Bloodlands - Conclusion - Furr

 "An Attack on the Enlightenment"

In Chapter 4 of Bloodlands Snyder accuses the Soviet Union of "an attack on the very concept of modernity, or indeed the social embodiment of Enlightenment" (153). In Chapter Seven of the present book we proved Snyder's accusation to be fraudulent. But it is true of Snyder's book. In virtually every accusation he makes against Stalin, the Soviet Union, or pro-communist forces such as pro-Soviet partisans and the Red Army, Snyder thrusts falsehoods at his readers and calls them the truth.

Bloodlands is a work completely devoid of integrity. It is a cloth woven of lies and falsifications from beginning to end, an outrage against the canons of historical research and the historian's responsibility. As such it is itself "an attack on the Enlightenment", debauching history to serve political ends.

Failure of the Field of Soviet and East European History

Bloodlands has received many very positive reviews by professional historians in historical journals. A few reviewers have questioned Snyder's historiographical or theoretical paradigm. Still others, experts on the history of the Jewish Holocaust, have criticized him for his tendency to repeat the "nationalist" mythologies of today's right-wing Easter European regimes.

But at the time of this writing I have yet to read a single review of Bloodlands where the reviewer is knowledgeable about the history of the Soviet Union during the 1930s and brings that knowledge to bear in the discussion of Snyder's book. Even reviewers who raise criticisms of other aspects of Bloodlands accept Snyder's fact-claims about the actions of Stalin, the Soviet leadership, and pro-Soviet forces. Yet any specialist in Soviet history of this period who has kept abreast of the scholarship and recently published documents could not fail to find a great many false statements in Snyder's presentation.

Here are two examples from major history journals. In his review of Bloodlands (1) Thomas Kühne rightly criticizes Snyder for his "move to link Soviet and Nazi crimes":

As it seems to reduce the responsibility of the Nazis and their collaborators, supporters and claqueurs, it is welcomed in rightist circles of various types: German conservatives in the 1980s, who wanted to 'normalise' the German past, and East European and nationalists today, who downplay Nazi crimes and up-play Communist crimes in order to promote a common European memory that merges Nazism and Stalinism into a 'double-genocide' theory that prioritises East European suffering over Jewish suffering, obfuscates the distinction between perpetrators and victims, and provides relief from the bitter legacy of East Europeans' collaboration in the Nazi genocide.

Kühne is certainly right that Snyder's book plays to the right-wing "nationalists" of Eastern Europe. But Kühne accepts without question Snyder's viewpoint about purported Soviet (often "Stalin's" or "Stalinist") "crimes":

"Snyder is not the first to think about what Hitler and Stalin had in common and how their murderous politics related to each other." 

"...the Hitler-Stalin Pact as the actual springboard of the two dictators' collaboration in the destruction of Poland..." 

"...the links betwe3en Hitler's and Stalin's mass-murder policies." 

"...Stalinist and Nazi terror..." 

"...Stalins' victims need to be included in these stories as well, he points out, that is, victims of Ukrainian holodomor (death by hunger), of the Great Terror in 1937-38, and not least of Stalin's 'ethnic cleansings' and anti-Semitic purges around and after 1945." 

"...an account on the mass crimes of the Nazi and Soviet regimes which infamously 'turned people into numbers'..."

None of these accusations against "Stalin" and the Soviet leadership are interrogated in the least. Kühne just accepts them as established, though where they have supposedly been established and by whom he does not say.

As the reader of this book will now realize, all these statements are false. Stalin had no "murderous politics"; there was no "collaboration in the destruction of Poland"; Stalin had no "mass-murder policies"; there was "Stalinist terror"; there was no "Holodomor" but a great famine in which the Soviet government, by all evidence, did the best it could. There was a "Great Terror", or Ezhovshchina, but it was not that of Stalin or the Soviet state. Stalin had no "ethnic cleansings" or "anti-Semitic purges." The Soviet regime committed no "mass crimes".

In Kiritika, a journal specializing in Russian and Soviet history, Michael Wildt (2) is rightly critical of Bloodlands on many counts. But Wildt shows no knowledge of scholarship on the Soviet Union and so he takes the following assertions straight from Snyder's book, without any question, much less examination:

"...the two most murderous regimes of the first half of the 20th century..." 

"And while the Nazi regime killed about 10,000 people in concentration camps and prisons before the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the Stalinist leadership had already allowed millions to die from hunger and had shot about one million people." 

"The first events Snyder recounts are the deaths from hunger during the early 1930s of millions of people, not only in Ukraine but also in Kazakhstan and other parts of the Soviet Union. These deaths were due to the arbitrary and rash collectivization of agriculture organized by the Stalinist leadership in Moscow." 

