The limits of Snyder’s premise

12At first glance, this perspective seems promising. In a time of spatial turns, transnational history, and genocide studies, shouldn’t the “bloodlands” paradigm open up histories and historiographies and allow for a decentering synonymous with a global history of massacres viewed as intertwined events? The new point of view voiced in Bloodlands, however, is based on a puzzling argument. Though he does not want to minimize the horror of atrocities committed further east or further west, Snyder seeks to “test the proposition that deliberate and direct mass murder by these two regimes in the bloodlands is a distinct phenomenon worthy of separate treatment” (BL, 411). In other words, the Gulag deportee who ended his days in Kolyma, the Soviet citizen shot in the back of the head in the Urals, the German Jew killed during Kristallnacht, the psychiatric patient gassed in a German clinic, the French resistance fighter dead of exhaustion at Mauthausen, and the Greek villager massacred during anti-partisan repression apparently all result from a regime of systematized crimes different than the one that prevailed over the “bloodlands.” They are hardly mentioned, if at all.

13A few examples suffice to demonstrate the limits of Snyder’s premise. When different killing methods were tested at Auschwitz, including suffocation by Zyklon B, it was at the time still just a concentration camp. Its transformation into a death camp cannot be explained without taking into account the concentration camp universe from which it emerged and to which it still belongs. Admittedly, Snyder is more interested in Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka than Auschwitz. But it is also necessary to venture beyond the bloodlands to understand how these camps came to be, given that the former architects of “Aktion T4,” meaning the extermination of German mentally ill patients, played a major role in their design and implementation. Similarly, the Einsatzgruppen lead to interest in the system from which they sprung and the administrations and organizations, namely the Gestapo and the SS, that produced their members—murderers whose training in violence began in Germany (before 1933 for some) during the partial civil war at the beginning of the Weimar Republic. The fact that a crime was perpetrated in one place rather than another does not make it somehow unique and “worthy of special treatment.” Everything is intermingled in the history of Nazi violence. The first victims of Zyklon B were Soviet prisoners of war who served as guinea pigs. Many Western Jews were then murdered in Birkenau, an extension of the original camp built by Soviet prisoners of war, nearly all of whom died in the process. As for the transformation of Auschwitz into a killing center, it cannot be understood without considering, on the one hand, mass shootings further east, in other death centers, and, on the other hand, the plan to deport Jews from across Europe. The crimes committed inside and outside the bloodlands are inextricably linked.

14As for Stalinist crimes, the isolating effect induced by the bloodlands paradigm cannot be justified either. People suffered and died in the USSR due to repression, deportation, or starvation in Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia, but also in the Volga, the Caucasus, Kazakhstan, work camps, and special villages in the country’s eastern-most and remotest areas. Like Nazi concentration camps, the Soviet Gulag is hardly considered. Yet its expansion coincides with the wide-scale collectivization and exacerbation of violence that peaked with the Great Terror. Here again, positing that the place in which crimes occurred necessitates a specific explication obscures the overarching system of state-sponsored crimes. This is why Snyder had no choice but to extend the scope of his history beyond the “bloodlands,” or else risk making his argument unintelligible. But that contextualization is very limited, with impressionistic touches and many gaps. It does not aim to provide the keys for understanding. All that matters is the supposedly specific nature of the crimes committed “where Hitler and Stalin’s imperial plans overlapped,” and “where the Soviet NKVD and the German SS concentrated their forces.” The bloodlands are “territories subject to both German and Soviet police power and associated mass killing policies at some point between 1933 and 1945” (BL, ix, 409).

15Therefore, in spite of the artificial nature of the notion of bloodlands—the regions and countries it groups together are far from homogeneous—, it is more than an attention-grabbing expression. It provides a way to analyze Nazi and Soviet histories through the lens of an interactionist model. Beyond this, a second model, closely intertwined with the first, structures the argument. Snyder makes the case for an “unabashed acceptance of the similarities between the Nazi and Soviet systems” (BL, 389). Even though he notes their differences in passing, these play a limited role. The notion of bloodlands can thus be viewed as rooted in the totalitarian paradigm, given the degree to which, in Bloodlands, Nazism and Stalinism present points in common. Snyder’s reflection is in line with an interpretative tradition that goes back to the 1930s and intellectuals such as Waldemar Gurian, [12] Franz Borkenau, [13] and Hermann Rauschning, [14] all precursors to the theory of totalitarianism, whose most canonical formulations were developed in the 1950s amid the Cold War.

16Let us set aside the fascinating history of a concept that has prompted countless publications on the role it played in intellectual and political debates [15] and turn to its scientific validity. In fact, a widespread consensus has emerged over the limitations of the concept of totalitarianism. In the latest collective reflection on that question, Sheila Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer called for it to be left behind, encouraging instead a “posttheoretical and posttotalitarian mode.” [16] Given this contested concept’s long history, it is surprising that Snyder spends hardly any time justifying his approach. He merely gives lip service to the notion of totalitarianism itself in a short reference to Hannah Arendt (BL, 380). Granted, he is not interested in the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as such. Mention of their real or supposed similarities is mainly used to support the study of crimes committed in the bloodlands, as part of an interactionist dynamic.

Overlooking the question of origins

18The Nazis’ ascension to power is thus presented rapidly and approximately. In Snyder’s telling, Adolf Hitler’s arrival at the chancellery reflected the desire among conservatives to use him “to keep the large German Left from power” (BL, 17). But the SPD had not been part of the government since March 1930. Furthermore, the Left was at that point very weak. Just as odd is the subsequent observation that conservatives had apparently been surprised by the announcement of new legislative elections for March 1933. In fact, yet another dissolution of the Reichstag was part of the deal negotiated with the Nazis. Also regrettable is the lack of attention paid to German conservative and anti-Semitic cultures, which are still worth studying, even though the famous Sonderweg (specific way) theory has lost some of its luster. Finally, Snyder tells us little about the context in which Nazism unfolded within a developed and advanced society, even though it was in the midst of a major economic crisis.

19As for the USSR, even less attention is paid to the question of origins. In fact, Snyder identifies a major historical break in the “heartless campaign of requisitions [of wheat] that began Europe’s era of mass killings. It was 1933” (BL, vii). The significance of the preceding period is radically understated as a result. Following a murderous world war, at least eight million soldiers and civilians were killed between 1918 and 1922 during confrontations between the Whites, Reds, and Greens, with violence on all sides. Still more died due to illness and the famine of 1921-22. The fact that this foundational moment is not taken into account underlines the inadequacy of the chosen chronological framework. Here again, in order for his account to remain intelligible, Snyder does address a few elements, but with a brevity that leads to questionable oversimplifications. How is a non-specialist reader supposed to understand the Russian Revolution when he or she reads that “Lenin himself had been a German secret weapon in the First World War; the Bolshevik Revolution itself was a side effect of the German foreign policy of 1917” (BL, 71–72)? [18] Most significantly, the essential and thorny question of the continuities between Soviet beginnings and the Stalin era is not raised, a casualty of the declaration of 1933 as the cut-off point. Many of the systems that propped up the terror of the 1930s had their foundations in the civil war, from political police to purges, and including the marginalization of “class enemies,” suspicion of rural classes, and the goal of collectivizing rural regions in order to achieve the “primitive socialist accumulation” so dear to Preobrazhensky. The mass operations conducted in 1927 by the OGPU, with the arrest of 49,000 persons to boot, within a context of a declining NEP, anti-imperialist psychosis, and the mistrust of populations, clearly show that many of the mechanisms implemented on an even broader scale in the 1930s were already at play. [19] Finally, the legacy of the Tsarist past, the tensions that existed prior to 1917 or 1914, and the importance of the development issue are not discussed.

20Because his intention was to concretize the interactions between the Nazi and Soviet regimes, Snyder had to chronologically align the latter with the former, without any regard for analytic rigor. The countries and regions studied only “became the bloodlands after the rise of Hitler and Stalin” (BL, 25). The neglect of the question of origins also reveals an excessive focus on Hitler and Stalin. Bloodlands, the subtitle of which is “Europe between Hitler and Stalin,” a linkage that also serves as title to the introduction (“Hitler and Stalin”), sacrifices itself to a “Great Man” history. In this work, the two dictators are demiurges and their visions drive history: “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” (BL, 387); “With the help of able associates such as Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler moved from one fictitious world to another, and brought much of the German people with him” (BL, 389). Bloodlands thus offers the long-outdated narrative of Hitler and Stalin surrounded by servile underlings:

21

Hitler’s henchman Göring in September 1941 behaved strikingly like Stalin’s henchman Kaganovich had in December 1932. Both men laid down instructions for a food policy that guaranteed death for millions of people in the months that followed.

