the PARTISAN WAR and RELATED ISSUES in BLOODLANDS

This chapter deals principally with the partisan warfare in Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine, which the Polish exile government in London and its underground army the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK) still considered to be part of Poland.

Snyder's obvious aim throughout is to portray pro-Soviet partisans as murderous, completely insensitive to the safety and needs of civilians, misogynistic, opponents of independence, and illegitimate. By "independent" Snyder means "capitalist", and by "legitimate" he means "obedient to the Polish government-in-exile in London" (e.g. on page 298).

Setting aside the language of propaganda, the London-based Polish government-in-exile was completely dependent upon, thus not at all "independent" of, the U.K. and the Western Allies. Nor was it any more "legitimate" than was the pro-Soviet formation that became the Polish government. In July 1945 the pro-Soviet Polish government was officially recognized by the Allies, thereby making it the only "legitimate" government of Poland.

An honest historian would explain these matters to his readers rather than foist Polish nationalist propaganda onto them through the use of value-laden terms like "legitimate" and "independent" without explanation. In fact much of Snyder's book is anticommunist Polish "nationalist" mythology and moralizing thinly disguised as historiography.

Did Stalin's Speech of November 7, 1941 Favor Russians?

In November 1941 Stalin was thus preparing an ideological as well as a military defense of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was not a state of the Jews, as the Nazis claimed; it was a state of the Soviet peoples, first among whom were the Russians. On 7 November, as the Jews marched through Minsk to their deaths, Stalin reviewed a military parade in Moscow. To raise the spirits of his Soviet peoples and to communicate his confidence to the Germans, he had actually recalled Red Army divisions from their defensive positions west of Moscow, and had them march through its boulevards. In his address that day he called upon the Soviet people to follow the example of their "great ancestors," mentioning six prerevolutionary martial heroes - all of them Russians. At a time of desperation, the Soviet leader appealed to Russian nationalism. (227)

Source (n. 5 p. 489): Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, 118-119.

Properly speaking this is not an anti-Soviet statement. Apparently Snyder included it so he could accuse Stalin of being "pro-Russian" instead of simply "pro-Soviet."

Brandenberger says: "...all of Stalin's examples were defenders of the old regime if not outright counterrevolutionaries." (118) Brandenberger is correct to note the appeals to Russian nationalism in Soviet rhetoric during the war. But this specific statement is nonsense. It is an anachronism and thus an absurdity to call these historical figures of centuries ago "counterrevolutionaries", as though they were living in the 20th century. (1)

Stalin's speech on November 7 1941 mentions six traditional Russian military heroes. (2) One might suspect that Stalin referred to Russian heroes because he spoke in Moscow, the historic capital of Russia that in November 1941 was again threatened with capture as it had been in earlier wars. All six leaders were relevant to the situation the USSR found itself in on November 7, 1941: defeating an invader, or fighting successful retreats (Suvorov) as the Red Army had been forced to do since June 22, 1941.

* Alexander Nevsky, who defeated the Teutonic Knights (Germans) and later the Finns

* Dmitry Donskoy, who defeated the Mongols at Kulikovo when they tried to conquer Moscow in 1380.

* Kuz'ma Minin, who raised a volunteer army (opol'chenie) in Nizhnii Novgorod and worked with Pozharsky (see below). During World War f2 the Soviet "home guard" of those unfit for service in the regular Red Army were also called "opol'chenie."

* Dmitry Pozharsky: Minin's army led by Pozharsky cleared the Kremlin of Polish-Lithuanian forces in 1612.

* Alexander Suvorov, who led a great strategic retreat across the Alps in 1799.

* Mikhail Kutuzov, who fought the French army at Borodino and then drove the Grand Army out of Russia in 1812. This war was also referred to as the "Patriotic War" (Otechestvennaia), as the war against the Nazis was already being called.

The Marxist view of history is that the Tsars were indeed imperialist exploiters, but also that the great land empire they had built laid the basis for socialism to seize one-sixth of the world. In the latter task the Tsars' expansion was progressive in both the bourgeois and Marxist senses of the word, as were all the bourgeois imperialist expansions from the 16th century on. Similarly, Ivan IV ("the Terrible") and Henry VII of England were progressive in unifying their kingdoms and suppressing the power of the feudal nobility because by doing so they laid the political basis for the development of capitalism and the capitalist class, precursor to socialism and communism.

The vast majority of Muscovites (as well as of Russians and Soviet citizens generally) were not communists. They had to fight and, in many cases, die for something - not for communism, then, but for their country. For all these reasons an appeal to traditional Russian patriotism at that critical time must have seemed logical.

Snyder continues:

People who had distinguished themselves in the Minsk of the 1930s had been shot by the NKVD at Kuropaty. ...Left to themselves, they would have endured Hitler for fear of Stalin. (231) (3)

His source (n. 13 p. 490): Epstein, Minsk, 130.

