This is not a book title that would grab me these days, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the assumption that I've already read this story. But I heard or read a review of the book at the time of its publication that intrigued me because it was clear that this was a history that I didn't really know. Snyder makes use of a lot of records that formerly were locked away behind the iron curtain.
The basic story of the book is that, in the countries between Germany and Russia (principally Poland, the three Baltic States, Ukraine, and Belorussia) between the years of 1933 and 1945, over 14 million people were deliberately murdered as political policy by Stalin and/or Hitler. This number does not count the people who died in concentration/labor camps, in the process of deportation or relocation, civilians that died as a result of military actions (think the millions who died at Stalingrad), or soldiers from any army who were killed in battle. It does include the Jews and others who were murdered in the death camps, the Russian prisoners of war who were deliberately starved and the ones who were shot.
Stalin began the policy of murdering his own citizens when he decided in 1933 to starve the Ukranian peasants. There were food shortages and hunger all over in the Soviet Union resulting from resistance to Stalin's collectivization of agriculture, but the author makes a clear distinction. Hunger is not policy. Starvation is. All of the Russia may have been hungry in those years, but it was only in the Ukraine and Belorussia that Stalin decided to starve the peasants by exporting 100% of their crops to get cash for his industrialization projects. The farmers of the area literally watched their production being shipped in rail cars to the ports on the Black Sea as they were dying. And of course they were shot if they tried to horde so much as a few grains for their own use.
A corollary is that after the war, the Soviet Union manipulated history so as to conceal much of this story. For one thing, the Soviets liked to pretend that WWII began for them when Hitler invaded in June 1941. But it really began in September 1939. They invaded Poland from the east at the same time as Hitler invaded from the west. The eastern Poles were invaded by the Russians in 1939, the Germans in 1941 and then again by the Russians in 1944. The story of the Baltic states is similar.
The author mentions in passing the irony that England and France declared war on Germany when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, but they were in no position geographically, politically or militarily to do a thing to help Poland as the war was coming to an end.
Aside from the fact that it's a depressing story and one that is difficult to read, it is easy to be overwhelmed by numbers and historical incidents, but the author constantly interjects the stories of real people when he can to counteract the numbing effect of the numbers that are beyond our imagination.
3 comments:
This sounds fascinating. I have heard for years about the "20 million Russians" who were killed during WWII, and most commentors indicate that it is difficult to determine how many were from the hands of Hitler and how many from Stalin. And you mention that it might be more the Poles, Lithuanians, and so on that the Russians?
I go back to the time when the Mennonites were run out of the Ukraine after developing its agriculture under the 100-year patents from Catherine the Great. When the patents expired, the Russians tried to conscript their young men in the years preceding the revolution. A lot of the Mennonites came to Canada and the US.
After the revolution, it was said that they developed collective farms and then introduced machines...but the tractors didn't have lights in the 1950's. Don't know if that is true, but it might be a good indication of the way collective farms work.
Anyway, the Chinese lost about the same number, 20 million, in WWII, and some were at the hands of the Japanese, but a lot were from the armies of Chiang Kai Shek bombing the levees and the citizens drowned.
Don't know if I will ever find the emotional energy to read something like this, but it is so good to know that there has been serious investigation.
Although there is undoubtably some overlap between the two numbers, the number of 14 million cited in the book does not include any of the civilian casualties of war (such as those at Stalingrad). It refers to people who were deliberately killed as a matter of public policy by both Stalin and Hitler.
One of the things it says to me is that I am not surprised that the Russians were plenty ticked off after WWII and into the Cold War. With that kind of carnage, every family would seem to have lost more than one member.
The Russian numbers are in doubt, as are the Chinese. The official Chinese estimate is 20 million. Most observers indicate that the Chinese Nationalists killed about 6 million. The latter number includes the toll of the 1938 flood.
The official count of Soviet Union military deaths is 10.7 million, an astounding number and about the same civilian.
As you point out, the number of Poles is nearly 6 million...and that approaches 17% of the pre-1939 population, and that leads all areas that I know of.
Mind boggling. I know that I heard people around Genoa talk about the guys who didn't come back, and the US "only" lost 418,000 or 0.3% of the population.
In our lifetime, only the genocidal wars in southeast Asia and the wars that have gone on constantly in Africa are like that in terms of percentages, and nothing that I know of is a huge in actual numbers.
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