22No justification is provided for this primacy of the “Great Man” theory. While Hitler and Stalin’s central roles should not be questioned or relativized, Snyder makes no attempt to address what has been learned from their main biographers, and he pays scant attention to the unique ways in which Hitler’s and Stalin’s powers operated.

A very hypothetical “interactionism”

23The book is based in no small part on an “interactionist” dimension. The reader thus discovers analyses from an earlier era concerning communism, which supposedly contributed heavily to the emergence of Nazism: “[Mussolini and Hitler] both represented a new kind of European Right, one which took for granted that communism was the great enemy while imitating aspects of communist politics” (BL, 16). Here, we are closer to Friedrich Hayek in The Road to Serfdom than a serious analysis of the rise of fascism in its various forms. Snyder speaks of the “large Communist Party of Germany” and claims that “the collapse of the German economy summoned the specter of a communist revolution; both helped Hitler come to power” (BL, 16): “The insistence of German communists on the need for immediate class revolution gained the Nazis votes from the middle classes. It also ensured that clerks and the self-employed voted Nazi rather than social democratic” (BL, 62). In his election campaign, Hitler apparently made the Ukrainian famine “a matter of furious ideological politics” (BL, 61). Stalin thus appears to have played an important role in the rise of Nazism:

24

Stalin’s own policies made it easier for Hitler to make this case, because they offered a similarly binary view of the political world. Stalin, his attention focused on collectivization and famine, had unwittingly performed much of the ideological work that helped Hitler come to power.

25Given the extent of the responsibility attributed to communism, it would have been reasonable to note that this line of (unsubstantiated) reasoning is rooted in a liberal and conservative analytical perspective that, again, dates back to the 1930s. Of course, the idea that a causal link exists between communism and Nazism is reminiscent of the famous “historians’ dispute” (Historikerstreit) that took place in the Federal Republic of Germany in the mid-1980s. If only to distance himself from that controversy, it would have benefited Snyder to situate his argument in relation to that of Ernst Nolte, [20] particularly since in Bloodlands, the “interactionist” model contributes directly to the analysis of mass killings. The fourteen million people killed in the bloodlands “were all victims of a Soviet or Nazi killing policy, often of an interaction between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany” (BL, x). If the author is referring to the German-Soviet pact, it makes sense to speak of interaction, even though such an observation offers nothing new. However, between September 1939 and June 1941 in annexed Poland, there was less an interaction as such than a parallel deployment of violence. The motives behind this violence were far from identical, even though there were similarities at different places along the new German-Soviet border. But Snyder claims there was a broader interactionism. Some years earlier, German historians Jörg Baberowski and Anselm Doering-Manteuffel had already formulated an interactionist analysis, with limited success. [21] In reading Snyder, who suggests rather than demonstrates the idea, we get the impression that the Soviet reality led to Nazi violence: “The East, until very recently, had belonged to the NKVD. One secret of Himmler’s success was that he was able to exploit the legacy of Soviet power in the places where it had most recently been installed” (BL, 189). The reader, however, struggles to determine the precise nature of the interactions mentioned in Bloodlands.

26The analysis of the death of three million Soviet prisoners of war, who “died as a result of the interaction of the two systems,” verges on truism: their fate “was a consequence of the belligerent encounter of two [societies], of the criminal policies of Germany on the territory of the Soviet Union” (BL, 381). While soldiers were indeed captured at the end of military operations, the fact that the camps under military supervision in which they died of starvation and cold—when they were not handed over to the SS for execution—were often located in the East does not in any way prove that the USSR was responsible for their fate, which can be attributed to the radical nature of the invasion plan. Yet the “war of extermination” (Vernichtungskrieg) planned during the spring of 1941 is hardly analyzed. Though he writes deeply moving passages about prisoners, Snyder quickly passes over the criminal orders (verbrecherische Befehle) decreed by the army high command and based on the logic of preventative terror. The overestimation of the Hitler factor even leads to a relativization of the soldiers’ responsibility: “German commanders would have to continue the war, which meant feeding soldiers, which meant starving others. This was the political logic, and the moral trap. For the soldiers and the lower-level officers, there was no escape but insubordination or surrender” (BL, 170).

27The partisan war, especially in Belarus, was also supposedly the result of an interaction:

28

Germans killed Jews as partisans, and many Jews became partisans. The Jews who became partisans were serving the Soviet regime, and were taking part in a Soviet policy to bring down retributions upon civilians. The partisan war in Belarus was a perversely interactive effort of Hitler and Stalin, who each ignored the laws of war and escalated the conflict behind the front lines (BL, 250); Partisan warfare was the supreme occasion for each leader to tempt the other into further brutality.

29The men and women who opposed the subjugation of their country are placed on the same level as the occupants who were starving, massacring, pillaging, rounding up, and deporting people. [22]

30Using the same logic, one could also posit that the resistant fighters who impeded the march of the Das Reich SS division toward Normandy the day after June 6, 1944 were co-responsible for the deaths at Oradour-sur-Glane, or that the Resistance was a perversely interactive effort between Churchill and Hitler, given that both ignored the rules of war. Claiming that resistance fighters violated the rules of war was incidentally one of the main arguments put forward by German authorities before and after 1945 to justify their actions. Granted, in the USSR, violence in areas affected by partisan warfare had a civil war dimension, inexistent at the same scale or intensity in France, that included numerous executions of real or supposed collaborators. However, in lieu of the concept of “interactive perversion,” analysis of that reality requires us to study long brutalized societies, evaluate the legacy of revolution and civil war, as well as of collectivization and the Great Terror, emphasize ethnic tensions, and consider the local context, in which Soviet authorities exercised real but distant control over partisan groups. [23]

31As far as the pogroms in the start of the war triggered in June 1941, they were apparently “a joint production, a Nazi edition of a Soviet text” (BL, 196). Note that they took place in towns that had, since the fall of 1939, been subjected to a particularly brutal Sovietization, in which the NKVD, rapidly withdrawing before the Wehrmacht’s advance, conducted massive prisoner executions, leaving behind countless bodies whose discovery shocked the local population. There is nothing that leads us to conclude, however, that the Soviets were responsible for the horrific killings of Jews that occurred afterwards and that can be explained by the intensity of local anti-Semitism, action by nationalist groups, the context of the war of invasion, and shooting operations conducted by the German Einsatzgruppen.

A very flattening comparatism

32If interactions are what characterize the “bloodlands” (“This is where the power and the malice of the Nazi and Soviet regimes overlapped and interacted,” BL, 384), the argument behind them rests on very fragile foundations. That is also the case for the similarities between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia: “In both the Nazi and Soviet polities the party played a leading role in matters of ideology and social discipline. Its political logic demanded exclusion of outsiders, and its economic elite believed that certain groups were superfluous or harmful” (BL, 390). Presenting them in this way, without further nuance, ultimately erases their differences. The fact that Nazi and Soviet ideologies were very dissimilar is only briefly mentioned, and this kind of flattening comparatism, also applied to the economy and society, is never questioned: “Both the Soviet and the Nazi political economies relied upon collectives that controlled social groups and extracted their resources” (BL, 390). This observation is incredibly simplified. The German economy, while subject to a dirigiste framework, was still capitalist after 1933, and large private groups partnered in the war effort. Under Hitler, economic, bureaucratic, and university elites maintained a certain degree of independence. The situation was very different in the USSR, where social structures were fundamentally disrupted by the revolution and Stalinism. Whereas, in the Soviet countryside, peasants were recruited into kolkhozes (collective farms) and kulaks were deported, in Germany, the Nazi regime sought to sustain medium-sized private farms through the Erbhofgesetz (law on hereditary farms).

