Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, 2nd edition, Latest York: Basic Books, 2022.
Unless otherwise indicated, all page references are to this book.
Introduction
In April, Basic Books published a second edition of Timothy Snyder’s 2010 book Bloodlands, promoting it because the “essential historical background to the war in Ukraine.” The extraordinary role that Snyder is playing in justifying the imperialist proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and the alliance of US imperialism with the Ukrainian far right make it imperative to analyze this work more closely.
For the reason that starting of the war in February, Snyder has appeared countless times on television, has published multiple pieces within the Latest York Times and the Latest York Review of Books and has spoken at quite a few academic events. In his appearances, Twitter threads and other writings, he has buttressed US imperialist war propaganda against Russia with historical distortions and lies, starting from false claims of “genocide” to an alleged “hunger plan” by Putin and the existence of a “fascist regime” in Russia. Because the WSWS has documented, his Twitter threads have repeatedly sought to disclaim or downplay the role of Ukrainian fascists each in contemporary Ukrainian politics and the military and within the annihilation of 900,000 Ukrainian Jews through the Nazi-led Holocaust in World War II.
Most of Snyder’s current war propaganda relies on Bloodlands. At the guts of Bloodlands is the claim that the crimes of Nazism in Europe were a response to the crimes of Stalin in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-1933, which “began Europe’s era of mass killing” (p. vii), and the “national terror” that Stalin allegedly launched against Poles within the Soviet Union in 1937-1938.
The main target of the book, Snyder claims, are the 14 million people who were murdered “by the Nazi and Soviet regimes” in Eastern Europe. Deliberately excluding many of the former Soviet Union, he only pays attention to what he calls the “Bloodlands” that prolonged “from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states.” (p. viii)
The reader isn’t given any coherent explanation as to where this concentrate on these “Bloodlands” is coming from and why much of the previous Soviet Union was excluded. Snyder just makes up this latest geographic category without even a lot as an attempt at a historical justification.
Neither is there any explanation given for why, suddenly, the famine in Soviet Ukraine of 1932-1933 must be seen as the start of “Europe’s era of mass killing.” Why not the First World War of 1914-1918, by which not less than 20 million people were killed, and which led to each the October Revolution and the emergence of fascist movements throughout Europe? The undeniable fact that during World War II alone, not less than 27 million Soviet residents perished, almost twice the variety of victims that Snyder chooses to concentrate on, can also be simply ignored. With over 12 million victims of Nazism in the previous Soviet Union ignored of his account, Snyder insists that “Stalin’s own record of mass murder was almost as imposing as Hitler’s. Indeed, in times of peace it was far worse.” (p. x)
The importance of those claims can only be understood of their broader historical and political context. In advancing these arguments, Timothy Snyder echoes, in all essentials, the positions of the far-right German historian Ernst Nolte. Starting in 1980, Nolte argued that the crimes of Nazism, including the Holocaust, were caused by the “violence” unleashed by the Russian Revolution of 1917. Nolte explicitly spoke of a “causal nexus” between the Russian Revolution and Nazism. He insisted that the crimes of Nazism could only be understood as a “fear-borne response to the acts of annihilation that took place through the Russian Revolution.” These “acts of annihilation” were, in response to Nolte, the category war of the Bolshevik regime against the bourgeoisie and later against the peasants within the forced collectivization campaign that began within the late Nineteen Twenties. These “acts of annihilation” were the “original,” Nolte claimed; those of Nazism “a distorted copy.” The Russian Revolution, in his words, was the “most significant precondition” of the Nazi regime.[1]
Nolte’s claims prompted the so-called Historikerstreit (Historians debate) and were refuted and rejected by the overwhelming majority of German historians on the time. Following the Historikerstreit, Nolte’s profession became largely confined to lecturing in openly far-right and neo-fascist circles. Repeating them became tantamount to acknowledging political and mental affinity with fascism.
In his afterword to the brand new edition, Snyder acknowledges that Nolte’s “shadow hung over my more descriptive and empirical project.” Without rejecting Nolte’s central claims, which he casually describes as a “series of connections between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany,” Snyder criticizes the far-right revisionist for having advanced them “without linguistic knowledge or a source base.” In contrast to Nolte, Snyder boasts, “I knew east European languages (and German and French and so forth), was using east European sources, and treated interaction as a hypothesis to be tested reasonably than as a type of dreamy dialectic.” (pp. 416-417)
As this review will show, what Snyder presents in Bloodlands isn’t an “empirical” project. The truth is, it can’t be called “history” within the actual sense of the term. Exploiting his prestige as a professor at Yale University, some of the elite institutions on the earth, Snyder presents an account of a few of crucial historical experiences of the twentieth century that relies on an amalgam of half-truths, lies, distortions and horror stories. Its central axis is the revival of the justification of fascism provided by Ernst Nolte, with modifications and additions which might be derived primarily from the ideological arsenal of the Polish and Ukrainian far right.