This is another fraudulent reference. There is nothing about Kuropaty in Epstein's whole book, let alone on this page. Neither Snyder nor anyone else knows who was "shot by the NKVD at Kuropaty," much less whether the victims buried there were "people who had distinguished themselves in the Minsk of the 1930s." Kuropaty has never been thoroughly studied and there is no list of identified victims. If Snyder had written: "It is a reasonable surmise that some people who had distinguished themselves..." he would have been on firmer ground.

Snyder also fabricated - invented - this "fact":

Left to themselves, they would have endured Hitler for fear of Stalin.

On the very page Snyder cites for this statement Epstein stresses that the Minsk underground did not act out of fear. On the contrary, "they supported the Soviet concept of authority..." (130).

Did Soviet Partisans Cause Nazi Atrocities?

Hitler, who saw partisan warfare as a chance to destroy potential opposition, reacted energetically when Stalin urged local communists to resist the Germans in July. Even before the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler had already relieved his soldiers of legal responsibility for actions taken against civilians. Now he wanted soldiers and police to kill anyone who "even looks at us askance." (234)

Source (n. 20 p. 490): "...Quotation: Lück, "Partisanbekämpfung," 228.

Here Snyder tries to blame Soviet partisans, and therefore Stalin, for Hitler's murder of civilians. He implies that Hitler stepped up his killing of civilians because of Stalin's setting up of partisan warfare. Snyder does this repeatedly in the last part of his book.

The citation from Lück is from Martin Bormann's notes of a discussion in Hitler's HQ of July 16, 1941. Bormann quotes Hitler as saying:

Die Russen haben jetzt einan Befehl zum Partisanen-Krieg hinter unserer Front gegeben. Dieser Partisanenkrieg hat auch wieder seinen Vorteil: er gibt uns die Möglichkeit, auszurotten, was sich gegen uns stellt. (4)

Translated:

Now the Russians have given the order for a partisan war behind our front. This partisan war also has an advantage: it gives us the possibility to exterminate anything that opposes us.

However, Lück notes that this was nothing new for Hitler:

...diese "Strategie" hatte die SS ohnehin schon längst angewendet... (Lück 228 n. 17)

Translated:

...this "strategy" had long been used by the SS...

Snyder suggests that Hitler's words should be taken literally: that he needed an "opportunity" to take murderous action against civilians, an "excuse" that Hitler did not have before. That is to say, Snyder is suggesting that if the Soviets had not begun partisan warfare Hitler would not have exterminated so many people! But Lück, Snyder's own source, makes it clear to his readers that in reality Hitler had been exterminating people long before Stalin's order for partisan warfare.

Hitler also made the second statement claimed by Snyder - to "kill anyone 'who even looks at us askance'":

Der Riesenraum müsse natürlich so rasch wie möglich befriedet werden; dies geschehe am besten daduch, daß man Jeden, der nur schief schaue, totschieße. (5)

Translated:

Naturally the huge area had to be pacified as quickly as possible and the best way to do this is to shoot dead anybody who looks wrong.

It is not true, as Snyder suggests, that Hitler also made this statement in relation to Soviet declaration of partisan warfare. Rather, Hitler just suggested that shooting as many people as possible on any pretext at all was the best way to "pacify this gigantic area."

By Snyder's logic all the Allies were facilitating Nazi mass murders, for French, Czech, Italian, and other partisans also fought the Nazis. Polish partisans fought the Nazis too, though the Polish underground generally considered Jews and communists just as much their enemies as the Germans and Ukrainian nationalists. But Snyder never raises this issue in connection with them. Snyder's goal is to associate the Soviet Union, but not Poland or the Allies, with Nazi atrocities.

Snyder does the same thing in the following passage:

Partisan operations, effective as they sometimes were, brought inevitable destruction to the Belarusian civilian population, Jewish and gentile alike. When the Soviet partisans prevented peasants from giving food to the Germans, they all but guaranteed that the Germans would kill the peasants. A Soviet gun threatened a peasant, and then a German gun killed him. Once the Germans believed that they had lost control of a given village to the partisans, they would simply torch houses and fields. If they could not reliably get grain, they could keep it from the Soviets by seeing that it was never harvested. When Soviet partisans sabotaged trains, they were in effect ensuring that the population near the site would be exterminated. When Soviet partisans laid mines, they knew that some would detonate under the bodies of Soviet citizens. The Germans swept minds by forcing locals, Belarusians and Jews, to walk hand in hand over minefields. In general, such loss of human life was of little concern to the Soviet leadership. The people who died had been under German occupation, and were therefore suspect and perhaps even more expendable than the average Soviet citizen. German reprisals also ensured that the ranks of the partisans swelled, as survivors often had no home, no livelihood, and no family to which to return. (238-9)

Sources (n. 34 p. 491):

* Musial, Mythos, 189, 202; 

* Lück, "Partisanbekämpfung," 238; 

* Ingrao, Chasseurs, 131; 

* Verbrechen, 495.

Lück, Ingrao, and the volume "Verbrechen der Wehrmacht" do not discuss Soviet partisans at all, much less blame them for German atrocities. Musial, an intensely anticommunist Polish nationalist historian, notes that the communist partisans forced the Belorussian peasants to feed them and "often" robbed them, while the German forces murdered them. But even Musial does not claim that the German murders were due to the Soviet partisans - the claim that Snyder makes here.