33To some extent because the two countries were at different stages of development, the socio-economic, and therefore political, stakes Hitler and Stalin were dealing with differed. Germany was struggling with a deep economic crisis that caused a dramatic decline in industrial production and an upsurge in unemployment. Re-armament would relaunch the economy through public spending. In the USSR, the challenge was development, including, on top of everything else, a collectivization and industrialization policy that, by its very radicalism, explains in large part the violence that befell Soviet society. Yet Bloodlands presents us with two dictators who face the same challenges and adopt the same policy: “Hitler and Stalin, for all of their many differences, presumed that one root of the problem was the agricultural sector, and that the solution was drastic state intervention” (BL, 18). [24]

34Another purported similarity is the proximity of the utopias that guided the two dictators: “[T]heir visions of transformation concerned above all the lands between. Their utopias of control overlapped in Ukraine” (BL, 19). This claim is perplexing. What is the relevance of the notion of “lands between,” which could have us believe that there may have been, in particular, a kind of more or less independent Ukraine situated between German and Russia? Next, what is meant by the idea of “overlapping”? It is not very clear. Stalin’s plans targeted Soviet territory. The vision of Volksgemeinschaft (community of the people) applied first and foremost to the Reich. Granted, beginning in 1938, Nazi Germany adopted a path of diplomatic revisionism, and then of expansionism, pure and simple. The USSR took advantage of the German-Soviet pact to expand to the west. But given that Ukraine was largely part of Soviet territory, there could not be any “overlap” between the two “utopias of control.” It would have been clearer to speak of the occupation of Ukraine, a victim, like other western regions of the USSR, of the German invasion. This fundamental reality of a country invaded by another is obscured rather than highlighted in Snyder’s analysis:

35

Stalin and Hitler had arrived at the same basic answer to this fundamental question. The state must be large in territory and self-sufficient in economics, with a balance between industry and agriculture that supported a hardily conformist and ideologically motivated citizenry capable of fulfilling historical prophecies—either Stalinist internal industrialization or Nazi colonial agrarianism. Both Hitler and Stalin aimed at imperial autarky.

36In both cases, the reader is therefore presented with a colonial project with Ukraine as victim: “The Stalinists colonized their own country, and the Nazis colonized occupied Soviet Ukraine: and the inhabitants of Ukraine suffered and suffered” (BL, 20).

37Last but not least, Nazi violence and Stalinist violence are depicted as of the same nature. Enemies were eliminated using the same methods: “Stalin exploited the Kirov assassination [in 1934] much as Hitler had used the Reichstag fire” (BL, 72); “Like Stalin, he [Hitler] revisited his own rise to power, and visited death upon some of the people who had aided him” (BL, 75–76); “Like Stalin, Hitler showed himself to be the master of the organs of power, presenting himself as the victim of plots, and then ridding himself of real or imagined rivals” (BL, 77). While Snyder concedes that the Night of the Long Knives, with its one hundred or so dead, is far short of the Stalinist purges, this remark, alone able to invalidate the parallel established between Nazi and Soviet repressions, is not developed further. And yet the ways in which internal tensions were handled within the Nazi system and within the Soviet regime had very little in common.

38Beyond this, the fourteen million deaths in the bloodlands are on the whole attributed to similar systems. The 1933 famine in Ukraine is compared to the deaths of Soviet prisoners of war in 1941-42: “Stalin knew what would happen when he seized food from the starving peasants of Ukraine in 1933, just as Hitler knew what could be expected when he deprived Soviet prisoners of war of food eight years later” (BL, x). The forms of violence are similar because they result from regimes operating in a similar way: “In the occupied Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Soviet cities the Germans added a new collective: the ghetto.” “Both the ghettos and the collective farms were administered by local people” (BL, 390). In a book that is not lacking in debatable shortcuts, this one is particularly questionable. The presentation of the ghetto as just another manifestation of a collectivist rationale shared by Nazism and Stalinism underscores one of the major weaknesses of Bloodlands, which tends to strip away the Holocaust’s singularity.

The use and misuse of statistics

43This narrative flaw is not offset by Snyder’s use of statistics. Many quantitative examples attempt to raise the reader’s awareness of the massive nature of the killings in the bloodlands and of certain types of lesser-known crimes. The approach in itself is legitimate. In his latest book, Christian Gerlach presents many percentages and estimates that, far from resulting in a cold statistical account, plunge the reader into an atmosphere of terror. [27] But in Bloodlands, the statistics are sometimes problematic. The observation that “[a] non-Jewish Pole in Warsaw alive in 1933 had about the same chances of living until 1945 as a Jew in Germany alive in 1933” (BL, 406) does not specify that more than half of German Jews emigrated before the extermination policy was inflicted upon their community. If the mortality of non-Jewish inhabitants of Warsaw is compared to that of Jews living in Germany in 1941, and not in 1933, they are no longer equivalent. Of course, Snyder then notes that “a Jew in Poland was about fifteen times more likely to be deliberately killed during the war than a non-Jewish Pole,” which clearly shows the extraordinarily deadly nature of the genocide of Jews. But why then present the preceding skewed comparison?

44These ambiguities result in part from the intention, laudable in itself, to recall the suffering of non-Jewish Poles. But that concern becomes questionable as soon as Snyder’s statistical approach appears to relativize the difference between the Holocaust and the occupation regime in Poland, as violent as the latter may have been. Other more qualitative analyses also seem particularly clumsy, and prone, here again, to creating confusion:

45

In Warsaw during the Second World War, Poles and Jews were alone in some of the same ways, beyond help from the outside world, even from those whom they regarded as friends and allies. They were also alone in different ways, confronting different fates in the same war.

46The use of statistical comparison is just as troubling when it involves Auschwitz:

47

Nearly as many non-Jewish Poles were murdered during the war as European Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. For that matter, more non-Jewish Poles died at Auschwitz than did Jews of any European country, with only two exceptions: Hungary and Poland itself.

48Is it necessary to resort to this type of comparison to evoke the long list of Polish victims? What is the scientific value to presenting orders of magnitude that are not truly comparable? How can the death toll at Auschwitz be considered without taking into account its two main groups of victims, meaning the 300,000 Polish Jews and 400,000 Hungarian Jews murdered at Birkenau? Are we to conclude that the importance given the Jews killed at Auschwitz has been exaggerated? Snyder seems almost to suggest this: “The journey of Jews from the camp to the gas chambers was a minor part of the history of the Auschwitz complex, and is misleading as a guide to the Holocaust or to mass killing generally” (BL, 383). Immediately after, he does clarify that Auschwitz was in fact a major site of the Holocaust. Yet, a few pages earlier, he notes that “only about one in six of the total number of murdered Jews died [in Auschwitz]” (BL, 377), reproaching historiography for having overestimated its significance. Ultimately, the section on Auschwitz, made up of contradictory analyses and debatable comparisons, is not the most successful one in Bloodlands. Focused on showing the criminal interactions between Hitler and Stalin, Snyder struggles to situate the camp within his explanatory system. But nothing, in fact, allows us to fit the monstrosity of Auschwitz inside an interactionist framework, however rudimentary it may be.

49In Bloodlands, parallels are also made between racist and genocidal Nazi violence and social and political Stalinist violence. On one side, persecutions and killings targeted Jews, on the other, kulaks and peasants, with the boycott of Jewish shops serving as the counterpart to collectivization: “Like collectivization, the boycotts indicated which sector of society would lose the most in coming social and economic transformations: not the peasants, as in the USSR, but the Jews” (BL, 62). Collectivization and the Holocaust supposedly stemmed from the same rationale:

50

In both collectivization and the Final Solution, mass sacrifice was needed to protect a leader from the unthinkability of error. After collectivization brought resistance and hunger to Soviet Ukraine, Stalin blamed kulaks and Ukrainians and Poles. After the Wehrmacht was halted at Moscow and the Americans entered the Second World War, Hitler blamed Jews.

51The Holocaust becomes nothing more than just one version among others of killing attributable to two tyrants engaged in a “violent struggle between races or classes” (BL, 156). Everything is mixed together in Snyder’s interpretation, including killing methods: “The Soviets and the Germans relied upon technologies that were hardly novel even in the 1930s and 1940s: internal combustion, railways, firearms, pesticides, barbed wire” (BL, xv). Little surprise then that the ghetto finds itself on the same level as the kolkhoz.

The use and non-use of the notion of genocide

52In the wake of this amalgamative interpretation, Snyder prefers to speak of “mass killing” rather than genocide. In his mind, the latter appears to be of little utility, and is even suspect. The term “gives rise to inevitable and intractable controversies” (BL, 413). It is admittedly difficult to define, and the ways in which it is used in the media and politics further complicate the debate. Rejecting the term when discussing the Holocaust would, however, require very solid argumentation, which Snyder does not offer. The second justification used for its avoidance refers to the Soviets, who “made sure that the term genocide, contrary to Lemkin’s intentions, excluded political and economic groups.” While it “is remarkable” that the legal instrument of genocide exists, “one must not forget that this particular murder statute was co-drafted by some of the murderers.” Snyder criticizes the justice dispensed by the victors for having imposed biased categories, safeguarding the crimes committed by Stalin from the ignominious label of genocide.

