The Origins of Mass Killing: the bloodlands hypothesis

so good evening everyone my name is anne westard i'm going to be the chair for the lecture today by professor timothy snyder who is the philippine professor in history and international affairs here at tennessee a very well-known writer and historian and let me say this again tim it is a real pleasure for us to have you here as the philip roman professor for this year now it could be said that this is the lecture that a lot of people have been waiting for now tim opened last term with two fantastic lectures on much of the work that he is doing now in this lecture he is going at least in part to look towards some of the main points that he made in a book that came out three years ago called bloodlands the title for today's lecture is the origins of mars killing the bloodlands hypothesis and this is a set of issues that tim has worked on throughout his career and it ended up in a book that was very much discussed it's one of the key works of history that has appeared over the last decade not least in terms of how widely it has been discussed not just among experts within the field but in a much broader sense and the reason for that is that it deals with a set of topics that are truly important not just for the era that it covers but for our understanding of all of 20th century international history the starting point is this that in the middle of the 20th century there were two european state projects nazi germany and stalin's soviet union that managed between them to kill at least 12 million civilians in peace time and in in war and the term coined in the book's title bloodlands deals with this thesis it encapsulates these thesis the bloodlines are the stretch of territory from the baltic to the black sea where europe's most murderous regimes did the most murderous work the bloodlines were caught between two terrible projects out of hitler's ideas of racial supremacy and eastern expansion and on the other hand the stalinist desire to remake society the broad scale according to the communist template and this in both cases meant shooting starving and in the german case gassing those who didn't fit in to those projects to me this book and the thesis that tim is going to discuss today is not about idle comparison it's certainly not about measuring degrees of evil we we cannot do that to me tim's book is the best kind of history that i know of that which tells the story of the voiceless and the forgotten those people who were the victims for these two projects it is foreign historian some of the most important things that you can deal with to try to understand a set of human catastrophes not just in terms of how they can be explained but hopefully also what they can teach us for avoiding similar kind of cataclysms in the future so without him it's a great pleasure to introduce you for your third lecture in this series so in the spring of 1933 a ukrainian man dug his own grave in what circumstances do you dig your own grave why would you dig your own grave in some sense the calculation is clear by early 1933 by the time this man picked up a shovel and began to work the still hard earth a couple of million people had already starved to death in his homeland in soviet ukraine as a result of the deliberate campaign of starvation organized from moscow that's part of the answer i think the other part of the answer has to do with human dignity you see if you were one of those thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands millions of people who starved to death in soviet ukraine in 1932 or 1933 your body would be found in a field by the roadside it would be picked up thrown into the back of a horse-drawn cart where it would be buried along with tens perhaps hundreds of other people collected that day in a place where if any of your family did survive they would be unable to find you so i think the other reason why this man dug his own grave had to do with a sense of his own dignity a sense that he would like later to be found as indeed he was in april of 1940 a polish officer was keeping a diary a very typical thing to be doing in the time and the place most of the polish officer corps were reserve officers in the 1920s and 1930s in independent poland everyone with a higher education or every male with a higher education was a reserve officer and in time of war war began of course in 1939 they were all called up so in 1940 in what was still of course an age of letters this polish officer was keeping a diary in the last entry of his diary the second to last entry of his diary he writes they asked for my wedding ring which i and then three points three three periods it trails off ellipsis what's happening there he like thousands of other polish officers in the time and place had been taken prisoner by the red army uh then taken to special concentration camps by the soviet secret state police the ence veda he had a feeling that when he was questioned and he was right that when he was questioned he would be asked where his wedding ring was he had a feeling that he was about to be executed he was right so he wanted to hide his wedding ring he wanted to make sure his executioners wouldn't found it wouldn't find it he must have had the thought as he was writing that sentence if i record what i've done with my wedding ring they might find it so he trails off and that's the last we know of the wedding ring but not the last we know of him because his diary was later found in september of 1942 in the town of kovalev in what's now western ukraine in what at the time was part of german occupied southeastern poland a young girl left a message for her mother it was an unusual sort of message in september of 1942 when in caldwell the remains of the jewish community had been gathered forced inside the synagogue closed by a bar from the outside and by september of 1942 events had proceeded far enough that everyone every jew everyone else knew what was going to happen next by then well over a million and a half jews had been shot in the occupied soviet union and everyone knew what awaited them so what did people do using what was to hand shards of pottery bits of stone glass occasionally a pen people left messages hebrew yiddish polish on the walls of the synagogue this girl who was there with two of her sisters wrote to her mother we are so sorry that you can't be with us it seems like a strange sentiment doesn't it in the circumstances but it reveals something very human indeed something very normal about the holocaust about the events that we now call the holocaust people didn't want to be alone they wanted to be with their families the message ends we kiss you over and over the tragedy of this subject is that these are three of 14 million stories over the course of 12 years in a certain time and place something like 14 million children women and men were deliberately killed as a matter of policy either by nazi germany or by the soviet union i would stress that all of this killing happened in a place in a place that we can define between the baltic sea to the north to the black sea to the south between berlin in the west moscow to the east roughly today's baltic states belarus ukraine much of today's poland in this place 14 million people were deliberately killed as a matter of policy now this place is not a state and what i'm going to be describing to you is not the history of a state this place is not a carefully demarcated history of homeland of a nation and what i'm going to be describing to you is not the history of a nation nor is it even an empire it is a zone which is defined above all or i am defining it as the zone where so many people were killed over a short period of time there is no other zone like this in all of european history now the zone is special for a couple of reasons i've already stressed one of them the one i'm using as a definition it is here that so many people were killed 14 million is a very large number that alone should command our attention but it's interesting a couple of other ways as well this is also precisely the zone where both soviet power and nazi power were present in the 1930s and the 1940s this is worth stressing this is worth being specific about the vast majority of the soviet union was never touched by german power the germans never intended to occupy more than 10 percent of the soviet union they never occupied more than 5 of it the vast majority of the lands touched by soviet power were never touched by the germans likewise much of much of the german empire in the second world war the low countries france belgium most of germany itself and so on was never touched by soviet power if you consider in other words the zone of german power and soviet power together you're looking at a zone which extends literally through the atlantic ocean the pacific ocean right from normandy to vladivostok most of the land surface of the largest land mass on the planet but the area in which these two regimes coincided is much much smaller and yet it's in this area where they coincided that the vast majority of the killing took place in all of this eurasian space from france to siberia the germans and the soviets deliberately killed about 17 million people of that 17 million 14 million were killed in this relatively compact area this seems also to me to be of interest the third way to think about this space indeed the third way to define this space and the interesting thing is that all three definitions overlap almost perfectly if you draw them on a map the third definition is this is where the holocaust holocaust took place here and nowhere else this is where the german policy to murder the jews of europe took place the tremendous majority of jews who were killed in the holocaust lived their whole lives in this zone and those who did not were brought here to die that seems to me to be also worthy of interest these three facts together seem to be worthy of interest and i'm going to consider why these connections might be interesting as we proceed now let's begin though with a question a question you know as historians would say about historiography if everything that i've said to you thus far is true and indeed everything i've said to you thus far is just a matter of looking at maps and making calculations everything i've said so far is just arithmetic and geography there's nothing remotely controversial about it if everything i've said thus far is true then we have before us the worst man-made catastrophe at least in european history perhaps in history as as such and yet we don't see this as a historical event we don't see this as a historical moment we don't see this as a subject of history why not how could that be how could we miss this how could we not notice it how could we look aside or a scance or a way i think the basic part of the answer is that we have stories that touch on these events but they're