"After the catastrophic harvest of 1931, which was partly a result of collectivization, the Stalinist leadership exported grain in order to be able to purchase industrial goods abroad. It consciously accepted the mass deaths that resulted from this policy. In December of that ear, Stalin decreed that kolkhozes that could not meet their grain delivery quotas should also deliver their seeds to the authorities. Thus in 1932-33 death from hunger became an ineluctable fate for millions of people." 

"Stalin was certain that the peasants' falling short of grain delivery quotas was proof of their collaboration with foreign enemies and of their resistance, both of which had to be crushed ruthlessly." 

"Between 1934 and 1939, when popular fronts against fascism were forged in Europe, the Soviet repressive organs shot about 750,000 people as alleged enemies of the people and deported an even greater number to the Gulag. The local secret police arrested and murdered according to quotas from above." 

"...the Stalinist regime also murdered according to ethnic criteria, as, for instance, in the so-called "Polish operation." 

"...the assumption that Soviet citizens of Polish nationality were enemies of the Soviet system." 

"...a non-aggression treaty on 23 August 1939, which amounted to nothing less than yet another German-Russian partition of Poland." 

"The Polish elite was shot or deported. The systematic murder of about 15,000 Polish officers, who had fled from the German troops in the east, literally decapitated the Polish army." 

"Snyder is correct in emphasizing the commonalities in the violent practices of the two regimes in Poland. Both Germany and the SOveit Union desired the "decapitation of Polish society" (125) and the ruthless exploitation of the remaining civilian population through forced labor. Both sides waged an ethnic war against the Poles." 

"The millions of dead from famine in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1930s were the consequence - no doubt, a foreseeable consequence and one that the Stalinist regime deliberately accepted - of a brutal industrialization n policy carried out at the expense of the rural population."

Every one of these claims has been disproven in the present book. Many of them, such as Snyder's account of the famine of 1932-33 which Wildt echoes uncritically here, have been disproven by respectable Western scholars. The "official version" of the "Katyn massacre" has been under sharp criticism by some Russian scholars for fifteen years. Highly anticommunist and anti-Stalin Russian scholars have shown that USSR did not "murder according to ethnic criteria" in the "Polish operation." Wildt appears oblivious to all of this.

Why do Wildt and Kühne repeat Snyder's fact-claims about the Soviet Union uncritically when they are by no means uncritical of other aspects of Bloodlands? In part it is because neither knows much about Soviet history. Wildt admits as much:

...here I should register the caveat that I am a specialist of Nazism, not Soviet collectivization..."

Nobody can be a "specialist" in everything. But most of Snyder's book is about Soviet, not German, actions. Why did Kühne and Wildt agree to review Bloodlands when each of them knows he is unqualified to have an independent judgement on Snyder's statements about Soviet actions?

I suggest that the reason is that the anticommunist paradigm, in the form of anti-Stalinism, is simply "taken for granted" in academia in a way that statements about, for example, Hitler and Nazi Germany are not. The scholarship on Hitler is meticulous and detailed. Misstatements about Nazi actions and crimes are caught, parsed, and subjected to criticism. But claims of "Stalin's crimes" are accepted without any interrogation at all.

How Could This Happen?

No scholarly field should function like this. It is a disgrace that a book like Snyder's could be published and widely read for years while his falsifications, phony references, dishonest use of sources, and incorrect statements pass not only unchallenged but accepted even praised, by professional historians. Any graduate student in this field could check Snyder's evidence and find what I have found: that every allegation of "crimes" against Stalin and the Soviet leadership is false.

Could a collapse of the historian's responsibility of this magnitude happen in any area of American or British history - always excepting the history of the communist movement in those countries? I doubt it. The spectrum of viewpoints in those fields is too broad. There are no "sacred cows" so firmly ensconced as such that all criticism, or all praise, of them is a priori ruled out of bounds.

There is no excuse for the ease with which statements about "crimes of Stalinism," unsupported by primary evidence, have been and continue to be accepted as truth. But there is an explanation. From its inception as an academic discipline the primary function of Soviet studies has been to provide a fount of anticommunist propaganda propped up by scholarship or the appearance of it.

For several generations anticommunist Russian exiles were among the most prominent figures in the field. Their anticommunist bias was enhanced by the advent of the Cold War and abetted by an influx of Soviet defectors, some of them former Nazi collaborators. The range of viewpoints acceptable in the field has been stretched to include Trotskyists and socialists of the social democratic type. But pro-communist viewpoints and researchers with and openly pro-communist orientation have always been excluded. This makes sense once one recalls that this field was created as a weapon against Soviet communism form the beginning.

More than two decades after the end of the Soviet Union the field of Soviet history remains first and foremost a weapon of political and ideological warfare. It has never encompassed those who challenge what I have called the "anti-Stalin paradigm" of Soviet history: anyone who insist on drawing conclusions about Soviet history based upon evidence rather that upon ideological grounds.

