BLOODLIES CHAPTER TWO: SNYDER'S CLAIM of the SOVIETS' "CLASS TERROR" EXAMINED

In this chapter Snyder does not focus on any one central event. Instead, he touches on a number of different issues: collectivization, Hitler's coming to power, the Spanish Civil War, the Moscow Trials and the so-called "Military Purges" (also known as "the Tukhachevsky Affair") and the Ezhovshchina or "Great Terror," which Snyder has already dealt with in Chapter One, and to which he will return in Chapter Four. Every fact-claim that has an anti-Soviet tendency is examined here, and all of the evidence that Snyder or his sources cite, is checked.

Collectivization

His policy of collectivization had required the shooting of tens of thousands of citizens and the deportations of hundreds of thousands, and had brought millions more to the brink of death by starvation - as Jones would see and report. (59-60)

Snyder states that collectivization was accompanied by "tens of thousands of executions." The two most crucial years for collectivization were 1930 and 1931. In 1930 there were 20,201 executions for all crimes, and 9876 executions in 1931, for a total of 30,077. Executions in the adjacent non-collectivization years were much lower: 1383 for the year 1929; 3912 (or, alternatively, 3194) in 1932; 2154 in 1933.(1)

It is logical to assume that most of these additional executions above the level of the preceding year (1929) and the following year (1932) would have been related to collectivization. These would have been due to the struggle against organized armed groups rebelling against collectivization, and against other kinds of sabotage of the collectivization movement. This would make the approximate number of executions due to collectivization around 20,000 to 25,000. Snyder is correct in this instance.

It was inevitable that kulaks - rich peasants who lived by exploiting the labor of others - and other rural opponents of Soviet power would oppose collectivization, often violently. Tauger has shown that collectivization was also supported by many peasants, and by poor and landless peasants above all. Indeed, this has been admitted even by such staunch anticommunists and opponents of collectivization as James Mace.

Documents from former Soviet archives do indeed confirm hundreds of thousands of deportations of peasants who resisted collectivization, as Snyder states. But Snyder's main fact-claims here are false. Collectivization did not cause the famine. Snyder has no evidence that it did and, in fact, does not even bother to try to prove it but simply "asserts" it. We have discussed this question thoroughly in connection with our analysis of Chapter 1 of Bloodlands. The famine was a secular event caused by poor weather conditions. There had been famines every 2-3 years in Russian history for at least a millenium.

Snyder is also prevaricating when he tries to associate Jones' genuine account of the famine itself with his, Snyder's, falsehood that the famine had been caused by collectivization. Jones could not have "seen" the cause of the famine that he witnessed because causes cannot be "seen." Jones witnessed famine conditions. But Snyder says Jones "saw and reported" that "collectivization... had brought millions to the brink of death by starvation." This is false.

Nor did Stalin "order the shooting of hundreds of thousands more Soviet citizens" "later in the 1930s." (59) No one has ever found such an "order," so Snyder has not seen it either. Therefore, Snyder's claim is deliberately false. We will discuss this in our analysis of Chapter 3.

Did "Soviet Cruelty" Lead to Support for Nazism?

Snyder states:

For some of the Germans and other Europeans who favored Hitler and his enterprise, the cruelty of Soviet policy seemed to be an argument for National Socialism. (60)

Snyder's claim that some chose Nazism because it was "less cruel" than communism is bizarre. As though even Nazism's supporters thought that it was "not cruel!" Some kind of humanitarian alternative to communism, perhaps? But collectivization was certainly "cruel" to kulaks, as the Revolution of 1917 had been "cruel" to capitalists - and as capitalism had been "cruel" to working people the world over, for centuries. Many capitalists supported Nazism because it seemed to be the best bulwark against communism, which threatened to dispossess them of their wealth.

As we have shown, not to have collectivized would have been the "cruel" policy with respect to the vast majority of the Soviet population, whether peasants or workers. Collectivization stopped the centuries-old cycle of famines in Russia which mainly killed the poorest.

Did Communist Hostility to Social-Democrats Facilitate Hitler's Rise to Power

Communists were to maintain their ideological purity, and avoid alliances with social democrats. Only communists had a legitimate role to play in human progress, and others who claimed to speak for the oppressed were frauds and "social fascists." They were to be grouped together with every party their right, including the Nazis. In Germany, communists were to regard the social democrats, not the Nazis, as the main enemy. 

In the second half of 1932 and the first months of 1933, during the long moment of Stalin's provocation of catastrophe, it would have been difficult for him abandon the international line of "class against class." The class struggle against the kulak, after all, was the official explanation of the horrible suffering and mass death within the Soviet Union. (61-2)

Snyder cites no evidence at all for his contention that communist suspicion of, and failure to work with, the Social-Democrats (SPD) helped the rise of Nazism. We cannot go deeply into this historical contention here. But it is important to note that the Social Democrats were intensely hostile to communism as well. Each party saw the other as its main rival for the allegiance of the German working class. The well-known book by noted Indian-born communist R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution (1934) sets forth the Comintern's view of the social democratic parties at this time and details their numerous betrayals both of the communists and of their own working classes. (2)

Once again Snyder tries to sneak in his unproven, and unprovable, assertion that it was collectivization that caused the famine. The "horrible suffering and mass death" was caused by the famine, not by "the struggle against the kulak," which was part of the struggle to collectivize agriculture. Nor did Stalin "provoke catastrophe." The truth is quite the opposite: collectivization ended the cycle of famines and enabled rapid industrialization, without which the USSR would certainly have been defeated by Hitler's armies - a true catastrophe.

Was Collectivization Like Hitler's Anti-Jewish Scapegoating?

In this respect Hitler's policies resembled Stalin's. The Soviet leader presented the disarray in the Soviet countryside, and then dekulakization, as the result of an authentic class war. The political conclusion was the same in Berlin and Moscow: the state would have to step in to make sure that the necessary redistribution was relatively peaceful. (62)

Snyder's main goal in Bloodlands is to argue that the USSR was similar to Nazi Germany, Stalin similar to Hitler. Here Snyder tries to smuggle past his readers the suggestion that collectivization was somehow similar to Nazi racism against Jews. But Snyder cannot find any real similarities. Therefore, he claims that collectivization was somehow "spontaneous," with the State just "stepping in." This is more than simply false - it is a statement made in flagrant disregard of the facts. There is no evidence to support it.

