Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder, 2010

 I first encountered the book Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder when I was in high school. For a history project in the IB Program, I was tasked with engaging in some academic research into a historical topic to produce a written report or analysis. I had by that time attempted to read Thomas Pynchon due to the reputation as intellectually challenging. Specifically, this meant Gravity’s Rainbow. From my current vantage point I now realize I didn’t understand the wider context of the tradition in which that work sits. I think it is fair to say that at least in some ways Gravity’s Rainbow is part of Western attempt to grapple with and understand World War II from the Western perspective and experience. Not to get too diverted in this topic, one of the subjects Pynchon explores is the Herero genocide in Southwest Africa in the first decade of the 20th century, taken by him and many others as an epsiode that foreshadows the larger actions in Eastern Europe a few decades later. I myself took up this line of thinking and decided to research this question. One of the books that I found in this research was Bloodlands. 

In my first encounter with this book, I read about half of it and left a bookmark in place that I later rediscovered when I picked this book up again in 2022, a decade later. My strongest memory of my first read-through is the section that described the connections or similarities between Nazi ideology and goals and those of the United States. To me at that time, this was revolutionary and shocking. I think now in 2022 this is likely a relatively popular and unsurprising position, at least on the left. I’ll discuss this a bit here since it remains one of the most powerful impressions I have from this book, after which I will discuss the book more broadly. 

Snyder describes the Nazi ideology as an ambition for Germany to become a geopolitical and economic super power, motivated by the “fact” that the German people deserve as much due to their status as a superior race. The question then becomes, how might this goal be achieved? In the first half of the 20th century, as Snyder describes, it is clear to the modern reader that power is a function of the same inputs (raw materials, labor, capital, industry, etc), but with a different mix. The Europe of the 1920s - 1930s (the time during which much of the ideology was fully formed) is today seen as deceptively industrialized or modernized when in fact it was in fact a highly agrarian place with enormous portions of the population situated as peasantry in the countryside. Economies were largely powered by human and animal muscle energy, and as such, calories and therefore arable land was a premier natural resource to be considered in geopolitical strategy, much as today we consider oil to be the energy necessity that we pursue. Therefore, the aspiring imperial power must pursue these resources - land.

Snyder describes in brief the geopolitical and economic situation of the period as one in which the British maritime empire defined the rules and roads of the game. British naval power enabled its large foreign colonies, such as in India or southeast Asia, and effectively boxed in other European powers to remain on-land, including Germany, due their lagged naval armament buildup. Snyder described how the quest to become an imperial power could either be pursued by directly confronting the British mode - becoming a maritime power to break out of the effective blockade (which was more or less the Japanese strategy) - or alternatively by remaining a land power with the goal of imitating the United States or the Soviet Union. These were continental empires with enormous frontier/colonial regions. Hitler viewed the Soviet Union as a rival that would need to be removed (more on this later) but analyzed the United States for lessons. 

In this telling, the United States presents an example of a small population of Western Europeans who colonize a large frontier territory with the use of racially inferior slave labor and at the expense of the extermination of the even more racially inferior native peoples that represent inconvenient and superfluous populations. The master race can then extract enormous natural resources from the colonial territories to feed a fast industrialization, in the end becoming a continental superpower that could move on to engage with the rest of the world. Hitler envisioned the roles of the Whites, Blacks, and Native Americans in the American story to be played by the Germans, Slavs, and Jews in his desired European story. Eastern Europe stretching into Asia would become the “Frontier West” for Germany, the lebensraum, with the Volga River playing the part of the American Mississippi (a direct, quoted comparison made by Hitler). The book describes the nazi Generalplan Ost, or East Plan, wherein the Soviet State would be destroyed, the Jews removed to Siberia/Madagascar/Palestine or killed, tens of millions of Slavs would be killed in famine, and the remaining small population reduced to slavery for the benefit of the new German settler populations.

These similarities, and the fact that Hitler himself leaned on them, was and remains shocking to me. While I am not at this time advocating a specific political or ideological use of these facts, any realistic person living in this country must have these facts in their mind and carefully consider them.

One other introductory remark - I picked this book up again in 2022 in part due to the renewal of violence and war in this region following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia. In fact, in 2022 one of the main concerns in the Ukraine conflict is again grain and calories. A major lesson is that perhaps today is little different than yesterday. Bloodlands was one of the books on this topic that became in-demand, and so I decided to re-engage with the material.

Moving to the theses of Bloodlands more broadly, Snyder describes a time and place in world history that is uniquely tragic. In Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, a large region between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (including modern-day Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic states, etc) was the setting of several political, mass-killing programs. These are programs in which the large and powerful states undertook intentional, mass-mobilized, and political programs of killing against civilians, often their own citizens. Furthermore, while other regions faced state-based mass killings, such as Maoist China, Eastern Europe was faced with two of the worst regimes in this regard more or less at the same time, with the pair both collaborating and competing. The most famous of these programz is the Holocaust, the killing of nearly six million Jews and the destruction of Eastern Eurpean or Ashkenazic Jewish civilization. But there were several political killing programs in the region, and Snyder sets out to describe, enumerate, and humanize each of them. The killing associated with direct warfare and unintentional deaths due to instability and conflict were not considered in this work. Therefore, the figures indicated in this book are a subset of the total fatality from the Second World War. 