separate stories right so we do have national histories we have a polish national history for example which would certainly bring to us the tragedy of the katine forest to which i alluded before where polish officers were executed we certainly have histories of the soviet union which include aspects of soviet terror we certainly have histories of the holocaust the problem is that these three histories are opposed to each other in various ways now if i've got you thinking about it i'm sure many of you have read many books from one two or all three of these fields isn't it strange when we reflect upon it that people writing about these events don't mention that the events they're describing happen in exactly the same place as the other events right how many books about the holocaust zero make clear that the zone where the holocaust happened is the same zone where most of the soviet killing happened how many explications or descriptions of national tragedy be they ukrainian or polish or lithuanian make clear that these national tragedies also happened where the holocaust happened and so on very very few of course is the answer so history itself as we have it as we have divided as we're used to reading it takes these events away from each other in order for us not to notice that they happen in the same place we have to not notice place at all which is what we do but of course the problem goes deeper than this it's not just a matter of parallel lines it's not just a matter of of national history going along this way soviet history here history the holocaust here onward to infinity it's worse than that you can't push the lines together the stories are magnetically opposed so to speak to each other if you try to push them together they resist as i've had occasion to learn over the years the national histories are each opposed to one another a ukrainian national history of victimhood and a polish national history of victimhood can't simply be integrated because very often the ukrainian villains are are are are the heroes um the iranian villains in a polish story are the ukrainian heroes and ukrainian story and so on and so forth um the same goes for soviet history and german history it's very hard to put the two of them together and i think the reason for this is ultimately a deeply political one since the french revolution we've had this habit of mind which i don't expect you to get over this evening but i'll suggest this as a moment to start we have a habit of mind of thinking of politics in terms of right and left we use a kind of analogy from geometry this is the left and this is the right and once we're thinking geometrically it's easy for us to believe that these two things never come into contact with each other the soviets are on the left the germans the nazis are on the right once we've arranged it that way once we think of them in terms of a kind of geometry of ideology in terms of their beliefs and where their beliefs place them in a mental map we then don't have to think about their presence on an actual map which is what i'm proposing that we do okay so how then might we go about something like this how then might we try to correct these sorts of problems how might we build up a historical map which actually embraces the policies embraces the suffering embraces all the killing let me begin negatively by by the things i try to avoid i tried to avoid the standard secular metaphysics that dominate these discussions that shape these discussions what do i mean by that metaphysics is a big word what do i mean by metaphysics i mean three things in particular the first thing that i mean is i try very hard to avoid exceptionalism which is harder than it sounds much history is based upon the idea that it's legitimate to write just about the irish or just about the english or just about the polls or just about the jews or chiefly about the irish chiefly about the english chiefly about the polls chiefly about the jews to treat the story of their emotional state to treat the story of their rise and fall as the story right if you think about the history books that you've read probably many of them take that form um i on the contrary i'm trying very hard as arnie has already stressed to begin from the assumption that everyone was a human being that everyone who lived on this territory should be the subject of equal methodological and moral interest from the observer and from and from the chronicler again that must seem very simple to you but it's not that simple i don't think in the execution the second thing that i try to do is avoid dialectics okay you're thinking another difficult word another difficult problem what are these dialectics how could there be dialectics dialectics perform a very strong function in the way these histories are told by allowing us not to see certain things one dialectic to start with the obvious case is the soviet one in the soviet dialectic the story goes something like this sure soviet policy killed hundreds of thousands maybe millions of people in the 1930s but that's the thesis here comes the antithesis but the red army liberated europe and won the second world war the the reasoning if you can call it that is that somehow all of that suffering in the 1930s is justified by or and even caused the liberation of europe now you only have to think about that for just a moment to see that it doesn't really make any sense stalin purging the officer corps in 1938 did not actually help the red army to win the second world war um but there's a deeper problem than that the deeper problem is this we are here in 2014 12 years from now in 2026 many unknowable things will happen right whatever they are we can't now say that they're going to take their meaning from 19 from from today right we can't relate periods at least if we're historians and not you know some kind of very special time traveling metaphysical dreamer we can't justify things that are going to happen in 2026 on the basis of what's happening now or vice versa we wouldn't even think of doing that and yet we have no problem saying 1945 makes 1933 all right i'm beginning from the position that 1945 does not make 1933 all right that if we want to understand 1933 we have to study the factors the interests the emotions that were in play in 1933. the second kind of dialectic which i try very hard to avoid um is a right-wing german position associated uh with uh with the scholar ernst nolte its idea is that the two systems the nazi and the and the soviet were in some kind of fatal relationship one with the other that each was each other's fulfillment that each learned from the other each taught the other to progress towards a certain common totalitarian destination i don't think this is correct as well as i'll describe later the two systems do interact but they are different systems the ways in which they interact is a specific empirical question we can't allow ourselves to say the nazis did something because that was part of soviet history or the soviets did something because of that was part of nazi history there are two different histories which overly at some places and don't overlay other places now this is me being the very boring anglo-saxon that i am right that's an empirical argument it's an empiricist argument the two systems are there but they do not have a fatal dialectical relationship we can't we can't substitute historical investigation with a kind of dance back and forth the third dialectic the one which is most popular today and you may recognize it in one form or another is the idea that eastern europe is really complicated right you're already recognizing it it's very messy there are a lot of peoples there who we didn't learn about in our western civ classes which began in greece and somehow went through italy and france and germany and britain without ever somehow touching eastern europe there are a lot of people there with history seems to be very entangled and bloody and we would just prefer not to know about it why don't we just say goes this dialectic that okay the germans and the soviets were both there but and the nazis certainly did some bad things but then the soviets came and that kind of canceled it all out why don't we just start from there why don't we start fresh now that view that the two systems sort of canceled each other out and let's do political science um instead of history um or journalism or something that that view that different people laughed when i said political science and journalism i noticed i assumed the political scientists laughed at political science and the journalists at journalists um but that view that the two cancel each other out um the the the the icon of that is the notion of the red army liberating auschwitz how many of you have have been forced to consider that stereotype the red army liberating auschwitz right that's the visual notion that the red that the soviets came in and in effect undid the evil that the germans had done now as an image it doesn't make any sense the people who the p the soldiers of the red army didn't know what they were liberating the fact that they were liberating auschwitz didn't stop them from trying to rape survivors for example auschwitz itself became part of the german empire as a result of an agreement between nazi germany and the soviet union if the red army had wanted to liberate auschwitz it shouldn't have waited for seven weeks on the vistula river while the last jews of woods were deported to auschwitz to be gassed and so on and so on and so on it doesn't make sense as an image but it's a powerful image what this story tells us the story of cancellation this dialectic of cancellation is that one plus one is zero the germans were there but then the soviets came in and made order let's just start clean in fact and you all know this one plus one is two what we have in eastern europe is the accumulation of nazi power and soviet power and all of our intuitions once we frame it that way will tell us that that's going to be worse than just one or the other one plus one is two another metaphysic that i'm trying very hard to avoid is that of sanctity in particular this has to do with the holocaust there's a strong tendency to believe that because the holocaust was worse than other policies or because it had to do with race or for one reason or another it doesn't belong in history it belongs somewhere else it belongs in memory it belongs in commemoration but it doesn't belong in history both personally and as a historian i think this is exactly wrong if the holocaust is not in history it won't be in memory for very long nor in commemoration moreover i think it's very important if we wish to take the jews who die and the jews who live seriously that we see them as real human beings subject to the same historical forces and processes as everyone else the next method that i pursue here um and again this will seem very simple when