PART 1: The false presentation of the Soviet famine as a “deliberate” policy of mass murder
The Soviet famine of 1931-1933 claimed the lives of an estimated 7 million people, roughly half of them in Soviet Ukraine. Even excluding the Urals, Siberia and the Far East—which also suffered famine—over 70 million out of the 160 million people within the USSR were living in famine areas. This included not only Soviet Kazakhstan and Soviet Ukraine, but in addition the Lower and Central Volga regions, the Central Black-Earth region and the North Caucasus.[2]
Yet despite the fact that Snyder offhandedly admits that “collectivization was a disaster all over the place within the Soviet Union” (42), his own discussion of the famine is restricted almost entirely to Soviet Ukraine. Snyder claims that “the evidence of clearly premeditated mass murder on the size of thousands and thousands is most evident in Soviet Ukraine. … Famine had struck parts of Soviet Russia in addition to much of Soviet Ukraine in 1932. Nevertheless, the policy response to Ukraine was special, and lethal.” (p. 42, emphasis added)
Throughout the book, Snyder puts the famine on par with the killing policies of the Nazis, claiming that it served as an inspiration for the latter. Echoing Nolte’s claims that the crimes of the Nazis were a “copy” of those of Stalinism, he writes, “It helps to know that Nazi planners were aware that Soviet policy had led to devastating famine in Ukraine in 1933, because then we understand that they sought to do the identical thing.” (p. 415)
While Snyder himself is careful to not expressly use the term “genocide” for the famine in Soviet Ukraine, he clearly insinuates that it is suitable. Thus, he mentions that Rafał Lemkin, “the international lawyer who invented the term genocide, would call the Ukrainian case ‘the classic example of Soviet genocide’.” (pp. 53-54)
Yet Snyder fails to provide a single document proving the intention to kill numerous people, let alone numerous specifically Ukrainians, on the a part of the Soviet leadership. This, nonetheless, could be the obligatory precondition to substantiate the very serious allegation and historical assessment of a “genocide,” based on the definition provided by the United Nations. It should be stressed that such documents proving the intent to kill exist in abundance for the Nazi policies of mass murder of the Jews of Europe, several other victim groups, or, for that matter, Stalin’s Great Terror of 1936-1938.
Snyder cites no such documents because they don’t exist. Despite many volumes of documentary collections and historical studies of the topic because the opening of the archives of the previous Soviet Union since 1991, not a single document suggesting that Soviet leaders had the intention to kill numerous people, let alone on an ethnic basis, has been found. The famine was the results of criminal policies, but these policies were of a really different nature than the genocide perpetrated by the Nazi regime against European Jewry.
The Russian Revolution and Soviet society within the Nineteen Twenties
To know the phenomenon of the Soviet famine, it must above all be placed within the historical context of the event of the Soviet Union and the emergence of Stalinism. It’s precisely this kind of evaluation that Snyder rejects. To the extent that Snyder discusses any historical background of the famine, he engages in a mix of anticommunist outbursts, snarky comments and half-truths.
Insinuating that the Stalinist policies that led to the famine were rooted within the 1917 Revolution and Marxism, Snyder denounces the October Revolution as a coup led to by a German-funded Lenin. He writes that the Bolsheviks sought “mastery of each peasants and nations” and that “they were the enemies of their very own peoples, whether defined by class or by nation. They believed that the people they governed was historically defunct, a bookmark to be removed before a page was turned.” (11)
This isn’t history but a political rant. Snyder fails to even try and substantiate any of his claims, as any historian must. He doesn’t address or refute the historical scholarship that has shown that the Bolsheviks were delivered to power in a social revolution, after having won the political confidence of the working class and sections of the peasantry.[3]
Neither is there any historical basis for the accusation that the Bolsheviks were “enemies of their very own peoples.” In point of fact, the early Bolshevik government initiated the arguably most radical democratic and socialist measures of any government in world history. Upon seizing power in Petrograd, the revolutionary government under Bolshevik leadership immediately ended Russia’s involvement in World War I and granted full democratic rights—including the suitable to national self-determination—to the oppressed nationalities of the Tsarist Empire. The landowners were expropriated, and the land was nationalized.
The Soviet government also nationalized the key banks and most of heavy industry and transportation, canceled the foreign debt and established a monopoly on foreign trade that ensured that international private capital couldn’t undermine the foundations of the newly created employees’ state and its economy. The eight-hour workday was introduced, and the Soviet Union, despite its relative poverty, established some of the advanced social and public health systems on the earth.
The conquests of the revolution were prolonged to a big portion of the previous Russian Empire, including the eastern part of what’s now Ukraine, in an almost four-year-long civil war against imperialist invading armies and nationalist forces by which the Red Army, led by Leon Trotsky, prevailed. During these years of civil war, revolutions and insurrections erupted in Germany (1918-19), Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria. Nonetheless, contrary to the expectations of the Bolsheviks, the working class—above all, due to betrayal of its old Social Democratic leadership—did not take power in other countries. The top of the civil war in 1921-1922 coincided with a relative ebb of revolutionary struggles by the working class internationally.
The mix of international isolation and the relative backwardness of the Soviet economy generated immense social and political pressures upon the fledgling employees’ state and its ruling party. A bureaucracy had already begun to take shape through the civil war and now gained in social and political strength. By the tip of 1923, a pointy shift within the international political situation—above all, the aborted revolution in Germany—had driven the internationalist wing of the party, led by Leon Trotsky, right into a minority opposition against the bulk faction around Joseph Stalin, which spoke for the interests of the nascent bureaucracy. By the autumn of 1924, this faction would articulate the social interests of the bureaucracy within the nationalist program of “socialism in a single country.”