The major programs described include the Soviet Ukrainian famine, called the Holodomor, in the early 1930s which killed over three million people; Soviet collectivization broadly; the Soviet Great Terror in the late 1930s; Soviet national minority killing progran, such as against Poles particularly; Nazi starvation of Soviet prisoners of war, killing over three million; Nazi shootings east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line; Nazi gassings west of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line; post-war ethnic cleansings in the new nation-states, including of Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Belarussians, etc; and there were others beyond this list. Snyder indicates that as many as fourteen million innocents were killed in these politically motivated killing programs.   Note that the numbers are difficult to determine and have been highly politicized by all the governments and groups involved. 

Furthermore, the book adds to a sorely needed clarification in the West - that the Second World War is in fact not a “good war” won by the western allies against evil. The truth is complicated simply by the fact that the Soviet regime was one of these allies, but the complication extends when one considers the relative scale of the war in the comparison between the European Eastern and Western fronts, both in terms of the military and the civilian components. In some real way, the European theater may be best cast as a war primarily between Germany and the Soviet Union.

The book is designed to reveal the extent and facts of these programs in a narrative and numerical way, and to draw attention to the direct and indirect interactions between the two regimes that enabled this period and tragedy to occur. Snyder goes to great lengths to provide the details but also to show that, in undertaking these actions, Hitler and Stalin had each other in mind and often egged each other on. A primary example of their interplay was the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement and the line that the regime drew in Eastern Europe that demarcated their respective spheres of influence. The invasion in 1939 that inaugurated the Phony War, as termed by the West, was not phony to the Polish people and others, and Operation Barbarossa in 1941 was a change in the interaction between the two regimes rather than a beginning (contrary to today’s Russian emphasis on 1941 and dismissal of their pre-41 complicity). Stalin supported Soviet-backed partisan movements in German-occupied regions with the intention of allowing Germans to be weakened in preparation for a Soviet counteroffensive, but also to identify and hopefully have the Germans remove potentially independent-minded elements that could one day resist Soviet occupation in much the smae way.

In a similar way to how the Snyder goes into the imperial/colonial strategy of the Nazi regime, he explains the actions of the Soviet regime as a policy of self-colonization through collectivization. In some ways, the main difference between Hitler’s and Stalin’s colonial goals was that Hitler had to engage in a war of conquest to take possession of the colonial lands that Stalin already possessed. Stalin’s killing policies were more clearly political rather than racial - when his regime occupied a new national area, the intelligentsia and kulak-analogues of the nation would be liquidated to make the raw material population easier to subdue and subsume into the Soviet industrialization goals.  

Snyder discusses the experiences of the people caught between these two regimes, and describes how Eastern Europe was a very complex and diverse place before the period in question. He addresses the Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish, German (living outside Germany), Belarussian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Latvian, Tatar, etc experiences in turn, and details how many of these people had to deal with multiple invasions and occupations. I think the claim may be made that in the Western mind, the idea of “peoples” died in this conflict. Today, the nation-state is truly dominant, and non-state-based peoples such as the Jews of Eastern Europe at the time do not make sense. 

The book also dives into the full details of the Holocaust in its many forms in different regions and times. I think that the Holocaust is a topic that has become more remote recently, more caricatured, and I learned a lot by reinvestigating the topic. Much of the philosophy that comes from the Holocaust stems from the idea that the fact that a “modern” people like the Germans could engage in something like this is a great lesson. Indeed. However, when one begins to consider the range in nature of the killing programs (perhaps starting from the waste of life in trench warfare in the First World War), the similarities and differences between the economies and lifestyles of the 1940s and 2020s, etc - everything becomes very gray, rather than black and white. Perhaps the lesson we should draw is that we must not overestimate ourselves - we are less advanced and less morally pure than we think we are today.

One other idea that really strikes me in this area of investigation is the idea of mass mobilization. I think the philosophy that enables societies to mobilize, that allows a state to deport hundreds of thousands of people within a couple weeks, to kill millions over months, and to do all this as a state administrative decision, is something to ponder. Our current world deals with ideas of individualism, tribalism, etc. But what does this mean?

It was difficult to read this book due to the subject matter. Many sections were very confusing to me, particularly the first chapters on the famine in Ukraine. Walking away from reading this book, I am still not sure why the initially seemingly accidental grain production shortages caused by a bad policy decision (collectivization) turned into an intentional famine program directed by Stalin and the party machinery. But details like the cannibalism of children during the famine were more than distressing. Later sections on the Holocaust were more personally relevant and painful.

As I write this reaction to the book, I find that I am breaking my policy to keep the reviews relatively short. The book is a gripping read due to its density of facts, its excellent writing, its impressive historical theorizing and narrative-building, and its goals. In the concluding sections, Snyder discusses directly how the Western narratives that followed the war were shaped by the incomplete picture that they had stemming from, for example, their liberation of several German concentration camps but not the death facilities of Eastern Europe that were encountered by the Red Army. He discusses the need to not just identify, understand, and memorialize with the victims of these campaigns of killing, but indeed to do the same with the collaborators, practitioners, and leaders of the killing programs as well. Snyder points out that victimhood identification was in use by the same regimes that engaged in the killings and generaed these other victims - Nazi ideology presupposed German victimhood by Jewish plots, and Soviet ideology made the same claims about imperial/capitalist plots. It is through the understanding of both the victim and the transgressor that we can better understand ourselves and perhaps avoid such occurrences again. 

Above all, however, I must admit that my primary reaction to reading this book is disbelief. It boggles the mind to think that these events really did happen, or even could happen. All the tools of philosophy, psychology, politics, etc, can be trained on this subject and yet nonetheless, their existence is profoundly disturbing and perplexing. I found myself stopping and confronting this again and again.