i say it is that i'm i'm undertaking a history of mass killing the phenomenon we're concerned with is the deliberate mass killing of 14 million children women and men and that's what i'm studying as opposed to for example studying the camps which is a related but a very different subject most people who went into a concentration camp viet soviet or german also came out the camps were horrible institutions but the camps were not the same things as starvation zones they were not the same things as shooting pits and they were not the same things as death facilities which is what a place like treblinka for example is properly called the camps are not even a prelude to killing the vast majority of people who were killed never saw a camp the vast majority of jews who were killed never saw a camp so the history that focuses on the camps is focusing on a certain terrible institution but it's actually avoiding the vast majority of the killing i'm focusing on killing by whatever method starvation which is the most important then shooting which is next and then gas now this focus on place which is the part of the method that arna already stressed so i won't stress it again allows us to see certain things it allows us to see the victims but it also allows us to see the regimes not just in berlin and moscow but in the place where they were at their most murderous it also gives us access to sources not just the sources from the regimes themselves but from the sources of the many people who are subject to their policies of which we have a bounty okay now if i focused on place if i focused on territory does that mean that i'm going to insist on some kind of territorial determinism does that mean that i'm going to argue that this killing somehow arose necessarily from the place where it happened am i going to claim that there's some kind of fatal geopolitics of this region no not quite like that in fact it seems to me that if we want to take ideas seriously and we're all interested in these ideas right if we want to take ideas seriously if we want to take nazi ideology and stalinist ideology seriously we have to start from place in other words if we want to understand how ideology can actually lead to killing we have to have a sense of territory because of course the ideas on their own don't march through history and kill right the ideas have to have purchase in something so what i try to do in the book is to bring ideology in place together in certain ways so that ideology can help us actually explain events what do i mean well an obvious point which you all know is that ideology has to be incorporated by organs of power right marxism alone does not kill if so my first lecture would have been a total bloodbath right marxism some of you might have thought it was in which case i asked for your tactful silence the marxism has to be incorporated even marxism and power doesn't automatically kill obviously right red vienna didn't kill a soul it extended lots of lives it has to be incorporated within limitless institutions likewise anti-semitism does not kill at least on a large scale by on its own it has to be incorporated within a certain kind of regime and even that regime the nazi regime did not kill jews without war a couple of hundred which is not very much right without war the nazi regime couldn't kill this question of place is also important for the the the still controversial ever controversial issue of collaboration when we say that someone is a collaborator we have to ask with what because the only regime with which you can collaborate is the one that happens to be governing the place where you happen to live so the question of place in the question of regime comes before the question of collaboration for almost everybody the second thing that you notice when you pursue the history in this way is the way that ideology in fact the surprising way that ideology deals with time so from the soviet point of view from stalin's point of view the revolution was in the past from the point of view of the 1930s and 1940s the revolution was in the past the revolution was the revolution of 1917. the revolution was a first great advance there was another revolution around 1930 into collectivization and terror these revolutions are in the past by the 1940s the revolution the soviet union is what has to be protected the homeland of socialism has to be protected for the nazis interestingly enough it's exactly the opposite which is one of the reasons why i caution against right and left and all of that for the nazis the revolution is in the future it's in the future everything which happens between 1933 and i think it's fair to say 1941 is preparation the nazis are preparing an ss they're preparing a camp system they're preparing for a war which will allow them to achieve their goals basically all of nazi terror the episodes i'm going to talk about the episodes i'm not happen as a result of a war which takes place beyond the borders of pre-war nazi germany now the implications of this different idea of time are really important and interesting and surprising it means for example that the soviet union killed almost entirely when the soviet union was at peace it killed fewer people as it were it killed almost entirely on its own territory admittedly a very vast territory the nazi system by contrast killed almost entirely during war and killed almost entirely beyond its own pre-war borders right now the point of my book of course is that when i say inside the soviet union and when i say beyond the borders of nazi germany i mean very much the same place right i mean a place that was touched by both now ideology in order to make sense again has to include economic aspirations we can't make a firm distinction between economics and ideology much as we would like to right here i will slip back into the marxist mode and say that every triumphant economic ideology claims not to be an ideology right but all forms of economics and all form of ideology have a kind of inherent connection the soviets to be sure have an ideology of class struggle but the ideology of class struggle is meant to serve a project of modernization hitler of course um uh and some of you are probably guilty of buying mineconf on kindle it's been a bestseller on kendall lately i'm just looking for guilty expressions now for a minute um express is a clear ideology of racial struggle right there's no doubt about that but this racial struggle is supposed to take place chiefly in vast colonies in eastern europe beyond germany for the time being where germany is going to build a kind of amazing agrarian empire so these are different ideologies right class struggle racial struggle there are even different views of what of what progress would mean from the nazi point of view progress means we take our industrial slightly decadent german middle european homeland and we add to it we complement it with a vast agrarian colony in eastern europe thereby achieving autarky imbalance from the soviet point of view we have a backward economy we have a backward population we're backward in every respect what we need to do is modernize we need to become industrial we need to become that thing that germany already is so the ideologies are different the views of the future are opposing but what's interesting and what's crucial is that the territory overlaps for both stalin and hitler indeed for the chief ideologists of both regimes not just the leaders the crucial place for both of these transformations was one country and that country was ukraine ukraine was going to be the country that allowed both the nazis and the soviets to break out of what they saw as the false capitalist liberal version of history how is this possible this is the last thing i want to say about idea about ideology ideology when you think it through this way along with power along with time along with economics ideology fixes a certain part of territory it fixes a certain part of territory in world history what do i mean i mean of course it's right that the nazis and the soviets thought globally of course it's right that from their own point of view their ideologies were universal of course it's right that hitler imagined that there was a planetary domination of jews in that sense he was thinking about the world all the time and of course it's right that stalin was thinking of a world revolution of course it's true that soviet history was only supposed to be the prelude to the progress of human history of course in that sense stalin was always thinking about the entire world the entire globe he also was a planetary thinker but in practice when the ideology is meant to be implemented the territory that comes first is ukraine and the territory that comes first to both is ukraine from the soviet point of view ukraine the fertile territory of ukraine is going to be the land that can be exploited to create excess capital with which the soviet union can be modernized from the german point of view the nazi point of view ukraine is lebensraum ukraine is that place which is going to allow germans to to kill starve displace settle and then become authentic to break the rules the present rules of economics to become antarctic to become to become to return their own to their own racial essence so you can have different ideologies you can have different temporalities different plans for development and still end up in the same place the overlap between these two regimes has to do with this territory now if you follow me that far if you just follow this kind of abstract argument about the relationship between ideology and place you can anticipate already what's going to happen between 1933 and 1945 1933 of course being the year when hitler comes to power and when stalin finally consolidates power 1945 being the end of a world war which in europe was chiefly a soviet german war you can anticipate at least roughly what's going to happen in those 12 years if you know all of this you can guess and you'll be right of course that the two regimes are going to chiefly kill in the lands between you will also guess that they will interact in the lands between right since they're both concerned with them and finally you can you can have a you can have a guess about what's going to happen to particular places between moscow and berlin you can see where they can cooperate where can they cooperate they can cooperate in a place that i barely mentioned thus far they can cooperate over the fate of independent poland independent poland is the only sovereign state that lies between directly between moscow and berlin it's the only major sovereign creation which is in the way of both of these ideologies both of these notions of development both of these visions of history and poland is where they can in fact cooperate and do in 1939 the two of them become military allies and jointly invade the country you can also have a good guess