Reading Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands"

I was a bit late in the game in terms of reading Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Undoubtedly, I would consider this one of the most important and moving books I have read this year. I found it an outstanding work of history, and perhaps (in terms of content) one of the most horrifying and disturbing books I have ever read as well.

One of the things that struck me in reading this work is the manner in which the victims themselves can so easily lose their humanity, becoming "just another statistic" -- both in the view of the perpetrators themselves (ex. the effort to meet Stalin's quotas during the Great Purge) but also in my own experience as a reader, as one's mind is repeatedly forced to reckon with Snyder's citation after citation of casualties and bodycounts:

Mass violence of a sort never before seen in history was visited upon this region. The victims were chiefly Jews, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, and Balts, the people native to these lands. The fourteen million were murdered over the course of only twelve years, between 1933 and 1945, while both Hitler and Stalin were in power. Though their homelands became battlefields midway through this period, these people were all victims of murderous policy rather than casualties of war.

The Second World War was the most lethal conflict in history, and about half of the soldiers who perished on all of its battlefields in the world died here, in this same region, in the bloodlands. Yet not a single one of the fourteen million murdered was a soldier on active duty. Most were women, children, and the aged; none was bearing weapons; many had been stripped of their possessions, including their clothes.

I find this to be a common experience of reading military history -- the dissolution of individual human life into the background of statistics: the numbers of casualties so huge in nature that the mind recoils and is simply left reeling in its attempt to grapple with the sheer horror of it. (To the author's credit, what makes me appreciate this book even more is Snyder's insistence and dogged efforts to acknowledge the humanity of the victims, by virtue of detailing their individual experiences and testimonies, often right up until the point of their death).

This makes for very grim reading indeed. There are accounts of acts of cruelty, or simply acts of suffering and tragedy, transcending whatever fiction could ever convey. This was a very difficult book to read, and yet, I would consider this book fundamental reading for an integral understanding of what happened during those times. Moreover, — lest we forget — it is just the kind of book I wish could be foisted on every generation as "required reading", especially those possessing an overly-optimistic (deluded) conception of human nature, a naive faith in human progress, or even a perception of themselves (or their generation) as being more socio-politically "enlightened" than the past. The history of Europe's Bloodlands stands as a warning to never underestimate man’s capacity to abandon all sense of humanity and commit acts of abominable evil, in the cold pursuit of ideological progress.

Related Discussion

These are a few of the subsequent discussions of Snyder's book that I've found intriguing. I'll likely supplement this post with additional links as I come across more.

• A Tragic Sense of History. DarwinCatholic 09/18/14. Responding to Daniel Lazar's article in The Jacobin which (predictably) takes strong exception to Snyder's presentation of Soviet history
• The Charnel Continent, by Istvan Deak. 12/20/10. "This is an important book. I have never seen a book like it. But even Snyder does not broach the problem of explanation. Why was there was so much savagery in the bloodlands?"
• Unshared Histories: Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands", by Menachem Kaiser. Los Angeles Review of Books 10/16/12.
• The Worst of the Madness, by ANne Applebaum. New York Review of Books November 2010:

  Snyder’s original contribution is to treat all of these episodes — the Ukrainian famine, the Holocaust, Stalin’s mass executions, the planned starvation of Soviet POWs, postwar ethnic cleansing — as different facets of the same phenomenon. […] Yet Snyder does not exactly compare the two systems either. His intention, rather, is to show that the two systems committed the same kinds of crimes at the same times and in the same places, that they aided and abetted one another, and above all that their interaction with one another led to more mass killing than either might have carried out alone.

• The Diplomat of Shoah History, by David Mikics. The Tablet 07/26/12. Does Yale historian Timothy Snyder absolve Eastern Europe of special complicity in the Holocaust?
  • In Defense of Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder. The Tablet 08/03/12. The Yale historian explains his masterwork and its transnational narrative of the Holocaust.
  • The Last Salvo, by David Mikics. The Tablet 08/03/12. Mikics Replies to Snyder.