The Strength of the "Anti-Stalin Paradigm"

Indeed, in important respects the ideological blinders in this field have hardened since the end of the USSR because of the post-Soviet states. Ukraine and Poland and, in a somewhat different way, Russia too have constructed national mythologies along rigidly anticommunist lines and upon historical falsehoods. Today a professional historian in the field of Soviet or Easter European history cannot get published, get access to archives, be invited to historical conferences, - in short, have a career - if they seriously question the mendacious historical mythologies propagated by the political and academic elites in these countries such as the "Katyn massacre," the "Holodomor,' or the "innocence" of Marshall Tukhachevsky or Nikolai Bukharin. (2a)

The history of the Soviet Union is fatally constrained by the anti-Stalin paradigm. It is simply "not done," virtually taboo, to find Stalin not guilty of some crime or other he has been charge with. If the evidence does not support the anti-Stalin conclusion, then so much the worse for the evidence! It will be ignored, or phony evidence will be invented, or conclusions based on not evidence at all. Utter falsehoods are acceptable as long as they conform to the paradigm of "Stalin-as-evil".

The sad fact is that in its broad outlines the field of Soviet history function more like propaganda than like history. Good research is done on very specific topics, especially when based on archival evidence. But the framework or paradigm of Soviet history during the Stalin period in which such studies situate themselves sets firm limits on what conclusions are acceptable. The academic field of Soviet history of the Stalin period is governed by a form of "political correctness" far more than it is by normal canons of historical research.

This is the context in which Snyder's disgraceful book, one that is nothing but falsehoods, falsifications, rumors, and lies, can receive positive reviews not just from obvious ideologues in the media or avowedly pro-capitalist organizations and publications but from professional academic historians.

What Can We Do?

The most basic conclusion of this book concerns Snyder himself. Nothing he writes about Stalin, the Soviet Union, communism, or Eastern European history can be assumed to be accurate. Every claim he makes must be double-checked. After all, that is what this book presents - a check of every statement of an anticommunist tenor that Snyder makes in Bloodlands, with the result that all of the are false, fabrications.

A scientist who is expose as guilty not just of making an error here and there - that is inevitable - but of nothing but "errors", of making nothing but false statements and therefore of reporting nothing but false statements and therefore of reporting nothing but false results, would be distrusted by fellow scientists forever thereafter. Science functions on the presupposition that the scientists of the past have reported truthful results in their work, results which can be used in the future work of other scientists. We would not trust the "research" of a biochemist hired by the Tobacco Institute to provide "evidence" that cigarette smoking was not causally related to lung cancer. We would assume his "research" was, in reality, not research at all but propaganda aimed at a preconceived and false result.

Distrust

Historians work in an analogous way. One historian who does false research and reports untruthful results is a threat to the field as a whole. His work should never be cited since it cannot be trusted. Like the biochemist hired to produce genuine-looking but phony "research" to support a preconceived conclusion, a historian who writes anticommunist propaganda in the guise of "research" has produced not history but propaganda. He has violated the canons of the historical profession. His work can never be trusted again.

But distrusting Snyder's work in the future is too narrow a response to Bloodlands. Snyder has failed to find a single "crime of Stalinism" despite his own best efforts and those of a battalion of Polish and Ukrainian academics. If they had found any such "crimes of Stalinism" we can be sure that they would have reported them. But they did not find any - hence all the falsifications.

This means that, as far as Soviet history of the Stalin period is concerned, all allegations of "crimes of Stalinism," "crimes" of communists, should be reflexively distrusted. We should be even more suspicious when such allegations emanate from persons with a preconceived ideological anticommunist commitment.

A Renewed Insistence Upon Objectivity

We need to distrust anti-Stalin allegations and anticommunist stories unless and until we can verify them ourselves. But we also need to take steps to ensure, as far as possible, our own objectivity in historical inquiry.

Everyone has preconceived ideas. It is one's own preconceived ideas and biases that are most likely to mislead one. To maintain a determination to be objective a historian must develop the habit of (a) giving an especially generous reading - suspending doubt and suspicion to a considerable extent - to any evidence that appears to go contrary to one's own preconceived ideas; and (b) adopting an especially critical attitude towards any evidence that tends to support one's own preconceived ideas or ideological positions. A further technique is to have colleagues who are aware of your preconceived ideas and commitments give a critical pre-publication reading to your research, having been asked in advance to be on the lookout for places where you may have unintentionally allowed your own prejudices to override your commitment to objectivity.

The Falsehoods of Polish "Nationalist" Mythology

Snyder has chose to adopt the framework, bias and falsehoods that characterize the work of Polish anticommunist "nationalist" historians. We have checked the evidence cited by Snyder in support of his fact-claims and found that it is fraudulent. Either it doesn't exist at all or it points to conclusions different from the conclusions Snyder draws, even contrary to what he claims. Since in the main Snyder is rehashing Polish "nationalist" mythology we have in effect, examined the main premises of that mythology and show it to be false.