about where they cannot agree they cannot possibly agree about ukraine ukraine is one territory that's crucial to both ideologies to both visions of development to both visions of future so ukraine is that place over which they must fight and over which they do fight the german soviet war which is the essence of the second world war is chiefly a war for control of ukraine and therefore it's not surprising that between 1933 and 1945 more people will be killed in ukraine than in any other country in the world it will be the most dangerous place to be between 1933 and 1945. you can also imagine if you if you think a little bit further um what the most dangerous place during the second world war itself will be where's the most dangerous place in the second world war i'll give you a hint it's not paris the most the most dangerous place in the second world war is belarus by far right and that shouldn't be surprising i mean in belarus something like half the population is moved something like a quarter of the population is killed no other country remotely approaches that total right why is that for a very simple reason belarus lies on the invasion route whether you're going from berlin to moscow or moscow back to berlin also belarus happens to be a fine territory for partisan warfare so between 1941 and 1945 during the soviet german war belarus is the most dangerous place to be the holocaust will happen there partisan and anti-partisan campaigns will happen there and soviet prisoners of war will be starved there in horrifying numbers the final thing that you might guess or begin to ask about or begin to think is what does this all mean for the jews and of course this is decisive for the jews in order for the holocaust to happen very simple point german power must extend to where the jews live where do the jews live primarily in this territory in poland ukraine lithuania belarus and western russia german power extends into this region not because the jews live there it extends into this region because of a german colonial project which encounters a soviet colonial project so for the holocaust to happen german power has to be where jews are it's a very simple point but it's worth stressing because when we think of the holocaust we think of german history and that's because historians of the holocaust write about german history and that's because they know german but in fact 98 of the victims of the holocaust right did not know german had no contact with german culture had nothing to do with germany whose first encounter with germany was usually with a member of an einsatzgruppen or with a german policeman or something of the sort right so the huge majority of the victims the holocaust don't have anything to do with germany they're from precisely these lands and so any history of the holocaust has to get you from germany into these lands for the holocaust to happen there has to be that and there has to be hitler's notion that the greatest threat to the world to germany to superior races is is is is jewish control you have to have both the ideology and you have to have the place so for the holocaust at the very least what this kind of argument supplies is the place this also suggests three periods so if we think about this history now over the 12 years that i've defined from 1933 to 1945 you can think of three periods there's a period between 1933 and 1938 when the soviet union nazi germany are at peace the soviets then carry out most of the killing roughly a million in episodes of terror roughly three million by starvation german killing in this period is essentially negligible it's counted in the hundreds in 1938 just to mention the camps since they're more familiar they're about 20 000 people a little bit less in german camps they're about a million people in soviet camps as of 1938 the soviets have killed something like a thousand times more jews in the 19th not even mentioning anyone else just jews than nazi germany has as of 1938. so in the first period we're dealing with a period where the soviets are are them are the mass murderers park salons the second period 1939-1941 is the period of political engagement of the two regimes the period of military alliance when the two of them together divide up eastern europe during this period correspondingly perhaps this is what we should expect the germans catch up to the soviets the soviets kill more slowly than they had in times of peace and the germans ramp up very quickly so that the two of them are killing on the scale of hundreds of thousands and 39 to 41. from 1941 to 1945 when nazi germany attacks the soviet union almost all of the killing is carried out by the germans the huge majority is being carried out by the germans on territories beyond children the way that the book progresses is that i consider each of the episodes of mass killing i've tried to suggest to you why mass killing in general could be expected should not be surprising how different episodes might be related in time and in place what i do in the book is that i consider each individual policy so it begins in 1933 with the famine soviet ukraine it begins in 1933 with stalin's policy of collectivization the idea of taking farmland from individuals um and groups and placing under the control of the state how this policy led to shortfalls rather than bounty as was expected and as the blame for this and the hunger that resulted from this was deliberately distributed in some places rather than others in particular stalin created the sort of story according to which ukrainian nationalists polish spies and so on in ukraine were responsible for disaster there and that the republic as a whole as a result should be punished and so measures were carried out in soviet ukraine like sealing the borders like making it illegal for peasants to go to cities and beg like taking away livestock which if you have any connection with farm you know how important that is which replied just to ukraine um so-called black zones were created communities which were not allowed to trade with the rest of the soviet union everyone there died so roughly three million people by the end of 1933 were killed the second major policy the second major soviet policy of the 1930s is the policy of the great terror which is related to the disaster of collectivization after the disaster of collectivization revolution in the soviet union was no longer confident revolution the soviet union was fearful fearful the people might realize what a disaster this had been both within and without the soviet union the rationale for the largest action of the great terror the kulak action akulak being a prosperous peasant um was that the japanese would recruit disgruntled soviet peasants from the gulag right japanese and east asia going to invade siberia and bring along the way with them ukrainian mainly deportees who are all the way out in siberia the japanese by the way we're trying this it's not as far-fetched as it would sound but this is the rationale for killing something well over 300 000 human beings the second group of terror actions in 1937 and 1938 were the national actions about a dozen of the soviet minority nationalities the very small minorities if you take them all together they total about one and a half percent of the population were targeted for campaigns of ethnic murder and ethnic deportation the largest of these was the polish action in which something like a hundred thousand soviet citizens of polish extraction were were murdered and a larger number deported the next chapter if just chapter four deals with this moment of encounter this moment of the joint attack on poland in 1939 and the joint decapitation of of the soviet educated classes it's an interesting moment because soviet policy and german policy are strikingly similar the soviets are much better at it than the germans at this point they're much more efficient they have much more experience they keep much better records um but this they're both aiming to destroy the polish nation by removing its top layers from the nazi point of view the top layer is a racial accident which should never exist from the soviet point of view the top layer are the bourgeoisie and feudal oppressors but it's the same people in effect i mean there are many cases where the germans kill one brother and the soviets kill another because their de facto analyses are the same this is the moment in 1939 and 1940 when states are removed from the map of europe which is incredibly important it's also the moment when jews are moved into ghettos in the next chapter i try to consider german political economy okay now it may seem like at this point i'm just trying to help you know readers who have had enough of mass murder find their way to sleep but political economy is incredibly important as i've already stressed political economy is important because in order to understand what the germans mean to do you have to know their ideological economics you have to know that what they think is going to happen is that they're going to invade the soviet union the soviet state is going to fall apart in two months right they invade in june 1941 and the expectation is not that they'll all be home by christmas the expectation is that they will all be home by the end of the summer right there is no winter gear that's one of the reasons why stalin didn't believe the intelligence accounts that said that the germans are about to attack he said no one would invade the soviet union without winter gear right no one should invade the soviet union without winter gear but the germans did and they expected to destroy the system within eight weeks then they expected that in the winter of 1941 the first winter of the war after a successful campaign and total domination of the western soviet union they would starve 30 million soviet citizens to death they would starve them as they reoriented the bounty of ukraine and southern russia to western europe which from their point of view is where it belonged and away from belarus and russia and the soviet cities the result of that they calculated would be that 30 million people would starve to death when that was over they would begin two major campaigns of resettlement one of themselves into the east this was called general planus over years and decades they would turn the soviet union into something like the american west that was hitler's favorite comparison and the other was what they called the final solution the notion that the jews would be deported somewhere far to the east probably to siberia heydrich had a fantasy that the jews should be put in the gulak right so that's what they thought was going to happen the only way to understand the actual german crimes is to see the relationship between those plans that sort of incredibly bloody ideological political economy and what they what they met in reality the forces that they couldn't that they couldn't control