Bible For The Hitler-Stalin Debate (WWII, ancient, war, bomb)
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In that the "Who was worse, Hitler or Stalin" debate seems to erupt once a year or so on this forum, even though I do not participate in those sorts of adjective bomb discussions, I wanted to bring to the attention of those who do enjoy the battle, a book which should be invaluable.
It is "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin" by Timothy Snyder. 2010, Basic Books.
It is an exhaustive review of the victims of the two dictators, the overwhelming majority of whom lived in a concentrated region between the two giant ideological rivals, the people of Poland, Belarus and the Ukraine.
Snyder begins with a stomach churning description of Stalin's cold hearted forced collectivization of the farms in the Ukrainian and Belarus regions. It is beyond question that the starvation deaths of millions was not some surprise and regretable after effect of the attempt at modernization, but rather a program rammed through with full advance knowledge of the horrors which would be created and upon whom they would fall. It was murder, cold blooded, premeditated murder. Compunding the ruthlessness with which it was executed, Stalin also managed to blame the Ukranians and Belarussians for the calamity, this after years of denial that it was taking place at all. When too many starving scarecrows were visible and it was no longer possible to deny the scale of the disaster, Stalin then told the Russian people that it was capitalistic propaganda, that so fanatic were the anti Communists of the Ukraine, that they deliberately starved themselves into parodies of human beings, just to try and make the collectivization plan look like a failure. They were not the victims, Uncle Joe Stalin was the victim of this slur.
Then we shift to the early Nazi days and the familar evolution of Hitler's racist policies, his euthenasia programs for the handicapped and mentally ill, and the curbing of civil rights for undesirables, especially Jews. The Nazis don't seem all that bad so far, at least compared to Stalin, who at the same time that Hitler was securing the Reich, was launching his purges and show trials.
Then the war begins and the Nazis play catch up in a huge hurry. Their murderous policies in occupied Poland, and later after taking the Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states in the first year of the Soviet invasion, move to center stage. Page after grisly page of the book, it is murder, murder and more murder. Millions being shot, gassed or worked to death. The horrors endured by Soviet POWs are especially difficult to absorb with one's lunch intact.
Synder traces the evolution of The Final Solution and offers the interesting thesis that had the Nazis won the war against the Soviet Union, the Final Solution would have been the deportation of the Jews, along with all other undesriables (which was nearly everyone who was there who wasn't German) to points east of the Volga River, which was to become, in Hitler's word's "The German Mississippi", a reference to the American removal of the eastern native tribes. The original plan had been to resettle the Jews on Madagascar, but when Britain declared war, and then didn't drop out as expected, that became impossible because the Royal navy would have intervened.
So the fallback plan became "beyond the Volga." Hitler expected to sweep through the western Soviet Union in three months and control everything west of the Volga. The Slavs of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic States and western Russia would all be removed to the east, replaced by imported German farmers. The Jews would be dumped there as well, let the socialists take care of "their own."
Then the war failed. Synder maintains that the Hitler recognized that the war was not going to result in obtaining his goals as early as December of 1941, when the Soviets launched their first counter attack. At that point says Synder, it was no longer a war to win living space or exterminate socialism, it was a war for no purpose other than controlling those lands long enough to kill all of the Jews.
Finally we have another prime magnitude disaster for the peoples of those regions when the Soviets drive the Germans west and retake the territories. Stalin's attitude toward any soviet soldier who surrendered, or lived under Nazi control, even briefly, was that they were now permanently suspect in their communist loyalties. So the poor survivors of all these horrors, were at last liberated only to be arrested and shipped to labor camps by their liberators. And of course in Poland, Stalin was only too happy to sit back while the Polish uprising exterminated Germans, and in turn were exterminated by the Germans. This was two for the price of one as far as Stalin was concerned. It killed more of his primary enemy, the Nazis, and also killed the majority of the Polish nationalists who would have formed the core of the opposition to his planned communist government for Poland.
The last part of the book is devoted to the concentration and death camps. I suspect everyone here is well aware of that calamity as the Nazis raced to complete the Final Solution before the were driven out of the contested areas.