53But in Bloodlands, the objection to the notion of genocide in fact conceals one of its most far-reaching definitions: “In each of the cases discussed in this book, the question ‘Was it genocide?’ can be answered: yes, it was” (BL, 413). This bold affirmation would also have benefitted from a sound justification. Snyder simply remarks, “Lemkin himself regarded the Ukrainian famine as genocide” (BL, 413, as well as 53). There is nothing original in making this reference. But the positions taken by the U.S. lawyer, unquestionably the architect of the concept of genocide, nonetheless need to be put in context. It was in 1953 that Raphael Lemkin equated the Ukrainian famine to genocide for the first time. In the anti-communist climate of that era, he viewed many communist acts of violence, such as the Slansky trial and the Budapest repression of 1956, as genocidal crimes. Closely connected to associations of eastern émigrés, which provided him with financial aid, he made statements at the time that, rather then be considered as a sanctified scientific foundation, should be analyzed as the product of Cold War culture. [28]

54Therefore, despite the fact that the fates of starvation victims are painted for the reader in horrifying passages in Bloodlands, the presentation of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 is not particularly clear. Though he avoids using the notion of genocide, Snyder nonetheless defers to Lemkin’s authority, and views the deaths of millions of Ukrainians as the product of an established murderous intentionality. At the end of 1932, “Stalin chose to kill millions of people in Soviet Ukraine. He shifted to a position of pure malice.” Among the regions that fell victim to a famine generally attributable to collectivization, “the evidence of clearly premeditated mass murder on the scale of millions is most evident in Soviet Ukraine” (BL, 42). Snyder mentions the measures that targeted it specifically. Remember that in his eyes, not only was the famine in Ukraine on the same level as the extermination of Jews (see above), so was collectivization as a whole. But Snyder once again contradicts himself. In another passage in his book, he provides a more moderate interpretation of the Ukrainian famine, explained as an “unintended result” of the ineffectiveness of collectivization and the “intended consequence of the vengeful extractions of late 1932 and early 1933.” Finally, this murderous intent was apparently weaker than that which drove the occupation of the USSR: “Hitler, on the other hand, planned in advance to starve unwanted Soviet populations to death” (BL, 162).

55Beyond these contradictions, Snyder’s analysis completely glosses over the long, and ongoing, controversy that began with the publication of Robert Conquest’s book, concerning whether or not the Ukrainian famine was genocide. [29] It is equally unable to problematize the complex question of collectivization, which affected the entire Soviet territory, notably the Volga and Kazakhstan, and not just the bloodlands.. Ultimately, these missing elements undermine the exploration of an irrefutably essential question—the more or less considerable specificity of the Ukrainian famine and its causes.

56The Great Terror, the second major dossier of Stalinist crimes, is equally stripped down. The debate between traditionalist and revisionist historians concerning the origins of the terror and the affirmation of Stalinist authority is not mentioned. Figures such as Robert Conquest, Oleg Khlevniuk, John Arch Getty, and Gabor Rittersporn appear at best in the notes. [30] Nor does the text place much emphasis on the importance of the opening up of archives after the fall of communism. The discovery of the “kulak operation,” the now sadly famous order No. 00447, and national operations, the most important of which was the Polish operation codified by order No. 00485, profoundly altered our understanding of a great terror long lumped together with the big Moscow trials and a process primarily impacting the Bolshevik elite. Yet the operations launched in July 1937, which resulted in by far the largest number of victims (around 1,500,000 persons arrested in 1937-38, 700,000 executed), were part of an enormous social engineering effort that expanded the sidelining of “suspect” populations to “harmful elements” and “people from the past,” who fell victim to urban cleansing operations beginning in 1933 as part of the “passportization” policy. [31] In the chapter entitled “Class Terror,” which makes numerous digressions concerning the international environment, this fundamental context is recreated only approximately. As a result, this short chapter, narrowly focused on the repressive process, becomes somewhat unintelligible. As for the observation of a now despotic Stalinist power, it does not include any analysis of the way in which Stalin’s tyranny and inner circle functioned. Finally, the bloodlands model overlooks many of the more eastern regions in the USSR that were harshly affected by anti-kulak operations, which became increasingly harsh between 1937 and 1938.

57National operations, for their part, supposedly reflected a significant reorientation in comparison to previous operations, as a rationale based on ethnicity was substituted for one based on class. Unlike order 00447, which targeted categories familiar to the Bolshevik imagination, order 00485, aimed against the fantastical “Polish military organization,” was very different in nature: it “seemed to treat a national group as an enemy of the state” (BL, 93). Considering the Polish operation as an act of “ethnic killing” nonetheless seems exaggerated. Of course, the Polish minority was particularly affected by the Great Terror. There is no doubt that many minorities were collectively targeted (operations in Latvia, Estonia, Romania, etc.), but the motivation behind deportations and executions relied less on ethnic or racial criteria than on a political and social plan to alienate populations deemed suspect. Yet Snyder makes parallels between the persecution of the Jews in Germany and of national minorities in the USSR:

58

Germany’s Nuremberg laws of 1935 excluded Jews from political participation in the German state and defined Jewishness according to descent. German officials were indeed using the records of synagogues to establish whose grandparents were Jews. Yet in the Soviet Union the situation was not so very different. The Soviet internal passports had a national category, so that every Soviet Jew, every Soviet Pole, and indeed every Soviet citizen had an officially recorded nationality.

59According to Snyder, at the end of the 1930s, the persecution of Jews in Germany was different from national operations in the USSR not so much due to its nature but to the fact that “its scale was much smaller” and “much more visible” (BL, 110); “As of the end of 1938, the USSR had killed about a thousand times more people on ethnic grounds than had Nazi Germany” (BL, 111).

60Here again, Snyder is prone to contradiction, specifying a few lines later, quite correctly, that the Jewish victims of the Great Terror “died not because they were Jews, but simply because they were citizens of the most murderous regime of the day.” However, stating that the USSR was conducting a “campaign of ethnic murder on a far larger scale” than the one seen in Germany tends to assimilate both processes. In the book’s largely off topic last chapter, Stalinist Anti-Semitism,” which notably explores the famous doctors’ plot at the end of the Stalinist era, national operations are compared to the Holocaust. Baseless hypotheses are made about what could have happened if Stalin had not died on March 5, 1953. The 35,000 Soviet Jewish doctors would have no doubt been deported, and “perhaps even the Jewish people as such would have been subject to forced removal or even mass shootings” (BL, 368). If it had taken place, such a murderous action against Jews “would have been one more in a series of national operations and ethnic deportations, which had begun in 1930” (BL, 368). The counterfactual prospect of “mass shootings” of a Jewish population, and therefore a killing operation comparable to genocide, allows an entire swath of Soviet crimes, beginning in 1930, to be situated next to the Holocaust.

61In order to determine the nature of national operations (particularly deportations of entire peoples, most notably in 1943-44 in the Caucasus, which took place far from the borders of the bloodlands), study of the decades prior to the 1930s would appear to be more fruitful than the exploration of hypothetical similarities with the persecution and deportation of Jews by the Nazis. During the civil war, the Bolsheviks massacred and deported 300,000 Don Cossacks, establishing a system of collective punishment of populations deemed counter-revolutionary. During World War I, one million people, Jews or descendants of German settlers, were displaced during the conflict, a policy inspired by theories on “suspect populations” in times of war developed in the field of military statistics. [32] Under Stalin, the ethnic dimension of the terror directed against national minorities stemmed from deep within Tsarist and Soviet history.

The challenge of contextualizing the Holocaust

62Ultimately, Snyder did not succeed in meeting the challenge of contextualizing the Holocaust, a crime that, though specific, needs to be situated within Germany and Europe’s dense history. Granted, the bloodlands model does provide some contextualization by focusing, rightly, on the east. But in addition to looking much like a work of amalgamative comparatism, it does not sufficiently consider the legacy of the past and does not situate Nazi violence within the larger view of a history of the eastern margins of Europe shaken by the processes of modernization and nationalization that had been affecting small nations and large empires since the end of the nineteenth century. This was Donald Bloxham’s ambition in The Final Solution, published in 2009. Even if the reader does not necessarily agree with all of his conclusions, his transnational approach results in a problematized synthesis of the contributions of the historiography of Nazism and of genocide studies. [33] In The Lands Between, Alexander Prusin also covers a much wider terrain than the one used in Bloodlands, which focuses on Hitler and Stalin. [34] Even World War I, though a focus for historians, receives scant attention, except for the observation, both brief and excessive, that “[t]he origins of the Nazi and the Soviet regimes, and of their encounter in the bloodlands, lie in the First World War of 1914–1918” (BL, 1).

