The Origins of Mass Killing: the bloodlands hypothesis

Good evening everyone, my name is Anne Westard. I'm going to chair today's lecture by Professor Timothy Snyder, a Filipino professor of history and international affairs here in Tennessee, a very well-known writer and historian, and let me tell you. This again, Tim, it's a real pleasure for us to have you here as Professor Philip Roman for this year. You could say that this is the conference that many people have been waiting for. Tim opened last semester with two fantastic lectures. In much of the work he's doing now at this conference, he'll be looking at, at least in part, some of the main points he made in a book that came out three years ago called Bloodlands.

The title of today's lecture is The Origins. The

hypothesis

of Mars

killing

the Bloodlands and this is a set of topics that Tim has worked on throughout his career and ended up in a book that was much discussed. It is one of the key works of history that has appeared over the last decade. in terms of how widely it has been discussed not only among experts in the field but in a much broader sense and the reason is that it deals with a set of topics that are truly important not only for the era it covers but for our understanding of the entire The international history of the 20th century, the starting point is that in the mid-20th century there were two European state projects, Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, which between them managed to kill at least 12 million civilians in peacetime. and in the war and the term coined in the title of the book Bloodlands deals with this thesis, summarizes this thesis the lineages are the extension of territory from the Baltic to the Black Sea where the most murderous regimes in Europe did the most murderous work the lineages were caught between two terrible projects based on Hitler's ideas of racial supremacy and eastern expansion and, on the other hand, the Stalinist desire to remake society on a large scale according to the communist model and this in both cases meant starving to death by shooting. and, in the German case, gassing those who didn't fit in.

For me, in those projects, this book and the thesis that Tim is going to discuss today are not about idle comparisons. It is certainly not about measuring degrees of evil. To me, we can't do that. Tim's book is the best kind of story I know. What tells the story of the voiceless and the forgotten, those people who were victims of these two projects, is a foreign historian some of the most important things he can deal with in trying to understand a set of human catastrophes not only in terms of how they can be explained but hopefully also what they can teach us to avoid similar cataclysms in the future, so without it it is with great pleasure that I present to you his third lecture in this series, so in the spring of 1933 a man ukrainian dug his own grave under what circumstances do you dig your own grave why would you dig your own grave in some sense the calculation is clear in early 1933 when this man took a shovel and started working the land still lasts a couple of million people already He had starved to death in his homeland in Soviet Ukraine as a result of the deliberate famine campaign organized from Moscow.

That's part of the answer. I think the other part of the answer has to do with human dignity. Will you see if you were one of those? thousands of tens of thousands hundreds of billions of people who died of starvation in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 or 1933 your body would be found in a roadside field it would be picked up thrown into the back of a horse-drawn cart where it would be being buried along with dozens, maybe hundreds of other people gathered that day in a place where, if any of your family survived, they wouldn't be able to find you, so I think the other reason this man dug his own grave had to do With a sense of his own dignity, a feeling that he would like to be found later, just as he was in April 1940, a Polish officer was keeping a diary, something very typical for the time and place where most of the Polish officer corps were in reserve. officers in the 1920s and 1930s in independent Poland, everyone with a higher education or all men with a higher education were reserve officers and in wartime, the war started, of course, in 1939, everyone was called up, so in 1940, in what was still, of course, an era of letters this Polish officer kept a diary in the last entry of his diary the penultimate entry of his diary he writes they asked me for my wedding ring which i and then three dot three three dot fades into ellipsis what's going on there he, like thousands of other Polish officers at that time and place, had been taken prisoner by the Red Army and then taken to special concentration camps by the state police Soviet secret ence veda, he had the feeling that when he was interrogated and he was right about that.

When they questioned him, they asked him where his wedding ring was. He had the feeling that he was about to be executed. He was right, so he wanted to hide the wedding ring from him. He wanted to make sure his executioners didn't find him. Find it, you must have had that thought while writing that sentence, if I record what I did with my wedding ring, they might find it, so it goes off and that's the last we know about the wedding ring, but we don't. last we know. of him because his diary was later found in September 1942 in the town of Kovalev in what is now western Ukraine in what at that time was part of German-occupied southeastern Poland.

A young woman left a message for her mother. It was an unusual kind of message. in september 1942, when in caldwell the remains of the jewish community had been forced together inside the synagogue closed by a bar from the outside and in september 1942 events had advanced enough for everyone, all the jews, all The others knew what was going to happen next. By then, more than 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 were at hand shards of pottery, pieces of stone glass, occasionally a pen?

People left messages in Polish Yiddish Hebrew. on the walls of the synagogue this girl who was there with two of her sisters wrote to her mother we are very sorry that you cannot be with us seems like a strange feeling, isn't it given the circumstances? but it reveals something very human in fact something very normal about the holocaust about the events that we now call holocaust people did not want to be alone they wanted to be with their families the message ends we kiss you again and again the tragedy of this topic is that these are three of 14 million stories over the course of 12 years at a given time and place, something like 14 million children, women and men, were deliberately murdered as a matter of policy, either by Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union .

