SNYDER'S FACT-CLAIMS in BLOODLANDS CHAPTER FIVE and SIX EXAMINED

Snyder's fifth chapter deals with the period immediately before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. There is little new here. Many of the fact-claims he makes about the Soviet Union, Stalin, etc., in this chapter are repeated from other chapters.

The Oft-Repeated Lie: "German-Soviet Alliance"

Snyder frequently repeats the falsehood that there was an "alliance" between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

...in the second, during the German-Soviet alliance (1939-1941), the killing was balanced. (155) 

How could the Soviets make an alliance with the Nazis? (155) 

What was it about the Nazi and Soviet systems that permitted mutually advantageous cooperation, between 1939 and 1941, but also the most destructive war in human history between 1941 and 1945? (156) 

After this ideological compromise ("socialism in one country"), Stalin's alliance with Hitler was a detail. (157)

Here Snyder assumes that Leon Trotsky was correct in claiming that "socialism in one country" was in opposition to Lenin's ideas. He does not even allude to the well-known debate over this question. Evidently Snyder is eager to seize upon any argument that is "anti-Stalin."

The allied Soviet Union had rejected Germany's proposal to import two million Jews. (160-161)

We have discussed this falsehood in the preceding chapter. In addition, we should note that all the Western capitalist countries had "mutually advantageous cooperation" with Nazi Germany. What else was the Munich Accord, or the trade agreements between the U.K. and Germany?

The Lie that the USSR Wanted to "Destroy the Polish Upper Classes"

Thus it was legitimate to destroy the Polish upper classes (Stalinism)... (156)

Snyder cites no evidence whatsoever that the Soviets wanted to "destroy the Polish upper classes" - because, of course, they did not. Nothing of the kind occurred. Polish "settlers" (osadnicy) and the Polish imperialist officials were not "detroyed" - they were deported from the lands they had occupied, Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine.

Snyder Equates Nazi Imperialism with Soviet Anti-Imperialism

Hitler wanted the Germans to become an imperial people; Stalin wanted the Soviets to endure the imperial stage of history, however long it lasted. The contradiction here was less of principle than of territory. (157)

If this convoluted statement means anything at all it suggests that genocidal and imperialist Nazism and Soviet anti-imperialism are basically the same. If you want to "endure the imperial stage of history" - that is, to survive it - you are somehow similar to those who want to impose it! True nonsense.

In reality, Nazi imperialism was fundamentally similar to the imperialism of Great Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Portugal, and Japan. The difference was that Hitler wanted an empire in Europe - specifically, Eastern Europe and the USSR - while the Western imperialists had imposed their imperial rule on other continents. The worldwide communist movement was the single most significant force opposing all of these imperialisms.

Hitler's Garden of Eden, the pure past to be found in the near future, was Stalin's Promised Land, a territory mastered at great cost, about which a canonical history had already been written (Stalin's Short Course of 1938). (157)

If this means anything, it is that the racist and genocidal Nazi Aryan empire, in which all except ethnic Germans would be killed off or reduced to slavery, was the same as the Soviet ideal of a multiracial state free of exploitation - a breathtakingly cynical statement.

Snyder is also wrong on elementary facts. Stalin's Short Course was a history of the Bolshevik Party, not a history of the USSR. Its title is History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks). Short Course. Either Snyder is deliberately misleading his readers, or he has never read the book and does not know what he is talking about.

Was Collectivization of Agriculture a Form of Colonialism?

The secret of collectivization (as Stalin had noted long before) was that it was an alternative to expansive colonization, which is to say a form of internal colonization. (159)

This is not only nonsense - it is yet another dishonest attempt to equate the USSR with Nazi Germany. There is no such thing as "internal colonization." And where did Stalin "note" that collectivization was "an alternative to colonization"? Snyder does not even attempt to document this claim, which is no more than name-calling. Basically, Snyder assumes, without evidence, that the purpose and function of collectivization was exploitation. This is false, as Tauger has argued. (Tauger 2006)

Collectivization had brought starvation to Soviet Ukraine, first as an unintended result of inefficiencies and unrealistic grain targets, and then as an intended consequence of the vengeful extractions of late 1932 and early 1933. (162)

Snyder is relating two distinct falsehoods here. First, collectivization did not cause the famine. Snyder does not even attempt to prove that it did; he simply asserts it. In reality, as we have seen, collectivization put an end to the age-old cycle of famines caused by Russia's and Ukraine's extreme vulnerability to natural disasters and the primitive - actually, medieval - methods of traditional Russian and Ukrainian peasant agriculture. Second, there was no "intended" famine or "vengeful extraction." We have examined this question in Chapter One.