Once again Snyder is trying to blame the Soviet partisans, and therefore Stalin and the Soviet leadership, in part for Nazi atrocities against civilians. Again Snyder fails to acknowledge that all the Allies, including the Polish nationalist Home Army, to whom Snyder is sympathetic, supported partisan groups and therefore were, in Snyder's sense, all as "responsible" for Nazi atrocities as were the pro-Soviet partisans.

It must be noted that Soviet partisans could not "take control of a given village" - only pro-German Ukrainians or Polish partisans working with the Germans could do that.

The logic of the Soviet system was always to resist independent initiatives and to value human life very cheaply...

Snyder cites no evidence to support his statement that the Soviets "valued human life very cheaply." There is evidence to the contrary, as witness this exchange between Marshal Vasilevskii and Stalin concerning a military operation to liberate Leningrad:

On January 10 Stalin and Marshal Vasilevsky talked with him {Marshal Meretskov} by direct wire. They expressed the frank opinion that the operation would not be ready even by January 11 and that it would be better to put it off another two or three days. 'There's a Russian proverb,' Stalin said. 'Haste makes waste. It will be the same with you: hurry to the attack and not prepare it and you will waste people'. (6)

The same thing - "valuing human life very cheaply" - was said of American commanders in World War 2 - for example, in the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific, where tens of thousands of American soldiers were killed in frontal assaults on islands that could have been bypassed, leaving the Japanese garrisons to starve or surrender. And what about the "over-the-top" tactics of the commanders on all sides of the First World War, when they could think of no better way of dealing with trench warfare than to order suicidal charges against barbed wire and machine guns at the enemies' trenches, often losing thousands of men in a day? Here, as elsewhere, Snyder's judgment is ruined by his strong anticommunist bias.

The Polish Home Army leadership that unleashed the Warsaw Uprising without a hope of victory and led to the deaths of a quarter million Polish civilians at Nazi hands, was far more guilty of "valuing human life very cheaply" than the Soviets. We will discuss the Warsaw Uprising later.

The previous hesitation of local Minsk communists turned out to be justified: their resistance organization was treated as a front of the Gestapo by the Central Staff of the Partisan Movement in Moscow. The people who rescued Minsk Jews and supplied Soviet partisans were labeled a tool of Hitler.

Source: (n. 35, p. 491): Slepyan, Guerillas, 17, 42.

Slepyan, Guerillas, pages 17 and 42, is a phony reference; Slepyan has nothing to say about anything in this passage of Snyder's.

But Barbara Epstein's book, which Snyder recommends elsewhere, does indeed discuss the Soviet authorities' suspicion against the Minsk Ghetto partisans and the persecution of its surviving members. What Epstein writes concerning this tragic and mistaken suspicion is worth quoting:

Why did Ponomarenko and others want to discredit the Minsk underground, and why did they continue their campaign against it for so many years? The simplest answer is that Ponomarenko honestly thought that the Minsk underground was a nest of German spies, and was determined to protect partisan units in the Minsk region from betrayal by its members. Ponomarenko was doubt informed of the mass arrests of underground members that took place in late September and early October 1942. He no doubt heard that all the members of the City Committee had been arrested, that Kovalyov and some others were providing the names of other underground members, and that photographs apparently of Kovalyov giving a speech to factory workers in which he urged them to drop their resistance to the Germans appeared in the Minsker Zeitung, that the City Committee had been created by the Germans to lure Soviet patriots and lead to just such a mass arrest. Certainly the second failure of the Minsk underground could be used to bolster such a view, as could the first failure, which had similar features: leaders of the Military Council, under arrest, had given the Germans names, and a mass arrest of underground members had followed. (244-245. Emphasis added.) (7)

However tragically mistaken he may have been in this case Ponomarenko had reason to suspect a Gestapo connection. (8)

Snyder writes:

Since both sides knew that their membership was largely accidental, they would subject new recruits to grotesque tests of loyalty, such as killing friends or family members who had been captured fighting on the other side. (244)

Sources (n. 45 p. 491):

* Szybieka, Historia, 345, 352;

* Mironowicz, Białoruś, 159.

This is a phony citation. Neither Szybieka nor Mironowicz say anything at all about "killing friends or family members" or any such "grotesque tests of loyalty." Szybieka does state that many Belorussians fought in the ranks of Soviet partisans, seeing the USSR as the only way to defeat the Nazis. He also describes battles between Belorussian partisans and the Polish Home Army.

It Was the Polish Home Army Who Massacred the Belorussian(9) "Elite"

Both Mironowicz and Szybieka are virulently anti-Soviet. Their sympathies are with the far-right Belorussian nationalists who paid lip service to "independence for Belorussia" - that is, with the Nazi collaborators. A further problem with both of these books (Szybieka's is a translation from the Belarusian) is that they contain few footnotes or other evidentiary information.

Szybieka - this is the Polish spelling of his Belarussian surname; the proper English transliteration is "Shybeka" - is a Belarusian professor. Mironowicz is a Polish professor who specializes in Belarusian history. He too is strongly anticommunist and respectful of the Nazi collaborators who presented themselves as "nationalists."