I would emphasize that all of these murders happened in a place in a place that we can define between the Baltic Sea to the north and the Black Sea to the south between Berlin in the west Moscow to the east approximately the present-day Baltic states Belarus Ukraine much of present-day Poland in this place 14 million people were deliberately murdered as a matter of policy now this place is not a state and what I am going to describe to you is not the history of a state this place is not a carefully demarcated history of the homeland of a nation and What I What I am going to describe to you is not the history of a nation or even an empire, it is an area that is defined above all or I am defining it as the area where so many people were murdered in a short period of time there.

There is no other area like this in all of European history. Now the area is special for a couple of reasons. I have already emphasized one of them, the one I am using as a definition. This is where so many people died. 14 million. a very large number that alone should catch our attention, but it is also interesting in a couple of other ways: this is also precisely the area where both Soviet power and Nazi power were present in the 1930s and 1940s. Ok worth emphasizing. It pays to be 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 lands touched by power soviet were never touched by the germans also much of the german empire in the second world war the netherlands france belgium most of germany and so on was never touched by the soviet power if you consider, in other words, the zone of german power and Soviet power together.

We're looking at an area that literally stretches across the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, from Normandy to Vladivostok, most of the land area of ​​the largest land

mass

on the planet, but the area where these two regimes coincided is much smaller and yet it is in this area where they agreed that the vast majority of the

mass

acres took place in this entire Eurasian space from France to Siberia the Germans and the Soviets deliberately killed about 17 million people of those 17 million 14 millions were killed in this relatively compact area this seems I'm also interested in the third way of thinking about this space, in fact the third way of defining this space and the interesting thing is that the three definitions overlap almost perfectly if you draw them on a map .

The third definition is this is where the holocaust the holocaust took place here and nowhere else this is where the German policy of murdering the Jews of Europe took place the tremendous majority of the Jews who were murdered in the holocaust lived their entire lives in this area and those who were not brought here to die that also seems to me to be worthy of interest, these three facts together seem to be worthy of interest and I will consider why these connections might be interesting as we move forward now, let's start with a question, a question you know as historians would. tell me about historiography if everything I have told you so far is true and in fact everything I have told you so far is just a matter of looking at maps and doing calculations everything I have said so far is just arithmetic and geography There is nothing remotely controversial about it, if everything I have said so far is true, then we have before us the worst man-made catastrophe, at least in European history, perhaps in history as such, and yet we do not see this as a historic event.

We don't see this as a historical moment. We don't see this as a theme of history. Why not? How could that be? How could we miss it? How could we not notice it? How could we look to one side or a scarcity or a path? I think the basic part of the answer is that we have stories that touch on these events, but they are separate stories, so we have national stories, we have a Polish national story, for example, which would certainly bring us the Katine Forest tragedy. to what I alluded to before, where the polish officers were executed, we certainly have stories of the soviet union that include aspects of soviet terror, we certainly have stories of the holocaust, the problem is that these three stories oppose each other in various ways now, yes I have you thinking about it, I'm sure many of you have read many books from one, two or three of these fields.

Isn't it strange, when we reflect on it, that the people writing about these events don't mention the events we are describing happened in exactly the same place as the other events. How many books on Holocaust Zero make it clear that the area where the Holocaust occurred is the same area where most Soviet murders occurred? How many explanations or descriptions of the national tragedy can be given? The Ukrainians, the Poles or the Lithuanians make it clear that these national tragedies also occurred where the holocaust occurred and so on, very very few, of course, is the answer, so history itself, as we have it, as we have divided, as we are used to reading, takes these events separate from each other so that we do not notice that they happen in the same place, we have to not notice the place at all, which is what we do, but, of course, the The problem is deeper than this, it's not just a question of parallel lines, it's not just a question of national history going this way soviet history here history the holocaust here towards infinity is worse than that you can't put 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 have had occasion to learn over the years, national stories are opposed to each other, a Ukrainian national story of victimhood and a national story Polish victimhood cannot be integrated simply because very often the Ukrainian villains are are the heroes um the Iranian villains in a Polish story are the Ukrainian heroes and the Ukrainian story and so on um the same goes for Soviet history and theGerman history is very difficult to put the two together and I think the reason for this is ultimately deeply political.

Since the French Revolution, we have had this habit of mind that I don't expect you to overcome this afternoon, but I will suggest this as a time to start. We have a mental habit. To think about politics in terms of right and left we use a kind of analogy of geometry: this is the left and this is the right and once we think geometrically it is easy for us to believe that these two things never come into contact with each other. others the Soviets are on the left the Germans the Nazis are on the right once we have organized 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 lead them.

