History has had its bloody periods, episodes of political, religious, and tyrannical conflict which stain our past. The Terror sparked by the French Revolution, the doctrinal slaughter of the Thirty Years War, and the Killing Fields of Pol Pot all immediately come to mind. But though all such conflicts have, directly or indirectly, impacted civilians, never have so many innocents born the brunt of a more widespread and systematic extermination than that which Germany and the Soviet Union enacted in the years between 1933 and 1945. Mr. Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, meticulously reconstructs these twelve, gory years and, in doing so, sheds light on crimes both familiar and forgotten.
Though their motives and their methods were quite different, Mr. Snyder estimates Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia to have, together, slaughtered 14 million eastern European non-combatants during this period. Though Stalinist Russia got an early start, enacting a series of disastrous economic policies and cruel political reforms which resulted in the mass-starvation of millions of its own people, many of them in the Ukraine, Hitlerian Germany swiftly caught up and surpassed the Soviet total when World War II ignited their plans to exterminate what they considered to be inferior races, particularly the Slavs and the Jews. In a chilling reconstruction of these unimaginable depravities, Mr. Snyder describes a relentless march of organized killing and its peripheral costs. He begins with the near extinguishing of civilization and civilized humanity in an Ukraine forced into cannibalism and, mercilessly, ends with the grotesqueness of Nazi death camps and starvation plans which tormented Poland and the Soviet Union. His conclusion? That these two nihilistic regimes walked similar paths of tyranny. Their policies brought about catastrophes, the blame for which they aimed straight at their enemies. In doing so, they succeeded in creating a kind of feedback loop in which the more things went wrong, the more they could fan the flames of anger for the enemy, further entrenching themselves in the seats of power.
Bloodlands is a valuable but masochistic read. It describes the consequences of state tyranny and articulates how that tyranny perpetuated itself. However, it takes the reader on an implacable tour of some of the grimmest scenes in human history. There seems, at times, no end to the existential slaughter, no reprieve from the cruelty of men who largely escaped the consequences of their terrible actions. But for as challenging as this book can be to the mind and the stomach, it articulates the motives and the processes that drove and allowed these two states, ensorcelled by charismatic tyrants, to commit some of the most grievous crimes in history.
The most valuable contribution here is the filling in of Soviet history which, for numerous reasons, has been played down in the decades since the Second World War. German accountability, coupled with a desire to never again succumb to such savage nationalism, has left behind a vivid record of Nazi atrocities. But the closed nature of Soviet society, succeeded by the prideful, authoritarian governments that have followed its collapse, have, to some degree, kept the lid on Stalinist crimes. In describing these barbarities, Mr. Snyder eloquently expresses what I consider to be Bloodlands' most telling truth about human nature, that Stalin, upon being faced with the calamitous nature of his economic reforms, fixed upon the idea that, as socialism nears its goal, resistance to its implementation increases. In other words, the failures of ones plans can be self-justified on the grounds that somewhere out there someone is working against you, frustrating you, defeating your noble goals, that it's not a fault in your stars but enemy resistance. This idea is the enabler of tyranny. "I'm not wrong!" "It will work if people stop fighting me!" Until we can rid ourselves of the capacity for such justifications, we will always be susceptible to the crimes of such men.
This is a powerful, existential, and sobering read, but its unyieldingly grim view of humanity during this period, while probably deserved, left me flailing for some shred of goodness to hold onto. It offers no reprieves from its repeated, savage blows to the reader's head. And so, even while it informs, it alienates. This is a tricky balance to maintain and Mr. Snyder never quite gets it right. (3/5 Stars)
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