Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin: An Interview with Timothy Snyder

YALE HISTORIAN TIMOTHY SNYDER’S BLOODLANDS: EURope Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2010) is a powerful and disturbing history of the Soviet and Nazi political mass murders from 1933 to 1945 in the contiguous area from central Poland to western Russia. Snyder makes the case that the mass murders in this region constitute a “distinct phenomenon worthy of separate treatment.” Bloodlands was a New York Times best seller and selected as a best book of 2010 by a number of publications including the Economist and the New Republic. Senior editor Donald A. Yerxa interviewed Snyder in August 2011.

Donald A. Yerxa:

Would you provide our readers with a brief summary of your book?

Swastika banners in a Nazi parade, ca. 1940. A still from Ken Burns’s 2007 PBS series, The War.

Timothy Snyder:

Between 1933 and 1945, when both Hitler and Stalin were in power, some 17 million non combatants were murdered by the two regimes. Although the two together ruled much of Eurasia, the vast majority of the murder, some 14 million of the killings, took place on a rather narrow band of territory between the Baltic and the Black Seas: today’s western Russia, the Baltics, Ukraine, Belarus, and eastern and central Poland. The bloodlands can be defined three different ways; each definition produces the same result: the place where the Jews of Europe were murdered in the Holocaust; the place where German and Soviet power overlapped; and the place where almost all German and most Soviet killing took place.

We think of the 20th century as the epoch that witnessed the end of European empire. At its beginning, however, it was rather a moment of the transmutation of imperial ideas. After the First World War, even the Nazis understood that Germany was unlikely to become a maritime empire after the British model. Hitler sought instead to treat the lands to Germany’s east, especially Ukraine, as future colonies. Meanwhile, Lenin’s successors in the Soviet Union also had to come to terms with the failure of a certain internationalist vision. Since their revolution had not brought an end to Great Britain and the other great capitalist powers, the Soviets would have to colonize themselves. For Stalin, as for Hitler, the crucial territory was Ukraine. Thus two neocolonial models overlapped conceptually in the same lands, and we are not surprised to learn that more people were deliberately killed in Ukraine between 1933 and 1945 than anywhere else.

The Nazi and Soviet projects were different in ideology and in goals, but overlapped in territory. The Soviets killed in very large numbers in the 1930s, first in pursuit of domestic modernization and then in the punishment of those who were supposedly responsible for its failures. The greatest episode of mass murder was the deliberate famine in Ukraine, followed by the Great Terror, which included several ethnic shooting actions in the western Soviet Union. It was precisely the alliance with the Soviet Union that permitted the Germans to begin to kill on a scale comparable to that of the Soviets. Between 1939 and 1941, while the two states were allies, several east European states were destroyed, Jews came under German occupation in large numbers and were placed in ghettos, and the Polish intelligentsia was targeted for mass murder and deportation by both sides. After 1941, when Germany betrayed its Soviet ally and invaded the Soviet Union, the tremendous majority of the killing was German. Hitler’s long-standing ambition to realize a Final Solution was implemented through shooting beginning in 1941 and gassing beginning in 1942. The Final Solution, originally conceived as a deportation, took on the form of a killing operation as German forces proved unable to win a quick victory against the Red Army. Other German plans for the starvation and deportation of millions of Slavs were scaled back as the Final Solution was radicalized. The Germans nevertheless killed more than 3 million Soviet prisoners of war and nearly a million civilians in “reprisals.”

Yerxa:

What is the significance of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line...