However, according to Mironowicz it was not the Soviet partisans but the Polish Home Army that was responsible for massacring Belorussian teachers and other "elites":

Urzędnicy białoruscy w przypadku konfliktu interesów z reguły wydawali decyzje niekorzystne dla Polaków. Chętniej także wysyłali na przymusowe roboty do Niemiec młodzież polską niż białoruską (wcześniej czynili tak urzędnicy polscy wobec młodzieży białoruskiej). Na narastającą dominację białoruską w strukturach władzy okupacyjnej AK odpowiedziała antybiałoruskim terrorem. W okręgu lidzkim konflikt przerodził się w wojnę na wyniszczenie elit. W współdiałanie AK i dominującej w tym okręgu polskiej policji pomocniczej doprowadziło do fizycznej likwidacji znacznej części organizatorów białoruskiego życia narodowego - nauczycieli, urzędników i działaczy Związku Młodzieży Białoruskiej. Współpraca z policją była tak widoczna, że miejscowi Białorusini postrzegali AK jako ugrupowanie militarne realizujące dyrektywy władz niemieckich. Niemiecki historyk pisze, że spółpracujący z AK policjanci polscy zastrzelili kilkuset Białorusinów, w lidzkim komisariacie rejonowym. Komendant nowogródzkiego okręgu AK pisał natomiast, że jego żołnierze w drugiej połowie 1943 r. wykonali ponad 300 wyroków śmierci na Białorusinach, a 80 zadenuncjowali na gestapo jako komunistów. Źródła białoruskie podają liczbę 1200 Białorusinów zabitych w 1943 r. przez polskie podziemie jedynie w rejonie lidzkim. Według historyków białoruskich podczas okupacji z rąk żołnierzy AK miało zginąć około 10 tys. Białorusinów. (10)

Translated:

Belarusian officials in the event of a conflict of interest as a rule made decisions unfavorable to the Poles. Also they were more likely to send Polish rather than Belarusian youth to forced labor in Germany (previously Polish officials had done the same to Belarusian youth). To the growing Belarusian dominance in the structures of the occupying power the AK responded with an anti-Belarusian terror. In the district of Lida the conflict escalated into a war of the annihilation of elites. In cooperation of the AK with the Polish auxiliary police who were dominant in the sub-district this led to the physical liquidation of a large part of the organizers of Belarusian national life - teachers, officials and activists of the Belarusian Youth Union. Cooperation with the police was so apparent that the Belarusian locals saw the AK as a military group implementing the directives of the German authorities. A German historian writes that the Polish police, in cooperation with the AK, shot and killed hundreds of Belarusians in the Lida police district. The commander of the AK in the Novgorod district, however, wrote that his troops in the second half of 1943 carried out more than 300 death sentences against Belarusians, and denounced 80 to the Gestapo as communists. Belarusian sources cite the number of 1200 Belarusians killed in 1943 by the Polish underground in the region of Lida alone. According to Belarusian historians, during the occupation about ten thousand Belarusians perished at the hands of AK soldiers. (Emphasis added.)

Snyder cites Moronowicz's book elsewhere - but not this passage, in which Mironowicz claims to expose mass murders by the Polish Home Army of Belorussians, including of "elites"! This fact serve to remind us once again that Snyder's book is not historiography, but "propaganda with footnotes."

Snyder Falsifies the Nalibocki Incident

Polish civilians were massacred by Soviet partisans when Polish forces did not subordinate themselves to Moscow. In Naliboki on 8 May 1943, for example, Soviet partisans shot 127 Poles. (247)

Sources (n. 50 p. 492):

* "On the shooting of 127 Poles, see Musial, Mythos, 210."

* "See also Jasiewicz, Zagłada, 264-265."

As in the case of the Katyn Massacres there is a scholarly dispute about Nalibocki. And as in the former case Snyder conceals the dispute from his readers and presents the anti-Soviet version as the only version. Everyone agrees that the Soviet partisans attacked a fortified police outpost in Nalibocki. However, this armed outpost could not have existed without German permission and German-supplied weapons. Snyder does not mention this important fact to his readers. A Russian language source states:

Б отчете советских партизан было указано, что в бою в селе разбит немецкий гарнизон самообороны. Было также установлено, что вооружённой ячейки Армии крайовой действовали под контролем оккупационных властей и сотрудничали с ними. По воспоминаниям узника минского гетто Михаила Окуня, в 1943 году «очень много партизан погибло от рук этих аковцев, и с ними началась война.» (xx)

Translated:

In the report of the Soviet partisans it was stated that in the battle in the village German self-defense garrison was smashed. It was also found that the self-defense forces in Naliboki, an armed cell of the Armia Krajowa (Polish Home Army) were functioning under the control of the occupying authorities and cooperating with them. According to the memoirs of Minsk ghetto prisoner Mikhail Okun, in 1943, "a lot of guerrillas were killed by these AKers {akovtsev} and we began a war with them."