Specifically, we have examined and refuted the following "myths";

Myth: The "Kresy Wschodnie" (Eastern Borderlands), the Polish term for the Western Ukraine and Wester Belorussia, were inalienable parts of Poland.

Fact: The "Kresy" became part of Poland in 1921 through military conquest in an imperialist war with Soviet Russia. The Polish government held no plebiscites to ask the population whether they wished to be in Poland or not. The "Kresy" never had a majority Polish population. Poland had to have recourse to a large-scale program of "settling" Poles - mainly military men - in these areas in the hopes of "polonizing" them (making them more "Polish"). These osadnicy (settlers) became the imperialist infrastructure of the "Kresy".

Myth: The Secon Polish Republic of 1919 to 1939 was a decent society to which its citizens owed loyalty.

Fact: Poland was strongly imperialist. The Polish Army seized Vilnius from Lithuania in 1922 and the Teschen area of Czechoslovakia from that country in October 1938. As late as January 1939 Polish Foreign Minister Josef Beck told German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop that Poland had aspirations to the Black Sea - that is, to take over about half of present-day Ukraine. Polish "nationalist" historians never discuss these land-grabs as imperialist.

The long-term aim of the Polish ruling elite was a Poland with the border of the 18th century, when the Grand Duchy of Poland and Lithuania encompassed Western Ukraine to the Black Sea and most of present-day Belarus. (4) The Polish leadership cared nothing for the desires of the populations of these areas.

The Polish ruling elite was viciously racist. Only Roman Catholics were considered "Poles." All minorities suffered significant discrimination, which increased during the late 1930s.

Myth: The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a plot to destroy Poland and provided for a "joint German-Soviet invasion."

Fact: This is false. The M-R pact divided Poland into spheres of influence, requiring that the German army would have to withdraw from Eastern Poland. This pact would have preserved an independent Polish state if the Polish government had not abandoned the country and its inhabitants to the Nazis.

Myth: The Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17, 1939.

Fact: There was no such "invasion." The USSR occupied Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia to prevent the Wehrmacht (German Army) from marching up to the Soviet border. The USSR's claim that it remained neutral in the German-Polish was accepted by all the Allies except the Polish Government-In-Exile.

Myth: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union were "allies."

Fact: There was no alliance of any kind. The M-R Pact was non-aggression pact.

Myth: German and Soviet troops held a "joint victory parade" at Brest-Litovsk.

Fact: The parade was a handing over of power from the German army to the Red Army, since under the M-R Pact Brest was within the Soviet sphere of influence. (5)

Myth: In April and May 1940 the Soviets shot about 22,000 Polish prisoners, including officers, in a series of mass murders known as the Katyn massacre.

Fact: As of 2013 at the latests - some historians would choose a much earlier date - we have clear evidence that the "official version" of the event known to history as the "Katyn massacre" is false.

The myth of the "Katyn massacre" is central to right-wing Polish nationalism and important to anticommunist discourse generally. In anticommunist scholarship it is considered "taboo", akin to "Holocaust denial", to question Katyn, regardless of the evidence.

At the very minimum, no one interested in the truth should pay any attention whatever to any account of the "Katyn massacre" that does not included a thorough and objective account of the historical dispute over this subject, including full discussion of the numerous Russian-language studies by Russian scholars who have long rejected and claim to have disproven the "official version" of Katyn.

Myth: After taking them back from Poland in September 1939 the Soviets were guilty of "atrocities" and "terror" in the former "Kresy".

Fact: There was no "terror". Anticommunist historians use the word "terror" to describe the arrests and deportation of the Polish imperialist "settlers" (osadnicy) in 1939-1941. Claims of "communist", "Soviet", or "Stalinist" "terror" or "atrocities" are a verbal ploy that serves to avoid the issue of Polish imperial conquest and racist oppression in Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia.

Myth: The myth of Polish "victimhood": Post-1939 Polish nationalism claims that Poland was "victimized" by two invasions, the German and the Soviet, in September 1939, which destroyed the Polish state.

Fact: This is false. In reality the Polish state disappeared because, in an unprecedented act of betrayal, the Polish government abandoned the country, leaving it without a government. We have shown this in our extensive discussion on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the German-Polish war of September-October 1939.

Myth: The myth of Polish "heroism".

Fact: Many Poles did indeed heroically fight against the Germans. But the Home Army, the armed force of the Polish government-in-exile (in Paris until June 1940, thereafter in London) also fought communist partisans, with whom they were supposedly in alliance. The Home Army routinely murdered Jews who were hiding form the Germans. Some Home Army commanders collaborated with the Germans (see below). Fighting against communist partisans, murdering Jews, and collaborating with the Germans is not "heroic" behavior.