63This lack of chronological depth explains, in part, why so little is made of ideology. It is seen as secondary, a variable subordinate to the economy: “Ideology cannot function without economics, and economics in the time and place was very much a matter of the control of territory” (BL, 394). The reader will learn nothing more about that rudimentary primacy of the economy. From then on, anti-Semitism is largely absent from Bloodlands. While there may be some value, as I believe, to structuralist approaches, as well as a need to relativize the importance of the ideological factor in the study of historical processes, its analysis nonetheless remains critical to any reflection on the Holocaust. The specific nature of Nazism, a movement and regime powered by a radical blend of nationalism, hygiene, racism, and anti-Semitism, seems to somewhat disappear from view in Bloodlands. Without any reference to the stigma-filled mindsets of many German decision-makers, both in Berlin and on the ground, the killings of Jews, the deaths of Soviet prisoners, and the oppression of occupied populations become enigmatic. Right away, the war against the USSR was thought of as a particularly brutal reality. Right away, it took a genocidal turn for Jewish populations. But because Snyder neglects the ideological factor, he hardly considers it. The first setback faced by the Wehrmacht in December 1941 explains nothing in itself. The importance of anti-Semitism is also relativized in that it is claimed, debatably, that genocidal violence first targeted Slavs, then, only at a later date, after December 1941, Jews: “Hitler’s decision to kill Jews (rather than exploit their labor) was presumably facilitated by his simultaneous decision to exploit the labor of Slavs (rather than kill them)” (BL, 215).

64In Bloodlands, the Nazi mindset had to play a limited role. If it were to be taken fully into account, it would conflict with the interactionist framework that, in its very premise, decreases the significance of that ideology to the benefit of a logic of alternative causality that places responsibility on the USSR. Snyder’s interpretation of violence in the east gives that country top billing, as it does to the context of war, which, though essential of course, is attributed far too much importance. Thus, the assimilation made by the Germans between Jews and partisans is explained first as a consequence of the difficulties encountered and the resulting reorientations. In Serbia, in fall 1941, Serbian Jews were killed as hostages in reaction to stronger than expected resistance. More generally, the killing of Jews as part of the fight against the partisans was supposedly a reactive process: “The logic of Serbia was universalized. Jews as such would be killed as retribution for the US-UK-USSR alliance” (BL, 217, although this is nuanced somewhat on page 240); “Hitler’s express decision to kill all the Jews of Europe raised the association of Jews and partisans to a kind of abstraction: Jews were supporters of Germany’s enemies, and so had to be preemptively eliminated” (BL, 235). There is some truth to that analysis. Violence crystalized around the interaction between worldviews and situations, or reversed situations, likely to influence the behavior of Nazi decision-makers. But this fluid context was itself deciphered using interpretive approaches that cannot be reduced to Hitler’s worldview alone. It is equally important not to lose sight of how earlier factors contributed to later decisions. The association of Jew and partisan is not a representation made after the fact (i.e., an ad hoc justification), but instead refers to an mindset that stigmatized partisans, drawing from a very negative view of them as well as from equally long-rooted anti-Semitism.

65It is not just the anti-Semitism of the occupiers that is overlooked; so is that of occupied populations. Granted, Snyder mentions collaboration, albeit briefly, and the participation of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Ukrainians, and people from the Baltics in the Holocaust. But he is not interested in the strength of an anti-Semitism with secular foundations. The pogroms of the Tsarist era, World War I, and the civil war are not included in his analysis. He posits that participation in the murder of Jews resulted from a cost/benefit calculation by rational agents weighing the positives and negatives of such behavior. For the local population, “they could cleanse themselves in the eyes of the Nazis by killing Jews” (BL, 398). This line of reasoning also establishes a strong link between collaboration under the Soviet regime and collaboration with the Nazi regime, suggesting that the majority of those who assisted in the Holocaust were connected to the Soviet authority, which is inaccurate:

66

Violence against Jews also allowed local Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Poles who had themselves cooperated with the Soviet regime to escape any such taint. The idea that only Jews served communists was convenient not just for the occupiers but for some of the occupied as well. Yet this psychic nazification would have been much more difficult without the palpable evidence of Soviet atrocities.

67Anti-Semitism and belief in Judeo-Bolshevism were supposedly only convenient fictions that allowed the occupiers to rule and the occupied to adapt, and not firmly entrenched mindsets.

68Hatred of Jews disappears as a factor for explaining the most connotative behavior. A gesture made by Poles—a finger drawn across the throat—when trains carrying deportees to the camps passed by is explained as “meant to communicate to the Jews that they were going to die—though not necessarily that the Poles wished this upon them” (BL, 266). Polish anti-Semitism is addressed quickly and spottily. The reader will not find any mention of the Jedwabne pogrom in June 1941 or the Kielce pogrom in 1945, after the end of the occupation, which killed dozens of people. Of course, Snyder does rightly note that Germany remains primarily responsible for the Holocaust. His reflections concerning the heavy constraints placed on local populations should not be overlooked. But his portraits of collaborators, more victim than executioner, and motivated by “negative opportunism” in the “hope to avoid a still worse personal fate” (BL, 398), appear oversimplified: “Almost none of these people collaborated for ideological reasons, and only a small minority had political motives of any discernible sort” (BL, 397). This view of subordinates devoid of autonomy or ideology struggles to elucidate the role of collaboration in the extermination of Jews.

The Holocaust: An “ecological” crime?

71Structures and contexts, elites and populations, radicalization dynamics and profiles of killers are absent from the introduction to Black Earth, which bears all the hallmarks of a highly dated and Hitler-focused history. This introductory section’s supposed originality comes from an iconoclastic re-interpretation of Hitler’s worldview, the primary traits of which (anti-Semitism, racism, imperialism, Darwinism, and nationalism) only make sense in light of an ultimate principle connecting them, which Snyder hammers home: “Hitler’s thought was ecological” (BE, xiv). Hatred of Jews was simply the consequence of an “ecological” awareness of a world lacking in resources, of a belief in the existence of a “planetary ecosystem” (BE, 21): “The struggle against the Jews was ecological, since it concerned not a specific racial enemy or territory but the conditions of life on earth” (BE, 8).

72These analyses pose a twofold problem. The first is that the revelation presented at the outset is not developed. The reader has to wait for the conclusion to hear more: “By presenting Jews as an ecological flaw responsible for the disharmony of the planet, Hitler channeled and personalized the inevitable tensions of globalization. The only sound ecology was to eliminate a political enemy; the only sound politics was to purify the earth” (BE, 321). The second is that the claim is not proven. Not one quotation in the book attests to the use of the words “ecology,” “ecological,” or “ecosystem” by Adolf Hitler, or any other terms with related meanings. Quoting the Nazi leader, for whom the Jews were “a pestilence, a spiritual pestilence, worse than the Black Death,” and reminding us that, in Hitler’s eyes, “If Nature designed the Jew to be the material cause of the decline and fall of nations, … it provided these nations with the possibility of a healthy reaction” (BE, 8), in no way proves that “the struggle against the Jews was ecological.” Snyder’s interpretation reveals itself to be a distorted one. Granted, the figures within the nationalist and völkisch movement thought in terms of Lebensraum, of “securing” agricultural production areas in the east, notably in Ukraine. However, this is no way reflects an “ecological” concern.

73For the most part, Black Earth deals with other topics. Chapters 2 and 3 cover Poland’s diplomatic position between Germany and the USSR, as well as its policy toward Jews. Particular attention is paid to the support received by Vladimir Jabotinsky’s small revisionist Zionist movement. I will skip over the (important) fact that this view of a Zionist Poland tends, on the one hand, to relativize the fundamentally anti-Semitic nature of its politics in the second half of the 1930s and, on the other, to exaggerate the support it received, which was in fact quite limited. [36] I will simply note that these developments are only tangentially linked to the Holocaust. While more relevant, the last three chapters, which primarily discuss Jewish rescuers and their various motivations, are similarly disconnected from the rest of the book.