They locate on a mental map, then we don't have to think about their presence on a real map, which is what I propose we do well, so how could we do something like this? How could we try to correct these types of problems? As? Could we construct a historical map that truly encompasses politics, encompasses suffering, and encompasses everyone? murder let me start negatively with the things that I try to avoid the standard secular metaphysics that dominates these discussions that shape these discussions. What do I mean when metaphysics is a big word? What do I mean by metaphysics?

I want to say three things in particular, the first thing I want to say is that I try very hard to avoid exceptionalism, which is more difficult than it seems. Much of history is based on the idea that it is legitimate to write only about the Irish or only about the English or only about the polls or only about the Jews or mainly about the Irish mainly about the English mainly about the polls mainly about the Jews treat the story of their emotional state treat the story of their rise and fall as the correct story if you think about the history books you've probably read that many of them take that form.

Um, on the contrary, I'm trying very hard, as Arnie has already emphasized, to start from the assumption that we are all human beings and that everyone who lived in this territory should be the object of equal methodological and moral interest on the part of the observer And from the chronicler, again, that must seem very simple to you, but it is not that simple. I do not believe in execution. The second thing I try to do is avoid dialectics, okay? think another difficult word another difficult problem what are these dialectics how could there be dialectics dialectics plays a very important function in the way these stories are told by allowing us not to see certain things a dialectic to begin with, the obvious case is the Soviet in the soviet dialectic history is something like this soviet policy killed hundreds of thousands maybe millions of people in the 1930s but that is the thesis here comes the antithesis but the red army liberated europe and won world war ii the reasoning If you can call it, it is that somehow all that suffering in the 1930s is justified or was even caused by the liberation of Europe.

Now you just have to think about that for a moment to see that it really doesn't make any sense for Stalin to purge the officer. The military corps in 1938 didn't actually help the red army win World War II, but there is a deeper problem than that, the deeper problem is that we are here in 2014, 12 years from now, in 2026, a lot of things will happen unknowable, whatever they are. Now I can't say that they are going to take on their meaning of the 19th from today, right, we can't relate periods, at least if we are historians and you don't know some kind of very special time traveling metaphysical dreamer, we can't. justifying things that are going to happen in 2026 based on what is happening now or vice versa, we wouldn't even think of doing that and yet we have no problem saying that 1945 makes 1933 okay.

I am starting from the position that 1945 makes I don't understand 1933: if we want to understand 1933 we have to study the factors, interests and emotions that were at play in 1933. The second type of dialectic that I try very hard to avoid is a German position right-wing associated uh with uh with the scholar ernst nolte his idea is that the two systems the nazi and the soviet were in some kind of fatal relationship with each other that each was the realization of the other that each learned from the other each taught the other to progress towards a certain common totalitarian destiny, I do not think this is correct, as I will describe later, the two systems interact, but they are different systems, the ways in which they interact is a specific empirical question that we cannot afford. to say that the Nazis did something because it was part of Soviet history or that the Soviets did something because it was part of Nazi history there are two different stories that overlap in some places and don't overlap in other places now this is me being the same boring Anglo-Saxon I'm right that is an empirical argument it is an empiricist argument the two systems are there but they do not have a fatal dialectical relationship we cannot we cannot replace historical research with a kind of back and forth dance The third dialectic, which is most popular today and you may recognize it in one way or another, is the idea that Eastern Europe is really complicated, right?

You are already recognizing it, it is very complicated, there are many people there that we do not we knew learn in our Western Civilization classes that started in Greece and somehow made their way through Italy, France, Germany, and Britain without ever touching Eastern Europe. There are a lot of people there with a story that seems to be very tangled and bloody and we'd rather not do it. to know, why don't we just say this dialectic that okay, the Germans and the Soviets were there, but the Nazis certainly did some bad things, but then the Soviets came and that canceled everything, why not? we just start from there, why don't we start again now with that view that the two systems cancel each other out and let's do political science instead of history or journalism or something like that view that different people laughed when I said politics ? science and journalism I realized that I assumed that political scientists laughed at political science and journalists laughed at journalists um but that view that the two cancel each other out um the icon of that is the notion of the red army liberating Auschwitz how many You've been forced to consider that stereotype of the Red Army liberating Auschwitz, right, that's the visual notion that the Red that the Soviets came in and actually undid the evil that the Germans had done now as an image doesn't make any sense. people who p the soldiers of the red army did not know what they were liberating the fact that they were liberating auschwitz did not stop them from trying to rape the survivors, for example, auschwitz itself became part of the german empire as a result of an agreement between the nazi germany and the soviet union if the red army had wanted to liberate auschwitz they should not have waited seven weeks at the vistula river while the last jews in the forest were deported to auschwitz to be gassed and so on and so on and so on and so on it makes no sense how image but it is 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 and put order, come on In fact, just start like this clean and everyone knows that this one plus one equals 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 it's going to be worse. that only one or the other one plus one is two another metaphysics that I am trying with all my might to avoid is that of holiness in particular this has to do with the holocaust there is 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 completely wrong if The Holocaust is not in history, it will not be in memory for long or in commemoration, furthermore, I think it is very important if we want to take seriously the Jews who die and the Jews who live, that we see them as real.