The unfolding inner-party struggle inside the Bolshevik Party is brushed off by Snyder in a number of paragraphs and ended, in his words, when “Trotsky left the country.” (p. 14) Furthermore, Snyder insinuates that the policies of collectivization and industrialization, which, in his words, resulted within the “mass starvation of 1933,” were only adopted as Stalin “associated himself with the policies of those purged rivals [in the Left Opposition].” (p. 13)
This mixture of omissions and half-truths makes it inconceivable to know the background to collectivization and the famine of 1930-1933. The policy of forced collectivization was adopted in 1929 as a part of a five-year plan that envisaged a rushed industrialization of the Soviet Union and the tip of the Latest Economic Policy (NEP) that had been introduced within the spring of 1921.
Snyder cynically refers back to the NEP by stating, “The Bolsheviks had first to perform the constructive work of capitalism” (p. 10). Again this formulation is wrong and explains nothing. The NEP did indeed entail concessions to the capitalist market and peasant layers inside the Soviet state, concessions without which the Bolshevik government would have lost the support of huge portions of the still predominantly rural population, and without which it might have been inconceivable to recuperate the economy.
Nonetheless, industry remained nationalized and, critically, the general control over the economy remained within the hands of the employees’ state. The contradictory and transitional nature of the Soviet economy was intrinsically tied to the target problems confronting the revolution in Russia.
The previous Russian Empire, an economically relatively backward country, had grow to be the primary country by which the working class was capable of seize state power and initiate the world socialist revolution. This international isolation not only deprived the Soviet economy of desperately needed technology and other economic resources, it also deepened and complex socio-economic relations inside the Soviet Union. While Snyder repeatedly refers to a “war against kulaks” or attempts to “subordinate the peasantry to the state,” he fails to supply his readers any explanation in any respect of the society and economy of the Soviet Union and the issue of the peasantry.
Without such an evaluation, nonetheless, it’s inconceivable to know the origins of the famine within the early Thirties.
Precisely due to belated development of the Russian economy and since there had been no bourgeois democratic revolution, most of the revolutionary measures of the socialist October Revolution were, ultimately, of a bourgeois not a socialist character. The land had been nationalized, giving the state the facility to distribute and allocate it. Nonetheless, in practice, the revolutionary measure of giving peasants land had led to a considerable increase in small, privately-owned farms. The Soviet economy because it developed within the Nineteen Twenties entailed each a “socialist” sector—heavy industry and transportation, which were virtually completely nationalized—and a “capitalist” sector, namely agriculture, where private capital still played a serious role. The influence of personal capital was kept in check above all by the Soviet state’s monopoly over foreign trade, which preempted direct trade relations between wealthier peasants, traders and enterprises with foreign capital.
The policies of the NEP period within the Nineteen Twenties accelerated a growing differentiation inside the peasantry, which was divided between probably the most impoverished layers, the so-called bednyaks, the center peasants (serednyaks) and the higher off peasants, which were called the kulaks.
Collectivization, the famine and the position of the Left Opposition
From 1923 onward, the Left Opposition had advocated a concentrate on industrialization and the strengthening of heavy industry, in an effort to increase the social and political weight of the commercial working class in Soviet society. The Opposition repeatedly warned that bourgeois layers within the peasantry could grow to be the idea for the emergence of a latest bourgeoisie and the restoration of capitalist relations should they manage to ascertain direct trade and political relations with capitalists within the more advanced capitalist countries. The Opposition, subsequently, insisted that the party needed to base its work and support within the countryside on probably the most oppressed and impoverished masses of peasants.
The Stalin faction rejected the policies of the Opposition. Explicitly arguing against Trotsky’s theory of everlasting revolution, which insisted that the contradictions of the social revolution in Russia could only be resolved through its extension on a world scale, the chief theoretician of the Stalin faction, Nikolai Bukharin, claimed that the economic interests of the working class and wealthy peasants could possibly be reconciled and that the Soviet Union could move toward socialism in a single country “on the pace of a tortoise.” [4] Based on these conceptions, the Stalin faction adopted policies that effectively undermined the event of Soviet industry, while strengthening probably the most privileged layers of the peasantry.
The international corollary of this nationalist and opportunist orientation was the subordination of revolutionary movements by the working class and peasants to bourgeois forces, most notably in China in 1926-1927. The resulting defeats of the working class in Germany, England and China reinforced the international isolation of the employees’ state, further consolidating the position of the bureaucracy and its political faction within the party versus the revolutionary left wing of the party.
In December 1927, the Left Opposition was expelled from the Soviet Communist Party. Its leaders and far of its membership were arrested and exiled. In 1929, Trotsky was exiled from the USSR, finding refuge initially in Prinkipo in Turkey.
But just because the bureaucracy escalated the persecution of its Marxist opponents, its economic policies began to backfire. In 1928 a large grain crisis hit the Soviet economy. The crisis prompted a turn to forced grain requisitions by the regime. The grain requisitions did not yield the obligatory results, and mass starvation loomed. In response to this desperate situation, in 1929, the Stalinist leadership shifted to a policy of forced mass collectivization. Small, private peasant holdings, which still dominated Soviet agriculture, were rapidly forced into collective farms, so-called kolkhozy, or socialized farms, the sovkhozy.