Stalin himself received more than a hundred such indications {that Hitler would invade the USSR in 1941}, but chose to ignore them. (165)

This is false. Everybody makes mistakes of judgment; Stalin unquestionably made them as well. As, of course, did the British and French, who were caught totally unprepared when Hitler sent his army against them in May 1940, even though they had officially been at war for more than eight months.

But Stalin did not make this specific error. We now have a great deal of evidence that Stalin and the Soviet leadership were expecting a German attack around June 21, 1941. I have collected many of them in Khrushchev Lied. (1) We also have American sources, such as the following:

In Moscow on June 20, Steinhardt received a cable from Washington that advised him to evacuate all American citizens from Russia. On June 21 a United States diplomatic official traveling east to Vladisvostok observed between 200 and 220 westbound trains, of twenty-five cars each, partially loaded with troops and army supplies. The same day, Nikita S. Khrushchev, Ukrainian Communist Party leader, lifted the phone in his Kiev office to hear Stalin alert him that the Nazis might begin military operations against Russia the next day, June 22. (2)

We now know that the Red Army commanders were instructed to go to battle stations on June 18, 1941, though some failed to do so. This question was the source of an interesting and acrimonious debate in a leading Soviet / Russian military journal 20 years ago. General Dmitrii Pavlov, commander of the Belorussian front, was tried and executed for failing to bring his army to battle readiness. The very partial evidence in his case that has been released suggested that there is some evidence that he was deliberately aiding Hitler.

The Red Army did indeed suffer serious defeat during the early months of the German invasion. This was certainly a mistake - it was not supposed to happen. However, the same is true of the other armies that Hitler's forces had attacked. At the war's outset none of the Allied armies were prepared to deal with the German Blitzkrieg. The entire French army was smashed in less than six weeks and Paris occupied. The British expeditionary force on the continent was routed, barely saving some of its remnants at Dunkirk thanks to bad weather for the Luftwaffe and indecisiveness on the part of the German commander. American forces were badly defeated in their first battle with German forces by German Field Marshal Rommel's Afrika Korps in February 1943 at the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia.

Eight years before, it had taken a strong Soviet state to starve Soviet Ukraine.... Under his rule, people in Soviet Ukraine (and elsewhere) stooped over their own bulging bellies to harvest a few sheaves of wheat that they were not allowed to eat. (172)

This is a grotesque idea, false in every detail, as we have shown in Chapter One. The image of starving peasants harvesting grain that they could not eat is absurd. Needless to say, Snyder did not document any examples of this. All of the available documentation shows that those who were working in the fields had a priority claim on whatever limited food was available during 1932 and 1933.

It was near Kharkiv that starving peasant children in 1933 had eaten each other alive in a makeshift orphanage. (172)

There was a serious famine, so of course terrible things occurred. But Snyder gave no evidence for this statement in his chapter on the famine and cites none here.

During the Great Terror, Stalin had made sure that Finns were targeted for one of the deadliest of the national actions, believing that Finland might one day lay claim to Leningrad. (172)

Not only does Snyder state as a fact that Stalin "targeted" Soviet Finns but also claims that he knows the reason Stalin supposedly did so. Yet he gives not a single citation to any evidence, or any document of any kind, to substantiate his claims. There is no evidence that Stalin even knew at the time about Ezhov's murder of thousands of ethnic Finns.

During the interrogations in 1939 Ezhov admitted that he deceived the Soviet government concerning these national actions:

The government, understandably, had no conception of our conspiratorial plans and in the present case proceeded solely on the basis of the necessity to prolong the operation without going into the essence of how it was carried out. 

