Bloodlands (71 page)

The important question is: how could (how can) so many human lives be brought to a violent end?

In both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, utopias were advanced, compromised by reality, and then implemented as mass murder: in autumn 1932 by Stalin, and autumn 1941 by Hitler. Stalin’s utopia was to collectivize the Soviet Union in nine to twelve weeks; Hitler’s was to conquer the Soviet Union in the same span of time. Each of these seems, in retrospect, to be horrendously
impractical. Yet each of them was implemented, under the cover of a big lie, even after failure was obvious. Dead human beings provided retrospective arguments for the rectitude of policy. Hitler and Stalin thus shared a certain politics of tyranny: they brought about catastrophes, blamed the enemy of their choice, and then used the death of millions to make the case that their policies were necessary or desirable. Each of them had a transformative utopia, a group to be blamed when its realization proved impossible, and then a policy of mass murder that could be proclaimed as a kind of ersatz victory.

In both collectivization and the Final Solution, mass sacrifice was needed to protect a leader from the unthinkability of error. After collectivization brought resistance and hunger to Soviet Ukraine, Stalin blamed kulaks and Ukrainians and Poles. After the Wehrmacht was halted at Moscow and the Americans entered the Second World War, Hitler blamed Jews. Just as kulaks and Ukrainians and Poles had taken the blame for slowing the construction of the Soviet system, Jews took the blame for preventing its destruction. Stalin had chosen collectivization, Hitler had chosen war: but it was more convenient, for them and their comrades, to shift the responsibility for the associated catastrophe elsewhere. Stalin’s interpretation was used to justify the starvation of Ukraine and then the mass shootings of kulaks and members of national minorities; Hitler’s interpretation was used to justify the shooting and gassing of all Jews. After collectivization starved millions to death, this was adduced by Stalin to be evidence of a victorious class struggle. As the Jews were shot and then gassed, Hitler presented this, in ever clearer terms, as a war aim in and of itself. When the war was lost, Hitler called the mass murder of the Jews his victory.

Stalin had the capacity to reformulate utopias. Stalinism itself was a retreat: from the impulse toward European revolution that had inspired the Bolsheviks in 1917, to the defense of the Soviet Union after that revolution did not take place. When the Red Army failed to spread communism to Europe in 1920, Stalin had a fallback plan: socialism would be made in one country, the Soviet Union. When his Five-Year Plan to build socialism brought disaster, he presided over the starvation of millions. But he explained the events as part of the policy, and reaped the benefits as the fearsome father of the nation and the dominant figure in the politburo. After turning the NKVD against the kulaks and the national minorities in 1937-1938, he explained that this was necessary for the security of the homeland of socialism. After the retreat of the Red Army in 1941, and indeed after its victory in 1945, he appealed to Russian nationalism. When
the Cold War began, he blamed Jews (and others, of course) for the vulnerabilities of the Soviet Union.

Hitler, too, could revise utopia. The tens of millions of dead envisioned by the Hunger Plan and Generalplan Ost became the millions of dead of the starvation policies and of deportations. Insofar as the war forced a major change in his thinking, it was in the nature of what the Nazis called the Final Solution. Rather than wait until the war was won to “resolve” the Jewish “problem,” Hitler endorsed a policy of extermination during the war itself. The killing of Jews was escalated in the Soviet Union in July 1941 after a month of war without decisive results, and then escalated again when Moscow did not fall in December 1941. The policy of killing certain Jews was initially grounded in the rhetoric of military necessity, and had some connection to political and economic planning. But its escalation after the military situation changed, and after those plans were discarded or suspended, reveals that the elimination of Jews was for Hitler an end in itself.

The final version of the Final Solution was not designed, as were Stalin’s improvisations, to protect the leader or his system. It was not a step in a logical plan so much as an element in an aesthetic vision. The original justifications for the killing of Jews gave way to the anti-Semitic incantation, always present, of a cosmic Jewish plot, the struggle against which was the very definition of German virtue. For Stalin, the political struggle always had political meaning. His achievement in that respect was nearly the opposite of Hitler’s: whereas Hitler transformed a republic into a revolutionary colonial empire, Stalin translated the poetics of revolutionary Marxism into durable workaday politics. Stalin’s class conflict could always be expressed in public as the Soviet line; the chain that bound Soviet citizens and foreign communists to his person was a logical one. For Hitler struggle itself was the good, and a struggle that destroyed the Jews was to be welcomed. If the Germans were defeated, then that was their fault.

Stalin was able to realize his fictitious world, but to restrain himself when necessary. With the help of able associates such as Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler moved from one fictitious world to another, and brought much of the German people with him.

 

Only an unabashed acceptance of the similarities between the Nazi and Soviet systems permits an understanding of their differences. Both ideologies opposed liberalism and democracy. In both political systems, the significance of the word
party
was inverted: rather than being a group among others competing for power according to accepted rules, it became the group that determined the rules. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were both one-party states. In both the Nazi and Soviet polities the party played a leading role in matters of ideology and social discipline. Its political logic demanded exclusion of outsiders, and its economic elite believed that certain groups were superfluous or harmful. In both administrations, economic planners assumed that more people existed in the countryside than was really necessary. Stalinist collectivization would remove superfluous peasants from the countryside and send them to the cities or the Gulag to work. If they starved, that was of little consequence. Hitlerian colonization projected the starvation and deportation of tens of millions of people.
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Both the Soviet and the Nazi political economies relied upon collectives that controlled social groups and extracted their resources. The collective farm, the instrument of Stalin’s great transformation of the Soviet countryside from 1930, was used by German occupation authorities from 1941. In the occupied Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Soviet cities the Germans added a new collective: the ghetto. The urban Jewish ghettos, although originally meant as resettlement points, became zones for the extraction of Jewish property and Jewish labor. Their nominal Jewish authorities of the Judenrat could usually be relied upon to raise “contributions” and organize labor brigades. Both the ghettos and the collective farms were administered by local people. Both the Nazi and the Soviet systems built large systems of concentration camps. Hitler would have used the Soviet camps for Jews and other ostensible enemies if he could have, but Germany never conquered enough of the Soviet Union to make that possible.

