This is part three of a review of Timothy Snyder’s book Bloodlands. Here are parts one and two.
Unless otherwise indicated, all page references are to Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, 2nd edition, New York: Basic Books, 2022.
The real political purpose of Snyder’s false equations of Stalinism with communism, and of the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany, is revealed in his account of World War II. In Bloodlands, the Nazi war of annihilation and the crimes of Hitler’s Wehrmacht are systematically trivialized and relativized as a “reaction” to, or as part of, an “interaction” with violence from the Soviet side.
The Nazis attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, launching the bloodiest war in human history. The estimated death toll among the Soviet population is 27 million, but may well have been higher. The war also marked a critical turning point in the development of the Nazis’ genocide of the European Jews. Within less than two years after the beginning of the Nazi-Soviet war, almost the entire Jewish population of Eastern Europe had been murdered.
The falsifications and omissions with regard to the Nazi-Soviet war in Bloodlands are of the most fundamental character. It is impossible to enumerate them all. Let the reader be reminded that over half of the victims of the Nazi-Soviet war do not even figure in Bloodlands as part of the death toll of the...
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