In this sense, of course, we were deceiving the government in the most blatant manner.(3)

Was Stalin's "No Retreat" Order Similar to Nazi-type Racism?

By treating Soviet soldiers horribly, he {Hitler} wished to ensure that German soldiers would fear the same from the Soviets, and so fight desperately to prevent themselves from falling into the hands of the enemy. It seems that he could not bear the idea of soldiers of the master race surrendering to the subhumans of the Red Army. Stalin took much the same view: that Red Army soldiers should not allow themselves to be taken alive. He could not counsel the possibility that Soviet soldiers would retreat and surrender. They were supposed to advance and kill and die. .... This tyranny of the offensive in Soviet planning caused Soviet soldiers to be captured. Soviet commanders were fearful of ordering withdrawals, lest they be personally blamed (purged, and executed). Thus their soldiers held positions for too long, and were encircled and taken prisoner. The policies of Hitler and Stalin conspired to turn Soviet soldiers into prisoners of war and then prisoners of war into non-people. (175. Emphasis added.)

This is false, yet another attempt by Snyder to yoke the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany. Specifically, Snyder is trying to blame Stalin for Hitler's mass murder of Soviet POWs.

In one of his published articles Snyder writes:

Germans took so many Soviet prisoners of war in part because Stalin ordered his generals not to retreat. (2011-1)

Stalin's "No Retreat" Order and Those of the Allies in 1918 Compared

There are more similarities between the policies of Hitler and Great Britain than between those of Hitler and the USSR. Stalin's orders not to retreat recall that given by Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, on April 11, 1918, which reads in part:

There is no other course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement {= retreat}. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end.(4)

At the same time Sir Arthur Currie, Commander of the Canadian Corps, issued a similar order:

...I place my trust in the Canadian Corps, knowing that where Canadians are engaged there can be no giving way. 

Under the orders of your devoted officers in the coming battle you will advance or fall where you stand facing the enemy.(5)

Stalin's orders were the same as these Allied commanders in 1918 - no retreat, fight till death. Both Haig and Currie ordered "fight on to the end", "fall where you stand," no retreat.

But there is a big difference between Stalin's orders and those of Haig and Currie. British and Canadian troops were being told to fight to the end, without retreat, simply to hold a given position at a given time. The British and Canadians were fighting on the soil of France. Their homes and families were not at all threatened in the case of a German victory. Even French homes and families were not threatened, any more than were German homes and families when the Allies won the war.

But for Red Army soldiers the situation was far different. They really were fighting for their homes and families. The Germans were bent on mass extermination. Hitler had already murdered millions of Soviet citizens. Even Snyder admits that Hitler planned to murder tens of millions more Soviet people if Germany were victorious. Snyder fails to make this distinction or to even inform his readers about World War I precedents for Stalin's order.

For hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, this was the second political famine in Ukraine in the space of eight years. (181)

And:

As during the Soviet starvation campaign of 1933...

Snyder is just repeating his falsehoods. As we demonstrated in our examination of Chapter One, there was no "political famine in Ukraine" or "Soviet starvation campaign of 1933." Snyder falsifies his "evidence" at every turn. In fact, he has no real evidence to support his contention of "political famine."

At Buchenwald in November 1941, the SS arranged a method of mass murder of Soviet prisoners that strikingly resembled Soviet methods in the Great Terror, though exhibiting greater duplicity and sophistication. Prisoners were led into a room in the middle of a stable, where the surroundings were rather loud. They found themselves in what seemed to be a clinical examination room, surrounded by men in white coats - SS-men, pretending to be doctors. They would have the prisoner stand against the wall at a certain place, supposedly to measure his height. Running though the wall was a vertical slit, which the prisoner's neck would cover. In an adjoining room was another SS-man with a pistol. When he saw the neck through the slit, he would fire. The corpse would then be thrown into a third room, the "examination room," be quickly cleaned, and the next prisoner invited inside. Batches of thirty-five to forty corpses would be taken by truck to a crematorium: a technical advance over Soviet practices. (182-3)

Snyder's sole source (n. 58 p. 483): Streim, Behandlung, 102-106.

