Ukrainians may have massacred their Jewish neighbors. But this was not because the Ukrainians had always hated Jews; it was because the famine of the thirties had led the Ukrainian people to fear Soviet power, and the Nazi invocation of Judeobolshevism as the cause of their miseries provided a pat and plausible enemy. (The Soviet administration did employ Jews “disproportionately to their numbers,” Snyder observes, although most Soviet collaborators weren’t Jewish.) Some did terrible things, but they did them out of political desperation and misrouted nationalism, not enduring hate.
Snyder’s regular invocation of “politics” is meant to illuminate this devil’s dance of impossibilities. The local Slavs or Baltic peoples, having previously collaborated with the Communists, could reclaim their national inheritance by murdering Jews, and cleansing themselves of the stain of collaboration. Neat trick. By supplanting “ancient hatreds” with contemporary politics, Snyder wants to situate the massacres within the specific logic of a time and place. Ukrainians and Polish Catholics don’t just hate Jews and kill them any chance they get. You have to put them in extremis first. The local populations got caught up in the killing because it was the prudent thing to do, given the context of the occupation.
Yet if the concept of “politics” is to be explanatory it should show how power gets dispersed and rebalanced among contending groups. Politics is how people adjust to one another’s needs and potential for violence. In the circ*mstance where one party has all the power, though, the invocation of politics seems unhelpful. The politics of a slaughterhouse is not really politics, at least not to the pigs; it is just a division of the labor. To coöperate or not is a political choice, made every day in prisons; to obey or die is not.
The real end of Snyder’s relentless invocation of “politics” is, one comes to feel, not without its politics. Snyder does not want the Putinists of 2015 to be able to discredit Ukrainian nationalism by pointing to Ukrainian participation in the Holocaust: he wants to make it clear that the Ukrainian nationalists were, in the hackneyed phrase, “victims, too.” But they were victims of a peculiar kind, and one can cheer their emancipation today without looking past their history. Snyder asks us not to blame the Lithuanians and the Latvians for what they did to the Jews without first blaming the Soviets for what they did to the Lithuanians and the Latvians. Surely one can blame all the evil actors without having to take sides with any. Going state by state and people by people through the Stalinist and Nazi destruction of local authority in all the occupied smaller nations, Snyder certainly shows that those local populations, whether Poles or Latvians or Ukrainians, could not be instantaneously motivated to rise up and murder Jews; they could only be very quickly motivated to do it. He seems to find more consolation in this distinction than it may possess.
What would be the opposite of Snyder’s view? First, that the “bloodlands” was not a geopolitical ground that generated its own events. The worst of the killings happened there, certainly, but there is no discernible difference in Nazi or, for that matter, Soviet behavior elsewhere. An entire village was murdered in central France, Jews were slaughtered en masse on the banks of the Danube. Numbers alone, not actions, made the bloodlands as bloody as they were. Snyder emphasizes that, where the state was destroyed, the Nazis got at their victims more easily. It’s certainly true that, the wider the moat, the harder it is for the tiger to get at its victims. In France, recently arrived eastern Jews, without friends or history, were easier to get at and deport than native French ones. But plenty of those went to the ovens, too. Picasso’s intimate friend, the poet and Catholic convert Max Jacob, an ornament of French culture and as French as any man could be, died on his way to Auschwitz, and his brother and sister were gassed on their arrival. The tiger’s appetite, not the width of the moat, is still the story. Denmark, the seeming counter-example, was the site of a relatively benign occupation, in Nazi terms, but the benignity was influenced by a sense of racial affinity, the vast irrational forces of racial hallucination seeming as powerful as the local political forces.
Snyder is admirably relentless in making the reader feel the horror of the Soviet mass killings, without waving them away or moving them to the margins. We meet, or, rather, shudder to have heard of, Vasily Blokhin, the N.K.V.D. executioner—hard to credit as a real person and not an Ian Fleming invention—who in one night could murder two hundred and fifty Polish military officers. This is not being even-handed. It is being clear-eyed. But if Snyder’s thesis is that, without the previous ten years of Soviet brutality, the peoples of the “bloodlands” would not have been complicit in the Nazi nightmare, then one would want more evidence—a correlation between Soviet brutality and genocidal eagerness, a direct relation between the two, something—to make the correspondence more robust. In Hungary, the Arrow Cross killed with mad vengeance, and the Béla Kun Communist period was far in the past. Vichy passed anti-Jewish laws, and hastened its Jews toward Drancy almost before they were asked for, and in France the Soviets were only a spectre.
Snyder is certainly aware of all this, and thinks that his account explains it: “Where Germans obliterated conventional states, or annihilated Soviet institutions that had just destroyed conventional states, they created the abyss where racism and politics pulled together towards nothingness.” But another view would see the obliteration as the auxiliary act and the abyss as the central moral landscape. Politics and procedures obviously enabled the killings; we owe Snyder a debt for his realism about this. But the desire to maim and murder had its roots in a disease of the mind so powerful and passionate that to call it political or procedural hardly seems to capture its nature, or its prevalence.