The Polish People's Army (Armia Ludowa, AL) and the pro-Soviet Polish Army (Wojsko Polskie, WP) led by Zygmunt Berling did fight the Germans heroically. They did so without anti-Semitic terror or collaboration with the Germans. These forces were pro-communist and led by communists. Praising Polish communist forces or expressing pride in their accomplishments is "taboo" in mainstream Polish "nationalist" historiography because that historiography promotes not truth but "political correctness" in the form of anticommunist lies.

Myth: Poland faced "two totalitarianisms": Nazi Germany and the USSR.

Fact: This is false, just another verbal ploy, a play on words. For the most part the term "totalitarian" has no fixed meaning. It is simply an epithet meaning "bad". It is sometimes used to refer to a state with only one political party. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union each had only one legal political party. But Nazi Germany and the USSR were diametrically opposite in every other way. Moreover, the existence of multiple political parties does not constitute real "democracy." Capitalist countries typically have multiple parties while being run by the wealth either openly or behind the scenes.

Poland was much more similar to Nazi Germany than the Soviet Union was. Like Hitler's regime the Second Polish Republic was authoritarian, imperialist, anticommunist, anti-labor, fiercely racist against ethnic minorities, viciously and officially anti-Semitic, and militarist. Most important, it was capitalist. Not surprisingly, many leading Polish politicians and intellectuals admired Hitler and Nazi Germany.

Myth: The Soviets betrayed the heroic "Warsaw Uprising".

Myth: The murderous postwar Polish underground was a "heroic" war for "freedom" and "liberation."

Why Tell Lies If the Truth Is On Your Side

Since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 a flood of primary source documents from former Soviet archives have gradually been made available to researchers. I have been locating, obtaining, and studying these documents - more precisely, those among them dealing with the Stalin period and the historical controversies about it - for more than a decade.

Based on this reading and research I studied Nikita Khrushchev's famed "Secret Speech" to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of February 25, 1956. To my amazement and no little discomfort I made the astounding discovery that every single accusation leveled by Khrushchev in that speech against Stalin and Lavrentii Beria is demonstrably false. (6) To date no one, specifically no historian of the Soviet Union, has challenged any of the results of my study. Khrushchev has no defenders.

I proceeded to formulate the hypothesis that many, perhaps even most, of Snyder's accusations of crimes against Stalin and the Soviet Union would turn out to be false. As it turned out, my hypothesis was correct - but it was also incorrect. I did not expect to discover that not many, not most, but virtually every accusation involving the claim of a crime of one kind or other, every crime alleged by Snyder against Stalin, the Soviet Union, and pro-Soviet forces, would turn out to be false. Yet that is the case. No ideological bias of mine but the evidence itself demands this conclusion.

Anyone who reads Snyder's book will see that he has tried to include any and all crimes and misdeeds that can be alleged against Stalin and the Soviet Union between the period of collectivization virtually until Stalin's death in 1953. It is worth of note that Snyder was unable to find even a single genuine crime.

This bears repeating: not one of the crimes alleged by Snyder against Stalin and the Soviet leadership is genuine. All are fabrications. Snyder was unable to find a single example - not even one - of a "crime" that really was committed by the Stalin and/or the Soviet leadership. The implications of this fact should be considered.

Snyder has not done all his research by himself. He has had the resources of many ideologically-committed anticommunist researchers of Eastern Europe, especially of Poland and Ukraine whose governments sponsor research facilities specifically devote to fabricating tales of "communist atrocities." It appears that some of these professional anticommunist researchers may have helped Snyder. In addition Snyder has been able to draw on decades of publication by well-funded Cold War publicists and propagandists. SNyder has also had at his service the magnificent bibliographical and research facilities of the major research libraries and institutes of the world.

And yet, despite all these resources, human and material, Snyder has not been able to find even a single crime that Stalin or the Soviet leadership of his day was guilty of. He has not been able to identify even a single genuine "crime of Stalin" or "crime of Stalinism." He has had to fabricate alleged by others before him.

Where are the "Crimes of Stalinism"

It is in principle impossible to "prove a negative." You can only prove a positive. You can't prove that Mr. X was not present in, say, Moscow on a given date and at a given time. All you can do is to prove that Mr. X was somewhere else - say, Leningrad - on that same date and at that time. This means that in principle no one can prove that Stalin and the Soviet leadership of his time did not commit even a single "crime"; that the set of events that historians conventionally call "crimes of Stalinism" is an empty set.

However, the fact that the combined efforts of all the anticommunist, anti-Stalinist, researchers in the world over a period of more than 70 years - "all the King's horses and all the King's men" (7) - and with the facilities of all the world's best libraries and archives, have not been able to come up with a single, genuine "crime of Stalin" of the period 1932-1945 - this is a fact that is worthy of attention. It is strong evidence in support of the negative conclusion: that there were no such "crimes of Stalin." For if there were any such crimes, surely these highly motivated and well-provisioned anticommunist researchers, with unprecedented and privileged access to the archives, would have found them by now.