The only reference Snyder cites here refers to German murders. Snyder has no evidence whatever to support his statement that "Soviet methods in the Great Terror" resembled those of the Nazis. Evidently this is another cheap attempt to associate the USSR with Nazi Germany.

oreover, there were no "Soviet methods in the Great Terror" because these were Ezhov's unauthorized mass murders, not those of the Soviet government, for which he and many of his men were tried and executed. But Snyder has no evidence, not even phony evidence, for this spurious claim.

Again the Lie that Stalin Rejected Jews from Germany

By late 1941 the Nazi leadership had already considered, and been forced to abandon, four distinct versions of the Final Solution. THe Lublin plan for a reservation in eastern Poland failed by November 1939 because the General Government was too close and too complicated; the consensual Soviet plan by February 1940 because Stalin was not interested in Jewish emigrations;... 

(185. Emphasis added).

There was no such plan for Jewish emigration to the USSR. We have examined this falsehood of Snyder's in a previous chapter.

.......

Bloodlands Chapter 6

This chapter is mainly about the Germans. It makes very limited reference to the Soviets. However, Snyder continues his attempt to put the Nazis and the Soviets side by side.

...in June 1940, eastern Poland had been annexed by the Soviets nine months before that, in September 1939. Here the Germans found evidence of a social transformation. Industry had been nationalized, some farms had been collectivized, and a native elite had been all but destroyed... 

(194, Emphasis added, GF)

This statement exposes Snyder's own elitist assumptions. The Soviets did not "destroy" any "native elite." The Poles deported from Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine were not "native" to those lands at all. They were mainly osadnicy, the Polish imperialist "settlers."

The Soviets also had what may be termed a "class-conscious understanding" of what an "elite" was - and it wasn't the same as Snyder's. For the Soviets, the "elite" consisted of leading Party members and advanced workers such as Stakhanovites, as well as intellectuals.

For the pre-war Polish ruling class, and for Snyder, the "elite" was the rich - the landowners, government officials, retired military men, and police commanders, together with the upper level of the intelligentsia. These people were not "destroyed" - killed - at all. They were "demoted" - their property confiscated, and they and their families subject to deportation so that the common people and the Soviets could be rid of them.

The Soviets had deported more than three hundred thousand Polish citizens and shot tens of thousands more. The German invasion prompted the NKVD to shoot some 9,817 imprisoned Polish citizens rather than allow them to fall into German hands. The Germans arrived in the western Soviet Union in summer 1941 to find NKVD prisons full of fresh corpses. These had to be cleared out before the Germans could use them for their own purposes. 

Soviet mass murders provided the Germans with an occasion for propaganda. (194)

Sources (n. 16 p. 485):

* "The 9,817 count in Verbrechen is at 93."

* "See also Wnuk, Za pierwszego Sowieta, 371 (11,000-12,000)"

* Hryciuk, "Victims," 183 (9,400).

We have already pointed out that the figure of 300,000 Polish citizens deported is exaggerated by a factor of five to eight.

Böhler, Verbrechen, is not a work of scholarship but a catalog of an exhibition about German army crimes in Poland in September-October 1939. Böhler himself is a specialist on the German war and German crimes in Poland. He has not researched Soviet history.

Hryciuk, "Victims," does state that 9400 persons - not "Polish citizens" - were killed by the Soviets:

* In Western Ukraine, "Of 20,094 prisoners in custody on 10 June 1941 ... more than 8700 were murdered...";

* In Western Belorussia, "Of the 6,375 prisoners in custody as of 10 June 1941... over 700 were murdered (mainly those in prison in Glȩbokie)..."

However, Hryciuk provides no evidence for these figures.

Nazi propaganda claimed that the Soviet NKVD shot many prisoners in L'vov and elsewhere before retreating from the city. Other sources claim that Ukrainian Nationalists killed many communists and Jews when the German army occupied L'vov. There is a controversy about just what happened, with little agreement.(6)

Soviet documentary evidence exists, as does at least one article by the anticommunist "Memorial" association that examines that evidence: "The Evacuation of the Prisons 1941," by Aleksandr Gur'ianov and Aleksandr Kokurin. (7) Both of these authors, like the "Memorial Society" itself, are extremely anti-Soviet and anticommunist. It is impossible that they would underestimate, let alone ignore, Soviet murders or crimes of any type.

