William2's Reviews > Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

If you wonder why Ukraine might hold a grudge against Russia, read Chapter 1 here: “The Soviet Famines.” In implementing his plan for the USSR’s collectivization of agriculture (1929–31) Josef Stalin killed 3.3 million Ukrainians. He starved them to death. He turned many into cannibals who ate their own sons and daughters. Far more than 3.3 million were sent to the Gulag for sabotage. But they weren’t saboteurs; they were sent into hard labor above the Arctic Circle because Stalin could not accept the fact that his collectivization plan had failed miserably. Ukranians paid the price for his ideological dogmatism. There’s a whole book on this by Robert Conquest, it’s called The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine.

“Part of Stalin‘s political talent was his ability to equate foreign threats with failures in domestic policy, as if the two were actually the same thing, and as if he were responsible for neither. This absolved him of blame for policy failures, and allowed him to define his chosen internal enemies as agents of foreign powers. As early as 1930, as problems of collectivization became apparent, he was already speaking of international conspiracies between supporters of Trotsky and the various foreign powers. It was obvious, Stalin proclaimed, that ‘as long as the capitalist encirclement exists there will continue to be present among us wreckers, spies, saboteurs and murderers.’” (p. 71)

Then came the period of the USSR show trials, 1937-38, and dekulakization. The show trials focused on destroying Bolsheviks. Stalin thought some might be Trotskyites and thus ideologically impure, so he killed them. For more on the show trials read Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror: A Reassessment. Dekulakization was the destruction of the so-called wealthy peasant class. Wealthy is a relative term. This “wealthy” peasant might perhaps have the luxury of a slate roof on his house rather than the thatched roof of his poorer neighbor. He might have two cows instead of one. Such marginally better off peasants were better at optimizing the shambolic Russian market economy of the day. Therefore they were capitalists, or the closest thing the USSR had to capitalists. Actually, the USSR had no bourgeois or capitalist class at all — classes Marx theorized must be destroyed if The Dictatorship of the Proleteriat was to be achieved. So a substitute had to be found, the kulaks, whose commitment to the market naturally made them reluctant to embrace collectivization. By the time Stalin was done, before World War II, he had killed millions, mostly Russians, but Ukrainians, Poles, and other nationalities as well.

I have long known that food was scarce during the war, but I’d always thought this was due to the enlistment of farmers. False. In the Soviet Union the farmers did not enlist, they were seen as anti-collectivists or fifth columnists and starved to death. As for Germany, it had produced the “Hunger Plan” whose goal was to systematically starve 30 million Soviet citizens to death in the soon-to-be-conquered USSR. The idea was to take over the fertile areas like Ukraine and redirect its agricultural products to Germany and its colonists. The plan was only realized in part because the Soviet Union turned the tide of war and chased the Nazis back to Berlin.

I don’t know of any book that compares and contrasts the murderous and genocidal policies of Hitler and Stalin in quite the way this one does. It is especially articulate when it comes to the ideation of mass killing. There is more information here, too, on the Nazi Einsatzgruppen and each of their mass killings than I have ever come across before in my wide reading. The two Warsaw uprisings — the Jewish Ghetto Uprising of 1943, and the broader 1944 military operation of the Polish Underground and Home Army — are discussed at some length.

“Political initiative had not been rewarded in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Anyone responding with too much avidity to a given situation, or even to a political line, was at risk when the situation or the line changed. Thus Soviet rule in general, and the Great Terror of 1937–1938 in particular, had taught people not to take spontaneous action. People who had distinguished themselves in the Minsk of the 1930s had been shot by the NKVD at Kuropaty. Even when it must have been clear in Moscow that Soviet citizens in Minsk had their own reasons to resist Germans, communists understood that this would not be enough to protect them from future persecution when the Soviets returned. Kaziniets and all the local communists [in wartime Minsk] hesitated to create any kind of organization, knowing that Stalinism opposed any sort of spontaneous action from below.” (p. 231)

If you want to read only one book on the massacres and genocides of 20th century Europe, this is it. Oh, and let me recommend, too, Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. Lifton is more about the dualist psychology of Dr Mengele — The Angel of Death — and his SS physician fellows.

Lastly, the chapters “Stalinist Anti-Semitism” and “Conclusion: Humanity” will set your hair on fire. In keeping with ideological purity of the Soviet state, it was necessary, the author explains, to deny The Holocaust. This because, “. . . to recall one’s own family’s deaths in the gas chamber was pure bourgeois sentimentality. A successful communist had to look ahead . . . to see just what the moment demanded from the truth, and act accordingly and decisively. The Second World War, like the Cold War, was a struggle for progressive against reactionary forces, and that was that." (p. 357)

To view the great crisis of the Second World War as The Holocaust was to diminish the Soviet experience. Stalin didn’t want Jewish deaths overshadowing the USSR’s losses. There can be no question that the war in the east was the real fight in Europe, which is not to diminish the American achievement, which was largely in the Pacific. There weren’t many Jews left, the Nazis had killed 6 million, but Stalin didn’t like divided loyalties between Polish communists and Israel (Zionism) or Israel’s supporter, America. If you weren’t all USSR all of the time you were suspect, if not a spy, who should be shot. Many were. But this later caper, known as the Doctors Plot, was diminished by the old boy’s death. It never reached the proportions of The Great Terror or collectivitzation.