German historian Bernhard Chiari has documented the collaboration between the Home Army and the German army against their mutual enemy, the Red Army. We will return to Chiari's research later in this book.

Bogdan Musial is an anticommunist Polish nationalist historian. But even one of Musial's books records a different version from Snyder's account. According to this account (12) the Nalibocki attack was

...einen überraschenden Angriff auf die deutsche Garnison der Selbstverteidigung in der Ortschaft Nalibocki {und zerstorten sie}.

Translated:

...a sudden attack against the German self-defense garrison in the village of Nalibocki {and destroyed it}.

In a note Musial claims that 128 "unbeteiligte Zivilisten" - "civilians not involved in the fight" - were killed and the village "plundered and burned." However, Musial's only source is interviews with surviving villagers. He made no effort to get the surviving Soviet partisans' accounts, as anyone would who was interested in the truth rather than simply in writing anticommunist propaganda.

The different perspectives on the Nalibocki affair can be illustrated by comparing the pages from different language versions of Wikipedia. For example, on the English Wikipedia page (xx) there's no ambiguity - the Soviet partisans broke an agreement with the Polish Home Army and slaughtered the townspeople. But the Russian Wikipedia (xx) says that the Soviet partisans attacked a unit of the Home Army that was armed and collaborating with the German army, and quotes Mikhail Okun, a veteran of the Minsk ghetto who states that these Home Army men ("akovtsev") killed many Soviet partisans, so the Soviet partisans fought them. (xx)

The English page stresses that the Bielski Jewish partisan group was not involved in the Nalibocki attack. But the specifically accuses the Bielsky partisans of collaborating with the Soviet partisans in murder the innocent villagers, emphasizing that they were "of Jewish ethnicity" - "osób narodowósci żydowskiej." The reality is that not just the Bielski partisan group, but all Jewish partisan groups, collaborated with the Soviets since Polish partisans consistently murdered Jewish partisans, as well as Jewish civilians, whenever they could do so.

So there is a serious controversy - one with more than a little anti-Semitism by the Polish nationalists - about what happened at Nalibocki and why. Snyder ignores his responsibility as an historian to objectively explore the different versions, or even to inform his readers that they exist.

Jasiewicz, Zagłada, 264-265 claims that the Soviet partisans attacked pro-German Polish farms and killed some Poles, families included. Perhaps some communist partisans did consider pro-German civilians - that is German collaborators - to be fair targets, as French and Italian partisans did. But these allegations are anecdotal, like Musial's account of Nalibocki. Ukrainian insurgents also disguised themselves as Soviets and committed atrocities.

Snyder Claims that Collective Farms Were Similar to Nazi Racism

The collective farm was to be maintained to extract food; Kube proposed to dissolve it and allow Belarusians to farm as they wished. By undoing both Soviet and Nazi policies, Kube was revealing their basic similarity in the countryside. Both Soviet self-colonization and German racial colonization involved purposeful economic exploitation. (249)

The comparison is nonsense. Snyder again tries to force some similarity between Nazi and Soviet policies. If collective farms maintained by the Nazis to feed German troops and by the Soviets to feed the Soviet population had a "basic similarity," as Snyder claims, then so would individual farms, whether under Nazi or Soviet control.

Snyder hates collective farms - that's clear! So he tries to associate collective farms with Nazi genocide whenever he can. But there is no such things as "self-colonization." Collective farmers paid a tax on what they produced so that the rest of society could be fed, the army maintained, industry built. This has nothing in common with deliberately murderous German exploitation. Moreover, Soviet peasants benefitted immensely from collectivization, which put an end to the age-old cycle of deadly famines.

The Jews who became partisans were serving the Soviet regime, and were taking part in a Soviet policy to bring down retributions upon civilians. The partisan war in Belarus was a perversely interactive effort of Hitler and Stalin, who each ignored the laws of war and escalated the conflict behind the front lines. (250)

This is another instance of a lie that Snyder often repeats. The Soviets had no "policy to bring down retribution upon civilians" any more than did all the other Allies, including the London Polish government. Of course Snyder has no evidence to support his contention - and no responsible historian would make such a serious charge without at least some evidence. In addition, Snyder touches here on a point which he tries to avoid throughout: the fact that Jewish partisans always sided with communist partisans because they had no choice. The Home Army, loyal to the Polish government in exile in London, did not accept Jews in its ranks and normally murdered Jews whenever it could do so.

Partisan warfare was also carried on by the Polish Home Army and Ukrainian Nationalists, to say nothing of General De Gaulle's partisan forces in France. Snyder never makes this statement about the Home Army partisans, who also (sometimes) fought the Germans. Why not?

"Ponomarenko's Report" - Another Example of Snyder's Bias

Snyder:

Red Army officers invited Home Army officers to negotiate in summer 1943, and then murdered them on the way to the rendezvous points. The commander of the Soviet partisan movement believed that the way to deal with the Home Army was to denounce its men to the Germans, who would then shoot the Poles. (247) 

Sources (n. 51 p. 492): 

    * Brakel, Unter Rotem Stern, 317; 

    * Gogun, Stalinskie komandos, 144.