Human beings subject to the same forces and historical processes as everyone else. The next method that I follow here, again and again, will seem very simple when I say that I am undertaking a mass murder story of the phenomenon that we. What worries me is the deliberate mass murder of 14 million children, women and men, and that is what I am studying rather than, for example, studying the camps, which is a related but very different topic for most people who went to a Vietnamese, Soviet or German concentration camp also left. The camps were horrible institutions, but the camps were not the same as famine zones, they were not the same as shooting pits, and they were not the same as extermination facilities, which is what a place like Treblinka, for example, is. called camps are not even a prelude to

killing

the vast majority of people who were murdered never saw a camp the vast majority of Jews who were murdered never saw a camp so the story that focuses on the camps focuses on certain terrible institution, but in reality it is to prevent the vast majority of murders.

I'm concentrating on killing by any method: starvation which is the most important, then shoot, which is next and then gas, now this focus on the spot, which is the part of the method that Arna already emphasized, so I don't do it. I will emphasize again it allows us to see certain things it allows us to see the victims but it also allows us to see the regimes not only in Berlin and Moscow but in the place where they were most murderous it also gives us access to sources, not only to the sources of the regimes themselves, but to the sources of many people who are subject to their policies, from which we have a reward, okay?

If I focused on the place, if I focused on the territory, does that mean I'm going to go? Does insisting on some kind of territorial determinism mean that I'm going to argue that this murder somehow necessarily arose from where it occurred? Am I going to claim that there is some kind of fatal geopolitics in this region? In fact, it seems to me that if we want to take ideas seriously, and we're all interested in those 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 somewhere else.

In other words, if we want to understand how ideology can really lead to killing, we have to have a sense of territory because, of course, ideas alone don't march through history and kill well, ideas have to be supported by something. , so I try. What the book needs to do is tie together ideology in certain ways so that it can help us explain events. What do I mean? An obvious point that you all know is that ideology must be incorporated only by the organs of power, right-wing Marxism. it does not kill if so my first conference would have been a total bloodbath right-wing marxism some of you might have thought it was, in which case I asked for your discreet silence marxism has to be incorporated even marxism and power does not It kills automatically, obviously true, the red vein did not kill a soul, it lengthened many lives, it must be incorporated into unlimited institutions.

Likewise, antisemitism does not kill at least on a large scale on its own, it must be incorporated into a certain type of regime and even that regime the Nazi regime did not kill Jews without war a couple of hundred which is not very good without war the Nazi regime could not kill this question of place is also important for the still controversial and always controversial question of collaboration when we say that someone is a collaborator, we have to ask with what, because the only regime you can collaborate with is the one that governs the place where you live, so the question of place in the question of regime comes before the question of collaboration for almost everyone.

The second thing you notice when you analyze history in this way is the way in which ideology, of In fact, the surprising way ideology deals with time, 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 towards collectivization and terror these revolutions are in the past in the 1940s the revolution the soviet union is what there is that protecting the homeland from socialism has to be protected for the Nazis, curiously it is exactly the opposite, which is one of the reasons why I warn against the right and the left and all that for the Nazis the revolution is in the future it is in the futureeverything that happens between 1933 and I think it's fair to say that 1941 is preparation the Nazis are preparing and the SS are preparing a camp system they are preparing for a war that will allow them to achieve their objectives basically all the Nazi terror the episodes which I am going to talk about the episodes that will not happen as a result of a war taking place beyond the borders of pre-war Nazi Germany now the implications of this different idea The time periods are really important, interesting and surprising.

It means, for example, that the Soviet Union killed almost completely. When the Soviet Union was at peace, it killed fewer people, so to speak, it killed almost entirely on its own territory. It is true that it is a very vast territory. The Nazi system. on the contrary, almost entirely killed during the war and almost entirely killed beyond its own pre-war borders, right now the point of my book, of course, is that when I say within the union Soviet and when I say beyond the borders of Nazi Germany I mean a lot. the same place, of course, I mean a place that was touched by both ideologies, now for it to make sense again it has to include economic aspirations, we cannot make a firm distinction between economics and ideology as we would like to do right here, I will go back to the Marxist way and say that every successful economic ideology claims not to be an ideology, but all forms of economics and all forms of ideology have a kind of inherent connection, the soviets, without a doubt, have an ideology of class struggle, but a class ideology. the fight is meant to serve a hitler modernization project of course um uh and some of you are probably guilty of buying mineconf on kindle it's been a bestseller at kendall lately i'm just looking for expressions of guilt now for a minute um express it's a clear ideology of racial struggle, there is no doubt about it, but this racial struggle is supposed to take place mainly in vast colonies in Eastern Europe beyond Germany for the moment, where Germany is going to build some kind of amazing agrarian empire, so these are different ideologies, right, class struggle, racial struggle, there are even different points of view on what progress would mean from the Nazi point of view.