In essence Snyder is arguing that socializing private property (collectivization in the USSR) is somehow similar to violently dispossessing German Jews while strengthening the position of large-scale industrialists, and private business generally (Hitler's policy in Germany). This absurdity is a good example of the lengths to which Snyder will go in order to force some comparison between the USSR and Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany was a form of capitalism. Collectivization was its polar opposite.

Snyder is wrong as well when he states as fact, with no evidence at all that "Stalin" - i.e. the USSR - had "policies" of "shooting," "deportation," or "starvation." As we showed in our discussion of Chapter One of Bloodlands Soviet policy was to collectivize agriculture. Collectivization was the only policy that could end the constant cycle of killer famines and allow the USSR to industrialize. No other policy that would accomplish either of these goals, much less both of them, has ever been dreamed up by anyone else, including anticommunist researchers.

Executions were for rebellions against the government or serious violations of laws controlling food supply. Deportations were for less violent opposition to collectivization. They were not "policies."

Had the USSR and Germany Planned to Dismantle Poland since 1922?

Snyder writes:

Since 1922, the two states [Germany and the USSR] had engaged in military and economic cooperation, on the tacit understanding that both had an interest in the remaking of eastern Europe at the expense of Poland. (64)

This is false. The 1922 Rapallo Treaty between Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia did not concern the "remaking of Eastern Europe" and had nothing to do with Poland at all. Moreover, if the "understanding" was "tacit," how does Snyder know about it? He cites no evidence of any such "tacit understanding" because there is none.

In reality the opposite is true. In 1939 the USSR tried many times to get Poland to sign a mutual defense treaty aimed at Germany. In a later chapter we show that the Polish government wanted no treaties at all with the USSR even if it meant facing Hitler's Wehrmacht alone.

Snyder fails to examine the legitimacy of Poland's claim to Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia. Both lie east of the Curzon Line in an area in which Poles were a distinct minority of the population. Regardless of the ethnicity or the desires of the population Pilsudski and other Polish nationalists wanted these lands because they had been within the boundaries of the Polish-Lithuanian state of 1772. This state occupied almost all of Western Ukraine, all of Belorussia, much of Latvia and Lithuania, and had a large part of the Black Sea coast. Polish imperialist ambitions aimed to reestablish a greater Poland along these lines. (3)

Therefore, when Poland "lost" Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia in September 1939 it lost nothing that it had any right to possess in the first place. Even today's Polish state, both capitalist and highly nationalistic, no longer claims Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia.

The Ezhovshchina

Aside from the famine of 1932-33 the Ezhovshchina or "bad time of Ezhov," called by anticommunists the "Great Terror," is the only source for mass murder that Snyder can find to blame "Stalin" (the Soviet government) for. A campaign of mass murder did indeed take place during the period of July or August 1937 through September 1938. Anticommunist historians sometimes claim that these mass murders took place because Stalin either ordered them - Snyder simply states this as a "fact" - or at least authorized them.

During the period of the Popular Front, from June 1934 through August 1939, about three quarters of a million Soviet citizens would be shot to death by order of Stalin... (67)

This is false. There is no evidence of any such "order of Stalin," so of course Snyder has never seen any and gives no reference to one. The reader of Bloodlands is left to assume that Snyder has such evidence when Snyder knows he does not. Snyder is deliberately misleading his readers. On the contrary, it is clear now that Stalin and the Politburo did not know that Ezhov was engaging in these massive executions of innocent people. We discuss this important matter in much more detail in Chapter Six of the present book.

The Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 was a very important event, the only war on the European continent and a "prequel" to World War II. Six months after the end of the Spanish Civil War Hitler invaded Poland. Hitler and Mussolini sent thousands of troops, tanks, and aircraft to attack the bourgeois Spanish Republic. Without them the fascist army, led by General Francisco Franco, could not have won.

In a brief paragraph Snyder claims that Soviet NKVD men were "sent to Spain to shoot" Trotskyists for "treason." But none of the works in Snyder's footnote to this passage demonstrate that. The reason is that, aside from the case of Andres Nin which we discuss below, there is no firm evidence that even a single Trotskyist (or anyone else) was shot in Spain by the Soviet NKVD.(4)

Snyder is correct when he states that the communists presented Trotskyists - more accurately, Trotskyism - as "fascist." Based on the evidence we now have, it appears to be true that some Trotskyists were involved in sabotaging the Spanish Republic. We simply have far too much primary source evidence directly about this, including from Nazi sources, for all of it to be fabrication.(5) In addition, Karl Radek testified at the January 1937 Moscow Trial that Trotskyists were active in Spain and appealed to them to stop.

A few pages later Snyder briefly picks up the Spanish Civil War again:

Orwell watched as the communists provoked clashes in Barcelona in May 1937, and then as the Spanish government, beholden to Moscow, banned the Trotskyite party [the POUM]. (75)

This is false. The Barcelona "May Days" revolt was precipitated by an Anarchist seizure of the Barcelona telephone station, which the Republican government of Barcelona took back. The phrase "beholden to Moscow," is likewise false. Neither the government of Largo Caballero (September 4 1936 to May 17 1937) nor that of his successor Juan Negrín were under communist control. Both Caballero and Negrín were suspicious of the communists.

The "Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxist" or POUM had participated in the Barcelona revolt. The Soviets had evidence then, and we have evidence today, that both Franco's and German agents were involved in the revolt.(6) It was logical to think that the POUM leaders were conspiring with them. POUM was not an "official" Trotskyist party, but it was friendly to Trotsky and unfriendly to the USSR. The head of POUM, Andres Nin, had been one of Trotsky's leading aides. The Soviets knew that Trotsky and some of his supporters - Karl Radek and Iurii Piatakov at least - had publicly denounced each other in the harshest terms as a cover for their continued secret collaboration. It was logical to assume that Nin had done likewise - as, in fact, he may well have done. Nin strongly supported the armed revolt against the Republican government, which benefitted only Franco and his Axis allies.

