Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
By: Timothy Snyder / Narrated By: Ralph Cosham
Length: 19 hrs and 14 mins
Overwhelming… Familiar…
For several years now, I’ve heard of Vladimir Putin toasting the name of Stalin as Savior for his victory over Hitler in WWII. How glorious Putin makes it all sound, eeeeven tho’ I knew there was starvation/famine during Stalin’s reign of terror, that he relied on public show trials that led to imprisonment in Gulags or, more likely, execution. Still, I watched an interview where Putin calmly yet vociferously waxed poetic about what a great man he was, how his was apPARently a Golden Age in Russia, his time of Soviet rule.
What unsettled me the most?
How Stalin’s public approval ratings were rising in Russia the more Putin extolled Stalin’s virtues…
How on earth?
So with war in Ukraine well into its first month, with the threat of nuclear war and WWIII being warned of, as the world basically stands back and watches a nation and its citizens as they struggle and are slaughtered… but still they fight? Well, doesn’t this all seem a tad familiar? Didn’t WWII really start with Hitler and Stalin invading and occupying Poland?
But author and historian of note, Timothy Snyder, posits that to understand ANYthing, one has to look earlier, and not just at the western part of Europe.
Look, he says, to the Bloodlands, as fitting a title for the square mileage, the mass slaughter of its civilians as any. Look, he says, to that area of overlap between the two regimes, and see what each learned from the other’s actions.
From Stalin’s demand for agricultural collectivization, to the first reports that it wasn’t going well, to eyewitness accounts of starvation, all the way to Stalin’s decision to weaponize starvation, shall we start here?
Or shall we go to rooting out possible “dissent” based on nationality? How many, many millions?
What Hitler did so very well in a few short years? Stalin was doing years before, all without having to account to anyone on the planet. No nay-saying from Great Britain, France. None from FDR and America. And whereas Stalin and Hitler were two opposite ends of the spectrum and, thus, should have been adversaries? The enemy of my enemy is my friend; and let’s divide and conquer Poland.
I’m sounding a tad glib, and I don’t mean to be. Snyder has done an impressive, impressive feat here: Clocking in at just over 19 hours, Bloodlands could make for depressing Listening. Still, from the beginning, even as he trots out staggering numbers, it very much stands out that most of Snyder’s numbers aren’t rounded off to numbers of ten. Rather, they seem to be odd and most effectively emotionally evocative: We numb out when we see rounded numbers; we wonder and feel oh so deeply when that 10,000 becomes 10,003. Who were those three? What lives? What dreams and what struggles? What fear and what pain?
Staggering.
Ralph Cosham should be The Man For All Things Emotionally Resonant. Seriously, there could be major numb-out here with the length, with atrocities after atrocities after even more atrocities. Was Stalin a madman? Was Hitler? Snyder lays out their acts, and Cosham narrates these things with proper gravity but never with maudlin overtones. And for all those precise numbers? Cosham conveys with dignity, with power.
Listen for the entirety, but do stay for the afterword by Snyder himself where he queries how we’ve come to weigh misfortunes against each other: You can’t talk about Stalin’s depravity because that would mean the suffering of Jews, their elimination via Hitler and the camps, isn’t as special. Oh brother. But if you can get past momentary outrage and human stupidity in the face of suffering, you’ll be even more enlightened by Snyder’s summation of what 19 hours did so well: You’ll understand Hitler and Germany after learning of Stalin and the Soviet states. Did Hitler see what a wonderful tool well-wielded starvation could be? Look at famine in Ukraine then see the Nazi policy regarding Russian POWs makes sense.
And so much more.
Staggering.
With the Bloodlands, civilians were caught between Soviet atrocities, then German atrocities, then perhaps Soviet atrocities again. Such overlap as boundaries and fronts moved constantly, civilians being caught in the crossfire or on the receiving end of brutal reprisals.
And Snyder chronicles each sorrow, each loss, one person at a time. There’s a difference, he notes, between concentration camps and the Death camps/Death pits of the Bloodlands: The concentration camps left survivors to tell the tale.
Let’s not forget those who didn’t survive.
And as our current reality bleeds into our eventual history? May this era NOT be written by the victors, no matter whom they might be; may Timothy Snyder write the truth out for us…
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