Like its policies before 1928-1929, the industrialization and collectivization drive was based on the conception that socialism could possibly be inbuilt “one country,” that’s, that every one the resources obligatory for rapid economic development at probably the most advanced level could possibly be leveraged from the Soviet population and raw material resources. This was a reactionary delusion. Neither Soviet industry nor Soviet agriculture was anywhere near the technological level obligatory for the establishment of large-scale collectivized farming, which, amongst other things, required the commercial production of advanced agricultural equipment on a mass scale.
While the Soviet government declared “war” on the “kulaks,” collectivization often hit hardest the poorest peasant households and people of the center peasants, which were often also very small and impoverished. Peasant households were forced to offer up their livestock to the collective farms under conditions where the overwhelming majority of households that owned animals only owned one cow or pig and two or three sheep.[5]
This policy had two foremost consequences: First, animals taken from different households were now herded together in often unhygienic conditions, with insufficient shelter and food. The result was mass starvation amongst animals and the spread of epidemic diseases amongst each livestock and the human population. Second, many peasants slaughtered their stock en masse to protest collectivization. Within the USSR as a complete, the stock of cattle and pigs declined by half by 1933. It might take until 1958, i.e., a complete generation, for the Soviet cattle and sheep population to recuperate to its 1914 levels.[6] The rushed collectivization of individual peasant holdings also virtually destroyed established crop rotation, undermining future harvests.[7]
Compounding these disastrous policies, poor weather conditions made the Soviet harvests of 1931 and 1932 exceptionally bad. One historian estimated that the mix of drought, rain and infestation of crops in 1931 and 1932 destroyed not less than 20 percent of the harvest and would “have been sufficient by itself to have caused serious food shortages and even famine.” Thus, despite the fact that grain quotas for 1932 were, actually, substantially lower than in previous years—i.e., less grain was requisitioned from the peasantry than in previous years—peasants were left with substantially smaller reserves.[8]
The policies adopted as a part of forced collectivization provoked not only famine but in addition a near civil war within the countryside, with uprisings against food requisitions and collectivization by desperate and ravenous peasants rocking large parts of the Soviet Union by 1930. The bureaucracy responded to mass social unrest with brutal repression and mass deportations, often of entire peasant families. At the identical time, famine began to hit the cities, where the urban working class was growing by leaps and bounds due to policy of rapid industrialization. The result was a horrific decline in living standards and a famine amongst each the urban and rural population.
The catastrophe of collectivization impacted the political and economic development of the Soviet Union for a long time to come back. Along with the tremendous human toll of not less than 7 million dead, malnourishment impacted multiple generations, epidemics spread amongst each humans and animals and the livestock suffered an unprecedented collapse. Politically, collectivization dealt a large blow to the political prestige of socialism in each the Soviet peasantry and oppressed masses throughout the world.
To insinuate, as Snyder does, that these adventurist and irrational policies, which had no basis in socio-economic reality, had been pioneered by the Left Opposition and were then “adopted” by Stalin is a falsification of the historical record. The Left Opposition had indeed advocated the collectivization of peasant households as the next organizational economic form to the dominant small peasant holdings. The Left Opposition, nonetheless, all the time viewed this policy as a gradual one, whose pace was necessarily depending on the general development of the Soviet economy and a much higher level of each industrial and agricultural productivity. In 1930, Trotsky wrote
This [new] course [in the Soviet economy] is the negation and adventuristic complement of the opportunistic course that prevailed in 1923 and which was especially pronounced from 1926-28. Today’s course is by no means less dangerous, and in certain respects is a more serious danger, than yesterday’s. … In essence, this isn’t a latest theory. It’s the old theory of socialism in a single country, but shifted into “third gear.” Earlier, we had been taught that socialism could be inbuilt backward Russia “at a snail’s pace,” with the kulak growing into socialism.
Now the snail’s pace has been replaced by a speed almost that of an aircraft. The kulak is not any longer growing into socialism—at such speeds it isn’t possible!—but is just being liquidated by administrative order.
Explaining the policies of the Opposition, Trotsky continued:
Time and again we decisively rejected the duty of constructing a national socialist society “within the shortest possible time.” Collectivization and industrialization we bind by an unbreakable tie to the world revolution. The issues of our economy are decided in the ultimate evaluation on the international arena.[9]
Even with Trotsky in exile and all other leading oppositionists imprisoned, the Soviet Left Opposition developed sharp analyses of the unfolding disaster. Thus, in December 1932, the imprisoned opposition leaders demanded “an end to the policy of complete collectivization,” warning of the eruption of a civil war. They accurately ascribed the causes of the economic disaster to the bureaucracy’s “lack of consideration for material resources, and [its orientation] toward the development of a closed national economy isolated from the world market” which resulted in a “complete violation of the planning principle.” They wrote:
A lot of the producing regions—the Urals and the Volga, the North Caucasus and the Ukraine, the foremost breadbaskets of the Union—find themselves almost under siege. Shootings and exile of communists and collective farmers have gotten a part of the system and the foremost methods of grain procurements in the manufacturing regions of the USSR. … We must make it clear not only to the agricultural employees, but in addition to the more significant strata of the peasantry, that the Leninist opposition has never succumbed to the frenzy of total collectivization, has never been infected with the illusion of eliminating the kulaks by administrative methods. [10]
These documents disprove Snyder’s claim that the policies of collectivization and industrialization in the shape adopted by the Stalinist leadership constituted a realization of the policies of the Left Opposition and Marxism.