Meanwhile the high-ranking Soviet commanders executed on June 12, 1937 in the "Tukhachevsky Affair" confessed at trial that they had been in collaboration with both Nazi Germany and Trotsky. One of them stated that Trotsky had given him the honor of opening the Leningrad front to the rebels in the event of a successful revolt against the Soviet leadership. Nin and the POUM leadership were arrested a few days later, on June 16, 1937, by Orlov, head of the Soviet NKVD in Spain. He was not tortured but refused to confess and was murdered a few days later.(7)

Snyder Claims The Soviets Made No Progress Towards Socialism

Snyder makes the bizarre claim that Soviet "progress toward socialism" was "largely a matter of propaganda." (71) The Soviet Union built an industrial, socialist society during the decade of the 1930s. A great many visitors to the USSR reported on the phenomenal changes that had taken place in Soviet society since the late 1920s. Any number of scholars have remarked upon the same thing.(8)

Snyder gives no evidence at all to support this statement, nor does he define what he means by "progress toward socialism." By social-democratic definitions of socialism - wide-ranging social welfare benefits for all workers in an industrialized or industrializing society - the Soviet Union had indeed achieved socialism by the mid-1930s.

No Foreign Subversion?

Snyder makes the following claim:

...the explanation of famine and misery at home depended upon the idea of foreign subversion...(72)

Snyder then claims that this idea "was essentially without merit" - that there was in fact no "foreign subversion."

Snyder does not deign to cite any evidence for either of these claims. It's no wonder that Snyder does not try to prove that there was no "foreign subversion," for Snyder himself documents considerable Polish espionage in his book Sketches from a Secret War.(9) There is a great deal of evidence of espionage by other countries too, especially Germany and Japan. If Snyder believes it to be false or fabricated, he should say so and state the reason for his suspicions. We examine this issue in more detail later in the present book.

Did Stalin Have No Political Opposition?

Snyder claims:

By 1937 Stalin faced no meaningful political opposition within the Soviet communist party, but this only seemed to convince him that his enemies had learned political invisibility. Just as he had during the height of the famine, he argued again that year that the most dangerous enemies of the state appeared to be harmless and loyal. (72)

Today there are available to researchers a great many primary documents giving evidence of multiple conspiracies against the Soviet government that involved high-ranking Party members along with many others. Some of these conspiracies resulted in the various trials of 1934-1938, plus the military conspiracy (Tukhachevsky Affair), Ezhov's conspiracy, and much else. This includes important evidence from outside the USSR, from sources that could not have possibly have fabricated it. Much of this evidence is from 1937, the year Snyder names here. We have discussed some of this in a recent book (see the following footnote).

Since there is so much documentary evidence of these conspiracies - "political opposition" - it is incumbent on Snyder to give evidence that these documents have been forged, faked, or in some way are not what they appear to be. He does not do this because he cannot. No one has ever proven these documents fakes. Moreover, there are far too many of them, from too many different sources, for them to all have been forged or falsified.

The Murder of Sergei Kirov - Did Stalin Have No Evidence For His "Theory"?

Since 2000 a great deal of scholarly attention has been devoted to investigating the assassination of Leningrad Party First Secretary Sergei M. Kirov in the Party Headquarters in the Smolny Institute in Leningrad on December 1, 1934. Four major studies, one of them by the present writer, have been devoted to it.

Snyder writes:

Stalin's interpretation of the Leningrad murder was a direct challenge to the Soviet state police. His was not a theory that the NKVD was inclined to accept, not least because there was no evidence. (73)

Snyder does not know what he is talking about. Stalin had no "interpretation." He instructed the NKVD to seek for the assassins among Zinovievites in Leningrad only after evidence of the assassin's, Leonid Nikolaev's, ties to these underground Zinovievites had been uncovered during the course of the investigation, both in Nikolaev's own notebooks and from the assassin's own statements to the investigators.

A very large body of evidence in the Kirov murder case has now been available to researchers. Much of it has been public for over a decade. All of it supports the official position of the Soviet prosecution at the time that Kirov was murdered by a conspiracy of underground Zinovievites; that Zinoviev and Kamenev were in overall charge of the murder; and that Trotsky and his followers were at least aware of it. Few of Snyder's readers will know this.

The present writer's book on the Kirov murder has now been published in both English and Russian editions. The evidence now available - not only from former Soviet archives but from non-Soviet sources - clearly proves that the conspiracies that constituted the main accusations against the defendants at the Kirov murder trial of December 1934, the First, Second, and Third Moscow "Show" Trials of August 1936, January 1937, and March 1938, and the Military or "Tukhachevsky Affair" trial of June 1937, really did exist.(10)

Snyder on the Moscow Trials

According to Snyder,

Beginning in August 1936, Yezhov charged Stalin's former political opponents with fantastic offenses in public show trials. (73)

Snyder is "bluffing" again. He uses the word "fantastic" in an attempt to confuse his readers, and so permit him to avoid the normal scholarly obligation to study the evidence that exists.

In reality there is a great deal of evidence that the charges against the defendants in the August 1936 Moscow Trial and the other two in January 1937 and March 1938 were true. Like other anticommunist writers Snyder prefers to pretend that it does not exist. Perhaps he is deliberately concealing it; perhaps he is unaware of it, and therefore incompetent to write about this subject. Again, few of his readers will know about it.

There was nothing "fantastic" in the charges brought in the Moscow trials. Lean Trotsky declared some of them to be "fantastic" - but Trotsky was secretly in league with at least some of the defendants, as we have known for more than 30 years now thanks to Trotsky's own admissions preserved in the Trotsky Archives in Harvard and the Hoover Institution.

Words like "fantastic" say nothing about the matter at hand - in this case, the charges against the Moscow Trial defendants. "The charges were fantastic" means, in fact, "I consider the charges to be fantastic," just as the statement "pistachio ice cream is delicious" simply means "I think that pistachio ice cream is delicious." In each case the statement tells us about the person who makes the statement. It says nothing about reality.

Snyder claims that "these old Bolsheviks had been intimidated and beaten, and were doing little more than uttering lines from a script." But once again, intentionally or not, Snyder is deceiving his reader. He cannot possibly have any evidence that the defendants were "beaten" since there never has been any. In 2003 Stephen F. Cohen, the world's greatest authority of Bukharin, wrote that Bukharin was definitely not tortured. Nor has there ever been any evidence that any of the other defendants were tortured. Likewise, there has never been any evidence of any "script."