Let's take a look at this interesting question.

Brakel does claim that at a session of the Central Committee on June 24, 1943 Paneleimon Ponomarenko, First Secretary of the Belorussian Party and head of the partisan movement in Belorussia, ordered that as much information as possible concerning Home Army units be collected and passed to the Germans, who would then presumably liquidate the Home Army partisans.

Zwei Tage später konkretisierte er {Ponomarenko} auf einer Sitzung des Büros des ZK KP(b) B seine Anweisungen nochindem er forderte, möglichst viel Informationen über die Einheiten der Heimatarmee zu sammeln und sie (wohl über Mittelmänner) bei den Deutschen zu denunzieren. 

- n. 437 Stenogramm der Sitzung des Büros ZK KP(b)B vom 24.6.1943, zit. nach Dokumenty o stosunki, S. 233-245, hier S. 243.

Translated:

Two days later he {Ponomarenko} concretized his instructions at a meeting of the Bureau of the CC CP(b)B by demanding the collection of as much information about the units of the Home Army and the denunciation of these units (probably though intermediaries) to the Germans.

But Brakel has biased his account by significant omission. Here is the fuller context of Ponomarenko's remarks from the document published in the Polish journal from which Brakel took it:

Следовательно, сточки зрения предстояшей борьбы с польскими националистическими организациями и польскими соединениями, а она будет при вступлении на территорию Западной Белоруссии, при чем здесь разумеется очень широка борьба, здесь не исключена возможность, а нужно предвидеть, что польские подпольные боевые организации, для того, чтобы ослабить влияние партизанских отрядов и наших подпольных коммунистических организаций на массы, они обязательно будут ставить под удар немецких оккупантов наши партизанские отряды и партийные организации. 

Это нужно предвидеть и поэтому сейчас нужно уже в своих указаниях, которые мы будем давать в части конспирации наших партийных организаций, в части контактов со стороны партизанских отрядов с различными представителями польскими, которые приходят для переговоров о совместной борьбе и Ñ‚.д., а поляки очень умеют вести крепко разведывательную работу и умеют конспирировать своюдеятельность, - это нужно иметь в виду. Поэтому параллельна с этой работой нам нужно ориентировать наши партизанские отряды и партийные оргаинзации на то, чтобы все эти польские оргаинзации, польские соединания, которые создаются, их выявлять и всячески ставить под удар немецких оккупантов. Немцы не постесняются расстрелять, если узнают, что это организаторы польских соединеий или других боевых польских организаций. 

Но тут нужна организация. Как это сделать? Методами тут не нужно стесняться. На это нужно идти широко, но обставлять нужно таким образом, чтобы это было гладко. Повидимому, прийдется поставить вопрос о разоружении польсних националистических патриотов, разоблачении их, как агентов Сикорского и предателей польского народа. (17)

Translated:

Accordingly, from the point of view of the coming struggle with the Polish nationalist organizations and Polish units, and there will be one upon the entry {of the Red Army} into the territory of Western Belorussia - and by this we must understand a very broad struggle - here not only is it not impossible but it is necessary to foresee, in order to weaken the influence of our partisan detachments and our underground communist organizations upon the masses, that the Polish underground military organization will expose our partisans and party organizations to the German occupiers. 

We need to anticipate this and so now it is necessary in the instructions that we will give in terms of the conspiratorial work of our Party organizations, in terms of contacts by guerrilla groups with various Polish representatives who arrive for talks concerning fighting together, etc., and the Poles are very skilled in the conduct of intelligence work and are able to keep their activities secret - you need to keep this in mind in mind. Therefore, in parallel with this work, we need to focus our partisan units and party organizations to ensure that all of these Polish organizations and Polish units that are being created should be discovered and exposed in every way to the blows of the German occupiers. The Germans will not hesitate to shoot them if they find that these are the organizers of the Polish units or other Polish fighting organizations. 

But here organization is necessary. How to do it? We must not restrict ourselves in the way of method. We must take this on broadly, but we must arrange things so that they go smoothly. Evidently we will have to raise the question of disarming the Polish nationalist patriots, of exposing them as agents of Sikorski and traitors to the Polish people. 

(Emphasis added)

Brakel is quoting a document in a Belarusian archive published by a Polish journal. Several issues with this document should excite our suspicions about it. In the notes immediately before this one Brakel cites another document by Ponomarenko dated June 22, 1943, from a Russian archival source. Evidently he could not locate the June 24, 1943 report in question in a Russian archive or the June 22 document in a Belarusian archive.

Another account of this same June 24 meeting records it differently:

24 июня 1943 года состоялось заседание бюро Центрального Комитета Компартии Белоруссии. Обсуждался один вопрос - «О разрушении железнодорожных коммуникаций». С небольшим докладом выступил П. К. Пономаренко. 

- Задача состоит в том, чтобы за короткий период подорвать как можно больше железнодорожных путей, - подчеркнул он. - Противник вынужден будет проводить огромные трудоемкие работы по замене рельсов. Потребуется колоссальное количество стали, проката, которых у немцев теперь не так уж много... 