in short they do manage to starve some people about four million maybe a little bit more mostly soviet prisoners of war in starvation camps and besieged leningrad where something like a million people are starved about three million are starved in the soviet prisoner war and the german prisoner of war camps for soviets um they do starve some people but they're forced in general to retreat it's impractical to starve people when you need them to work for you and you need to occupy them but above all the germans don't destroy the soviet system so they pull back they pull back from a colonial vision and they pull back to something they pull back to what i think of as the de-colonial mission they pull back to the idea that the jews are the greatest enemy not only the enemy which is preventing them from winning the war which of course is the claim that they make but also the main enemy anyway the enemy which structures the entire world and therefore the enemy which should be attacked while it can be so much of the mage much of the original vision colonial vision is withdrawn but a part of it the final solution is radically escalated and accelerated the final solution instead of being a deportation plan for after a victory becomes a plan for murder during the war itself which brings me to the next four chapters of the book which deal with the holocaust the holocaust as i've stressed happens entirely within the bloodlands and some of the things which happen with respect to other policies other groups earlier periods of time are very important to see in order to have a chance of understanding how the holocaust could happen so for example where and how does the holocaust begin that is where and how does an idea of deportation become a practice of actually shooting people where they live which is what the holocaust is by the way it's shooting people where they live that's how it starts that's where half the killing is the gas chambers are a way of making things easier on the germans but if we understand how the holocaust started and what people are capable of doing we have to see the holocaust as being shooting face-to-face shooting of people not far from where they live that's what it was that's what we need to explain the rest of it are technical modifications so where does the holocaust start it starts precisely in places where the soviet union has already been present it starts precisely in the lands that the soviet union itself has invaded in 1939 and 1940 and it starts precisely because of a combination of german intentions to eliminate jews and the german ability to recruit people by way of political lies about what what they will get in return so the holocaust starts in a zone of double occupation without that zone of double occupation it is not clear how the holocaust would have started in the event that is how it started and where does it proceed i mentioned earlier that 1939 1940 are the moment of the destruction of states the hall of that's in fact another definition of the bloodlands where the state is destroyed the holocaust extends eastward from the doubly occupied bits in as far east and the soviet union as the germans proceed it extends westward into poland which the germans have already destroyed the holocaust extends to places where the state has been destroyed but not further not further if you all of the killing happens where the state has been destroyed so the prior destruction of the state a fact which is recorded entirely in national histories right the end of the polish state is something that the polls want you to remember the end of lithuanian state is something lithuanians want you to remember but it mattered most for the jews by far for the jews if you were a jew who lived in a place where the state existed even if it was the nazi state even if it was a nazi state your chances of surviving were better than one and two if you were a jew who lived where the state was destroyed your chances of surviving were worse than one in 20. it's a difference of an order of magnitude the difference of an order of magnitude and it has to do with the destruction of the state so things that happen in the bloodlands which aren't so to speak directed at jews are very important then for what happens later to jews so the book proceeds through discussions of the holocaust in ukraine in belarus and finally in poland it closes with three chapters on the fate of warsaw on ethnic cleansing after the war and finally on stalinist anti-semitism which is by way of closing the discussion on interaction this is where i'd like to begin to close my own remarks what is this a book about as arnold has already stressed it's not a book that compares um although i spent a lot of time talking about comparison it's not really what i find interesting and i think the reason why i don't find it interesting is that it's not something we're really ready for in order to compare two things right apples and oranges let's say you have to know that apple and orange are and you have to know that an apple is one thing and orange is another thing seems very simple right the soviet union and nazi germany we don't know that well and the reason we don't know them that well is that we don't understand what their interaction has meant we don't understand where they did their killing and why i think we're just the beginning of that but above all we can't really separate them to make a clean comparison you have to be able to take two things apart you have to say these things are at least analytically distinct i don't think that's really possible i think the two of them and this is where the book really moves the two of them interact at the very least in the question of mass killing the two of them interact at least to the point where you can't really explain the actions of one without the presence of the other now i'm not claiming as i said before that they always interact that would be absurd i'm not claiming that hitler's decisions can always be explained by reference to some obscure policy by a soviet bureaucrat in rostov-on-don or something or the contrary i'm not i'm not claiming that what molotov does can somehow always be explained by something that somebody does in munich no sometimes they interact and sometimes they don't and it's an empirical question for example it is not really the case that hitler's anti-semitism his idea that all jews were bolsheviks and all bolsheviks were jews had something to do with experience that was an axiom that was an axiom interestingly insofar as hitler had experience with the soviet union he moved away from those ideas without ever saying he was right but as he actually engaged the soviet union and killed its jews he then started to say things like you know i think stalin has actually done away with all of his jewish advisers or you know i think the soviet union is a russian imperial state or stalin he's a beast but he's a beast of grand stature when he actually engages the soviet union he changes interpretation of it completely so interaction in this case actually undermines at least a little bit the ideology which was which was unfortunately so decisive for the fate of the jews or stalin's campaigns in the 1930s the collectivization that killed 3 million people in ukraine about 7 million people overall the great terror which kills about a million people these are indeed in some sense reactions to a feeling of threat but it's not really a feeling a threat from germany it was what stalin was above all afraid of was a japanese polish encirclement the japanese were much more important than the germans in salon's calculations um probably reasonably so he was afraid of a japanese polish encirclement which might or might not include the germans that's what he was afraid of that was what insofar as you can justify the terror as a result of some kind of interaction it was an interaction with tokyo and warsaw more than it was in interaction with berlin so you can't take everything that happens on one side and blame it on the other nevertheless there are forms of interaction that are important so for example soviet modernization and nazi demodernization that is a theoretical conversation when going in nazi germany establishes a four-year plan to control the soviet union that is in fact a response to the five-year plan to modernize the soviet union literally a response so the five-year plan builds up the cities the four-year plan plans on destroying those cities right the five-year plan builds up industry the four-year plan plans on getting rid of that industry and restoring farmland and so on and so on the main interaction of course is the military alliance of 1939 very important interaction everything that follows from the second world war follows from this right without this we don't know how the second world war would begin or how it would follow and of course the soviet german war of 1941 is also an interaction it's an interaction where certain soviet and german crimes nevertheless have a relationship to each other take the prisoners of war if it weren't for the holocaust the worst nazi war crime would have been the deliberate starvation of soviet prisoners of war more than 3 million human beings this is a crime on an enormous scale um hardly remembered at all it happens in part because this um stalin criminalizes retreat um because stalin makes it clear that anyone who retreats is going to be treated as as outside the bounds of soviet society therefore people prefer to be taken prisoner there's a kind of interaction there partisan warfare the soviets deliberately carry out partisan warfare in places where they know the result is going to be that that um that peasants are going to be killed in large numbers or the warsaw uprising obviously a german crime to kill more than a hundred thousand polish civilians in 1944 during the uprising nevertheless the fact that the soviets encouraged the city to rise up and then don't help in fact prevent help from arriving is part of the story so even in cases where it's quite clear who the major criminal is you can't really tell the story adequately is history without some kind of interaction or to take an example a little bit beyond my story the gulag when is the gulag truly deadly the gulag is truly deadly for for about two years 1942-1943 a bit into 1944. during those years the death rates in the gulag were about half the rest of the time it was less than 10 percent why is that well of course in part it's because millions of people were sentenced to the gulag by the soviet system but it's also in part because germany attacked the soviet union right in conditions of war time the gulag is at the very bottom of the list of priorities for supplies and so people die of starvation malnutrition and disease can you explain that just with the soviet system no you have to have some reference to what the germans are doing as well now i'm trying to i'm