The bibliography and annotations which follow consume 82 pages. This is an extremely well documented book.
It won't help you determine the "Who was worse" winner, but it will provide endless ammunition for those who wish to argue either side. Both of these men were homicidal monsters, filled with malice and hostility for those they killed.
Reading your synopsis, one comes to probably unexpected and unintended conclusion; no matter what the reasons are behind the actions of either one of them, Stalin or Hitler, but it's the same group of people who seem to be targeted and destroyed over and over again ( plus Russians,) not just "Europe" in general as the title suggests.
Reading your synopsis, one comes to probably unexpected and unintended conclusion; no matter what the reasons are behind the actions of either one of them, Stalin or Hitler, but it's the same group of people who seem to be targeted and destroyed over and over again ( plus Russians,) not just "Europe" in general as the title suggests.
I don't really understand your statement. Given that the same people (Poles, Jews, Ukrainians and so forth) inhabited that region, naturally it would be the same groups being targeted, though maybe for different reasons and in different ways each time. Or am I missing something?
I don't really understand your statement. Given that the same people (Poles, Jews, Ukrainians and so forth) inhabited that region, naturally it would be the same groups being targeted, though maybe for different reasons and in different ways each time. Or am I missing something?
It's not that you are missing anything, but may be you should look at it at slightly different angle; no matter who does what and what goals are pursued, the same group of people ends up dead as the result of it. Looks sort of biblical to me, in many ways like WWII in Russia.
I'm really surprised this hasn't touched off a firestorm yet, lol. It's a good book. I have it, but have not yet been able to read the entire thing. I have read some criticisms of some of the conclusions reached by Snyder, but it doesn't diminish the overall work. As GS said, plenty of fodder for the "whose the worst" debates that people love to have. I generally shy away from Biblibal intonation, but reading the few pieces of the book I have, you certainly get a sense that many people were simply trapped on the Plain of Tel Megiddo as the Battle of Armageddon raged around them. Of course, in this version of the battle, there were only two Satan's.
I'm really surprised this hasn't touched off a firestorm yet, lol. It's a good book. I have it, but have not yet been able to read the entire thing. I have read some criticisms of some of the conclusions reached by Snyder, but it doesn't diminish the overall work. As GS said, plenty of fodder for the "whose the worst" debates that people love to have. I generally shy away from Biblibal intonation, but reading the few pieces of the book I have, you certainly get a sense that many people were simply trapped on the Plain of Tel Megiddo as the Battle of Armageddon raged around them. Of course, in this version of the battle, there were only two Satan's.
It certainly wasn't the place to be in the 1930's and '40's. The readers of Synder's book cannot help but becoming completely numb as they advance from mega cruelty to mega cruelty, the numbers are overwhelming and the individual suffering gets lost in the immense scale of it all.
Think of the absolute worst possible situation in which you could find yourself, one where your dignity has been humiliatingly stripped away, where you are helpless and under the absolute control of an unyielding sadist who is infliciting every possible physical and mental torment upon you and your family. You see no possibility of escaping the situation short of being killed.
Then, the above times about 20 million.
That is what belongs on the consciences of Hitler and Stalin.
That one should receive credit for 12 million while the other was responsible for 8 million, hardly rehabilitates the second one in any manner.
It certainly wasn't the place to be in the 1930's and '40's. The readers of Synder's book cannot help but becoming completely numb as they advance from mega cruelty to mega cruelty, the numbers are overwhelming and the individual suffering gets lost in the immense scale of it all.
Think of the absolute worst possible situation in which you could find yourself, one where your dignity has been humiliatingly stripped away, where you are helpless and under the absolute control of an unyielding sadist who is infliciting every possible physical and mental torment upon you and your family. You see no possibility of escaping the situation short of being killed.
Then, the above times about 20 million.
That is what belongs on the consciences of Hitler and Stalin.
That one should receive credit for 12 million while the other was responsible for 8 million, hardly rehabilitates the second one in any manner.
