Bloodlands

Of the fourteen million people deliberately murdered in the bloodlands between 1933 and 1945, a third belong in the Soviet account.

The idea that only Jews served communists was convenient not just for the occupiers but for some of the occupied as well.20

With or without German agitation, many people in interwar Europe associated the Jews with communism. Interwar communist parties had in fact been heavily Jewish, especially in their leaderships, a fact upon which much of the press throughout Europe had commented for twenty years. Right-wing parties confused the issue by arguing that since many communists were Jews therefore many Jews were communists. These are very different propositions; the latter one was never true anywhere.

The city of Vilnius had been the northeastern metropolitan center of independent Poland and briefly the capital of independent and Soviet Lithuania. But throughout all of these vicissitudes, and indeed for the previous half-millennium, Vilnius had been something else: a center of Jewish civilization, known as the Jerusalem of the North. Some seventy thousand Jews lived in the city when the war began.

Terror prevailed in the Gulag, as everywhere else. It might be difficult to see how concentration camp inmates could threaten the Soviet state: but like the regions of the USSR, the Gulag system had its own death quota, to be met or exceeded. Just as people who had been defined as kulaks might be dangerous, so might people who were incarcerated as kulaks—so went the logic. The camps of the Gulag had an initial quota of ten thousand executions, though in the end 30,178 of its prisoners were shot.

logic of Hitler’s domestic terror was of a future offensive war: fought by an expanded Wehrmacht loyal to Hitler, transformed into a war of destruction by the SS and the police. In this one sense, Stalin’s fears of war were perfectly justified. The Germans, however, were not counting on help from the Soviet population in that coming war. In this respect, Stalin’s scenario of threat, the union of foreign enemies with domestic opponents, was quite wrong. Thus the still greater terror that Stalin would unleash upon his own population in 1937 and 1938 was entirely fruitless, and indeed counterproductive.

crucial months for the famine, however, were also critical time for the future of Germany. The insistence of German communists on the need for immediate class revolution gained the Nazis votes from the middle classes. It also ensured that clerks and the self-employed voted Nazi rather than social democratic. Even so, the communists and the social democrats together had more popular support than the Nazis; but Stalin’s line ensured that they could not work together. In all of these ways, Stalin’s uncompromising stand in foreign policy during collectivization and famine in the Soviet Union helped Hitler win the elections of both July 1932 and March 1933.7

day before Herriot was to visit the city, Kiev had been closed, and its population ordered to clean and decorate. The shop windows, empty all year, were now suddenly filled with food. The food was for display, not for sale, for the eyes of a single foreigner. The police, wearing fresh new uniforms, had to disperse the gaping crowds.

Duranty’s claim that there was “no actual starvation” but only “widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition” echoed Soviet usages and pushed euphemism into mendacity. This was an Orwellian distinction; and indeed George Orwell himself regarded the Ukrainian famine of 1933 as a central example of a black truth that artists of language had covered with bright colors. Duranty knew that millions of people had starved to death. Yet he maintained in his journalism that the hunger served a higher purpose. Duranty thought that “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” Aside from Jones, the only journalist to file serious reports in English was Malcolm Muggeridge, writing anonymously for the Manchester Guardian.

desperate peasants holding up infants to train windows were not necessarily begging for food: often they were trying to give their children away to someone aboard a train, who was likely from the city and therefore not about to starve to death.