В принятом постановлении отмечалось, что железные дороги в Беиоруссии почти на всем протяжении находятся под контролем партизан, а это имеет огромное значение для срыва оперативных и стратегических замыслов противника. (18)

Translated:

On June 24, 1943 there took place a meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus. One question was discussed: "Concerning the destruction of rail communications." P. K. Ponomarenko made a short report. 

- The task is to blow up as many railroad lines as possible in a short period of time. - he stressed. The enemy will be forced to carry out huge time-consuming works to replace the rails. That will require an enormous amount of steel and rolling stock, of which the Germans do not now have very much... 

It was noted in the adopted resolution that the railways in Belorussia throughout most of their length are controlled by the guerillas, and that fact is of great importance for the disruption of the operational and strategic plans of the enemy.

The assertion that there was only one topic discussed at this meeting - the question "Concerning the destruction of rail communications" - is repeated in Vladimir P. Ilin, Partizany ne zdaiutsia! (19)

Brakel's source is a Polish collection of supposedly Soviet documents. A more detailed account of this same meeting is widely cited with all citations coming back to the book by Bogdan Musial, Sowjetische Partisanen in Weißrussland (Munich, 2004), p. 223. Musial cites a Russian archive but also cites the same Polish source as Brakel. (20)

Musial has been described as an anti-Semitic writer who strives in his research to blame all Polish anti-Semitism on the fact that Jews were "pro-Soviet" - essentially the Nazi "Judaeo-Bolshevism" argument. (21)

There are a number of points about this document that are relevant to our evaluation of Snyder's book:

First: Is the lengthy account from the Belorussian archive of the June 24, 1943 meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belorussia genuine? There are reasons to question its authenticity:

* The two accounts by Kalinin and Ilin claim that there was only one topic discussed at the meeting, and that Ponomarenko's report was short. The Studia Podlaskie document (pages 233-245 in the journal), and Ponomarenko's remarks are part of a discussion, not of a report.

* In this document Ponomarenko calls the Polish underground "patriots." But it is unlikely that the real Ponomarenko would have used the word "patriots" to refer to the anticommunist Polish underground. By this time the Soviets had already formed a pro-Soviet Polish organization and military. The Home Army was attacking and murdering Soviet and Jewish partisans. Ponomarenko might well call pro-Soviet Polish partisans "patriots." But how could he also call these hostile, anticommunist forces "patriots"? This ought to awaken the suspicions of any competent historian.

Second: Even if it is genuine Brakel - and, therefore, Snyder - have omitted a number of important facts necessary to evaluate Ponomarenko's statement:

* Ponomarenko claims that the Polish underground will expose the Soviet Party organizations and pro-Soviet partisans to the Germans, and therefore the Soviet forces must plan to do the same thing to the Polish underground. Brakel, like Musial, omits this context.

* Brakel and Snyder know that the Home Army was extremely hostile to communists as well as to Jews. The Polish Government-in-exile in London regarded the Soviets as an enemy just as much as they did the Germans. By February 1943 the massive German defeat at Stalingrad had already taken place, and everyone recognized that Germany would eventually lose the war. The Soviets suspected Polish collaboration with the Germans over the Katyn affair in April, 1943, when the London Poles worked closely with the Germans in a manner that completely undermined any sense of alliance with the Soviet Union. Soviet partisans would have regarded Katyn as a Nazi-Polish government-in-exile provocation, since this was Moscow's position.

With eventual German defeat inevitable and a pro-Soviet Polish leadership and army already set up, by June 1943 it was obvious that the Home Army would begin to fight the Soviets in any way they could. This is the context for Ponomarenko's remarks - assuming they are genuine, and they may not be. By the end of 1943 at the latest some officers of the Home Army were beginning direct military collaboration with the Germany Army against the Soviets.

Gogun, Stalinskie komandos, 144: Snyder gets this all wrong. The page is 145, not 144; the time is not "summer 1943" but November 6, 1943; the Polish nationalists were allegedly shot not before but after the meeting took place; and they are not identified as Home Army men.

Gogun claims that a commander of the guerrilla band of the famous Soviet Ukrainian partisan leader Aleksei Fedorov invited three Polish nationalist commanders to a celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution and then asked them to join the Soviet partisans. The Polish nationalist partisans refused and then left, whereupon the Soviet partisans shot them in the back and hid their bodies.

Did this event happen this way? Snyder did not check. Gogun cites two sources. One is a Polish nationalist history of an Home Army unit to which we do not have access. The other is the diary of the Soviet partisan commander - but this is unpublished, cited from an archive. Moreover, the Soviet commander's diary says only this:

«Тов. Зубко (заместитель Балицкого. - А. Г.) организовал убийство польских националистов - заядлые были нашей советской Родины.»

Translated:

"Comrade Zybko (Balitsky's assistant - A.G.) organized the killing of Polish nationalists - they were inveterate enemies of our Soviet Motherland."

It is Gogun who identifies the event referred to in this statement as the same murder described by a Polish nationalist source, asserting that they are "obviously" the same. But he cites no evidence that this is so. Evidently, neither source describes what took place at the meeting.