Actually it does. I still don't know where 8 million is coming from exactly ( as number of Stalin's victims I assume, which I still highly doubt,) but this is what I see as a bigger picture from a distance;
Hitler was playing god ( or messiah) creating the new nation and venturing into the field where no conqueror went before - meaning genetics, employing science/pseudoscience depending on how you look at it. Stalin on another hand had sociology in mind and that was nothing new in history, starting probably from the French revolution and may be earlier. He is definitely not the first despot creating/organizing empires in a certain way, and the consequences of his actions were not the total destruction, but organization of a military state, that was playing a vital role in the future world balance, as imperfect as the world is. None of the people he ravaged were marked for total extermination, none of them died out as the result of his policies. More than that, Stalin ( being a head of a powerful state that couldn't be not taken into account any longer) was instrumental in creation of Israel. So as cruel as he was, I see him rather instrumental in world's affairs ( as say Persians were in ancient times,) where Hitler's ideas/actions were spinning the world in a different direction. ( That is if we are taking in consideration the "two Satans" that NJ Goat mentioned in his previous post.)
erasure, I think you are hitting around it, but it becomes a matter of definition.
Hitler: Targeted defined people along ethnic/racial/religious lines that were "not desirable" to have in his empire.
Stalin: Targeted defined people along class lines and continually modified the definition of the class. He considered these people a major threat to the establishment and existence of his empire.
The Hitler one is simply a little bit easier for people to get their heads around then the Stalin one. People hear "Jew, Slav, Pole, homosexual and disabled" and they can picture who Hitler was going after. When they hear "kulak and intelligentsia" it's a more amorhpous collection of people, even if Stalin pursued their persecution and destruction with equal zeal.
I think the other difference and this is somewhat touched on in Bloodlands is that the "Hitler tragedy" is generally viewed as exactly that, a tragedy without purpose except to attempt to create the world as envisioned by a madman. In the case of Stalin though (and we have discussed this before), there is an attempt to paint a purpose to the tragedy. The persecution and suffering of millions was done so that the nation could advance towards its goal of communism. Even among some modern historians there is an ambivalence about the victims of Stalin because some of them see it as nothing more then a casualty of progress. Hobsbawm who is a well known socialist historian was asked in an interview, "...if the glorious and bright future of communism had been reached, would it be worth the lives of 15, 20, 30 million people to get there?" His answer was an unrequited, "yes".
Stalin won the war, he advanced the Soviet Union domestically and internationally and shaped world affairs. His victims become written off as casualties of progress by some and remain an anonymous blob to others who don't know what kulak and intelligentsia looks like. Hitler lost the war and led Germany to ruin. His victims are more easily defined in peoples minds and they were tragically killed by a madman pursuing his agenda. Regardless of the definition and how well people can relate to it or what purpose it served, countless millions suffered at the hands of these two dictators.
When they hear "kulak and intelligentsia" it's a more amorhpous collection of people, even if Stalin pursued their persecution and destruction with equal zeal.
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Except that Stalin never set out to liquidate the intelligentsia as a class, as he did with the kulaks. He was always aware of the power of art and science, and wanted to harness them in the service of the socialist state (he called writers “the engineers of human souls”). This is probably why the list of artistic casualties under Stalin is quite low, compared to his persecution of other categories of the population. He preferred to harass them in hopes of getting a useful result out of them. Why destroy talents like Shostakovich and Eisenstein when you can use them for political purposes?
That is an excellent summary of the matter and reflects my own thinking.
I would say that the image of Stalin as willing to sacrifice lives in the name of the progress of socialism, will suffer greatly in the minds of those who read Synder's description of the process by which the collectivization was carried out. Synder makes it clear that execution of the policy went far beyond neccessity and that Stalin was not only not troubled by the staggering loss of lives, he was annoyed that anyone was complaining about it. Perhaps if he had shown some sign that he viewed it all as a neccessary tragedy it would alleviate the moral repulsion, but he only ever behaved as though he viewed it as neccessary.
Maybe it is just a Russian thing, they are famed for their ability to endure suffering.
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