Once again Snyder's falsehood is also a "bluff." Perhaps many of Snyder's readers will think: "A full professor of history like Snyder must have evidence that the defendants had been 'intimidated' and 'beaten' and so gave false testimony." But neither Snyder nor anybody else has any such evidence. On the contrary, we have a lot of evidence that the defendants in the Moscow Trials testified as they wanted to. That does not mean that they always told the truth, but that if and when they lied, they did so because they chose to lie to the prosecution.

Snyder writes:

The party newspaper, Pravda, made the connection clear in a headline of 22 August 1936: "Trotsky-Zinoviev-Kamanev-Gestapo." Could the three Bolsheviks in question, men who had built the Soviet Union, truly be paid agents of capitalist powers? Were these three communists of Jewish origin likely agents of the secret state police of Nazi Germany? They were not, but the charge was taken seriously, even outside the Soviet Union. (74)

This is a falsehood - specifically, a "straw man." None of the testimony in the August 1936 Moscow Trial portrays Zinoviev and Kamenev as either "paid agents of capitalist powers" or "agents of the secret state police of Nazi Germany," as Snyder alleged. Any reading of the trial transcript, which is widely available on the Internet, will show this.

The testimony at the August 1936 Moscow trial simply confirms that Zinoviev and Kamanev and their followers were in touch with Trotskyites, who were also in touch with Trotsky, and that some of the Trotskyites had conspired with agents of the German Secret Police. It is a shibboleth of respectability, de rigueur in certain corners of anticommunist scholarship, to assert that the Moscow Trials were all "faked." But there is no evidence at all that they were, and much evidence that corroborates the confessions of the most important defendants.

It is striking that Snyder seems to believe that he can tell whether the charges against and confessions of the defendants in the August 1936 Moscow Trial were true or not simply by ratiocination. This is the fallacy of disbelief, a version of the logical fallacy of "begging the question": "I cannot believe it, therefore it is not true." It is a statement about the speaker, not a statement about the matter at hand, as competent historians are aware.

Snyder falsely claims that:

He [Stalin] believed that the Spanish government was weak because it was unable to find and kill enough spies and traitors...(74)

Sources (n. 35 p. 470):

* Werth, Terreur, 282. 

* "See also" Kuromiya, Stalin, 121. 

This is a false statement. Here follows an examination of these sources.

Werth, Terreur, 282: This reference contains no evidence to support Snyder's statement. Werth merely refers to a conference presentation by Oleg Khlevniuk, claiming that Khlevniuk has "show" (montré) that the defeats of the Spanish Republic were caused by their inability to uproot spies from their midst. These conference papers have proven impossible to obtain. At any rate Snyder never read this essay, or he would have referred directly to it. Therefore, Snyder does not know what Khlevniuk actually said, only what Werth claims he said.

Kuromiya, Stalin, 121, quotes from essays published by Khlevniuk in 1995 and 1998. It is likely that Khlevniuk said the same thing here as in the unpublished essay cited by Werth. Here is the relevant quotation from Kuromiya:

As Oleg Khlevniuk has convincingly shown, the Spanish Civil War (which Stalin closely followed) demonstrated to him that 'the situation in Spain itself, the acute contradictions between the different political forces, including those between the Communists and Trotsky's adherents, provided Stalin with the best possible confirmation of the need for a policy of repression as a means of strengthening the USSR's capacity for defense'.

The part in quotation marks above is evidently from Khlevniuk. However, even Kuromiya gives no evidence to support this statement of Khlevniuk's.

Kuromiya continues (121):

As Soviet military dispatches from Spain in 1936 and 1937 made clear, the war was characterised by 'anarchy, partisan and subversive and divisionist [sic, diversionist] movements, relative erosion of the frontiers between front and rear, betrayals.' The events in Spain were for Stalin direct proof that there existed, and very obviously, just such a threat from within.

This represents either Khlevniuk's views, with which Kuromiya agrees, or Kuromiya's views alone. In either case, they deliberately omit some crucial facts:

* At the January 1937 Moscow Trial former Trotskyist Karl Radek called upon Trotskyists in Spain to stop their subversive activities there.

* In May 1937 anarchist and Trotskyist forces rebelled against the Republican government of Barcelona in an event known as the "May Days" revolt. This rebellion during wartime was regarded as a stab in the back by the Republican government and by the Soviets as well.

* We have documentary evidence of Nazi German and Francoist involvement in the May Days revolt. Trotskyists like Andres Nin and the POUM, friendly to Trotsky, were also involved.

* The Tukhachevsky Affair defendants testified that Trotsky was in collaboration with them and the German general staff in planning a revolt within the USSR.

* On June 4, 1937, in the midst of the Tukhachevsky Affair, Stalin told an expanded meeting of the Military Soviet that the accused Soviet generals had wanted to make of the Soviet Union "another Spain."

Kuromiya (121-2) claims that from the disorder within the Spanish Republic Stalin drew the conclusion that subversion was rife and a "quiet rear" was essential.

None of Snyder's sources - or anybody else - claims that Stalin believed the Spanish Republic should "find and kill enough spies and traitors." Evidently Snyder has invented this.

The Tukhachevsky Affair

Snyder:

Eight high commanders of the armed forces were show-tried that same month; about half of the generals of the Red Army would be executed in the months to come...37 (75)

This is an unusually incompetent falsehood even for Snyder. The definition of "show trial" in the Oxford English Dictionary conforms to common usage - a highly publicized, public trial. But the trial of the eight "Tukhachevksy Affair" defendants on June 11, 1937, was top-secret.

Although the transcript exists no one, even anticommunist Russian scholars trusted by the Russian government, has been allowed to see it since Col. Viktor Alksnis in 1991. After reading the transcript Alksnis, who until that time thought the generals had been framed, changed his mind and concluded that they were guilty. This information has been available since 2001 when Alksnis revealed these facts in an interview in Russia. He has recently repeated this in print. (11)

In addition, Marshal Semion Budiennyi's letter to Marshal Voroshilov, and NKVD General Genrikh Liushkov's statements to his Japanese handlers, leave no room for doubt that Tukhachevsky and the military leaders convicted with him, plus many others, were guilty. Either Snyder does not know about all this evidence or he has withheld this information from his readers.