Of course there are really a number of categories of acts that have been termed "crimes" of Stalinism." One is the category of acts that are crimes by any definition, such as deliberate killings of innocent persons. This is the "empty set." The anticommunists of decades have never yet succeeded in identifying even a single one of them.

The second category consists of "crimes" against property and the resistance of the propertied. Collectivization of agriculture deprived many rich, and also many not-so-rich, peasants of their private property in land, just as the Revolution of 1917 deprived capitalists of their private property in the means of production, landlords of their estates, urban landlords of their rentable buildings, and so on. These were "crimes" by a kind of class-conscious definition - the definition of the property-owning class. At the same time they were acts of liberation from the viewpoint of the exploited classes of workers, peasants, and many others. The liberation of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia by the Red Army is considered a "crime" by the Polish "nationalist"-imperialists.

A third category is the crimes committed by members of the Soviet leadership during Stalin's period. The principle example here is the Ezhovshchina, the mass murder of several hundred thousand Soviet citizens under the pretense of fighting organized counter-revolutionary groups. This was certainly a massive crime by any standard. But a truthful account of these horrendous events is not useful to ideological anticommunists because it was carried out unbeknownst to Stalin and the Soviet government who eventually, and far too late, realized what was going on, stopped it, and punished the criminals. We have presented the relevant evidence in chapters 5 and 6 of the present book.

Unquestionably the Ezhovshchina represents a massive failure of the Soviet system. Arch Getty termed it "the self-destruction of the Bolsheviks." (8) Some such term certainly applies. But it was not "Stalin's" crime in that he and the Soviet top leadership did not order it or wish it, and when they learned of it they acted to stop it and punish the guilty.

It is crimes of the first kind, and especially alleged atrocities - mass murders - that are the subject of Snyder's book. Without them Snyder's attempt to compare Stalin with Hitler, the USSR with Nazi Germany, and Bolshevism with Nazism, falls apart.

The Crimes of Western Imperialism

In the absence of such atrocities by the Soviet Union it is the acts of the Western imperialist countries, especially in the colonial world, that most closely resemble the crimes of Nazism. Not "Stalin + Hitler" but "Churchill + Hitler," "Daladier + Hitler," "Roosevelt and Truman + Hitler." To quote again from Professor Domenico Losurdo:

On a d'ailleurs longtemps comparé le colonialisme anglais et occidental et le colialisme hitlérien. Gandhi disait: «en Inde nous avons un gouvernement hitlérien, faut-il le comoufler en termes plus légers?», «Hitler a été le péché de la Grande-Bretagne.»

Translated:

British and Western colonialism has long been compared to Hitler's colonialism. Gandhi used to say: "In India we have a Hitlerite government. Must we disguise it with softer terms?" "Hitler was Great Britain's sin."

To count the millions of colonial victims of the Western "democratic" powers would be a large task. They certainly amount to the tens of millions. Even as concerns World War II it is hard to be precise in calculating the crimes of the Western Allies against non-combatant civilians such as the victims of the terror-bombings against Japanese and German cities, or of the two atomic bombs which could have been dropped on, for example, the Japanese Kwangtung Army but instead were dropped on defenseless civilian cities virtually devoid of military significance.

There is the "man-made famine" in Bengal, India, which cost the lives of between 1.5 and 5 million persons and for which the British government was completely responsible. (9) Then, shortly after the war, the murder of 40,000 Korean peasants on the island of Cheju-do, where with American knowledge and support South Korean leaders, until recently Japanese collaborators, sent in fascist killers against a peasant revolt in an area where peasant revolts had taken place for many years. (10)

There is the horrific mass murder - mass torture campaign by the British against the Kenyan "nationalist" movement. Within the last decade major scholarly works by Western authors have begun to bring to Western attention facts about this world-class atrocity that have been well known in Kenya but suppressed in the "Free World." (11)

The Vietnamese anti-imperialist struggle for independence, first against France, then against Japan, then again against France, then against the United States, cost the lives of between 2 and 4 million Vietnamese. None of them would have been killed if the French imperialists had simply ceded independence. During the course of this thirty-year war both French and American forces committed numerous horrific atrocities against civilians. A recent book about American atrocities in Vietnam is titled Kill Anything That Moves. (12)

This is just a short selection. The list of horrors committed by Western anticommunist nations could be greatly lengthened. One can understand, therefore, why it is important that enemies of the communist movement - who are at the same time defenders of Western imperialism and its crimes - find it so important to fabricate "crimes of Stalinism."

The Crimes of Eastern European "Nationalists"

An equally powerful motive is the ideological requirements of the right-wing "nationalists" of the former Soviet bloc and former Soviet Union. Holocaust researchers centered around the website "Defending History" (13) have increasingly come to realize, and point out to others, the fact that Snyder's Bloodlands has become a kind of "Bible" of the anticommunist "nationalists" whose political predecessors sided with the Nazis and helped them murder millions of Jews and others, often outdoing the Nazis themselves.