The explanation of the human appetite for mass murder obviously does not lie in the peasant simplicity of the Eastern Europeans. (Is there a single historian or journalist who holds this view?) But it does seem to lie in the enduring power of old hatreds, and our capacity for turning group hatred into massacre, given opportune circ*mstance. Just as we can’t pretend that Stalinist crimes were unrelated to absolutist Enlightenment habits of mind in which class enemies easily become nonpersons, we can’t pretend that the Hitlerian crimes can be released from an anti-Semitism deeply rooted in European Christianity. The great and sympathetic historian of Christianity Diarmaid MacCulloch writes that it is still “necessary to remind Christians of the centuries-old heritage of anti-Semitism festering in the memories of countless ordinary twentieth-century Christians on the eve of the Nazi takeover. In the 1940’s, this poison led not just Christian Germans, but Christian Lithuanians, Poles and many others gleefully to perpetrate bestial cruelties on helpless Jews who had done them no harm.”
And anti-Semitism was surely different in kind from the other ethnic hatreds of the time and place. The Jew was doubly evil, as both an agent of modernity and the possessor of an occult mystery. Jews were cosmopolitans, bankers, merchants, middlemen; the same family passed at will, from day to day, as German, French, or Russian. Jews were also possessors of an ancient text, a secret language, a lore kept hidden and unavailable; they welcomed no converts, teaching their ancient language reluctantly. This compound suspicion helped make anti-Semitism so virulent. It was, as Confino shows, reflected in the sad*stic Jewish parades in which, in the thirties, helpless Jews were forced to participate: the Torah was burned, with the enthusiastic participation of German Christians.
Postwar people who fastened onto the story of Anne Frank, as has been observed before, were not in any sense sentimental to do so. That a modern state would send the police out to entrap a fifteen-year-old girl and then send her across Europe to her death because she was a Jew was an evil genuinely new in the world in a way that horrific massacres (and counter-massacres) were not. For that matter, when Martin Amis returned to the question of Auschwitz in last year’s novel “The Zone of Interest,” it was because he knows that it represented something genuinely new in the practice of evil: an institution set up with all the normal domestic appurtenances of middle-class life whose essential purpose is the mass murder of human beings.
Snyder offers his own view of the right lessons to draw in a final chapter of “Black Earth,” ambitiously called “Conclusion: Our World.” The college student’s Rwanda arrives here rapidly: just as Hitler’s world view derived from his bizarre response to an ecological crisis—the threat to a Germany deprived of land for growing grain—what happened in Rwanda happened, in part, because of the exhaustion of arable land. Africa, in Snyder’s view, may become the world’s new bloodlands, where ecological crisis is capped by mass slaughter and where ethnic explanations of killings (those Hutus always hated the Tutsis) conceal the political manipulation of power.
Surely Snyder is right when he implies that the well-meant “Godwin’s law,” which, beginning as an observation about Internet arguments, has come to be shorthand for the rule that the Nazis should never be introduced into ordinary political arguments, is miscast. In fact, we should keep the image of the Germans and the Nazis in front of us—not to show how close the people on the other side of an argument are to unutterable evil but to remind ourselves that we, too, can become that close in a shorter time than we like to think. In a period of fear and panic, it is the easiest thing in the world to talk ourselves into the idea that bad things we do are necessities of human nature. The Germans listened to Mozart and Beethoven and then murdered children, and this was not a cognitive dislocation from which we couldn’t suffer but the eternal rationale offered by the terrified: we can’t protect what really matters if we don’t do things that we wish we didn’t have to.
War makes ordinary people do horrible things. If there is a point that perhaps Snyder does not underline enough—it comes through vividly in Antony Beevor’s books on the Battle of Stalingrad and other campaigns—it is that the Germans who killed were dying, too, in increasingly vast numbers and in cold and fear of their own. Wars make atrocities happen. Americans have still not come to terms with My Lai, a Vietnam atrocity not unlike the acts of the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front, though thankfully more isolated. To engage in political or procedural or even geographic explanations of these histories misses their history. Once panic sets in, for an army or an occupier, then the persecution—indeed, the slaughter—of the population seems a necessity for survival. Frightened soldiers in foreign lands murder the locals without mercy or purpose. One wishes that this happened rarely. In truth, it happens all the time.
Yet another truth also rises here. Hitler ruled for twelve years. The worst of the horrors occurred during four of them. Stalin’s reign was twenty-five-odd years. Hell on earth is possible to make but is hard to go on making. The human appetite for social peace, if not for social justice, eventually asserts itself. This is of no comfort to the victims. But it should be of some comfort to the survivors, their inheritors, and us. Those who think that the horrors of the nineteen-thirties and forties were eclipses of the sun, rather than an eternal darkness of the earth, are invariably mocked as Panglossian. But Dr. Pangloss, Voltaire’s fatuously optimistic philosopher, is an unfairly reviled man. The Enlightenment philosophers who insisted that the world could be improved were right. Voltaire was one of them. The mistake was to think that, once improved, it couldn’t get worse again. Voltaire’s point was not that optimism about mankind’s fate is false. It was that, in the face of a Heaven known to be decidedly unbenevolent, it takes unrelenting, thankless, and mostly ill-rewarded work to cultivate happiness here on earth, no matter what color the soil. That was the lesson Dr. Pangloss and his students had yet to learn.♦