Snyder's "Fundamental" Source - A Hitler Supporter

Snyder's footnote to this statement about the Military Purges reads as follows:

n. 37 ... On the Red Army generals, see Wieczorkiewcz, Łańcuch, 296. This is a fundamental work on the military purges. (Emphasis added, GF)

The book by Pawel Wieczorkiewicz that Snyder recommends here, Łańcuch śmierci (= "Chain of Death"), it is not only not a "fundamental work" - it is worthless. Wieczorkiewicz's book reflects pre-1991 "scholarship" - essentially, Khrushchev- and Gorbachev-era falsehoods. It does not use any of the large quantity of evidence that has been published since the end of the USSR in 1991, especially during the past decade. It is never cited by any of the highly anticommunist Russian scholars who write on the Tukhachevsky Affair. (12) This is another of the many references that suggest that Snyder does not study Russian-language materials and is not familiar with the scholarship, yet insists on writing about Soviet history.

But Snyder is concealing from his readers something that is widely known in Poland. The late Pawel Wieczorkiewicz (he died in 2009) was a far right-wing crackpot whose views were extreme even among far-right Polish nationalists.

Wieczorkiewicz's admiration for Hitler's Germany led him to wish that Poland had united with Hitler to invade the USSR. He had great trust in Hitler and wished Polish leaders could have stood beside Hitler in Red Square, taking a victorious salute after the defeat of the USSR.

Nie chcieliśmy znaleźć się w sojuszu z Trzecią Rzeszą, a wylądowaliśmy w sojuszu z tak samo zbrodniczym Związkiem Sowieckim. A co gorsza, pod jego absolutną dominacją. Hitler zaś nigdy nie traktował swoich sojuszników tak jak Stalin kraje podbite po II wojnie światowej. Szanował ich suwerenność i podmiotowość, nakładając jedynie pewne ograniczenia w polityce zagranicznej. Nasze uzależnienie od Niemiec byłoby więc znacznie miejsce niż to, w jakie wpadliśmy po wojnie wobec Związku Sowieckiego. Mogliśmy znaleźć miejsce u boku Rzeszy prawie takie jak Włochy, a na pewno lepsze niż Węgry czy Rumunia. W efekcie stanęlibyśmy w Moskwie i tam Adolf Hitler wraz z Rydzem-Śmigłym odbieraliby defiladę zwycięskich wojsk polsko-niemieckich. Ponurą asocjacją jest oczywiście Holokaust. Jeżeli jednak dobrze się nad tym zastanowić, można dojść do wniosku, że szybkie zwycięstwo Niemiec mogłoby oznaczać, że w ogóle by do niego nie doszło. Holokaust był bowiem w znacznej mierze funkcją niemieckich porażek wojennych.

Translated:

We did not want to be in an alliance with the Third Reich and ended up in alliance with the also criminal Soviet Union. And what is worse, under its absolute domination. Hitler never treated its allies as Stalin did the conquered countries after World War II. He respected their sovereignty and subjectivity, requiring only some limitations in foreign policy. Our dependence on Germany would have been much less than the one in which we ended up with after the war against the Soviet Union. We could have found a place at the side of the Reich almost like Italy, and definitely better than Hungary or Romania. As a result, we would have been in Moscow and there Adolf Hitler together with Rydz-Smigly would have reviewed the parade of the victorious Polish-German armies. A grim association is, of course, the Holocaust. If, however, you consider it well, one can conclude that a rapid German victory would have meant it would not have come to that. The Holocaust was in fact largely a function of the German military defeats.

Wieczorkiewicz's favorite historian was British pro-Nazi, forger, and Holocaust denier David Irving, about whom Wieczorkiewicz said:

To najlepszy i najwybitniejszy znawca historii II wojny Å›wiatowej. Badacz, dla którego miarodajne sÄ… źródÅ‚a, a nie poglÄ…dy historiografii, opinie kolegów, czy wrzask mediów. CzÅ‚owiek, któremu z racji ogrmnych zasÅ‚ug - zebrania lub odtajnienia i udostÄ™pnienia kluczowych dokumentów III Rzeszy, czapkÄ… buty czyÅ›cić by trzeba. Historyk tej miary, że ma prawo napisać i powiedzieć wszystko.<.blockquote> 

Translated:

He is the best and most prominent expert on the history of World War II. A researcher for whom sources, not the viewpoints of historiography, the opinions of colleagues, or the media uproar, are what is meaningful. A man, who by virtue of his enormous merits - of collecting or declassifying and sharing key documents of the Third Reich - we should shine his boots with our hat. A historian of such caliber that he has the right to write and tell everything.(13)

Wieczorkiewicz openly wished that Poland had sided with Nazi Germany in World War II! In an interview published in the Polish journal Wiadomosci on January 2, 2006, Wieczorkiewicz said the following:

Talaga: Wybuch wojny poprzedziÅ‚o zawarcie paktu Ribbentrop-MoÅ‚otow. Co by siÄ™ staÅ‚o, gdyby Polska zgodziÅ‚a siÄ™ wówczas na żądania Niemiec? PoczÄ…tkowo Hitler wcale nie chciaÅ‚ atakować Polski, uderzenie byÅ‚o raczej efektem okolicznoÅ›ci niż przemyÅ›lanego, tworzonego wiele lat planu. Czy Polska swoim twardym stanowiskiem sprowokowaÅ‚a poniekÄ…d ukÅ‚ad sowiecko-niemiecki? 

Wieczorkiewicz: Beck zrobił, moim zdaniem, kardynalny błąd: nie dostrzegł czynnika sowieckiego. Rozgrywał grę polityczną perfekcyjnie, ale przy założeniu, że nie ma Związku Sowieckiego. Co by było, gdybyśmy poszli z Hitlerem na Związek Sowiecki? Polska byłaby jednym z głównych twórców - obok Niemiec i Włoch - zjednoczonej Europy ze stolicą w Berlinie i z niemieckim językiem urzędowym.

Translated:

Talaga: The outbreak of war was preceded by the conclusion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. What would have happened if Poland agreed to the requests of Germany? Initially, Hitler did not want to attack Poland, the strike was the result of circumstances rather than a deliberate plan that was years in creation. Did Poland provoke somewhat by its hard position the Soviet-German agreement? 