Although the instruments of local exploitation looked the same, and sometimes were the same, they served different visions of the future. In the National Socialist vision, inequality between groups was inherent and desirable. The inequalities found in the world, between a richer Germany and a poorer Soviet Union for example, were to be multiplied. The Soviet system, when it was expanded, brought to others the Soviet version of equality. There was no more dramatic plan than that, and that was dramatic enough. If the Soviet system encountered nomads, it forced them to settle. If it encountered peasants, it forced them to supply the state with food. If it encountered nations, it eliminated their upper classes: by co-optation, deportation, or murder. If it encountered contented societies, it required them to embrace the Soviet system as the best of all possible worlds. It was, in this special sense, inclusive. Whereas the Germans
excluded the majority of the inhabitants of their empire from equal membership in the state, the Soviets included almost everyone in their version of equality.

Stalin, no less than Hitler, spoke of liquidations and cleansings. Yet the Stalinist rationale for elimination always had to do with a defense of the Soviet state or the advance of socialism. In Stalinism mass murder could never be anything more than a successful defense of socialism, or an element in a story of progress toward socialism; it was never the political victory itself. Stalinism was a project of self-colonization, expanded when circumstances permitted. Nazi colonization, by contrast, was totally dependent upon the immediate and total conquest of a vast new eastern empire, which would have dwarfed prewar Germany in size. It assumed the destruction of tens of millions of civilians as a precondition of the enterprise. In practice, the Germans generally killed people who were not Germans, whereas the Soviets usually killed people who were Soviet citizens.

The Soviet system was most lethal when the Soviet Union was not at war. The Nazis, on the other hand, killed no more than a few thousand people before the war began. During the war of conquest, Germany killed millions of people faster than any state in history (to that point).
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At a great distance in time, we can choose to compare the Nazi and Soviet systems, or not. The hundreds of millions of Europeans who were touched by both regimes did not have this luxury.

The comparisons between leaders and systems began the moment that Hitler came to power. From 1933 through 1945 hundreds of millions of Europeans had to weigh what they knew about National Socialism and Stalinism as they made the decisions that would, all too often, determine their fate. This was true of unemployed German workers in early 1933, who had to decide whether they would vote for social democrats, communists, or Nazis. It was true, at the same moment, of starving Ukrainian peasants, some of whom hoped for a German invasion that might rescue them from their plight. It held for European politicians of the second half of the 1930s, who had to decide whether or not to enter Stalin’s Popular Fronts. The dilemma was felt sharply in Warsaw in these years, as Polish diplomats sought to keep an equal distance between their powerful German and Soviet neighbors in the hope of avoiding war.

When both the Germans and the Soviets invaded Poland in 1939, Polish officers had to decide to whom they would surrender, and Polish Jews (and other Polish citizens besides) whether to flee to the other occupation zone. After
Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, some Soviet prisoners of war weighed the risks of collaboration with the Germans against the likelihood of starving to death in prisoner-of-war camps. Belarusian youth had to decide whether to join the Soviet partisans or the German police—before they were press-ganged into one or the other. Jews in Minsk in 1942 had to choose between remaining in the ghetto or fleeing to the forest to seek Soviet partisans. Polish Home Army commanders in 1944 had to decide whether or not to try to liberate Warsaw from the Germans themselves, or to wait for the Soviets. Most survivors of the Ukrainian famine of 1933 later experienced German occupation; most survivors of the German starvation camps of 1941 returned to Stalin’s Soviet Union; most survivors of the Holocaust who remained in Europe also experienced communism.

These Europeans, who inhabited the crucial part of Europe at the crucial time, were condemned to compare. We have the possibility, if we wish, to consider the two systems in isolation; people who lived under them experienced overlap and interaction. The Nazi and Soviet regimes were sometimes allies, as in the joint occupation of Poland. They sometimes held compatible goals as foes: as when Stalin chose not to aid the rebels in Warsaw in 1944, thereby allowing the Germans to kill people who would later have resisted communist rule. This is what François Furet called their “belligerent complicity.” Often the Germans and the Soviets goaded each other into escalations that cost more lives than the policies of either state by itself would have. Partisan warfare was the supreme occasion for each leader to tempt the other into further brutality. From 1942, Stalin encouraged guerrilla actions in occupied Soviet Belarus, knowing that it would bring down massive reprisals against his own citizens. Hitler welcomed the opportunity to kill “anyone who even looks at us askance.”
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During the Second World War, the bloodlands were subjected not to one invasion but to two or three, not to one occupation regime but to two or three. The mass murder of Jews began as the Germans crossed into lands that the Soviets had just annexed for themselves a matter of months before, from which they had deported tens of thousands of people just weeks before, and in which they had shot thousands of prisoners just days before. The German Einsatzgruppen were able to mobilize local anger over the murder of prisoners by the Soviet NKVD. The twenty thousand or so Jews who were killed in these orchestrated pogroms were only a very small part, fewer than one half of one percent,
of the victims of the Holocaust. But precisely the overlap between Soviet and German power allowed the Nazis to propagate their own description of Bolshevism as a Jewish plot.