The executive summary is that the Soviets murdered more in peacetime and the Nazis more in wartime; and both mostly murdered by deliberate starvation or by rounding up people and shooting them. The people of (e.g.) Poland or Belarus were caught in a vise: what you needed to do to survive under one would get you killed under the other. And slave labor, killing, and forced migrations didn't end when the war did.
Because the ideology was supreme (though Stalin was perfectly happy to use nationalism when it suited him), peasants didn't matter as much as industrialization, so they could starve--and should. And on the other side, Hitler claimed that international Jewery was the cause of the failure delay of the Russian campaign, so the best way to win was a massive campaign to kill all available Jews.
I'd never realized how devastated Poland was.
If you want the details, read the book. If not, you'll probably sleep better if you don't read it.
I'm given to understand that the Soviets were pretty brutal when they incorporated the Chechens and other Muslim groups into the Soviet empire, but they aren't the subject of this study.
Tribes invading other tribes looking for loot and land and slaves is an old story, as is the plight of those caught in the seesaw. I don't know if it is the sheer scale, the methodical care, the fact that this is within living memory, or the insanity of the ideologies that makes this seem more horrible.
I have an historian friend who recommends the book highly, believing the scholarship to be very solid.
ReplyDeleteIt's been sitting on my bedside table for, I swear, over a year, since someone recommended it at Maggie's Farm. I just can't make myself read it. I know it's solid. It just makes my stomach clench.
ReplyDeleteI remember reading "The Tin Drum" in college and being terribly struck with the phrase "All's lost, but not forever. Poland is not lost forever." At the time I didn't dream Poland would escape from behind the Iron Curtain. But what went on in that part of the world is almost beyond imagination, even if you thought you had some idea from having learned a little about the Nazi camps.
And the things people can dream up to blame on the Jews. There just seems no end of it. It's the side of human nature that tempts me to despair.
I know the book is somewhat controversial in some circles because it's seen to minimize the Holocaust somehow by putting those mass murders into the wide context of the horrible insanity that was gripping our culture in those decades. The specific targeting of Jews always will hold a special horror for me, but the story of Poland, Belarus, and the Ukraine bears repeating, too.
I'll come to the author's defense on the charge of minimizing the Holocaust. He hammers home the point many times that the Jews were especially targeted and disproportionately murdered. He even devotes a chapter to Stalinist antisemitism, which never quite got traction. (Stalin had shown a tendency to demand brutal action, and then replace and shoot the directory on charges of sabotaging the revolution or some such. After a while people lost enthusiasm for being enthusiastically brutal.)
ReplyDeleteHe just doesn't want the rest of the dead to be forgotten.
I didn't think the criticism was valid. It was just a little mini-storm over the book when it first came out. The author kept issuing public statements that I found completely persuasive. It was as though a lot of people were offending that he would dare to talk about other mass murders at all.
ReplyDeleteThere are two prevailing cultural tendencies that may drive this. Many Jews get skittish at anything that looks like it will undermine the hugeness of the Holocaust, thinking that is a slippery slope to considering it unimportant. Next, leftists get skittish about denunciation of the actions of even despotic leftist governments, thinking that will be used as a club to criticise all leftism.
ReplyDeleteThey may be over-prickly about that, but not without reason. For example, I do consider the refusal to go hard on the communist governments is an accusation against leftists that they still bear but refuse to acknowledge. As for the Holocaust, it was not-very-unusual Asian behavior that exploded into Europe, where it had been diminishing for 6 centuries. Treating it as a one-off horror is even more damaging.