Wieczorkiewicz: Beck committed, in my opinion, a cardinal error: he overlooked the Soviet factor. He played the political game perfectly, but without taking the Soviet Union into account. What would have happened if we had gone with Hitler against the Soviet Union? Poland would have been one of the main creators, along with Germany and Italy, of a united Europe with its capital in Berlin and with German as the official language.(14)

Snyder continues:

The Germans, however, were not counting on help from the Soviet population in that coming war. In this respect, Stalin's scenario of threat, the union of foreign enemies with domestic opponents, was quite wrong. Thus the still greater terror that Stalin would unleash upon his own population in 1937 and 1938 was entirely fruitless, and indeed counterproductive. (78)

This is all wrong. From non-Soviet sources interested scholars have known since the late 1980s that Hitler was indeed expecting a military coup in the USSR and the establishment of a pro-German military regime.(15) It has been clear since the late 1990s that the military conspiracies really did exist and were coordinated with the conspiracy of the "Rights and Trotskyites," and much more evidence has come to light since the late Alvin D. Coox's work.(16) And there is even more evidence of these conspiracies today.

All this evidence accords very well with the great deal of evidence that we have from former Soviet archival documents now declassified.(17) This is as good confirmation of Tukhachevsky's collaboration with the Germans as we are likely to ever have. Snyder is either ignorant of this fact (incompetent) or knows about it but fails to tell his readers (dishonest).

Collaboration with the Germans was the substance of many of the confessions of defendants in the Moscow Trials and in the Tukhachevsky Affair. In 1939 Nikolai Ezhov, head of the NKVD during the so-called "Great Terror", admitted that by means of mass murder the conspirators under his command were trying to make enough people dissatisfied with the Soviet government that they would either revolt in the case of invasion, or would not oppose it. There is no evidence that these confessions were coerced or fabricated. Certainly Snyder has never seen any such evidence. If he had, he would have cited it. (18)Once again, Snyder's statement is a "bluff." 

Snyder Says There Were No Such People as "Kulaks"

Snyder claims that there were in reality no such people as "kulaks" and that the Soviets had invented the term:

As a social class, the kulak (prosperous peasant) never really existed; the term was rather a Soviet classification that took on a political life of its own. (78-9)

This is either incompetence or deliberate deception. The term "kulak" had existed long before the Russian Revolution or Russian Marxism. Kulaks were defined as those peasants who employed other workers on their farms.

Here are quotations from three pre-revolutionary non-Russian writers who commented on the "koolaks" and their role in the peasant society. English author Emile Joseph Dillon wrote:

...this type of man was commonly termed a Koolak, or fist, to symbolize his utter callousness to pity or truth. And of all the human monsters I have ever met in my travels, I cannot recall any so malignant and odious as the Russian Koolak.

-Emile J. Dillon. The Eclipse of Russia. New York: George H. Doran, 1918, p. 67.

Other prerevolutionary references to the kulak are the following:

The great advantage the koulaks possess over their numerous competitors in the plundering of the peasants, lies in the fact that they are members, generally very influential members, of the village commune. This often enables them to use for their private ends the great political power which the self-governing mir exercises over each individual member. The distinctive characteristics of this class are very unpleasant. It is the hard, unflinching cruelty of a thoroughly uneducated man who has made his way from poverty to wealth, and has come to consider money-making, by whatever means, as the only pursuit to which a rational being should devote himself.

- "Stepniak" (a pseudonym), The Russian Peasantry. London: George Rutledge; New York: E.P. Putnam & Co., 1905, p. 55. 

On the other side arise the kulak (literally, the "fist"), a name coined to designate those ex-serfs and simple peasants who, utilising the unpropitious condition of their fellow members of the commune, made one after another their debtors, next their hired labourers, and appropriated for their own individual use the land shares of thsoe economical weaklings. 

The kulak is a very interesting figure in rural Russia ... There is no doubt that the methods used by this usurer and oppressor in the peasant's blouse have not been of the cleanest. ... The conspicuous position he now occupies came about during the last twenty or thirty years. In Russian literature he has been dubbed the "village eater," and has been clothed with all sorts of diabolical qualities. ... He is the natural product of a vicious system. ...

- Wolf von Schierband, Russia, her Strength and her Weakness. New York and London: G.P. Putnam's, 1904, p. 120.

Conclusion: The category of "kulak" is well documented from pre-Soviet times. Snyder's false claim that is was a "Soviet classification" is ignorant.

The Ezhovshchina, Again

In a telegram entitled "On Anti-Soviet Elements," Stalin and the politburo issued general instructions on 2 July 1937 for mass repressions in every region of the Soviet Union. The Soviet leadership held kulaks responsible for recent waves of sabotage and criminality, which meant in effect anything that had gone wrong within the Soviet Union. The politburo ordered the provincial offices of the NKVD to register all kulaks who resided in their regions, and to recommend quotas for execution and deportation. Most regional NKVD officers asked to be allowed to add various "anti-Soviet elements" to the lists... (80-1) 

...The killing and imprisonment quotas were officially called "limits," though everyone involved knew they were meant to be exceeded. Local NKVD officers had to explain why they could not meet a "limit," and were encouraged to exceed them. No NKVD officer wished to be seen as lacking élan when confronting "counter-revolution," especially when Yezhov's line was "better too far than not far enough." (81)

This outline of the Ezhovshchina - called the "Great Terror" by anticommunists - is all wrong. The text of the Politburo Decree "On Anti-Soviet Elements" is online in Russian as is a facsimile of the original telegram. (19) It is published in a well-known documentary collection.

Extract from Protocol #51 of the Politburo of the CC resolution of 2 July 1937 

STRICTLY SECRET Central Committee All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) 

No. P51/94 3 July 1937 

To: Comrade Yezhov, secretaries of regional and territorial committees, CCs of the national Communist parties. 

#94. On anti-Soviet elements. 