Progress means that we take our slightly decaying German industrial homeland in Central Europe and add to it, supplement it with a vast agrarian colony in Eastern Europe, thus achieving an imbalance of autarky from the Soviet point of view. We have a backward economy. We have a backward population. We are behind in all aspects, what we have to do is modernize, we have to become industrial, we have to become what Germany already is, so the ideologies are different, the visions of the future are opposite, but the interesting and Crucially, the territory overlaps. For both Stalin and Hitler—indeed, for the main ideologues of both regimes, not just the leaders—the crucial locus for both transformations was one country, and that country was Ukraine.

Ukraine was going to be the country that would allow both the Nazis and the Soviets to break. of what they saw as the false liberal capitalist version of history, how is that possible? This is the last thing I want to say about the idea about ideology, ideology, when you think about it this way, together with power, together with time, together with economics, ideology fixes a certain part of the territory fixes a certain part of the territory in world history what do I mean of course it is correct that the Nazis and Soviets thought globally of course it is correct that from their own point of view their ideologies were universal of course it is true, hitler imagined that there was a planetary domination of the Jews in that sense, he was thinking about the world all the time and of course it is true that stalin was thinking about a world revolution, of course it is 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 was also a planetary thinker, but in practice, when the ideology is intended to be implemented, the territory that comes first is Ukraine and the territory.

The first thing for 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. nazi Ukraine is the lebensraum Ukraine is that place that will allow the Germans to kill starve move settle and then become authentic break the rules the current rules of the economy become Antarctic become return to their own racial essence then you can have different ideologies, you can have different temporalities, different development plans 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 here, if you just follow this kind of summary In the argument about the relationship between ideology and place one can already anticipate what will happen between 1933 and 1945. 1933 is, of course, the year in which Hitler comes to power and Stalin finally consolidates power. 1945 is the end of a world war that in Europe was mainly In a German-Soviet war you can anticipate at least approximately what will happen in those 12 years.

If you know all this, you can guess, and you will be right, of course, that the two regimes will kill mainly in the lands between. I also assume that they will interact in the lands between, since they are both worried about them and you can eventually guess what will happen in 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 until now They can cooperate about the fate of independent Poland Independent Poland is the only sovereign state that lies directly between Moscow and Berlin It is the only important sovereign creation that is in the path of both ideologies, It is from these two notions of development, from these two visions of history and of Poland, that they can actually cooperate and, in 1939, the two become military allies and jointly invade the country.

You can also have a good I guess they can't agree on Ukraine. Ukraine is a territory that is crucial for both ideologies, for both visions of development, for both visions of the future, so Ukraine is the place for which they must fight and for which they fight against the German Soviets. The war, which is the essence of World War II, is primarily a war for control of Ukraine and therefore it is not surprising that between 1933 and 1945 more people died in Ukraine than in any other country in the world. It will be the most dangerous place. be between 1933 and 1945.

You can also imagine if you think a little more, what will be the most dangerous place during the second world war? Where is the most dangerous place in World War II? I'll give you a hint, it's not Paris that is the most dangerous place in World War II, it's Belarus because of the extreme right and that shouldn't be surprising, I mean, in Belarus something like half the population is relocated something like a quarter of the population dies in any other country. is even remotely close to that complete right, why is it that, for a very simple reason, belarus is on the invasion route, whether you go from berlin to moscow or from moscow back to berlin, belarus also turns out to be a good territory for partisan war, so between 1941 and 1945 during the Soviet German war Belarus is the most dangerous place to be the holocaust will happen there there partisan and anti-partisan campaigns will be carried out and Soviet prisoners of war will starve there in horrifying amounts, the last thing one would guess or start to ask or start to think is what does all this mean for the Jews and of course this is decisive for the Jews for the Holocaust to occur.