Snyder’s distortions of historical scholarship
The archival materials published on the topic since 1991—they usually are vast—confirm, essentially, the assessment recommend by the Left Opposition on the time. Amongst crucial studies are the works of historians Stephen Wheatcroft and Robert W. Davies. Snyder references different works of theirs a minimum of 27 times in the primary chapter alone, giving the impression that he relies on their research to advance his claims a couple of “deliberate policy of mass murder.”
Nothing could possibly be farther from the reality. The truth is, Davies and Wheatcroft are amongst the perfect known scholarly opponents of the claim that famine constituted a “genocide” or was a “deliberate” policy of mass murder. Snyder references their 2004 volume Years of Hunger almost two dozen times in his chapter on the famine. In contrast to Snyder, nonetheless, Wheatcroft and Davies discuss the famine as a union-wide, that’s, not a Ukrainian phenomenon, which was led to by a mix of catastrophically fallacious policies, the legacy of a backward agriculture and poor weather conditions.
But Snyder never openly tells his readers what Davies and Wheatcroft actually say. Furthermore, most of the references to this work in Bloodlands are misleading.
Thus, Snyder references the book to substantiate the intense allegation that in Soviet Ukraine, “Doctors and nurses were forbidden [by the authorities] from treating (or feeding) the ravenous who reached their hospitals.” (p. 22) But Davies and Wheatcroft write no such thing. Moderately, on the page referenced by Snyder, they discuss the little question horrific decisions by local and central authorities to preference those that could work on collective farms within the food distribution. They quoted a “chilling decision of the Ukrainian party central committee on March 31” concerning peasants within the Kiev region who were hospitalized due to hunger. The hospital employees were instructed: “Divide all those hospitalised into sick and improving, and considerably increase the food of the latter in order that they may be released for work as quickly as possible.” [11]
In one other case, Snyder refers to this book to substantiate the claim that 2,505 people were sentenced for cannibalism in 1932 and 1933 in Ukraine. No such figure is provided on the given page, which doesn’t check with cannibalism in any respect. In yet one more example, Snyder purports to depend on Wheatcroft and Davies when claiming that the famine resulted in each Kazakhstan and Ukraine in a shift of the “demographic balance … in favor of Russians.” The page referenced in Years of Hunger (p. 316) offers no discussion in any respect of demographic shifts within the ethnic composition of Soviet Ukraine or some other a part of the Soviet Union.[12]
The truth is, Davies and Wheatcroft have produced volume after volume over the past 30 years, including several edited collections of archival documents, that disprove your complete presentation of the famine as an ethnically targeted policy of mass murder.
In an essay referenced but never accurately summarized by Snyder, Wheatcroft explicitly denounced attempts by Nolte and others “to attract a simplistic causal link between the repression and mass killing within the Soviet Union and in Germany. These claims … are generally based on a poorly defined understanding of the complexities of those phenomena, an inaccurate understanding of their scale and a weak appreciation of their chronology.” [13]
Wheatcroft distinguished between the causation of the premature death of individuals through policies that were catastrophic, on the one hand, and deliberate killings, on the opposite. While he discussed the mass executions of the Great Terror and Hitler’s genocide of European Jewry as deliberate killings, he accurately described the deaths of the famine as having been attributable to the Stalinist regime through disastrously incorrect policies but not a deliberate policy of mass murder.
Davies, too, is a well-known opponent of the claim that the famine was a “genocide.” Contrary to all of the claims by Snyder, Davies observed that Stalin treated the unfolding famine “… as a roughly normal bureaucratic problem, as as a consequence of the mistaken distribution of the grain procurement plan and to the necessity for local leaders to ‘devote a correct amount of attention’ to agriculture.” Davies concluded that Stalin’s correspondence with Lazar Kaganovich, then the second most significant figure within the Soviet Politburo, testified to Stalin’s preoccupation with the “routine activity of the machinery of party and state” which “fully corresponded to his belief in the facility of the state and party machines, and of administrative measures.” [14]
This passage is a devastating indictment of the bureaucracy and its head, but it surely also disproves claims that Stalin’s policy had been one in all deliberate mass murder.
Snyder’s failure to acknowledge that two of the perfect known experts on the famine that he references repeatedly actually opposed his claims can’t be considered an innocent mistake. Nor are his obsessive concentrate on Soviet Ukraine and the unsubstantiated claims of a “deliberate” policy of “mass killing” that targeted Ukrainians the results of merely a poor historical method.
Timothy Snyder’s claims of the famine as a “deliberate” act of mass murder targeting Ukrainians have a protracted history, going back to the Ukrainian far right, which collaborated with the Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine during World War II. As a part of their occupation of Ukraine, the Nazis encouraged “revelations” of Stalinist crimes by their journalist hirelings in occupied Ukraine. A lot of these “journalists” were members or sympathizers of the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Without using the term “genocide,” which was not yet in use, they presented the famine as such and blamed “Muscovite imperialism,” the “Russification of Ukraine” and spoke of a “destruction of Ukrainian culture by the Bolsheviks.” [15]
The tradition of this narrative has all the time included a heavily anti-Semitic element, because the famine was routinely presented because the end result of the workings of the “communist Jews” in Moscow. After the war, this far-right falsification of Soviet history was promoted by far-right elements within the Ukrainian diaspora who enjoyed the backing of Western intelligence agencies and had ties to outstanding academic institutions within the US and Canada.