The following telegram is to be sent to secretaries of regional and territorial committees and to the CCs of national Communist parties: 

"It has been observed that a large number of former kulaks and criminals deported at a certain time from various regions to the north and to Siberian districts and then having returned to their regions at the expiration of their period of exile are the chief instigators of all sorts of anti-Soviet crimes, including sabotage, both in the kolkhozy and sovkhozy as well as in the field of transport and in certain branches of industry. The CC of the VKP(b) recommends to all secretaries of regional and territorial organizations and to all regional, territorial, and republic representatives of the NKVD that they register all kulaks and criminals who have returned home in order that the most hostile among them be forthwith administratively arrested and executed by means of a 3-man commission [troika] and that the remaining, less active but nevertheless hostile elements be listed and exiled to districts [raiony] as indicated by the NKVD. The CC of the VKP(b) recommends that the names of those comprising the 3-man commissions be presented to the C within five days, as well as the number of those subject to execution and the number of those subject to exile." 

Secretary of the CC I. Stalin(20)

It is not a "general instruction" for "mass repressions" but instructions for opposing rebellions against the government. This volume and other documentary collections make it clear that the Soviet leadership was correct in believing that a serious crisis existed.

The disclosure of a widespread conspiracy by the top leaders of the Red Army, and the continuing uncovering of high- and medium-ranking Party leaders and officials in several secret conspiratorial organizations, proved that plans - probably several plans - for a coup against the government and Party leadership in favor of Germany and Japan had been far advanced.

In his recent study Practicing Stalinism Soviet historian J. Arch Getty has written:

Stalin and his associates seem to have believed that a large-scale conspiracy was about to overthrow them.(21)

Getty points out that Molotov and Kaganovich continued to believe this decades later. (263-4). We have excellent evidence today that such conspiracies did in fact exist. The Tukhachevsky Affair defendants gave details about some of them. Existence that these military conspiracies not only existed but were connected to the Rightist conspiracy involving Nikolai Bukharin and Aleksei Rykov, defendants at the third Moscow Trial of March 1938, come from NKVD escapee Genrikh Liushkov, who informed the Japanese of them after he fled the USSR in 1938.(22)

What Stalin and the Party leadership did not know was that Nikolai Ezhov, head of the NKVD, was also a conspirator. Ezhov conspired with other Party leaders and with his own subordinates to kill as many Soviet citizens as he could, in order to spread discontent with the Soviet system and aid any invasion by Germany or Japan.

Snyder claims that there were "quotas" for executions - and then admits that there were none. In fact all the documents we have today show that the center - Stalin and the top leadership - insisted that the limits on executions and imprisonments be restricted. Snyder's claim that "everybody knew" that "limits" really meant "quotas" is false. Like other anticommunist writers Snyder would like to have evidence that Stalin set "quotas" for executions. But Snyder goes too far when he implies that he does have such evidence. And he does imply this, for otherwise how would he know that "everybody knew"?

Arch Getty makes this clear:

Order No. 447 established limits (limity) rather than quotas; maximums, not minimums. (Practicing 201)

He goes on to insist that Stalin could not possibly have intended these numbers to be exceeded (232). Getty also adds the following about the "limits-quotas" issue:

One of the mysteries of the field [of Soviet history - GF] is how limity is routinely translated as "quotas." (Practicing 340 n. 109)

Getty's specific example is Oleg Khlevniuk, another researcher whose anticommunist bias and lack of objectivity ruin his scholarship. But it applies to Snyder as well. Maximums are different from minimums. Ideological anticommunists like Khlevniuk and, as here, Snyder, would like their readers to believe that Stalin demanded "minimums," so that's what they write.

Snyder is fabricating again when he states the following:

Under time pressure to make quotas, officers often simply beat prisoners until they confessed. Stalin authorized this on 21 July 1937. (82)

It is certainly true that Ezhov and his men beat prisoners until they made false confessions. Some of Ezhov's men confessed to doing this and/or observing other NKVD men doing it. We know this because it is documented, and these documents exist because Ezhov and his men were prosecuted, tried, and punished for these crimes after Ezhov had been removed as Commissar of the NKVD and replaced by Lavrentii Beria.

But the claim that Stalin "authorized this" is false. Neither he nor anyone else has seen any such authorization by Stalin of July 21, 1937, or any other date, because none has been found. If it existed, it would have been well publicized - it is just the kind of evidence that anticommunist writers have been eagerly looking for. It is needless to add that Snyder provides no source for his claim. But few of his readers will know this.

Snyder fill page 82-84 with accounts of mass shootings. Not all are reliable - many of the secondary sources Snyder uses are by scholars just as lacking in objectivity and prone to making undocumentable statements as Snyder is. Ezhov and his men did shoot hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens. The point is that Ezhov's mass murders were part of his anti-government conspiracy.

Snyder makes a number of false statements in these pages too. For example:

Yet even Stalin presented his own policies as inevitable... (85)

This is false. Snyder cites no such statement by Stalin, nor - to our knowledge - has anyone else.

Phony NKVD "Shorthand"

Snyder claims that NKVD men justified "victimizing" Poles in the following manner:

In a kind of a operational shorthand, NKVD officers said: "Once a Pole, always a kulak. (86)

Snyder's note to this statement reads as follows: "n. 62 - Gurianov, "Obzor," 202." This is a reference to the following work:

A. Ie. Gurianov, "Obzor sovetskikh repressivnykh kampanii protiv poliakov i pols's'kikh grazhdan," in A.V. Lipatov and I.O. Shaitanov, eds., Poliaki i russkie: Vzaimoponimanie i vzaimoneponimanie, Moscow: Indrik, 2000, 199-207.

This is a phony reference. There is no such passage in the article by Gur'ianov (note correct spelling of his name). The expression "Raz poliak - znachit, kulak" was in use in the USSR at the time, perhaps mainly in Ukraine and Belorussia.(23) Crude as it was, such an expression made some sense. Poles in Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia were likely to be "osadnicy," imperialist "settlers," and therefore landlords.

Conclusion to Bloodlands, Chapter Two: Every fact-claim Snyder makes in this chapter that alleges some kind of criminal or immoral action by Stalin and/or the Soviet leadership is false.