trying to make the case that this book insofar as it's about the two systems is about their interaction rather than about comparison but i don't want you i want to give you the wrong idea about comparison and i certainly don't want you to think it's something that we academics can or should shy away from on the contrary it's very difficult to see some important features of these systems without comparing take the history of the holocaust the history of the holocaust is in large measure a failure of the germans to deport you see that much better when you see how well the soviet union could deport you understand hitler's frustrations much more clearly when you see that hitler was watching the soviet union deport very efficiently the germans fail to starve 30 million people to death they can't carry out a planned starvation really it's easier to understand that when you have seen a planned starvation carried out as in the soviet union but more than that if we seriously if we took seriously the idea that we can't compare that there was a taboo on comparison we would become our we would become our own mind police just to give you an example earlier in this lecture and at least you know 40 of you were paying attention because i'm watching i said that 20 20 000 people were in the german camps while a million people were in the soviet camps that's a comparison right what are you going to do with that are you going to forget it are you going to make yourself forget it what is the technique that you use to make yourself forget it right how do you keep these things out of the rest of your analysis i would suggest that it's impossible that when we look at these things there are natural comparisons and they help us to understand perspective but more importantly than this and now we're getting to the nub of the issue since both regimes were present on both territories everybody who lived on since both regimes were present on a single territory everybody who lived on this territory so long as they were alive anyway had experience and anticipation of both everyone jews ukrainians below russians polls russians lithuanians latvians doesn't matter everyone had experience of both everyone was making comparisons if you were a jew and worse on september of 1939 and the vermont is coming you don't say to yourself i am imposing a ban on comparison which is going to prevent me from thinking about whether or not i should flee the city right i have yet to find that in the record anyway in the record you find jews who stay in warsaw jews who decide to flee eastward to the soviet union but you don't find any jews who say i can't think about comparison because it should be a taboo issue right that would be grotesque and absurd given the actual historical situation it's true of everyone yellow russian families during the anti-partisan campaigns where one son was seized by the germans to fight in the police and the other son was seized by the soviet partisans where on both sides there was a loyalty test which said you had to kill your own family if necessary those people naturally compared soviet prisoners of war who were from ukraine who found themselves in german starvation camps in 1941 naturally compared their experience to surviving 1933. how could they not how could they not do that that would be absurd so the point is that comparison is not something that we impose from outside the tabuon comparison is something that we impose from the outside but comparison is inside this history it's inside these sources to demand from the people who experience both systems that they not compare is to extract forcibly all of the humanity out of what actually happened now i understand this is going to be the last point that i make i understand that there's a reason why people insist on taboos taboos are about trying to preserve some element of a social structure i understand the reason of trying for trying to impose a taboo on these comparisons is that there's a wish to preserve the special status of of the holocaust um i understand that there's a view that says that if we actually knew the history that would be bad for us i'm against that view i'm i'm an old-fashioned free speecher in some sense but also i think the consequences are not what we think they're going to be the idea that good history is bad for us and bad history is good for us is one that i want to oppose i think that bad history is bad for us and good history is good for us i think this way of understanding history of being unconcerned about the taboos which are artifacts of our own moment helps us to understand very crucial issues about of this history whether it's colonization or collaboration it also helps us to understand the holocaust this will be my subject next time it allows us to see the holocaust where it happened it allows us to see the victims for who they are and not just as the nazis saw them which is the chief way that we see them it allows us to try to explain the holocaust against its historical setting again this is my topic next time and it also allows us if we want to and as i stress this is not really my interest and i spent about a sentence on this in the book if we want to it allows us to compare the holocaust to the crimes it allows us to make the case that the holocaust was in fact unprecedented in fact this book if anyone reads it this far i think makes the most radical case for the unprecedented nature of the holocaust ever made in three ways the first is this book allows us to avoid the hegemonic minimization okay hegemonic minimization what do i mean there i can give that in two syllables auschwitz the association of the holocaust with auschwitz is the hegemonic minimization of the holocaust the holocaust took place at auschwitz alistar was a terrible facility which took a million lives but that is one-sixth of the holocaust five-sixths of the holocaust took place elsewhere mostly in the east why is auschwitz a comfortable synonym for most people most the time for the holocaust i'll tell you why the idea that germans didn't know about the holocaust is absurd german soldiers and policemen and thousands of other secretaries administrators you name it saw the holocaust happen in the east tens of thousands hundreds of thousands probably everyone in germany knew about the holocaust while it was happening because the holocaust was above all mashed face-to-face shooting that took place in public in a german empire led or carried out by germans germans knew when it was happening if you say the holocaust is auschwitz then you can say well i didn't know about auschwitz therefore i didn't know about the holocaust right which is the german myth that continues to this day the question is falsely phrased as did they know about auschwitz or not that's not the right question they might or might not know about auschwitz but they certainly knew about the holocaust and if you know what the holocaust was where it started how it started then this question resolves itself auschwitz is also very convenient for the soviets if the holocaust is auschwitz and auschwitz is the holocaust then you can avoid such problems as the fact that the holocaust began on territories that the soviets occupied that a very large number in fact most of the perpetrators of the holocaust were soviet citizens that the germans were able to draw collaborators from soviet territory everywhere where they went everywhere right those are just basic facts that become immediately obvious when you look at the territory but they're not comfortable facts for soviet history or today for russian history so if you put that if you put the holocaust in auschwitz you're allowing yourself a very comfortable minimization the same goes for all of us for all humans insofar as we think of auschwitz as a kind of mechanized factory or we think of auschwitz as an endpoint of modernity it's not a real place in time where real humans that other did real things to other real humans it distances all of us right so if you look at history this way if you look at the territory in all of its population you find a holocaust that can't be minimized that's the first thing the second thing you find is that the holocaust killed more people than any other policy right now i can say that on the basis of my research because in my research all the other policies are present the standard view in the history of the holocaust i stress has always been that the germans killed fewer people than the soviets but the germans killed according to race only half of that is true the germans killed more people than the soviets the holocaust itself killed more people than all of the soviet killing policies put together but you can only say that if you put all the sofia policies together right which i've done and then the final point the third way is that the holocaust is in fact the only attempt to try to remove the large people from the face of the earth there i agree but in adding those two other elements i'm making it the strongest possible case i think for the unprecedented character of the holocaust so good history i think is better for us i think transnational history is better for us and i think the risk is worthwhile but this is not what the book is fundamentally about and here i'd like to return to a point that only very kindly made at the beginning it's important for us to be able to explain these policies it's important for us to have our own ways of interpreting it's important for us to be able to think through the methods and the taboos that dominate in our own time but it's also important to be able to write about history as human history it's important to know what the numbers are i try very hard to get them right but a big number a number like 14 million a number where i began any big number 6 million 3 million even 20 000 any big number is very difficult to grasp we have to be able when we read and we do history to think of 14 million as 14 million times one where 14 million means one over and over and over and over again and where that one is not just a generic arithmetic unit where that one is not a unit at all but where that one is a life in other words we have to be able to think about numbers in such a way that the difference between zero and one is an infinity um history is a humanity history is about that particular infinity history is about each life history is about life it's not about death and so in that spirit what i'd like to do at the very very end is return to where i began and give you the names of the three people i discussed at the beginning because of course these aren't just three stories each of the three people had a name just like there aren't just 14 million stories there are 14 million names the name of the ukrainian who dug his own grave was petroveldi the name of the pole who kept the diary was adam solsky and the name of the young jewish woman who left a note for her father her mother