Very simple point: German power must extend to where the Jews live, where the Jews live mainly in this territory. In Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus and Western Russia, German power extends to this region not because Jews live there, it extends to this region because of a German colonial project meeting a Soviet colonial project, so For the Holocaust to occur, German power has to be where the Jews are. It's a very simple point, but it's worth emphasizing because when we think about the holocaust we think about german history and that's because holocaust historians write about german history and that's because they know german, but in fact, 98 of the Holocaust victims are right. didn't 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 like that, so the vast majority of holocaust victims didn't They have nothing to do with Germany, they are precisely from these lands, so any Holocaust story has to take you from Germany to these lands for the Holocaust to occur, there has to be that and there has to be Hitler's notion that the The biggest threat to the world for Germany and the superior races is Jewish control, you have to have both the ideology and the place, so for the Holocaust, at least what this type of argument provides is the place that this also suggests. three periods, so if we think about this history now during the 12 years that I have defined from 1933 to 1945, we can think of three periods, there is a period between 1933 and 1938 when the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, are at peace, the Soviets then carry out most of the deaths, approximately one million in episodes of terror, approximately three million from starvation, the German massacres in this period are essentially insignificant, numbering in the hundreds in 1938, just to mention the camps, since which are more familiar, there are around 20,000 people a day. a little less in the German camps, there are about a million people in the Soviet camps in 1938, the Soviets have killed something like a thousand times as many Jews on the 19th, not to mention anyone more Jews than Nazi Germany in 1938.

So in the first period we are dealing with a period in which the Soviets are the halls of the mass murderer park the second period 1939-1941 is the period of political compromise of the two regimes the period of military alliance when the two together divide Consequently, in Eastern Europe during this period perhaps this is what we should expect: the Germans catch up with the Soviets. The Soviets kill more slowly than in peacetime and the Germans increase very quickly, so they are both killing. scale of hundreds of thousands and 39 to 41. from 1941 to 1945, when nazi germany attacks the soviet union, almost all the killings are carried out by germans, the vast majority are carried out by germans in territories beyond children, in the same way as the The advance of the book is that I consider each of the episodes of mass killings that I have tried to suggest to them why mass killings in general might be expected, it should not surprise us how the different episodes can be related in time and place.

What I do in the book. is that I consider each policy individually, so it starts in 1933 with the famine in Soviet Ukraine, it starts in 1933 with Stalin's collectivization policy, the idea of ​​taking farmland away from individuals and groups and putting it under state control, how this policy led to deficits. instead of reward as expected and as the guilt for this and the hunger that resulted from this was deliberately distributed in some places rather than others, in particular, Stalin created the kind of story according to which Ukrainian nationalists, spies Poles and others in Ukraine were responsible. for the disaster there and that, as a result, the republic as a whole should be punished, so measures were carried out in Soviet Ukraine, such as sealing the borders, such as making it illegal for peasants to go to the cities and begging, like removing cattle, if you have any. connection with the farm, you know how important that is, that responded only to Ukraine, the so-called black zones were created, communities that were not allowed to trade with the rest of the Soviet Union, everyone died there, so approximately three million people at the end of 1933 were killed the second great policy the second great Soviet policy of the 1930s is the policy of great terror which is related to the disaster of collectivization after the disaster of collectivization the revolution in the soviet union no longer had confidence in the revolution the soviet union was afraid fearful the people could realize what a disaster this had been both inside and outside the soviet union the fundamental reason for the greatest action of the great terror the kulak akulak action was a prosperous peasant um was that the Japanese would recruit disaffected Soviet peasants from the Japanese right gulag andEast Asia is going to invade Siberia and bring with it Ukrainians, mainly deportees who are in Siberia, the Japanese, by the way, the way we are trying, this is not as far-fetched as it seems, but this is the fundamental reason for killing just over 300,000 human beings the second group of terrorist actions in 1937 and 1938 were the national actions of about a dozen Soviet minority nationalities, the very small minorities, if we take them all together, amount to about one and a half percent The population was subjected to campaigns of ethnic murder and ethnic deportation.

The largest of these was the Polish action in which some one hundred thousand Soviet citizens of Polish origin were killed and a larger number deported. The next chapter, if only chapter four is about this moment. If we come across this moment of the joint attack on Poland in 1939 and the joint decapitation of the Soviet educated classes, it is an interesting moment because Soviet policy and German policy are strikingly similar, the Soviets are much better at that than the Germans are at this. moment. They are much more efficient, they have much more experience, they keep much better records, but they both aim to destroy the Polish nation by eliminating its upper layers from the Nazi point of view, the upper layer is a racial accident that should never exist from the Nazi point of view.

Nazi. From the Soviet point of view, the upper layer is the bourgeoisie and the feudal oppressors, but in reality they are the same people. I mean, there are many cases where the Germans kill one brother and the Soviets kill another because their de facto analyzes are the same. This is the moment. In 1939 and 1940, when states were removed from the map of Europe, which is incredibly important, it is also the time when Jews are moved to ghettos. In the next chapter I try to consider German political economy. Well, now it may seem like at this point I'm just trying to help readers who are already fed up with mass murder find a way to sleep, but political economy is incredibly important, as I've already emphasized, political economy It's important because to understand what the Germans want to do, you have to know it. their ideological economy, you have to know that what they think is going to happen is that they are going to invade the Soviet Union, the Soviet state is going to collapse in two months, they just invaded in June 1941 and the expectation is not that they will all be in home for Christmas.