The “destruction of the state”: A reductionist meta-explanation

74The core of Black Earth is contained in chapters 4 to 9, which are the most coherent and present the “destruction of the state” theory. In lieu of the major historiographical debates surrounding the Holocaust, which are hardly discussed, if at all, Snyder hammers in the same argument, raised to the status of a meta-explanation, page after page: “[M]urder was possible only where state institutions were destroyed” (BE, xiv). In destroying states, the Germans “created the abyss where racism and politics pulled together towards nothingness. In this black hole, Jews were murdered” (BE, 320). The process of destroying the state began in 1938 in Austria and Czechoslovakia, spread to Poland the following year, and finally reached Russia, where, according to Snyder, the Einsatzgruppen’s “essential mission” was “the destruction of institutions to permit racial war” (BE, 112). In the “middle cases,” countries and “places where German power reached but where the state was not destroyed,” Jews were not killed on such a massive scale (BE, 219). Finally, in “sovereign states that were untouched by German power,” Jews were not threatened. Given the importance it is accorded, this analysis merits careful consideration.

75First, what is meant by “destruction of the state”? Strictly speaking, the Polish and Soviet states were not destroyed. The continuity of the Polish state was assured by the British government, which supported the AK, the non-communist internal resistance. While it did lose control of part of its territory, the Soviet state did not disappear in summer 1941. Without it, victory over Nazi Germany would no doubt have been impossible. The USSR’s ability to absorb the initial shock of the invasion allowed hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews to take refuge in the east and escape extermination. These are realities about which Snyder, in both Black Earth and Bloodlands, says little. “Destruction of the state” should therefore be understood as the disappearance of state bodies that held power and protected citizens: “Not only the Holocaust, but all major German crimes took place in areas where state institutions had been destroyed, dismantled, or seriously compromised” (BE, 338–39). Written this way, the argument is tautological. It is very rare that an invader would allow an occupied country to govern itself as it wanted. Conquest results in the transfer of authority from the conquered state to the occupying state. In occupied Poland and the occupied USSR, the “destruction of the state” was certainly extreme, with homegrown institutions reduced to almost nothing. But Snyder’s argument obscures different realities. Can we speak of “destruction of the state” in the case of Austria? Most importantly, does this concept help us understand an essential aspect, indeed the central dimension, of the history of the Holocaust?

76To start, why is it necessary to use this very abstract category to refer to something that could be more clearly presented as a brutal hold over the occupied East? The destruction of the state is less the cause than the result of a radical project of domination. As such, it does not have the explanatory weight attributed to it. Nor is it a type of mechanism that automatically makes the worst atrocities possible. Immediately after May 8, 1945, the German state was “destroyed.” However, neither the United States, nor Great Britain, nor France subjected the Germans, who had been stripped of the “protection” of their “institutions,” to policies comparable to those implemented in the East by Nazi Germany. Even in the Soviet zone, where mortality was high in the camps and many rapes were committed, there were no mass killings, and even less genocide. Making the “destruction of the state” the fundamental prerequisite for the Holocaust minimizes the criminal nature of the Nazi project to conquer and the murderous intentionality that underpins it. There seems to be a significant contradiction with the intentionalist standpoint presented at the beginning of the book.

77But Snyder also postulates that the regions in which Nazi crimes took place are “non-state” areas: “Mass killings generally take place during civil wars or regime changes. It was the deliberate policy of Nazi Germany to artificially create conditions of state destruction and then steer the consequences towards Jews” (BE, 337). The lack of government arguably leads to anarchy and violence. The Russian civil war is a textbook case. But the Nazi “destruction of the state” did not produce this result. Admittedly, Germany did not have sufficient occupying forces. Occupied populations maintained some degree of freedom to adapt to a new evolving situation while pursuing their priorities. Corruption reached its height in the General Government. Ethnic cleansing followed a tortuous path against a backdrop of rivalries within the Nazi apparatus. Plans to deport Jews changed. But policies were implemented, populations were oppressed, resources were exploited, and Jews were exterminated. The occupied territories were not “the stateless zone where a Holocaust could be imagined, begun, and completed” (BE, 219). Snyder confuses the disappearance of the state with the substitution of one rule for another. The occupied territories were not characterized by the absence of the state but by a murderous order, albeit chaotic in certain respects, implemented by Germany.

78Based on these premises, the argument of state destruction brings Snyder back to Auschwitz, whose supposedly paradoxical nature is underscored in Black Earth:

79

[Auschwitz] was the planned murder site for very large numbers of Jews who were still citizens of states that Germany recognized as sovereign. Its intended Jewish victims were generally people who lived beyond the German zone of state destruction and who were therefore much less vulnerable to the imposing power of the SS … Millions of European Jews who were condemned to die at Auschwitz survived because they never boarded a train. Jews under German control who were supposed to be sent to Auschwitz were more likely to survive than Jews under German control who were not supposed to be sent to Auschwitz. That is the Auschwitz paradox, and it can only be resolved by considering how states were and were not destroyed … Auschwitz demonstrates the universal design to kill Jews. It also demonstrates the general significance of statehood in protecting them.

80Said paradox arises from either an obvious observation or a debatable analysis. Everyone would agree that Nazi Germany had more trouble killing Jews who were not under its direct control. Again, it suffices here to study the deportation of Jews from western or central Europe using the appropriate tools. According to Snyder, 75% of Dutch Jews were killed because “the Netherlands was, for several reasons, the closest approximation to statelessness in western Europe” (BE, 242). The reality was more complex. Many factors explain the murderous effectiveness of deportation, including the assistance provided by the Dutch administration, which had not disappeared even though the queen and the government were in exile. More generally, states and bureaucracies were not always obstacles to extermination, far from it. According to Snyder, “[t]he vast majority [of Hungarian Jews] perished after the German intervention that compromised Hungarian sovereignty” (BE, 237). This contradicts the statement, made earlier on the same page, that “[i]n practice, however, the work of deportation depended upon the records of the Hungarian interior ministry and the work of Hungarian local policemen.” When the Hungarian state stopped its assistance in summer 1944, Eichmann could not continue deportations. It is also important to note that the Vichy state first provided essential assistance for deportations, and that the “protection” provided to Jews of French nationality was relative, to say the least.

81Snyder confuses the rule of law with the state. In his view, bureaucracy and violence are incompatible:

82

Citizenship in modern states means access to bureaucracy. Bureaucracy has the reputation of killing Jews; it would be closer to the truth to say that it was the removal of bureaucracy that killed Jews (BE, 222); Even German bureaucracy did not kill Jews by itself … German Jews died not because of bureaucratic precision in Germany but because of the destruction of bureaucracies in other countries. German Jews were not killed, with a very few exceptions, on the territory of prewar Germany. Instead they were extracted from Germany and deported to bureaucracy-free zones in the East.

83Even when narrowly defined as a traditional apparatus of the state, the German bureaucracy—whether it was the Ministry of the Interior, the army, or the foreign affairs ministry, and ranging from the Nuremberg laws to criminal orders to the plan to deport Jews to Madagascar—was heavily involved in the persecution and deportation of Jews. Many ministerial representatives were present at the Wannsee Conference.

84Limiting the Nazi state to traditional administrations is perhaps reminiscent of the pioneering (but now dated) analyses of Ernst Fraenkel, who made a distinction between the “normative state” and the “prerogative state.” [37] Or it may be an allusion to Behemoth by Franz Neumann, who believed he had identified a national socialist non-state (Unstaat), which equated to direct control of the population by dominant groups. [38] In any case, Snyder’s text provides no analysis of the certainly complex nature of the national-socialist state. To understand how Germany’s bureaucracy operated, it is of course necessary to consider all of the administrations and organizations it involved, including the SS. At that point, an argument could be made to present the extermination of Jews as a bureaucratic crime. The resources and capabilities of one of the most powerful states on the planet were placed at the service of a murderous willfulness. But the elites who put it into operation are invisible—they do not interest Snyder. And yet their involvement has been thoroughly documented over the past two decades. Ultimately, by not taking them into account, Black Earth resuscitates a very traditional view of Nazism that restricts the field of responsibility to Hitler and the major leaders of the SS.

