When a Comparison Is Not a Comparison — Or Is It?

Timothy Snyder’s study of Bloodlands, as the lands themselves, is riddled with puzzles and paradoxes. It is a work that is easy to read but also misread. Facility with Einstein’s concept of “relativity of simultaneity”—rather than with that of Ockham’s razor, may help.

The most surprising thing about the study is the effusive praise that many reviewers, even historians, have lavished on it. I agree it is an important book, yet I’m not sure that the praise has been for the right reason. After adding up the minuses and subtracting its merits, it is more important that the book’s author is a professor at Yale than that his name is Timothy Snyder. The title is eye-catching and the writing is good. But it is not a book of either high scholarship or a major contribution to our knowledge. Snyder breaks no new ground by telling us that there was an exceptionally blood-soaked patch of land in Eastern Europe or that without the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact we would not have had the war and the Holocaust. The peoples of Eastern Europe, in spite of their captivity, have known it for fifty years. From this aspect the best that one can say about the book is that the author is a superb popularizer of monographic and secondary literature. He has exceptional skill of milking published literature and playing it back as if it is original. Most historians (and not only they) of Europe, Germany, the Holocaust, Eastern Europe, and Russia/USSR are familiar with lot, if not of all, of the books that Snyder cites.

Some reviewers have presented the book as a study of the Holocaust, yet the Holocaust parts are the weakest, the most derivative, of the book. The author displays much deeper knowledge when discussing Hitler and Stalin, their criminal minds and plots. His discussion of the Holocaust in the Baltics is thin to threadbare. The total space that Snyder devotes to the area, where arguably the Holocaust began, would not exceed two pages. In explicating the patterns of the Holocaust in this important territory, the author uses no recent primary scholarship, certainly he cites none. To explain the Holocaust in Latvia, the only work that the author notes is the one by Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein1. The author shows no awareness that the book is three removes from being a primary study and in some sinuous particulars it is still a book of the old regime.2

It is the kind of a book in which the argument has a higher value than facts. Yet it seems important to question the basis for the following sentence on page 393 that a friend of mine pointed out: "…independent Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and eastern Poland...the number of people killed either by the state or in civil strife in the 1930s was no more than a few thousand in all of the countries taken together." Not knowing about Poland, vouching for the Baltic countries, during the 1930s there were no political victims.

However, there is a flip side that makes the book a healing, even perhaps a therapeutic one. Especially, it is curative for that part of Europe, Snyder’s Bloodlands, that has not fully woken from the sleep and in part are still addicted to the Murti-Bing pill that the empire of the East had imposed on themselves and the Bloodlands. While I’m minimizing the book’s scholarly contribution, I want to maximize its polemical significance in contemporary discourse about the war and the Holocaust, the evil that was Hitler and Stalin. I am sure the author wanted to write a polemical book; that it has also come out to be a healing one may be an unintended consequence. By intention or contrariwise, Snyder has floundered upon some truths that are pleasing to the people of the Bloodlands. It is especially gratifying because the author of the book is a professor of Yale University, an abode of scholars that frequently have finessed the Bloodlands for some “higher” stake. When the war ended, unlike the lands of the West, peace did not arrived to the Bloodlands, but rather a new wave of victimization began. Not infrequently in abstentia in “public squares” of the West, USA not excluding, hand cuffed and gagged, the people of the lands were deemed to be worse than the Nazis, the “real” criminals of Europe.

To the folks of the Bloodlands the basic conclusions of study are no news, but it is nice for them to hear the author with Solzhenitsyn’s intensity assert that Stalin was a criminal: gave Hitler permission to attack and attacked himself the countries of the East, and along with the Nazis, victimized, unarmed and peace loving populations. If there is a novelty in Snyder’s work it is unequivocally seeing Stalin as a significant perpetrator of the Holocaust, asserting that without Stalin there could not have been a Holocaust.

I wonder about the reviewers who have deemed Snyder’s work courageous, as if professors at Yale need courage to speak their mind. By praising Snyder are the reviewers saying that no other elite authors have dared to speak the truth? I venture to think it is in his seemingly unrelenting comparison of Stalin with Hitler that they find Snyder worthy of praise! since, in Germany it is the “left”, and in Israel the “right” that consider a comparison of Stalin with Hitler a betrayal. Snyder already has and will continue to learn that that the comparison is a sticky wicket.

About the Stalin/Hitler conundrum, one needs to note that while Churchill and French intellectuals used it during the Cold War, it was not an issue, but it began to arise after the Soviet transformation when the so called “nationalists” began to bundle the two dictators. It is a truism that Stalin is not essentially like Hitler, but it is not likenesses that elicit comparisons, but similarities. If we don’t extract similarities and differences between frogs and apples, oranges and basketballs, we have surrendered an important principle of scientific inquiry and historical truth-finding. There is little that adversaries can do about limiting speech. One can call somebody a fascist but can’t stop one from saying that my smart brother was killed by Stalin and the dumb one by Hitler.

So far Snyder has played the issue as softly as possible:

“I try to reckon with the crimes that both regimes committed in the lands between Berlin and Moscow, where 14 million people, including more than 5 million Jews, were killed in the 12 years.”

In effect saying:

“I make no comparisons: only the facts, ma’am.”

Anne Applebaum, a sympathetic reviewer of Snyder’s work explicated the problem more fully, thus:

“…his intention is not to compare the two dictators or their systems, but rather, to show that the two systems committed the same kinds of crimes at the same times and in the same places, that they aided and abetted one another, and above all that their interaction with one another led to more mass killing than either might have carried out alone.” 3

What is to be made out of Snyder’s book? Did he or did he not compare Stalin with Hitler? By what logic can we say that Hitler is beyond comparison? Who has committed an error if a blind reader sees a comparison where an author did not? Speaking of sticky wickets, isn’t a refusal to make a comparison a comparison?

What is the power of this taboo that one dares not name? Has a Sphinx beleaguered the land and do we need an impetuous king to solve an obvious puzzle and get us in yet deeper muck?

Snyder’s book, for whatever light it has brought to us, also marks the misunderstandings that occasionally erupts between the Bloodlands and the West. It needs to be understood that although the laceration originated in history and the misuse of language had much to do with it, the solution may not be found in language or history, although words need to be watched and facts respected.

Andrew Ezergailis, retired Prof. of History
Author of The Holocaust in Latvia