on the wall of the synagogue was dobshikagan thank you very much right thank you very much turns a powerful very sophisticated lecture certainly made a great impression on me and i'm sure on everyone in this room we have um time for a few questions at the end i wanted to start off by asking you one about war and the impact of war on these two sides from the soviet and on the german side because you made a point which you make even more forceful in the book it's very sophisticated point that on the soviet side the advent of war if not put an end to the killing reduced the numbers very very dramatically well on the german side as we all know this is what opened the flood gates for various projects and first and foremost of course for the mass uh extermination of european jury so i wonder if you could take you a little bit further on that parallel because a parallel indeed it is although inverted is there something with regard to the ideologies in themselves that lead to this result i mean does this go beyond contingencies of war does it go beyond the political calculus that are made at that particular moment is there something with these two projects that point in the direction of how they behave when warfare comes yes i think that's very much the case in both in both examples you can point to ideology and then you can ask what happens when ideology goes goes wrong when an implementation doesn't bring what you expect the soviets are starting from a revolution as you know better than i they're starting from a revolution which is not the revolution they expected the revolution the soviets expect is a world revolution or at least the european revolution their revolution in 1917 is supposed to set off um the spark in the proverbial powder keg is supposed to set off a european revolution that doesn't happen um the soviets are left with their own revolution and then they have a kind of problem to solve which lenin's successors heirs spend the 1920s discussing if the germans and the english if those working classes aren't going to rush to aid us in our development towards socialism how are we going to aid ourselves towards socialism and the answer that stalin comes up with or the way that stalin in an unguarded moment talks about his answer is internal colonialism right so stalin says unlike the british unlike the french we don't have vast world empires which we can exploit so we have no choice but exploit ourselves now this comes straight from the ideology because the ideology says there is a path of history you go from feudalism to capitalism to socialism capital feudalism looks a certain way capitalism is a certain way socialism a certain way we have no choice but to get to something that looks like capitalism in order to get to socialism how do we do it and so the answer is internal colonization collectivization what does that mean it means that in practice the class war is an internal war right collectivization is defined explicitly as a war against the peasants or a war against the kulaks that word war in the 1930s it's not used with the germans stalin is always hopeful that he's going to find peace with the germans um it's not used against the germans until you know until summer of 1941 but it's used against the peasants all the time so there is a kind of war which is going on but it's internal and then when that fails it leads it leads to the terror whereas if you start from hitler's ideological priors if you start from hitler's fundamental beginning point you see the world as a as a how does he put it a finite space uh over which races compete there's only so much territory territory matters because it's fertile uh we all belong to races what races do is they compete for this limited supply of territory for what he calls what he calls lebensraum so naturally the the superior races um need to have more territory than the inferior races what germany is going to do is germany is going to expand this its natural reach by by conquering the east now that comes from ideology because the the idea is that germans are artif have been artificially compressed chiefly by the jews a bit by bad luck into this little patch of territory when in fact they should by virtue of their strength which is axiomatic their superiority which was axiomatic they should have much much more territory then there's a practical issue right because you can't just and hitler understands this you can't just come to power in 1933 and declare a race war you have to prepare which they do i mean the all of these things which i just briefly mentioned um maintaining the ss from the 20s into the 30s using the ss to penetrate the police forces creating hybrid organizations which are half state half racial which involve police but which are mainly about carrying out terror abroad building up the vermont to these improbable dimensions all of this is preparation for this racial campaign which is going to be in the future so yeah i mean this difference killing at home calling abroad arises from different ideologies as applied to the same point in history other questions i'll take it i'll take a couple of them let me start with the gentleman back there wait for the microphone please be brief because we don't have all that much time for discussion at the end here now so take two together you there and someone upstairs yes the gentleman over there start with youtube please can i can i suggest that you also need to extend this notion of the bloodlands back in time and to the future because there's a similar conflict in the final stages of the first world war and during the russian civil war in exactly the same area there's conflict between the poles and the russians in that area that area is that's where poland is destroyed in the 18th century it's where the new states after versailles are created it's also now where the european union and mr putin are competing for the same territory it hasn't finished thank you upstairs yes please okay uh in your remarks you said that both nazi germany and the soviet union were driven by an economic imperative which meant they focused on the ukraine i think i understand why it was that nazi germany was focused on the ukraine but i can't really uh fully understand how it was that the ukraine was essential for the modernization of the soviet union could you explain a bit more about that thanks take those to tim yeah so the the first question is about the the origins and the heritage of this this territory that i call the bloodlands it's it's it's a very good point and it's one that i try to make in the first chapter of the book that there are certain precedents in the 19th century and in the great war um it's quite right that this territory since the partitions of poland from 1772 to 1795 which you mentioned um all the way through to the 20th century is never governed by a coherent state unit right and that seems to be rather important there was never the poland was not a centralized state in the modern sense so you could push the point back even further into the past if you wanted to there was no coherent state um and the second thing which in a way predates all of this and which is so to speak objective is that there is the myth in the reality of ukraine as a breadbasket i'm foreshadowing a bit my answer to the second question um that is something which is known about by everyone who's interested in this part of the world forever we don't think about it quite so much today although perhaps we should uh because of global warming i mean ukraine if you look at the charts of grain exports ukraine although it looks like a mess in every other respect you know it's us canada brazil and then who's next not russia ukraine it's quite extraordinary in any event there are these precedents and i think an important one probably the most important one uh is is the uh the heritage of german colonialism in the great war so the germans have this idea which they actually carry out of creating a chain of of puppet states the baltic states belarus ukraine they they do that i mean the the bolshevik revolution this historic this world historical event that's a german provocation i mean they send this guy you know ulyanov whom nobody has heard in a train and all of a sudden there's this revolution that was a german idea right i mean zimmerman had a couple of ideas one of them was to get the mexicans to fight the americans i'm talking about the german foreign minister another was to get russian immigrants to start a revolution one of those two both of those ideas were equally crazy and one of them worked and that was the idea to the russian revolution as a result of the russian revolution the germans were able to move very quickly very deep into eastern europe they were able to sign peace treaties with the new russian state as well as with independent or quasi-independent ukrainian belarusian baltic states and by 1918 they've won the war in the east they've won the war in the east um and and the journey you know which is one reason why the the end of the war is so confusing for germans they never lost in the east they won they won all those soldiers marching back or marching back from from victory as far as they know you know they don't know about the defeat in france so um but the point is that there was a german empire in the east which existed and which didn't last long enough to fail it only lasted for a few months the germans had this idea that they were going to get millions and millions and millions of tons of grain from ukraine that didn't actually work in 1918 because of political instability communist sabotage nationalist and anarchist bandits it's people with a general fetish for destroying the rail lines you know et cetera et cetera et cetera it didn't work um uh but it but but hitler and others could think that it could work and then what happens in the second war is sort of strikingly similar to what happens in the first war but the precedent of an of an empire in the east is very important so i take your point there as to the bloodlines continuing today i mean a lot a lot of things have changed um but a couple of things have remained the same one or her renewed importance one of them already mentioned which is that with whatever you want to call it um climate change uh major powers in the world are much more concerned with food supply than they were 20 years ago so china for example just tried to buy nine percent of all the arable soil in ukraine that's a pretty big figure nine percent i say tried to because trying to buy anything in ukraine even if you're china is tough um which is why incidentally in the in the recent troubles in ukraine you know when when um when yanukovych goes to china the what do the chinese tell them make a deal with russia no they say make a deal with the eu because if ukraine makes a deal with the eu then maybe there's the rule of law in ukraine and then maybe the chinese can