Snyder's book is also valued by Polish "nationalists" who have based their claims to legitimacy on the mythology that the prewar Polish regime was heroic and a "victim" of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The truth is almost diametrically the opposite. Pre-war Poland was a horrific imperialist regime, ferociously anti-labor, fierce racist against its non-Polish citizens.

The prewar Polish regime rejected collective security with the Soviet Union, the only policy that could have foiled Hitler's aggression. Once Hitler's forces attacked, the Polish government abandoned first its capital, Warsaw, and then the country itself without forming a government-in-exile. No other government did this. This unique act of cowardice and indifference to the fate of their people guaranteed the destruction of Poland as a state and condemned the Polish population to Nazi occupation and mass murder.

Poland had a shameful history of anti-Semitic attacks against its Jewish citizens - attacks that continued under German occupation and even after the war. Polish anti-Semitism was the fault of the Polish political, religious, cultural, and educational elite. It continues to be very strong on the Polish right today despite the fact that few Jews remain in Poland. The Polish elite also encouraged racist pogroms against Ukrainians. In a previous chapter we have quoted American scholar Jeffery Burds' brief description of one such anti-Ukrainian pogrom. Research done by the Polish "Center for Holocaust Research" (Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów) and the work of the highly anticommunist scholar Jan T. Gross document the astounding extent of violent anti-Semitism, as well as anticommunism, in prewar, wartime, and postwar Poland.

During the 1980s the Solidarność "union" made Marsha Pilsudski and the regime of the "colonels" that followed Pilsudski its symbols and its national heroes. The post-1990 capitalist Polish governmental and educational elite have made it their task to "rehabilitate" the prewar Polish elite. This entails denying their crimes. it has also meant fabricating prewar and wartime "crimes" by communists and especially by the Soviet Union.

"Nationalism" Justifies Nothing

The anticommunist Polish and Ukrainian researchers from whose works Snyder draws his allegations in Bloodlands have looked hard for "crimes of Stalinism." Snyder has foisted their fabrications upon a Western audience largely unfamiliar with this self-serving, right-wing version of history that predominates in Eastern Europe. In the present book we have proven, citing the evidence, that all of these claims made by Snyder in Bloodlands are false.

Snyder's book has won the raise of anticommunists and crypto-fascists. The "Defending History" site quotes enthusiastic praise for Bloodlands by a right-wing Lithuanian academic. On first glance one might think this strange, since Snyder says virtually nothing about Lithuania. But the reason is not far to seek. The Lithuanian regime, like most Eastern European regimes, bases its claim to historical legitimacy and nationalism on the prewar regime - an authoritarian, elitist and racist dictatorship, anti-labor, anticommunist, and anti-Semitic - that was closely aligned with Nazi Germany

Important parts of this elite collaborated in the mass murder of Soviet Jews and fought on Hitler's side in the war. As in the other Baltic countries, Poland, and Ukraine, "nationalist" soldiers went underground after the war and devoted themselves to terrorism - murder and sabotage. This terrorist activity is officially praised as "heroic" in today's Baltic states as in Poland. In some cases like that of the Ukrainian OUN these terrorists received aid from the American CIA just as did Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden four decades later. Now the soldiers who fought for the Nazis are praised as "freedom fighters" while the Red Army soldiers who liberated these countries from Nazism are called "invaders" and "imperialists."

Most post-socialist countries of Eastern Europe are dominated by anticommunist regimes that justify their reactionary policies in part by their claim to be "true nationalists." All have been engaged in constructing national mythologies - false "nationalist" histories. All these countries, again with very few exceptions, have turned from being allies of the Soviet Union to being allies of NATO and the United States and hostile to post-Soviet Russian.

But "nationalism" justifies nothing. Hitler and his lieutenants were all German "nationalists". The Nazi leaders who went to the gallows after Nuremburg proclaimed with their last words their devotion to Germany. We can assume they were being truthful. Like the Polish, Ukrainian, and other Eastern European "nationalists" the Nazis committed their massive crimes in the name of patriotism, of "the nation."

The Role of NATO and the United States

The United States wasted no time in taking advantage of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It attacked Iraq in 1991, and subsequently organized an embargo that killed a half million Iraqi children. (14)

In 2001 the USA led an invasion of Afghanistan and, in 2003, of Iraq, that have cost the lives of at least another 100,00 innocent civilians. None of this would have been possible if the Soviet Union had remained intact. None of it could have been done, or done as throughly, without the collaboration of the new "nationalist" regimes of the former Soviet bloc and USSR.

The stability and legitimacy of the countries of the former Soviet bloc and former USSR are of obvious importance to the American elite, which plans to keep military forces in the Middle east indefinitely. This pits the interests of the US elite against those of the Russian elite. Synder's book plays a role in de-legitimizing Russia, as the successor state to the Soviet Union, just as it helps to justify the far-right and even crypto-fascist politics of Eastern Europe.