The expectation is that everyone will be home by the end of the summer. There are no winter clothes. That's one of the reasons why Stalin didn't believe the intelligence reports that the Germans were about to attack. He said that no one would invade the Soviet Union without winter equipment. True, no one should invade the Soviet Union without winter equipment. but the Germans did so and hoped to destroy the system within eight weeks then hoped that in the winter of 1941 the first winter of the war after a successful campaign and complete domination of the western Soviet Union would starve 30 million Soviet citizens.

They would starve while redirecting the generosity of Ukraine and southern Russia towards 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 was that they calculated that 30 million people would starve to death. When that was over, two major resettlement campaigns would begin, one of them to the east, this was called the general planus, over years and decades they would turn the Soviet Union into something like the American West, which was Hitler's favorite comparison and the other It was what they called the final solution, the notion that the Jews would be deported somewhere far to the east, probably Siberia.

Heydrich had a fantasy that the Jews should be put in the gulak, so that's what they thought. was going to happen, the only way to understand the real German crimes is to see the relationship between those plans, that kind of incredibly bloody ideological political economy, and what the forces that couldn't control, in short, managed to starve, actually found. some people, about four million, maybe a little more, mostly Soviet prisoners of war in starvation camps and in besieged Leningrad, where something like a million people starve, about three million starve in the soviet prisoner war and german prisoner of war camps for the soviets they starve some people but generally they are forced to retreat it is not practical to starve people when you need them to work for you and you need occupy them, but above all the Germans do not do it.

They destroy the Soviet system so that they go back, go back from a colonial vision and go back to something, go back to what I consider the decolonial mission, go back to the idea that the Jews are the greatest enemy, not just the enemy that prevents them from winning the war, which of course is the claim they make, but also the main enemy anyway, the enemy that structures the entire world and therefore the enemy that must be attacked, although it can be both the magician. from the original vision the colonial vision withdraws but a part of it the final solution intensifies and radically accelerates the final solution instead of being a deportation plan for after a victory it becomes a murder plan during the war itself. which brings me to the next four chapters of the book that deal with the holocaust, the holocaust, as I have stressed, happens entirely within the bloody lands and some of the things that happen with respect to other policies, other groups in time periods previous ones, it is very important to see them to have a chance. to understand how the holocaust could have occurred, for example, where and how the holocaust begins, that is, where and how the idea of ​​deportation becomes a practice of shooting people where they live, which is what the holocaust is by The way people are shot where they live, that's how it starts, that's where half the killing happens.

The gas chambers are a way to make things easier for the Germans, but if we understand how the Holocaust began and what people are capable of doing, we have to see the Holocaust as a shooting in the face. -shooting people face to face not far from where they live that's what it was that's what we have to explain the rest are technical modifications so where does the holocaust begin? It begins precisely in places where the Soviet Union has already been present. It begins precisely on the lands that the Soviet Union itself invaded in 1939 and 1940, and it begins precisely because of a combination of German intentions to eliminate the Jews and the German ability to recruit people through political lies about what they will get in return. so the holocaust begins in a zone of double occupation without that zone of double occupation it is not clear how the holocaust would have started if that is how it started and where it proceeds.

I mentioned before that 1939 1940 are the time of the destruction of states the room that is in fact another definition of the bloody lands where the state is destroyed the holocaust spreads eastward from the doubly occupied parts in the far east and the union soviet as the germans advance extends westward towards poland the germans have already destroyed the holocaust extends to places where the state has been destroyed, but no further if all the killings occur where the state has been destroyed, for what the previous destruction of the state is a fact that is fully recorded in national histories since the end of the Polish state is something that the polls want you to remember the end of the Lithuanian state is something that Lithuanians want you to remember, but to the Jews cared a lot more if you were a Jew living 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 or two. If you were a Jew living 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, then the things that happen in the bloody lands that are not, so to speak, directed at the Jews, are very important for what It happens later to the Jews. Thus, the book progresses through discussions of the Holocaust in Ukraine, Belarus and finally Poland, and closes with three chapters on the fate of Warsaw, on ethnic cleansing after the war and, finally, on Stalinist anti-Semitism, which It is a way to close the discussion about the interaction.

This is where I'd like to start closing my own comments. What is this book about? As Arnold has already emphasized, it is not a book that he compares. Although I spent a lot of time talking about comparison, it's not really what I find interesting. I think the reason I don't find it interesting is because it's not something we're really prepared for to be able to compare two things: apples and oranges, let's say you have to know what an apple and an orange are and you have to know that. An apple is one thing and an orange is another, it seems very simple, right, we don't know the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany 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 killed and why I think we are just the beginning of that, but above all we can't separate them to make a clear comparison. You have to be able to separate two things. to say that these things are at least analytically distinct I don't think that's really possible I think the two and this is where the book really moves the two interact at least on the issue of mass murder the two interact at least to the point where that you really cannot explain the actions of one without the presence of the other.