buy up all the land um but but no that's that actually happened um uh but to but just to make a little footnote on your point about how this contest continues here's what i find interesting the european union has enlarged to post-soviet territory in the baltic states but where the european union has not reached is in the so into soviet territory as of the founding of the soviet union right so all of the territories which were subject to these policies that i described today these policies of the 1930s the collectivization of the first five-year plan the great terror not an inch of that territory has been admitted to the european union that is a real line not the soviet border of 45 but that's that that that soviet territory which was subject to these policies of the 1930s so far that line has not been crossed right ukraine would be the first if it were to happen but so far it hasn't been crossed and that confirms to me not so much that there's a simple continuity but that what happened in the 1930s remains very weighty on so on the soviet model it's not it's not very it's not very complicated the the the in moscow they understood the same things we understand um volga russia and ukraine are the most fertile territories in order to modernize you have to be able to extract surplus and they think they can get the biggest surplus from ukraine their failure to get a surplus from ukraine is what leads to the disaster that follows we have two more questions maybe i should start upstairs this time there's another one yes right at the front over there young lady right at the brothers refund please um thank you um about um ukraine going to china in china telling no way get a deal with the eu i'm a bit confused because i was i got a sense that when yanukovych went to china well actually because imf was not giving well the money on their condition so it was the easiest way to get the money that would be china if not russia so as far as i understood is that actually china didn't want to um compromise russia which is a big regional ally i don't know if how how do you know that it is the eu uh that china would prefer ukraine today slightly on the side of the talk but they understand where the question is coming from okay okay you may answer only in a little bit tim um anyone down here yeah right at the end yes please hi i'd just like your thoughts on um the totalitarian paradigm popularized in the 1950s um as a result i mean based on your book and uh how does is it would you consider it defunct now and especially in light of comparative history and transnational history this is the danger of trying to be interesting in q a somebody asked a question you say something interesting off the topic and then you get questions about your answers instead of about the talk itself i actually can't tell you how i know that but i'm pretty sure it is the case uh yeah we're not gonna make this interesting or a methodology no i mean as arno can tell you the chinese the chinese are much much more sophisticated in general than we credit them for being um the larger point though that i would stress if we can retain something from this discussion is the interest in ukrainian soil i mean five ten years ago if i had said you know the fertile the fertile ukrainian bread basket everybody would have laughed now only about half the audience laughs because we're moving into a different historical moment whether we realize or not most of our leaders realize this and there are very intense calculations being made over what parts of the planet need to be controlled which is something you know totally normal for western history up until the green revolution of the 1950s and 60s and we are all children all of us really i mean even those who were born before the 50s and 60s we're all children of this green revolution where children of irrigation fertilization hybridization these things that make us who we are that make food a non-issue in our lives that's that's the big that's the big world historical change between our history our experience in the history that i'm trying to talk about that's and that's the thing which because we have no experience with it when it comes back we're going to say oh this is new this never happened before how can we possibly deal with this when in fact food scarcity is the main and the distribution of hunger is the mainstream of you know western history that's the thing which i would like to sort of retain from this conversation about you know china and the eu and russia however that might be we're moving back i think into a world which is more like this world um than we would than we would like to think on totalitarianism um i mean if you've read the book you know that it's a i mean in some measure it's a kind of you know bittersweet love letter to hannah ahren i mean i am i am i'm a tremendous admirer of hannah arendt um she repays rereading um over and over again um she knew lots of things at the time which people i mean the time if she wrote origins 1948 1947 she knew lots of things at the time that people have subsequently managed to forget for example the polish terror she makes multiple references to the polish action of the great terror um which in the meantime she knew about it in 1948 and then it was forgotten for 60 years right rather but somehow orange knew about it um she makes repeated and confident references to the famine in ukraine of 1933 which she refers to as the beginning the history of alienation and i think quite correctly i mean there are a few things that are more alienating than being put in a position where you either have to you either have to um eat your neighbor or not i mean there are a few things which are more dramatic in human relationships than that i think she was absolutely right about that so i'm an admirer of honor and i think there are some things in the in the analysis which are certainly right i mean i think her her her her unemotional indifference to taboo is certainly very important her focus in that book and also in in in in contemporary works on the relationship with the individual in the state is very important her understanding that individual rights is a hollow concept without a relationship to the state i think is very more important than even she realized for the history of the holocaust because basically everybody who's killed in the holocaust is first stripped of their relationship to a state the main way that that's achieved as i try to stress in the talk is not by a kind of slow step-by-step german way nuremberg laws and so on the main way that's achieved is by actually destroying the state that's the way you create stateless people and stateless jews wholesale you get rid of the state and then when that's done the jews in general are killed so there are parts of the analysis which i think are are extremely important i think her general idea on the part which people remember less about imperialism is certainly worth contemplating somehow hitler was able to think his way into something um which many people in europe and america find so alien is difficult for them to contemplate i mean even including racists he was able to think his way into a position of seeing east europeans as being like africans right um just how that happened you know as a matter of much dispute but surely orient is right that it had something to do with the european experience in africa in the late 19th century and early 20th century um that's a part of the analysis which i think is certainly worth considering and thinking about the totalitarianism thesis in and of itself i have a couple of problems with the the first problem is that if it were true then the way that killing would would proceed would be from the center outwards right in a totalitarian system you'd expect the killing to start in the in the capital in the metropolitan areas and then preceding the peripheries in fact the opposite is the case empirically the the killing in the soviet union is on the soviet periphery the western part of which is is my subject the german killing is beyond germany um almost all of it until the very very end i mean the last weeks of the war there's some killing inside germany itself um there's the handicapped of course which is significant but for the most part the killing is beyond it's an imperial no man's land that's not what you would expect if her theory were right and the the second thing um which the second major disagreement i have is with the process you know it's with her whole phenomenological understanding of alienation she believes that the way that the killing proceeds is that you and i are first alienated from society in general we are concentrated metaphorically and then really in places like camps and then we are exterminated then we were eliminated in fact um and then she goes so far as to say very you know overstated hana aren't type things like the people in the camps were dead even before they were killed now we know that that you know that that statement falsifies the whole claim because people survive the camps they write memoirs about the camps and that's how we know about the camps right um the camps may have changed them in certain fundamental ways but they were still alive they were still human in fact most the killing happens without concentration um most most of the killing happens without people being concentrated first so that whole sequence the alienation the concentration elimination which dominates the discussion it's in our end and it's also in ral hillberg that whole sequence turns out not to be correct that's my that's my second major disagreement but i would i would close just by by just by emphasizing my respect for her i don't think we would be where we are um in these you know insofar as we try to speak theoretically and generally about these issues without without hana tim will be signing uh copies of his book up here uh after the event ends the book is for sale outside and you can pick up i i copy there and then bring it back in here to get it signed uh the the last lecture in this series is is coming up they've already announced uh the topic on on the holocaust there are also quite a number of other discussions seminars talks that are going on on issues that deal both with contemporary and historical international affairs directed by llc ideas i would strongly encourage you to look at the website and see what is coming up there among them i discussion about power shifts and the rise of china which some of you would be interested in but for now it remains for me to thank you again tim for a an extremely powerful lecture that will limit us for a very long time to come even after this event is over thank you very much

Channel: LSE

Views: 140,437

Keywords: LSE, London School Of Economics (Organization), IDEAS, Mass Murder (Crime Type)

Id: fXrqGlgufCA

Length: 92min 23sec (5543 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 22 2014