupied Baltics. The Nazis meant to starve thirty
million people in the winter of 1941 –42; in fact, some four million were
starved. Among the hungry were the prisoners of war who were recruited from
the prisoner-of-war camps. These were true death camps in Arendt’s sense: they
concentrated people in order to kill them. In the choice of Soviet citizens to
spare themselves starvation what further motivation do we need?55 Do we need
to add an experience of prewar Soviet hunger and terror, which was very often

54
The role of Ukrainian nationalists in the pogroms of that summer is the subject of forthcoming
work by John-Paul Himka and Marco Carynnyk. In the Baltic case Joachim Tauber and Christoph
Dieckmann have taken up the subject. We need much more work by scholars using both local
languages and German sources. On that issue see Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, The ‘Final Sol-
ution: in Riga: Exploitation and Annihilation, 1941–1944 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), and
its reviews.
55
Consult Peter Black, ‘Handlanger der Endlösung: Die Trawniki-Männer und die Aktion Reinhard
1941–1943’, in Bogdan Musial (ed.), Aktion Reinhardt, Der Völkermord an den Juden im General-
gouvernement 1941–1944 (Osnabrück: Fibre, 2004), pp. 309–352; Dieter Pohl, ‘Ukrainische Hilf-
skräfte beim Mord an den Juden’, in Gerhard Paul (ed.), Die Täter der Shoah (Göttingen: Wallstein
Verlag, 2002), pp. 205 –234.

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present? Do we need to add political and ideological factors arising from the war
itself? What the first group of death facility guards had in common was that they
were Soviet citizens, young men raised and educated in a political environment of
anti-racism and anti-antisemitism unique in the world. And hunger and almost
certain death, that too they also had in common.
We neglect state power, but we forget more readily about the nature of rural life
and preoccupations with food. The largest single pool of collaborators were the
prisoner-of-war camps, starvation zones that killed about three million people
and produced about one million collaborators (according to Yitzhak Arad).56 A
very significant number of people joined police forces because this was one of
the jobs that would allow them not to be sent to Germany as forced labour
(thus separated from family and also unable to bring in that autumn’s crop). We
also neglect banal factors like simple occupational continuity. People who were
policemen before the war tended to be policemen during the war. (This was the
case for example of Jan Karski’s brother, who recruited him to the resistance,
and helped begin his career as the man who told leading British and American
politicians about the Holocaust.) People who were militiamen under the Soviets
in 1939 were sometimes policemen for the Germans in 1941. People who reported
on enemy nationalities in 1938 to the NKVD were perhaps (we don’t know this
yet) likely to inform on enemy nationalities in 1941 to the Sicherheitspolizei.
So a full account of collaboration, in addition to ideology and volition, would
have to consider state destruction, imagined political economy, food supply,
social advancement, and prewar and wartime daily life.
Collaboration in my book might not appear in familiar forms. It is not a default
cause to be deployed when explanatory power wears thin, a canopy covering the
absence of local knowledge of the lands where the Holocaust took place, a substi-
tute for discussion of relevant Soviet experience, or a way of writing ethnonational
history sans le mot. Like victimhood and perpetration, collaboration appears in
individual human terms, smaller than what is customary, and within an overall
argument that takes an international form, larger than what is customary. I do
not assume that cooperation with powerful regimes was simply a matter of the
reported ethnicity, ostensible ideas or the apparent voluntarism of the people con-
cerned. I take these to be possibilities, among others, to be considered within the
framework of territory, power, scarcity and ideology that allowed me to pursue my
major subject. While throughout the book I consistently stress the ontology of
human choice, I also strive to ensure that we are in a position, as students of
history, to understand what choices were available and conceivable, and what
experiences and expectations troubled the minds of those who made them.

56
Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press and
Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009), p. 311.

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