Footnotes

(1)Oleg Mozokhin is the expert on this question. His book, Pravo na repressii (Moscow, 2006), contains serious misprints: numbers are put in the wrong columns. Mozokhin's web pages give the corrected figures for executions, which are reported here. For 1931, see http://mozohin.ru/article/a-41.html ; for 1932, 

(2) It is now available online at http://www.plp.org/books/dutt.pdf (accessed February 2014)

(3) See the map at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Polish-Lithuanian_Commonwealth_in_1764.PNG

(4)Trotsky activists Mark Rein, Kurt Landau, and Erwin Wolf vanished. Paul Preston, the foremost historian of this period, believe they were abducted and killed either by "Soviet agents" or by the "Grup d'Informació", the secret intelligence unit for the Catalonian government, the Generalitat. It is logical to think so, though not proven. See Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth Century Spain. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012) 407, 418-419.

(5)Grover Furr, "Communist Anti-Trotskyism, and the Barcelona "May Days" of 1937," in press.

(6)Ibid.

(7)Details about Nin's activities, arrest, and murder are in Preston, Spanish holocaust, 402, 411-412. The trial of the "Tukhachevsky Affair" generals is reported and a key document examined in Vladimir L. Bobrov and Grover Furr, "Marshal S.M. Budiennyi on the Tukhachevsky Trial. Impressions of an Eye-Witness",Klio (St Petersburg) 2012 (2), 8-24 (in Russian). At http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/budennyi_klio12.pdf Reprinted in M.N. Tukhachevskii: Kak My Predali Stalina ("M.N. Tukachevsky. How We Betrayed Stalin") Moscow: Algorithm, September 2012, pages 174-230.

(8)A good discussion by a noted economic historian is Robert C. Allen, From Farm to Factory. A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution. Princeton University Press, 2003. It has a good bibliography too.

(9)Timothy Snyder. Sketches from a secret war: a Polish artist's mission to liberate Soviet Ukraine. Yale University Press, 2005. The subject of this book, Henryk Józewski, supported greater autonomy for Ukrainians in Volhynia but was a staunch anticommunist. We will return to this book in a future chapter.

(10)Grover Furr, The Murder of Sergei Kirov: History, Scholarship and the Anti-Stalin Paradigm. Kettering, OH: Erythros Press and Media LLC, 2013. For evidence from beyond the USSR see Chapter 17. Russian translation: Grover Ferr (Furr). Ubiystvo Kirova. Novoe issledovanie. Moscow: Russkaia panorama, 2013.

(11)Alksnis's recent statement of February 2013 is at: http://www.echo.msk.ru/programs/graniweek/1012648-echo/#element-text For Alksnis' earlier statements see «Последний полковник империи». Интервью «Элементов» снародным депутатом СССР Виктором Алкснисом // Элементы, 1993. No 3; also Алкснкс В.И. Я не согласен! // Русский обозреватель. 2009, 31 окт. см.: http://www.rus-obr.ru/opinions/4577

(12)The present author bought and studied a copy of Wieczorkiewicz's book 10 years ago while researching the Tukhachevskii Affair.

(13)"Politica poprawność, a prawda historyczna, rozmowa z profesorem Pawłem Piotrem Wieczorkiewiczem z Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego." ("Political correctness and historical truth - conversation with Professor Pawel Piotr Wieczorkiewicz of Warsaw University"). Templum Novum, March 2006.

(14)At http://wiadomosci.onet.pl/kiosk/historia/zabraklo-wodza,3,3331024,wiadomosc.html

(15)We refer to the Mastny-Benes note of February 9, 1937, concerning Mastny's private talk with German emissary von Trouttmannsdorff. See, for example, Ivan Pfaff, Die Sowjetunion und die Verteidigung der Tschechoslowakei 1934-1938: Versuch der Revision einer Legende. Koeln - Wiemar - Wien: Bohlau Verlag, 1996, "Prag unde die Affaere Tuchacevski," 191-216. First published in Pfaff, "Prag und der Fall Tuchatschewski." Vierteljahresheft fuer Zeitgeschichte 35 (1987), 95-134. Pfaff's own interpretation of this important document is very faulty. We have obtained a copy of the document and plan to publish a study in the future.

(16)See, Coox, "The Lesser of Two Hells: NKVD General G.S. Lyushkov's Defection to Japan, 1938-1945." Journal of Slavic Military Studies 11, 3 (1998) 145-186 (Part One) (Coox 1); 11, 4 (1998) 72-110 (Part Two).

(17)These documents are published, mostly in excerpt, in Kantor, Iulia. Voina i mir Mikhaila Tukhachevskogo. Moscow: Izdatel'skii Dom Ogoniok "Vremia," 2005, and Kantor, Iulia. Zakliataia druzhba. Sekretnoe sotrudnichestvo SSSR I Germania v 1920-1930-e gody. M-Spb: "Piter," 2009. Kantor tries to contend that Tukhachevsky was innocent nonetheless. The documents alone are in a series of articles by Kantor in Istoriia Gosudarstva i Prava (2006). I have put them on line at http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/kantor_4articles_igp06.pdf

(18)For the complete texts in Russian and in English translation of all of Ezhov's confessions that had been published by 2010 see Grover Furr, "The Moscow Trials and the "Great Terror" of 1937-1938: What the Evidence Shows." At http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/trials_ezhovshchina_update0710.html See also Bobrov and Furr, "Marshal S.M. Budiennyi."

(19) Text of decree at: http://www.alexanderyakoviev.org/fond/issues-doc/61096 Facsimile of the original at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Решение_Политбюро_ЦК_ВРешение_Политбюро_ЦК_ВКП(б)_№_П5194.jpg?uselang=ru This translation is from Getty and Naumov, 470-1. They capitalize the text. The Russian language edition does not, so we have restored the text to normal sentence format.

(20)Lubianka. Stalin I Glavnoe Upravlenia Gosbezopasnosti NKVD 1937-1938 Dokumenty. Moscow: MFD, 2004, No. 114, pp. 234-5. (Лубянка. Сталин и Главное Управление Госбезопасности НКВД. 1937-1938. Документы.) Hereafter Lubianka 1937-1938.

(21)J. Arch Getty. Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars, and the Persistence of Tradition. Yale University Press, 2013, 263. 

(22)For a summary and further bibliography see Furr, Murder of Sergei Kirov, Chapter 17.

(23)Per Anders Rudling suggests that this term was used in Belorussia during 1937-1938. "Vialikaia Aichynnaia vaina u sviadomastsi belaruau (The Great Patriotic War in the minds of Belorussians)" Arkhe (Minsk) 5 (2008), p. 44.