Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder was on my list for awhile, and I suppose I finally decided to read it because of the war in Ukraine. This is a good book and a horrible book, in the sense that it is a well-researched, well-written account of probably the worst series of events in world history. It is first and foremost a book about the Holocaust. It is also a delightful romp through the famine Stalin intentionally imposed on Ukraine in the early 1930s, Stalin’s internal terror unleased on his own citizens in the late 1930s, Nazi mass murder of Soviet prisoners of war, the siege of Leningrad, and the forced relocation of people (including Germans remaining in newly Soviet-occupied areas) at the end of the war that resulted in additional deaths.

I certainly don’t have much to add to scholarly discourse on the Holocaust. I have read more than one account and feel that I have a grasp of the facts, which is a very different thing than wrapping my head around the events, which I am not sure anyone can do. I think everyone needs to have a grasp of the facts, grapple with them, and then not think about them all the time. One thing that surprised me is Snyder’s explanation of how the complete picture really became available only after the end of the Cold War. This is because many of the worst atrocities happened in areas that came under Soviet control at the end of the war, and western (i.e. outside the Communist countries) scholars after the war tended to focus on the evidence and accounts available to them of Jews and others in Western Europe. These people suffered horrible atrocities, but the atrocities further east were of another magnitude in terms of both body count and utter depravity. The Soviets did not exactly deny the Holocaust, but for propaganda reasons they tended to downplay the mass murder of Jews and portray events as atrocities committed by Germans against Soviet civilians, sometimes glossing over the fact that people in these areas came under Soviet control only late in the war, and in some cases were also subjected to Soviet atrocities.

Something I was not aware of was Stalin’s antisemitism in the early 1950s. This fit into his general pattern of paranoia that groups within the Soviet Union, whether Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Japanese, etc. might be under foreign influence and therefore be a threat to the Soviet state. In his paranoid mind, the ties between West Germany, the United States, and the newly formed Israel were a threat. There is some evidence he was planning a purge of Soviet Jews at this time. Luckily, he was not taken as seriously by underlings at this point as he had been in the 1930s, and he died before he could set any of these events in motion. Echoes of his paranoid rantings linking Nazis and Jews surfaced in Poland as late as the 1960s and 1970s, and I think we hear some echoes of this in the bizarre and seemingly illogical Russian rantings about “denazification” of Ukraine today.

Another theme that struck me was the underlying tension of food insecurity in Europe and the Soviet Union in the pre-war era. This was a motivating factor both in Hitler’s plan to colonize Eastern Europe and exterminate whoever was in the way, clearing the way for German farmers, and in Stalin’s depraved grain quotas imposed on Ukraine in the 1930s, in which peasant farmers were forced to grow grain for export but executed if they were found eating it themselves. Neither of these was a rational response to food insecurity, of course, but I think it holds lessons for us today. In the United States and much of the world, we have taken food security for granted for many decades now. As climate change takes hold, other environmental problems mount (soil erosion? ocean acidification? groundwater mining?), and population continues to grow (though slowly decelerating), the future of global food supply is not secure. On top of the technical and environmental challenges, food insecurity can trigger mass migration, civil unrest, geopolitical instability and even war, which in turn can exacerbate environmental and food supply problems in a vicious feedback loop. These are tough, tough problems, but one thing we can try to do is keep a focus on global peace and stability so we at least have a chance to focus our technological and economic prowess on solving the food security issue.