85The paradox of Auschwitz is therefore not a paradox at all. The benevolent bureaucracy of the best of Snyder’s worlds did not protect the Jews who remained on German soil in 1941. [39] In satellite countries, some Jews were saved not by states as such, but by certain governments that, for political reasons, decided to not (or no longer) cooperate in this regard. This minimization of the responsibility of bureaucracies marks a significant departure from Bloodlands, where the state was the tool of the dictator’s will: “[Stalin was] atop a bureaucracy that claimed to see and make the future”; “Anticipating this struggle [collectivization], Stalin had ordered in 1929 the most massive deployment of state power in Soviet history” (BL, 29); “German officials were (…) using the records of synagogues to establish whose grandparents were Jews” (BL, 110); “In both the Nazi and the Soviet cases, periods of mass murder were also periods of enthusiastic, or at least uniform, administrative performance” (BL, 396). In Black Earth, it is no longer a matter of “[f]ourteen million people … deliberately murdered by two regimes” (BL, 406). Polish ghettos also underwent a radical reinterpretation. In Bloodlands, they were, like the kolkhozes, a “collective,” a symbol of the totalitarian hold over societies. In Black Earth, they are merely “the urban expression of state destruction” (BE, 109), a description that is nebulous to say the least. The most Snyder will concede (in a note) is that “Soviet bureaucracy might seem to be an exception” to the argument concerning state destruction. [40] In a paragraph in the conclusion, he also slips in the idea, in three lines, that Nazi Germany apparently brought together two “logics of death”—that of state collapse and that of communist party-states (BE, 339).

86These embryonic remarks do not invalidate the central argument concerning state destruction, which also serves to demonstrate the USSR’s supposed responsibility in the extermination of Jews. The “double destruction of the state” is thus at the heart of Black Earth. Indeed, “even ghettoization and the proclamation of a colonial order were not enough to precipitate a Holocaust. Something more was needed” (BE, 117): “In the zone where the SS destroyed Soviet state structures, the vague concept of a Final Solution of the Jewish ‘problem’ could become the specific project of killing Jews where they lived” (BE, 178). The first “state destruction” attributable to the USSR, between fall 1939 and spring 1941, is presented as having paved the way for the Holocaust:

87

In its newly acquired lands, the Soviet Union created material, psychological, and political resources for the Germans, openings for future Nazi power in eastern Europe that had not existed before 1939. Though the Soviets did not intend to create these resources, their availability was decisive for the course of events after the Germans invaded these lands.

88Victims of the nationalization of the economy, though they were considered as having benefited from the new system, Jews were even more poorly viewed by local populations given that Soviet power resulted in the total destruction of the state, as in the Baltic countries. On this fertile ground, the worst scenario could occur following the second destruction of the state:

89

[H]ere, in this special time and place, where one extraordinarily severe regime gave way to another, where collaboration with the Soviets had been broad and where Nazi instructions for racial murder were general, there was no guiding source of political authority. The politics of the greater evil was a common creation at a time of chaos.

90This view of a stateless zone prompts a sharp re-evaluation of collaboration: “[T]he murderous politics that emerged was a joint creation of Germans and locals” (BE, 153). The poor wretches who had no autonomy in Bloodlands are now partners with the Germans. While the significant focus on collaboration is laudable, it appears overly broad. Certain comments are prone to mislead the reader about who was responsible, and even to minimize Germany’s primary responsibility. For example, in regards to Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka (the Operation Reinhard camps), mentioned remarkably little in a book on the Holocaust, Snyder states that “[w]hen the trains arrived …, the Jews would be murdered in gas chambers built and manned by Soviet citizens” (BE, 200). The reference to Soviet citizenship is rather surprising given the book’s main argument. Furthermore, collaboration is always presented as a rational calculation made by former collaborators from the Soviet era seeking to make up for past collaboration. The importance of nationalism and the strength of anti-Semitism are hardly taken into consideration. In a similar vein, the horrific visibility of killings is overlooked. Though not everyone collaborated, many villagers saw their Jewish neighbors killed in front of their eyes. Many took their belongings and property. [41] Those who did help did not always act unselfishly, and some denounced Jews they had initially hidden. For surviving Jews, the environment was fundamentally hostile and dangerous. Ultimately, in Black Earth, the importance attributed to collaboration serves less to support the analysis of a central aspect of occupied societies, and more to point the finger at the USSR. [42]

The “lessons” of the Holocaust: A dangerous futurology

91Black Earth concludes with a somber warning: “Understanding the Holocaust is our chance, perhaps our last one, to preserve humanity” (BE, 344). We are apparently much closer than we think to Hitler’s world. The Green Revolution, which reduced the food shortages following the war, is now reaching its limit. Global warming is already creating tension and conflict: “The civil war in Syria began after four consecutive years of drought drove farmers to overcrowded cities” (BE, 325-326). History could repeat itself:

92

In a scenario of mass killing that resembled the Holocaust, leaders of a developed country might follow or induce panic about future shortages and act preemptively, specifying a human group as the source of an ecological problem, destroying other states by design or by accident.

93Climate change “might make Hitlerian descriptions of life, space, and time more plausible” (BE, 327). An “apparent solution” to that challenge would be “to define a global enemy” (BE, 328).

94Political fiction-esque hypotheses are used to back these statements. In the vein of the “yellow peril,” Snyder imagines what Chinese imperialism could become in fifteen years. The leaders in Beijing might draw “the conclusion … that leaders in Berlin drew in the 1930s” and consider that globalization “must be complemented by durable control of living space that ensures food supplies” (BE, 331). Potable water shortages could lead to the worst extremes: “Under pressure, the Chinese will perhaps find the ideas that seem to justify the impoverishment and death of Africans and Russians” (BE, 332). Granted, Putin’s Russia is no better off:

95

In a new Russian colonialism that began in 2013, Russian leaders and propagandists imagined neighboring Ukrainians out of existence or presented them as sub-Russians. In characterizations that recall what Hitler said about Ukrainians (and Russians), Russian leaders described Ukraine as an artificial entity with no history, culture, and language, backed by some global agglomeration of Jews, gays, Europeans, and Americans.

96Islam is another threat:

97

It is already the case that North African Muslims bring anti-Semitic beliefs to Europe. But what if such Muslims in North African and the Middle East actually blamed Jews for environmental disasters? […] In a Middle Eastern war for resources, Muslims might blame Jews for both local problems and the general ecological crisis; that was, after all Hitler’s approach.

98Attentive to a “balanced” futurology, Snyder adds that “[n]aturally, Israelis could also blame Muslims and seek to draw their American allies into a larger conflict” (BE, 335).

99In view of these scenarios, the categories used to analyze the past appear no better suited to describing the present and predicting the future. The “ecological” lens reduces the complexity of the contemporary world. The Rwandan genocide and the civil wars in Sudan and Syria, beginning in 2003 and 2011 respectively, are framed as essentially due to a climate problem. States, and the threats they face, are the second main issue addressed in the conclusion. In the Middle East, “states are generally weak.” But then what of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the Assads’ Syria, Islamic Iran, and al-Sisi’s Egypt? There would seem to be a sufficient number of exceptions to merit considering whether the problem is not also due to the existence of strong and violent states, whose policies must be questioned.

100Snyder’s recommendations tell us a lot about his view of politics, notably the importance of rehabilitating the state unfairly devalued by postmodern intellectuals who learned the wrong lessons from the Holocaust. Some, on the left, inherited the anti-state analyses of the Frankfurt school, while others, on the right, are products of the Austrian school of economic thought embodied by Friedrich Hayek. This leads to a convergence that goes beyond their differences and entails criticizing the state, even though it is, in Snyder’s view, “for the recognition, endorsement, and protection of rights, which means creating the conditions under which rights can be recognized, endorsed, and protected” (BE, 343). His other major recommendation is to “invest in science” (BE, 343). Essentially, if Hitler presented the elimination of Jews as the way to resolve the ecological crisis, it was because, as the enemy of science, he refused to invest in agronomic research to resolve a food shortage crisis. Today, U.S. conservatives are apparently adopting the same stance by refusing to accept the irrefutable scientific reality of climate change.

101In final analysis, Snyder’s recommendations are based on an unconditional faith in progress. If a state proves to be criminal and murderous, it is no longer a state, but a non-state that can no longer be theorized. Such a position is somewhat troublesome, however, when conducting a study of the Holocaust. The modern bureaucratic state can only serve citizens and protect them from arbitrariness and violence. As for science, only the future will tell whether or not it will be able to meet the challenge of climate change. However, just like the state, science has its dark side. Presenting Hitler as an enemy of science is highly debatable. There were many scientists and intellectuals who lent their support to Nazi Germany by designing the most sophisticated weapons, conducting the most inhumane medical experiments, and providing pseudo-scientific legitimacy to racism and authority. While Snyder is strictly within his rights to present the state as a guarantor of the law and science as a vector for progress—for that matter, I completely share those ideals—it seems counterproductive to connect this claim to such debatable arguments.