The massive-scale legitimization of this far-right narrative began within the Nineteen Eighties and was advanced primarily by American academics with close ties to the US state apparatus. In 1986, Stanford University’s Robert Conquest published the book Harvest of Sorrow. It was the primary work of a well-known Western academic that claimed that the famine constituted a “genocide” directed against the Ukrainians in the shape of a “terror-famine.” Conquest denied that the famine had any natural origins and compared it as an alternative explicitly to the crimes of the Nazis.[16] It must be noted that Conquest later himself revised his claims and refused to talk of a “genocide” by the early 2000s.[17]
Arguably much more consequential for the rehabilitation of the Ukrainian far-right narrative on the famine was the work of James Mace, who was affiliated with Harvard University and headed a US Congressional Commission on the Ukraine Famine. In 1988, Mace gave a report back to Congress about its “findings,” claiming that the “investigation” had established that the famine constituted a “genocide.” Mace explicitly compared the famine to the Holocaust, going thus far as to assert that it was even worse, with an alleged 7 million versus 6 million dead.[18]
As a part of this deliberate effort to place the famine on par with the Holocaust, the term “Holodomor,” which accurately means murder by starvation, was brought into use by the Ukrainian diaspora.[19]
Within the Soviet Union, where the bureaucracy was moving toward the full-scale restoration of capitalism, Ukrainian nationalist intellectuals and former Stalinist hacks were desirous to parrot the historical lies of the Ukrainian diaspora and its academic allies.
The “genocide” narrative inside the context of NATO’s expansion in 2000s
The most important push of the claim that the famine constituted a “genocide,” nonetheless, occurred within the context of NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe and the aggressive intervention of the US in Ukrainian politics within the early 2000s. In 2003, the Ukrainian parliament, the US Congress, in addition to the Canadian parliament all passed resolutions that condemned the famine as a “genocide,” effectively adopting as official narrative that of the Ukrainian fascists.
In 2004-2005, the pro-NATO government of Viktor Yushchenko got here to power after the US-backed protests of the so-called “Orange Revolution.” The federal government undertook major efforts to rehabilitate the World War II era Nazi collaborators in Ukraine and their historical falsifications. The “Holodomor” became a subject taught in schools to children, and the federal government supported the issuing of a documentary collection that explicitly called the famine the “Ukrainian Holocaust.”[20]
This campaign prolonged beyond Ukraine and in addition involved international historians, all of whom now claimed that the famine constituted a “genocide,” disregarding entirely all evidence on the contrary.[21]
Snyder’s account is basically based on works that emerged out of this campaign. Thus, amongst his most significant sources is The 1932-1933 Famine as Genocide by the outstanding Ukrainian historian Stanislav Kulchytsky. Ignoring all findings on the contrary, the book reiterates Robert Conquest’s claims that the famine was a genocide targeting Ukrainian peasants within the Soviet Ukrainian republic in addition to the Kuban.[22] (Kulchytsky himself had rejected the claim that the famine was a “genocide” until 2003.)
One other vital reference point for Snyder is Robert Kuśnierz’s Ukraine within the years of collectivization and the Great Famine (1929-1933), which was published in Polish in 2005 and is referenced a minimum of 28 times in Snyder’s 99 endnotes for the chapter on the famine. In his references to this work, Snyder not only makes quite a few mistakes, but in addition introduces, in an underhanded manner, propaganda by the Ukrainian right.
Kuśnierz is one in all Snyder’s preferred sources for his quite a few “horror stories” about cannibalism and other facets of collectivization with which he intends to shock and disturb his readers. In several cases, nonetheless, he inaccurately summarizes this source and adds or omits critical details.[23]
Thus, in a single passage, Snyder describes, based on Kuśnierz, harrowing crimes by party brigades and members of the youth movement, the Komsomol. He portrays them as little greater than a gang of marauding gangsters who were raping and killing people on behalf of the state.
Like an invading army the party activists lived off the land, taking what they might and eating their fill, with little to point out for his or her work and enthusiasm but misery and death. … They might urinate in barrels of pickles, or order hungry peasants to box one another for sport, or make them crawl and bark like dogs, or force them to kneel within the mud and pray. … In a single village the brigade got drunk in a peasant’s hut and gang-raped his daughter. Women who lived alone were routinely raped at night under the pretext of grain confiscations—and their food was indeed taken from them after their bodies had been violated. This was the triumph of Stalin’s law and Stalin’s state. (pp. 39-40)
Yet even Kuśnierz, who’s a bitter anticommunist, acknowledges that the Komsomol members were expelled for his or her “un-Bolshevik attitude” and punished for his or her crimes. In other words, unlike what Snyder suggests, their behavior was every part but condoned. Kuśnierz also notes that members of brigades who had been guilty of crimes were placed on trial and sentenced to prison or camp. This goes unmentioned in Bloodlands.[24]
There may be yet another revealing case. In one in all his many ghastly descriptions of the famine, Snyder writes, “In a single village in Soviet Ukraine, the triumphal arch built to have fun the completion of the Five-12 months Plan was surrounded by the corpses of peasants.” (p. 54)
Because the source for this claim, Snyder refers to Kuśnierz (p. 178) who tells us that this description relies on the account of an “eyewitness,” who’s supposedly cited within the 1976 English-language issue of Ethnocide of Ukrainians within the USSR of the journal Ukrainian Herald, an “underground” journal by right-wing Ukrainian dissidents that was published with the assistance of Robert Conquest.