According to the evidence cited and examined by Gur'ianov and Kokurin the only prisoners executed were those convicted of or, in some cases, under investigation for, capital crimes. Many or most of those were probably members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), active Nazi collaborators. This article is well documented from Soviet-era records and seems credible, though of course it cannot claim any precision in numbers of persons killed.

Other prisoners were shot while attempting to escape either from prisons under bombardment or from evacuation columns. A great many prisoners were either left in the prisons or set free by their NKVD guards. It is doubtful, therefore, whether Hryciuk's use of the term "murdered" here is legitimate.

We note in passing that Snyder fails to mention the murders of Ukrainian nationalists in Lviv after the Soviets had retreated. A good recent account is that by anticommunist but also anti-nationalist scholar John-Paul Himka: "The Lviv Pogrom of 1941" (2011). Himka concludes:

In sum, the Lviv pogrom was an action undertaken at German initiative, but carried out largely by the Ukrainian militia set up by the Bandera faction of the OUN {Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, allied with the German Nazis} as the policing arm of the newly proclaimed Ukrainian State. Mob participation supplemented the violence. The pogrom took place on 1 July 1941, a day after Lviv was occupied by the Germans and the Ukrainian nationalists declared statehood. The pogrom itself probably took dozens or at most hundreds of lives, but systematic executions during the pogrom and in its aftermath took thousands. In the executions, OUN militia were also active in the round up and beating of Jews, just as they had been during the pogrom preceding them. (8)

Snyder has done no research on these matters and evidently doesn't know anything about them. On the next page (197) he states:

The NKVD, usually discreet, had been revealed as the murderer of prisoners. Germans broke through the levels of mystification, secrecy, and dissimulation that had covered the (far greater) Soviet crimes of 1937-1938 and 1930-1933. The Germans (along with their allies) were the only power ever to penetrate the territory of the Soviet Union in this way, and so the only people in a position to present such direct evidence of Stalinist murder. Because it was the Germans who discovered these crimes, the prison murders were politics before they were history. Fact used as propaganda is all but impossible to disentangle from the politics of its original transmission.

A page after claiming that the Soviets shot roughly 10,000 prisoners, Snyder admits that it is impossible to extract the truth from German - that is Nazi - documents! Snyder has evidently not consulted, is ignorant of, or at least does not cite, the Soviet studies and documents that reveal that the killings were not "murders", as the Germans and Ukrainian Nationalists described them. And, of course, such logic applies to the Katyn Massacres, which were "politics before they were history."

The act of killing Jews as revenge for NKVD executions confirmed the Nazi understanding of the Soviet Union as a Jewish state. ... 

Yet this psychic nazification would have been much more difficult without the palpable evidence of Soviet atrocities. The pogroms took place where the Soviets had recently arrived and where Soviet power was recently installed, where for the previous months Soviet organs of coercion had organized arrests, executions, and deportations. They were a joint production, a Nazi edition of a Soviet text. (196)

Here Snyder tries to make the Soviets share the blame for Nazi murders and pogroms! In reality Poles and Ukrainians had carried out antisemitic pogroms long before the Soviets came along.

Snyder's long footnote 21 (on pages 485-6 of Bloodlands) has to be read to be believed. It contains no sources or evidence, only a convulated "theoretical" argument with which Snyder tries to justify blaming the Nazi pogroms and murders on the Soviets. It is too long to reproduce here.

In reality, there is no evidence of "Soviet atrocities." To say this is not denial, or even defensiveness. It is the simple truth: we have no such evidence. The evidence cited by the "Memorial Society" authors above is of executions of prisoners convicted or under investigation for capital crimes, and shootings of prisoners while the NKVD guards suppressed prisons escapes and uprisings or escapes from evacuation convoys. These are not atrocities but acts under conditions of martial law, when normal judicial procedures do not apply.