Other works on Soviet partisans and on the Home Army note occasions when Home Army forces killed pro-Soviet partisans. For example, there are several such accounts in the collection of essays edited by Bernhard Chiari, Die Polnische Heimatarmee in which Snyder himself has an essay. Snyder does not mention them.

Footnotes

(1) Brandenberger does note the establishment in 1943 of the order of Bogdan Khmel'nitskii, awarded to Ukrainians in the Ukrainian language. This caused much dissatisfaction because of the anti-Jewish pogroms carried out by Khmel'nitskii's men in the mid-17th century. Along with his Ukrainian provenance Khmel'nitskii's alliance with the Tsar and organizing the struggle of Ukrainian peasants against Polish exploiters appear to have been the reason for the award.

(2) An English translation of Stalin's speech is at http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1941/11/07.html The Russian text is at http://grachev62.narod.ru/stalin/t15/t15_14.htm

(3) Kuropaty (Russian) / Kurapaty (Belarusian) is an area outside Minsk, Belarus, where an unknown number of persons shot by the NKVD, probably in 1937-1938 under Ezhov, plus an unknown number of other victims including, possibly, victims of the Nazis, may have been buried. It has never been thoroughly excavated and studied. Estimates of the total number of persons buried there vary from 7000 to 250,000. The higher numbers are promoted by anticommunist Belarusian nationalists.

(4) Martin Bormanns. Abschrift einer Besprechung im Führerhauptquartier (16 Juli 1941): http://www.ns-archiv.de/krieg/1941/nationalsozialistische-besatzungspolitik.php

(5) Ibid.

(6) Harrison Salisbury. The 900 Days. The Siege of Leningrad. New York: Harper & Row, 1969, p. 559.

(7) During most of the war Pantaleimon Kondrat'evich Ponomarenko, first secretary of the Communist Party of Belorussia, was head of the Central Staff of the Partisan Movement.

(8) Ponomarenko has been called an anti-Semite. However, Epstein's book, the latest and very thorough study of the Minsk partisan movement, gives no evidence that he was one. 

(9) As part of the Soviet Union the republic was normally spelled "Belorussia", which is a Russian spelling. Since independence the country is called Belarus, its name in Belarusian language. Both Russian and Belarusian are offical languages in Belarus today as during Soviet times.

(10) Mironowicz, Bialorus, 217-218.

(11) At http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Массовое_убийство_в_Налибоках Accessed on December 1, 2012. Since then the last sentence, quoting Okun, has been removed. This page is highly contested.

(12) Musial, ed. Sowjetische Partisanen in Weißrussland, 116 Doc. 2 - Soviet partisan report.

(13) At https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naliboki_massacre Accessed June 2, 2014

(14) At https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Массовое_убийство_в_Налибоках Okun's claim is in the version of this page from March 23,2013. As of June 2, 2014 it had been removed.

(15) The source of Okun's account is the excerpt from his memoirs "106-I evreiskii partizanskii..." (106th Jewish Partisan Unit) at the Mark Solonin site: http://www.solonin.org/live_106-y-evreyskiy-partizanskiy

(16) At http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zbrodnia_w_Nalibokach

(17) "Stenogramma zasedaniia biuro TsK KP(b)B of 24 iiunia 1943 goda." In Michal Gnatowski. "Dokumenty o stosunku radzeickiego kierownictwa do polskiej konspiracji niepodległościowej na północno - wschodnich kresach rzechypospolitej w latach 1943-1944." Studia Podlaskie (Białystock) V (1995), p. 243.

(18) Petr Zakhkarovich Kalinin. Partizanskaia respublika. M.: Voenizdat, 1964. Part 3: "Partizanskaia razvedka", p. 292: http://militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/kalinin_pz/10.html

(19) Ilin, Partizany ne zdaiutsia! (Moscow: Eksmo, 2007) Chapter 3, p. 375: http://militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/ilin_vp/03.html

(20) An article by Musial translated into Russian from the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine includes what is supposed to be a quotation from Ponomarenko's directive to pass information about the AK on to the Germans:

    Ð’ выборе средств можете не стесняться. Операцию нужно провести это широко и гладко. 

Translated: 

    We must not restrict ourselves in the way of method. We must take this on broadly, but we must arrange things so that they go smoothly. 

These two sentences, but no more of Ponomarenko's directive, are widely reproduced on the Internet. They do not correspond to the text of the document we cite above. Evidently they are a re-translation back into Russian of the German-language passage quoted by Musial himself in Sowjetische Partisanen: 

    Bei der Wahl der Mittel dürft ihr keine Skrupel haben. Dies muß breit angelegt werden und so, dag es glatt vor sich geht. (223) 

Like Brakel Musial does not quote the actual document, much less the context of the quotation.

(21) Joanna B. Michlic. "Anti-Polish and Pro-Soviet? 1939-1941 and the Stereotyping of the Jew in Polish Historiography." Shared History - Divided Memory. Jews and Others in Soviet-Occupied Poland, 1939-1941. (Leipzig, 2007), 67-101, at 85 ff.