The story cited by each Kuśnierz and Snyder may be found on page 47 of that journal. The article in query is authored by Maksim Sahaydak and entitled “Soviet fascism.” It rants concerning the alleged slow-motion genocide of Ukrainians without even purporting to be an objective evaluation of anything or a reputable scholarly source. The story with the arch is mentioned with none source provided (no eyewitness is referenced). In other words, it has no scholarly credibility in any respect. Kuśnierz inaccurately identified this source in a Polish book. Then, Snyder simply repeated this right-wing propaganda in his supposedly scholarly work, well aware that almost all of his readers wouldn’t have the ability to examine his Polish-language references.[25]
It must even be identified that in several cases, Snyder provides inaccurate page numbers for figures and quotes that he takes from Kuśnierz.[26]
Furthermore, Snyder repeatedly references the Polish translations by Kuśnierz of Russian-language articles and speeches by Joseph Stalin. This includes references to well-known articles by Stalin akin to “Dizzy with Success,” which is instantly available not only in Russian but in addition in English. That is comparable to a German historian of the American Revolution citing a Chinese translation of the American Declaration of Independence, as an alternative of citing the widely available original or the German translation. It isn’t only absurd but illegitimate.
Historians are dutybound to make the references they use as easily accessible as possible and at the identical time to get as close as possible to the unique document. Which means that, unless a longtime translation of a document or text exists, the unique should be cited. The goal is to make it each as easy as possible to confirm the sources and to stay as closely as possible to the written record. Yet Snyder cites neither one in all the numerous English translations of those documents nor the unique Russian but reasonably the barely accessible translation right into a third language, Polish.
As any academic of his training and standing, Snyder is well aware of the principles and principles guiding citation. Historians must not only substantiate their claims with accurate references to other historians and first documents but in addition accurately discover and summarize the findings and arguments of other historians, whether or not they agree with them or not. After they develop a special or latest assessment of any historical phenomenon or event, they need to cite the historical evidence that forms the idea for his or her conclusions and assessments.
Snyder’s many mistakes within the citations and his reliance on sources in lesser known languages, even when translations can be found, not only testify to a rare degree of sloppiness. In addition they make it difficult to confirm his claims and check his sources. For nearly all of his readers, this makes all of it but inconceivable to know that Snyder hides essential facts from them which don’t fit his “narrative,” while making up others for which there is no such thing as a historical record. He either ignores, falsifies or refutes established historical scholarship without ever openly saying so, while deriving his foremost arguments from right-wing propagandists.
To be continued
Endnotes
[1] Ernst Nolte, “Between Historical Legend and Revisionism?”, in: Ernst Piper (Ed.). Ceaselessly within the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy In regards to the Singularity of the Holocaust, transl. by James Knowlton and Truett Cates, Latest Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993, p. 14.
[2] Stephen Wheatcroft, R. W. Davies: The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933, Palgrave/Macmillan 2004, pp. 410-411.
[3] See, particularly, the study by Alexander Rabinowitch of the 1917 Revolution in Petrograd, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, Haymarket Books 2009. David North has addressed the claims that 1917 represented a coup in “The Bolshevik Seizure of Power in October 1917: Coup d’État or Revolution?”, 17 April 1995, World Socialist Web Site. URL: https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/01.html. For a discussion of the lies regarding “German money” behind the revolution, an old claim by the Russian far right, see: David North, “Professor Sean McMeekin revives discredited anti-Lenin slanders,” 30 June 2017, World Socialist Web Site, URL: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/06/30/mcme-j30.html
[4] See: Nikolai Bukharin, “The Theory of Everlasting Revolution,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1924/permanent-revolution/index.htm
[5] Wheatcroft, Davies, Years of Hunger, p. 312.
[6] Ibid., p. 326.
[7] Ibid., p. 110.
[8] Mark B. Tauger, Natural Disasters and Human Actions within the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933, Carl Beck Papers in Russian & East European Studies, Number 1506, 2001, pp. 6-8, 20.
[9] Leon Trotsky, “The Latest Course within the Soviet Economy,” Writings of Leon Trotsky [1930], Latest Yorl: Pathfinder Press, 1975, pp. 106, 111, 118.
[10] “Polozhenie v strane i zadachi bol’shevikov-lenintsev” [The situation in the country and the tasks of the Bolshevik-Leninists], 10 December 1932, URL: https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/3656916.
[11] Wheatcroft, Davies, Years of Hunger, p. 220.
[12] Just a few more cases must be noted: A quote by Stalin on p. 146 is incorrectly reproduced by Snyder, who changes the term “Ukrainian demobilizers” to “Ukrainian destabilizers” (p. 36). The reference to the book on p. 187 for a quote in endnote 63 is leading nowhere; the references in endnotes 64, 66 and 67 all result in page numbers that don’t have anything to do with the period and the claims that Snyder makes. In endnote 72, the reference is to p. 210 as an alternative of 211, and the reference in endnote 91 to p. 158 is totally misleading. While Snyder discusses the famine in Ukraine, the passage referenced in Wheatcroft and Davies discusses a wholly different issue, concerning how the famine was unfolding within the North Caucasus and the Central Volga region.
[13] Stephen Wheatcroft, “The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Repression and Mass Killings, 1930-45,” in: Europe-Asia Studies, December 1996, Vol. 48, No. 8, p. 1319.