Apology for Holocaust Perpetrators - But Not Only for Them

Historians of the Holocaust have been the most prominent critics of Bloodlands. But neither they nor the few other critics of this book have noted the fact that Snyder has not only falsified World War II and the role of Polish and Ukrainian Nationalists - though he has indeed done that. All of Snyder's claims about Soviet "crimes" are also false. Yet this fact has drawn virtually no attention from Snyder's critics. It seems that they do not realize it, or do not object to it.

This is the task that the present book takes up. The falsehoods in Bloodlands are all of apiece: both apology for anticommunist (and anti-Semitic) "nationalists" and falsification of what the Soviet Union did. But the latter has attracted no scholarly attention - until now.

Snyder is a significant figure in American intellectual life. He is a frequent columnist for the most influential intellectual journals. His book is taken as a statement of facts, his lies and falsehoods about the Soviet Union and Stalin are accepted as true. In mainstream Western intellectual circles, and even on most of the Left, it is "taboo" to question any charge against Stalin or the Soviet Union, no matter how absurd. (15) If you try to challenge them - the present author has done so - the response is: "You are a defender of Stalin!" (16)

Therefore, the present book will inevitably be called "an apology for Stalin," even "for Stalin's crimes." But by now the reader knows this is false. This study is simply an attempt to get at the truth. Not to "defend Stalin" or "defend the Soviet Union," but simply to discover and document what really happened, using the best evidence, research methods, and appropriate means of deduction and conclusion.

Any blow in defense of the truth is a blow for the enlightenment, for civilization, and for the future, and against the injustices not just of the past but of the present and against those who lie about the past to justify their exploitative practices today. May this book contribute, however modestly, towards those goals.

Footnotes

(1) "Great Men and Large Numbers: Undertheorizing a History of Mass Killing." Contemporary European History, 21, 2, (2012), pp. 133-143.

(2) Wildt review of Bloodlands in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 14, 1 (Winter 2013), 197-206.

(2a) WEB EDITOR'S NOTE: Changed pronouns to third-person, see web editor footnotes in Ch.15

(3) The present author has demonstrated this in detail with respect to the Decmeber 1 1934 murder of Sergei Kirov, Leningrad Party leader. See Grover Furr, The Murder of Sergei Kirov, History, Scholarship, and the Anti-Stalin Paradigm (Kettering, OH: Erythros Press & Media, LLC, 2013).

(4) See the map at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Poland1764physical.jpg

(5) A related myth is that the Nazi Gestapo and the Soviet NKVD held three "conferences" at which the killing of the Polish elites was planned. There is no evidence whatever for such conferences. Not all Polish nationalists make this specific claim today. Snyder does not mention it.

(6) All but one minor accusation, which I could neither confirm nor disprove. See Furr, Khurshchev Lied.

(7) From the British nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty Sat on a Wall"

(8) J. ARch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror, Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999

(9) Among many sources for the Bengal famine see Mark Tauger, "the Indian Famine Crises of World War II." British Scholar 1, No. 2 (March 2009), 166-196; Scott Horton, "Churchill's Dark Side: Six Questions for Madhusree Mukerjee." Harper's November 4, 2010. At : http://harpers.org/archive/2010/11/hbc-90007797; Gideon Polya, "The Famine of History - Bengal 1943" International Network on Holocaust and Genocide 10 (1995) 10-15; The Bengal Famine, 1943-45." Freedom from Famine at: http://www.duo.uio.no/publ/statsvitenskap/1997/514/3/7/8.html

(10) See John Merrill, "The Cheju-Do Rebellion" Journal of Korean Studies 2 (1980), 139-197. This horrific slaughter is thoroughly studied by South Korean scholars but virtually unknown in the west.

(11) Begin with David M. Anderson, "Atoning for the Sins of Empire", NYT June 12, 2013. Continue with Anderson's book Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (2006) and Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning. The Untold Story of the End of Empire in Kenya. (New York: Henry Holt, 2005).

(12) Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves, The Real American War in Vietnam. New York: Metropolitan Books - Henry Holt, 2013

(13) At: http://defendinghistory.com

(14) Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: "We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it." - "60 minutes" (American news commentator television program), May 12 1996

(15) Russia is one of the few countries where some space still remains in intellectual life for honest research into the Stalin period.

(16) An example of an essay that takes Snyder's claims in Bloodlands as fact is István Deák's review "Could Stalin Have Been Stopped?" New York Review of Books, March 13 2013. As a youth, Deák was in a labor battalion in fascist Hungarian Army that invaded the Ukraine alongside Hitler's forces and that killed at least hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens, to say nothing of Red Army soldiers. The present author wrote a response to Deák's essay, and also sent it to a few email lists.