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The form: Bloodlands as European history
Not long ago I was discussing before a theatre audience in Philadelphia a performance of 'Our Class', Tadeusz Slobodzianski's remarkable theatrical reinterpretation of Jan Gross's pioneering book Neighbors. It helped so very much that the discussion took place after rather than before the performance! It is a great honour to find my book at the centre of this discussion by colleagues, but it would be great vanity on my part to expect that every reader of this exchange will have first read my book. And yet without some general sense of the argument and substance of Bloodlands, I can hardly explain why the four responses are so different each from the other, what underlying concerns unite them, and how they might be answered. The book is a study of all German and Soviet mass killing policies in the lands between the Black and Baltic Seas from south to north and from Smolensk to Poznan from east to west. It begins from the observation that fourteen million non-combatants were deliberately killed in this zone between 1933 and 1945, when both Stalin and Hitler were in power. The figure is very high in its own right, and represents the vast majority of Soviet and German killing. The territory can be defined in terms of the number of murdered, or as the place where the Holocaust was perpetrated, or as the zone touched by both German and Soviet power: all three definitions generate the same map of the bloodlands.
The book includes what I hope to be an accessible theoretical account of mass killing. It took five forms. First, Stalin undertook modernisation by way of the self-colonisation of his Soviet Union, which involved a deliberate starvation campaign in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. Then the Soviets effected a retreat into terror. In the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938, the Soviet leadership identified peasants, the victims of collectivisation, as the primary threat to Soviet power. In 1939, the Soviets and the Germans invaded Poland together, and carried out a policy of de-Enlightenment. After the Germans broke the alliance and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the two enemies killed civilians in a...