[14] Robert W. Davies, “Introduction,” in The Stalin-Kaganovich correspondence, 1931-1936, Yale University Press, 2003, pp. 12-13.
[15] Tanja Penter, Dmytro Tytarenko, “Der Holodomor, die NS-Propaganda in der Ukraine und ihr schwieriges Erbe” in: Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 69 (2021) H. 4, pp. 646-648.
[16] Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow. Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, Oxford University Press 1986, p. 3. It must be noted that Snyder doesn’t acknowledge that Conquest later revised his claim of “genocide.” In a very important footnote in The Years of Hunger, Wheatcroft and Davies indicate: “… in June 2006 a Ukrainian delegation of experts on the Holocaust and the Golodomor met Robert Conquest in Stanford University and enquired about his views, and were told directly by him that he preferred not to make use of the term genocide.” The Years of Hunger, p. xvii.
[17] In 2003, Conquest wrote to Wheatcroft and Davies, “Stalin purposely inflicted the 1933 famine? No. What I argue is that with resulting famine imminent, he could have prevented it, but put ‘Soviet interest’ aside from feeding the ravenous first thus consciously abetting it.” R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, “Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932-1933: A Reply to Ellman” in: Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 58, No. 4 (June 2006), p. 629.
[18] James E. Mace, “Secret of Ukrainian Genocide Must Not Be Forgotten Tragedy,” The Vindicator, August 22, 1986, pp. 1, 9.
[19] The presentation of the famine as a genocide on par with if not surpassing the Holocaust was developed by the right-wing diaspora and their academic allies, not least of all in response to the trial of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator, which began in 1986, and the establishment of a commission to analyze alleged war criminals in Canada.
Explaining the motivations behind this push, the preeminent scholar of Ukrainian nationalism, John-Paul Himka, has identified that “Some thought that making the general public aware that Ukrainians were also victims on a big scale ‘could blunt the force of the efforts made to portray Ukrainians as ruthless oppressors of Jews’ through the Holocaust. Furthermore, presenting the Soviet Union as an anti-Ukrainian, criminal regime could discredit the evidence that the Soviets were supplying to the prosecutors in war-crimes hearings.” John-Paul Himka, “Making Sense of Suffering: Holocaust and Holodomor in Ukrainian Historical Culture, and Holod 1932-1933 rr. v Ukraini iak henotsyd/Golod 1932-1933 gg. v Ukraine kak genotsid [The 1932–33 Famine in Ukraine as a Genocide] (review)” in: Kritika Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Vol. 8, No. 3, Summer 2007, pp. 687-688.
[20] See David Marples, Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine, Central European University Press, 2007, pp. 35-77.
[21] In France, it was advanced by Nicholas Werth and in Italy by Andrea Graziosi. See Nicholas Werth’s essay on the famine that Snyder quotes in La Terreur et le désarroi. Staline et son système, Perrin 2007, pp. 117-134. The essay was written on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the tip of the famine in 2003, explicitly references the choice of the Verkhovna Rada and concludes by echoing Mace’s assessment that the “Holodomor” needed to be seen on par in its horror and scale with the genocide of the Jews and that of the Armenians. (Ibid., pp. 132-134). Andrea Graziosi’s essay, also often cited by Snyder, is probably the perfect known case of a Western historian rehabilitating the “Holodomor” thesis. “The Soviet 1931-1933 Famines and the Ukrainian Holodomor: Is a Latest Interpretation Possible, and What Would Its Consequences Be?, in Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 2004-2005, Vol. 27, No. 1/4 (2004-2005), pp. 97-115.
[22] Stanyslav Vladyslavovych Kul’chyts’kyi, Holod 1932-1933 rr. v Ukraini iak henotsyd/Golod 1932-1933 gg. v Ukraine kak genotsid [The 1932–33 Famine in Ukraine as a Genocide], Instytut istorii Ukrainy NANU, 2005. For some reason, Snyder cites not the Ukrainian original however the Polish translation. Stanisław Kulczycki, Hołodomor: Wieki głód na ukrainie w latach 1932-1933 jako ludobójcstwo — problem swiadomosci, Kolegium Europy Wschodniej im. Jana Nowaka-Jeziorańskiego, Wrocław 2008.
[23] In a single case of a transparent mistranslation, he cites Kuśnierz because the source for an incident where a “six-year old girl, saved by other relatives, last saw her father when he was sharpening a knife to slaughter her.” (p. 50) The “six-year old girl” was, actually, a boy by the name of Iwan Wołosenko, as is clearly indicated in Kuśnierz. Robert Kuśnierz, Ukraina w latach kolektywizacji i Wielkiego Głodu (1929-1933), Wydawnictwo GRADO, Toruń 2005, p. 168.
[24] Ibid., pp. 119 and 146.
[25] Maksym Sahaydak, “Ethnocide of Ukrainians within the USSR”, in: The Ukrainian Herald, 1976, Nos. 7-8, p. 47. The journal referenced is offered for download online, and it might have been easy each for Snyder and his editors to examine this source—as it might have been for his readers, had he accurately pointed it out as his original source for his claim.
[26] That is the case for endnotes 18, which must be to Kuśnierz, p. 41, not p. 40; endnote 47 where the page number 139 which is provided because the source for a quote by Snyder doesn’t include this quote; and endnote 81 which must be p. 158, not p. 157.