102Ultimately, Timothy Snyder’s two books reveal a large gap between intentions and results. In Bloodlands, the announced decentering is not truly implemented. The functioning of the Nazi occupation machine and the behavior of executioners on the ground are insufficiently analyzed. The occupied societies seem very abstract when viewed reductively through the lens of a double occupation. The lack of chronological distance prevents Snyder from taking into account the history of the Soviet West, marked by the end of tsarism, World War I and then civil war, the uncertainties of the NEP, and the ultra-violent voluntarism of the 1930s. The interactionist bias impedes the analysis of the regional area the book is supposed to take as its focus. Far from a decentered history, Bloodlands presents a conventional narrative, written from the point of view of Berlin and Moscow, with Hitler and Stalin as driving factors. The comparison flattens out any distinctions and recycles many clichés in an extremely dated history of totalitarianisms. Finally, in Black Earth, the focus on “the destruction of the state” appears far from convincing.

103The excessive simplification of a complex reality is the second problem raised by Bloodlands and Black Earth. Major debates are either eliminated or consigned to brief and confusing, even incomprehensible, notes. One could retort that in a book intended for a general audience, going into detail is difficult, and that the Anglo-American narrative tradition has its limitations. No doubt. But what narrative strategy works best for a history that, in Snyder’s words, must be “intelligible to Poles and Israelis and Latvians and Californians and Irish and Portuguese”? [43] If a “global” audience is being addressed, the most essential points need to be emphasized. But what exactly are they?

104It seems indispensable to explain that historians do not always agree and that their thinking evolves as archival discoveries are made and new questions are raised. The first challenge in popularizing history is to show that it is not a factual and interpretative given. There is no reason not to clearly show that not everything can be reduced to Hitler or Stalin, that rivalries between administrations may engender different procedures, and that the starvation of three million Ukrainians is subject to contradictory analyses, etc. There is also, in my mind, a minimum code of conduct to follow. It is scandalous to write that “[f]or the time being, Europe’s epoch of mass killing is overtheorized and misunderstood,” to introduce a book on the Holocaust without the slightest reference to historians who have sometimes dedicated their entire lives to that history, and to suggest that the historical community has largely failed until Snyder. There are limits to one’s aptitude for self-promotion. [44]

105Finally, Bloodlands and Black Earth do not explore cold history, but sensitive subjects. The horrific suffering evoked by Snyder, at times very movingly, is a complex and weighted topic. In the Western world, the Holocaust remains, as we know, a vivid memory. While the Soviet past is less familiar, it nonetheless remains present. Aired in prime time on the France 2 television station in November 2015, the documentary Apocalypse Staline drew 3.1 million viewers. [45] The discordance is just as visible with Eastern Europe, where debates center on communist crimes. Given this backdrop of collective memory, one might have expected Snyder, a specialist in Eastern Europe, to provide some perspective. However, aside from some observations about Auschwitz’s central position in Western memory, Bloodlands floats in a kind of ideological and memorial void. It tells the reader about the Ukrainian famine without mentioning the importance of the Holodomor in Ukraine today, and lauds the merits of the comparison between Nazism and Stalinism without reminding us that it has for a long time been used to demonize communism. The fall of the Berlin Wall did not diminish the fraught nature of their juxtaposition. But Snyder casts a dark eye on partisans, and more generally on the USSR, without questioning how his analyses might resonate in countries that at times have a very positive view of past nationalist and anti-communist movements that were indisputably anti-Semitic and involved in the Holocaust. In his review of Bloodlands, Efraim Zuroff expresses concern about a book that “is already on its way to becoming the bible of the Holocaust distorters in post-Communist Eastern Europe.” [46]

106While that appraisal may seem excessive, its underlying concern is not. Snyder certainly appears untroubled by any ambiguities. For example, he put pen to paper to denounce Lithuania’s memorial blindness to its past. [47] And yet his analysis sketches a story that differs from the one that dominates historiography. Relativizing the specificity of the Holocaust, minimizing the role of anti-Semitism, and attributing significant responsibility to the USSR are not trivial acts when it comes to how we remember things. It is unfortunate that Snyder did not explore the non-scientific questions of a highly combustible history that he specifically views from a provocative angle, especially since Bloodlands is not a purely scholarly analysis. Since 2005, Snyder has called for the emergence of a “shared European culture,” synonymous with overcoming “the ‘cultural differences’ between the different spheres of Europe,” and aspired to a new European narrative larger than the one written in Western Europe after 1945, and which would include Eastern Europe and the suffering attributable to communism. [48] In 2011, he wrote: “Europeans need to know about this shared part of their history. A French person has to understand the fate of murdered Poles and a Ukrainian that of German Jews. Without a shared historical consciousness, the EU cannot function.” [49] Bloodlands is driven by one ambition—forge the master narrative of a Europe united in memory.

107It is true that in the West, we still have trouble grasping the terrible violence of Stalinism and the hold it had on society, and the excessiveness of a repression that, though some groups were more impacted than others, could strike anyone. Millions of people were killed and the lives of millions of others ruined. From 1930 to 1952, eighteen to twenty million people were sentenced to live in camps for various periods of time. But is it the historian’s role to contribute to the construction of a new form of remembrance? Is that not a mixing of genres? Most importantly, I cannot help but strongly disagree, scientifically speaking, with the vision promoted by Snyder. The reunification of memories cannot be operated at the cost of diluting the differences between Nazism and Stalinism. It is not at all certain that the focus of collective memory on Auschwitz, meaning above all on Birkenau, is excessive, as Snyder claims. The site of historical significance embodied by the camp does not in any way obscure other Jewish victims or the non-Jewish victims of other Nazi crimes. Given how its implementation was determined, the complexity of its manifestations, and the number of its victims, Auschwitz is the epitome of an unparalleled genocidal enterprise.

108Via a detour through the concentration camps, set aside by Snyder, I will conclude with the bloodlands model and the argument of state destruction. On April 20, 1945, Neuengamme was the site of one of the last episodes, and a particularly horrifying one, of a singular criminal regime. This episode is mentioned by Saul Friedländer in the final pages of Nazi Germany and the Jews and is the subject of a book by German journalist Günther Schwarberg. [50] Twenty Jewish children, ten boys and ten girls, who were deported to Auschwitz, were spared and transferred in November 1944 to the Neuengamme camp near Hamburg. They became guinea pigs for medical experiments. On April 20, 1945, as the Führer’s birthday was being celebrated and British troops were less than four miles away, the order came from Berlin to kill the children. The Nazi state, which had, since 1942, been facing a much stronger coalition of adversaries, nonetheless continued to mobilize all of its efforts until the end of the war, producing weapons in ever-larger quantities and putting up fierce resistance on all fronts. It also pursued the extermination of Jews until its final days. Beyond that, the entire concentration camp system erupted into peak levels of violence.

109On April 20, 1945, the twenty Jewish children were transferred to a Neuengamme subcamp, to the Bullenhuser Damm school, where Dr. Alfred Trzebinksi, who worked at Maidanek and Auschwitz before being transferred to Neuengamme, gave them sedatives. They were then hanged. In a neighboring cellar, twenty-four adults were also hanged that day. It took them six to eight minutes to die. Among them were two French doctors who had been deported for acts of resistance and two Dutch caregivers connected to the team of Dr. Kurt Heissmeyer, who was in charge of the experiments. The twenty other adults murdered on April 20 were Soviet prisoners of war. The three Polish nurses who had accompanied the children during the transfer from Auschwitz to Neuengamme were hanged on December 4, 1944. The young victims came from all over Europe: France, Holland, Yugoslavia, and Poland. Eleonora and Roman were from a Jewish family from Radom, Poland. On March 21, 1943, on Purim, they and their parents had been taken from the ghetto and led outside the city, with other notable families to be shot by a Trawniki unit (Ukrainian auxiliaries) under German command. Along with their mother, they escaped death, even as their father was killed in front of them. On July 21, 1944, the three survivors were deported to Auschwitz, at a time when Hungarian Jews were being exterminated en masse, before the two children ended their days less than a year later at Neuengamme.

110This bleak story, which took place far from the bloodlands, shows that mass shootings in the East, deportations to Auschwitz, the murder of French resistance fighters, the extermination of Polish Jews and Dutch Jews, the deaths of Soviet prisoners, and the fates of non-Jewish Poles are realities that intersect and cannot be attributed to different nexuses of factors or to some form of spatial determinism. In contrast, the supposed interactions between Hitler and Stalin do not allow us to understand much at all. There is nothing to be found within Stalinism, despite all its violence, that compares to the level of criminality revealed by the fate of the twenty Jewish children at Neuengamme.