Soviet atrocities would help German SS-men, policemen, and soldiers justify to themselves the policies to which they were soon summoned: the murder of Jewish women and children. Yet the prison shootings, significant as they were to the local people who suffered Soviet criminality, were for Nazi leaders rather catalyst than cause. (197)

It would be interesting if Snyder had cited some accounts from memoirs, or indeed from any primary source, of German "SS-men, policemen, and soldiers" who actually "justified to themselves" the mass murder of "Jewish women and children" with reference to "Soviet atrocities." Historical honesty should prevent him from making such a statement unless he had evidence to support it. Of course such self-justification would still be Nazi thinking, not sober historical analysis. But this is what Snyder is doing here - engaging in such Nazi thinking - and he is the only one doing it! Once again Snyder is trying to connect Nazi atrocities to the Soviets without even a fig-leaf of evidence.

There was a group whose activities at this time could validly be connected to Nazi atrocities, because they were engaged not only in aiding the Nazis in committing mass murders but were carrying out mass murders of their own. That group is the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. But the OUN is praised as "freedom fighters" and "heroes" in today's Ukraine. It was also the OUN that invented the "Holodomor" fabrication.

Bloodlands is popular among today's Ukrainian Nationalists. Snyder has been honored repeatedly by Ukrainian nationalist groups in Ukraine and elsewhere. It is no wonder, then, that Snyder has virtually nothing to say about their atrocities. Instead, he fabricates Soviet crimes that did not happen.

The Reichskommissar {of the Ukraine}, Erich Koch, was a man known for his brutality. Hitler's advisors called Koch a "second Stalin," and they meant it as a compliment...(222)

Snyder has evidently invented this falsehood too, as he has so many others. He does not cite any evidence to support it. It is not made in any of the sources Snyder cites in his footnote 70. I have tracked it down in a biography of Erich Koch:

...als „brauner Zar" der Ukraine soll er sich als „zweiter Stalin" geriert haben...(12) 

... as "Brown Tsar" of the Ukraine he is said to have boasted of himself as "a second Stalin."(9)

It is not at all a reference to Koch's brutality - something Hitler's advisors would not object to in any case. Nor was it a "compliment." Rather it was Koch's own arrogant posturing. The Ukraine was once ruled by the Tsar, then by Stalin, and now by "the brown Tsar" and "second Stalin." It means only that Koch saw himself as the successor to the other two.

Footnotes

(1) Grover Furr, Khurshchev Lied: The Evidence That Every "Revelation" of Stalin's (and Beria's) Crimes in Nikita Khruschev's Infamous "Secret Speech" to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, is Provably False. Kettering, OH: Erythros Press & media LLC, 2011. See the two sections titled "30. Stalin Did Not Heed Warnings About War", 84-86 and 334-340.

(2) Robert H. Jones. The Roads to Russia: United States Lend Lease To The Soviet Union, Norman, University of Oklahoma, 1969, 31-32.

(3) Nikita Petrov, Marc Jansen. Stalinskii pitomets - Nikolai Ezhov. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008, p. 368. "No. 21. From the transcript of the interrogation of the accused Ezhov Nikolai Ivanovich. August 4, 1939." Online at http://msuweb.montclair.edu/%7Efurrg/research/ezhov080439eng.html

(4) At http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/backstothewall.htm

(5) At http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/lys_currie.htm

(6) See "The Lviv pogroms controversy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_surrounding_the_Lviv_pogroms_of_1941) and Alfred De Zayas' account, "The Lviv Massacre" (http://www.alfreddezayas.com/Chapbooks/Lembergmassacre.shtml) De Zayas is well known as an apologist for the Nazis. Naturally, he is also a strong anticommunist, so other anticommunists continue to rely on his work.

(7) «Evakuatsiia tiurem 1941.»: http://www.hro.org/node/6729

(8) Himka, Paper for ASN Convention, April 2011: https://www.academia.edu/1314919/The_Lviv_Pogrom_of_1941_The_Germans_Ukrainian_Nationalists_and_the_Carnival_Crowd

(9) Ralph Meindl, Ostpreußens Gauleiter: Erich Koch - eine politische Biographie. Osnabrück: fibre Verlag, 2007. In his note Meindl cites a report of September 1941 to Alfred Rosenberg.