Now I am not claiming, as I said before, that they always interact. That would be absurd. I am not claiming that Hitler's decisions can always be explained by reference to some obscure policy of a Soviet bureaucrat in Rostov-on-Don or something like that, or on the contrary, I am not claiming that what Molotov does can always be explained in some way by something that someone does in Munich, not sometimes. They interact and sometimes they don't and it's an empirical question, for example, it's not really true that Hitler's anti-Semitism, his idea that all Jews were Bolsheviks and all Bolsheviks were Jews, had anything to do with experience, that It was an interesting axiom to the extent that Hitler had experience with the Soviet Union, he walked away from those ideas without ever saying that he was right, but when he actually compromised with the Soviet Union and killed its Jews, he began to say things like, you know, I think Stalin actually eliminated all of his Jewish advisors or you know, I think the Soviet Union is a Russian imperial state or Stalin is a beast but he is a beast of great stature when he actually gets involved with the Union.

Soviet completely changes its interpretation, so the interaction in this In reality, this case undermines at least a little the ideology that, unfortunately, was 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 in total, the great terror that kills about a million people, these are in a sense reactions to a feeling of threat, but in reality it is not a feeling of threat from Germany, what Stalin feared most was a Polish Japanese encirclement, the Japanese were much more important than the Germans in Salon's calculations. um, probably reasonably, so I was afraid of a Polish Japanese encirclement that may or may not include the Germans, that's what I feared, that's what, to the extent that terror can be justified as a result of some kind of interaction , it was an interaction with Tokyo. and Warsaw more than in interaction with Berlin, so you cannot take everything that happens on one side and blame the other, however, there are forms of interaction that are important, such as Soviet modernization and Nazi demodernization, which is a theoretical conversation. when he goes to nazi germany he establishes a four year plan to control the soviet union which in fact is an answer to the five year plan to modernize the soviet union literally an answer for the five year plan to build the cities the four years the plan plans to destroy those cities properly the five year plan strengthens industry the four year plan plans to get rid of that industry and restore farmland and so on the main interaction of course is the military alliance of 1939 very important interaction everything that follows the second world war derives from this right, without this we do not know how the second world war would begin or how it would continue and, of course, the German-Soviet war of 1941 is also an interaction, it is an interaction in which certain Soviets and the German crimes however are related to each other taking prisoners of war if it were not for the holocaust the worst Nazi war crime would have been the deliberate starvation of Soviet prisoners of war more than 3millions of human beings this is a crime on an enormous scale um it is hardly remembered at all it happens in part because this um stalin criminalizes withdrawal um because stalin makes it clear that anyone who withdraws will be treated as if they were outside the limits of Soviet society therefore people prefer to be taken prisoner there is a type of interaction there is partisan war the Soviets deliberately carry out partisan war in places where they know that the result is going to be that um, that the peasants are going to be killed in large numbers or the warsaw uprising it is obviously a german crime to kill more than a hundred thousand polish civilians in 1944 during the uprising, however, the fact that the soviets encouraged the city to rise up and then did not help, in fact, They stopped help from arriving is part of the story, so even in cases where it's pretty clear who the main criminal is, you really can't tell the story properly?

Is it history without some kind of interaction? Or, to take an example a little further from my story, the gulag, when is the gulag really deadly? The gulag is truly deadly for about two years, 1942-1943. Shortly after 1944. During those years, mortality rates in the gulag were about half, the rest of the time, less than 10 percent. It's also partly because Germany attacked the Soviet Union right under wartime conditions, the gulag is at the bottom of the priority list for supplies and that's why people are dying of hunger, malnutrition and disease. Can you explain that it is not possible with the Soviet system alone?

I also have to have some reference to what the Germans are doing. Now I'm trying to argue that this book, to the extent that it is about the two systems, is about their interaction rather than a comparison, but I don't. I want to give you the wrong idea about comparison and I certainly don't want you to think that it is something that we academics can or should avoid; On the contrary, it is very difficult to see some important characteristics of these systems without comparing. the story of the holocaust the story of the holocaust is largely a failure of the germans to deport.

You see it much better when you see how well the Soviet Union was able to deport. You understand Hitler's frustrations much more clearly when you see that Hitler was watching. the soviet union deports very efficiently the germans fail to starve 30 million people they cannot really carry out a planned famine it is easier to understand that when you have seen a planned famine carried out like in the soviet union but more than that If we were serious, if we took seriously the idea that we can't compare, that there was a taboo on comparison, we would become our own thought police, just to give you an example earlier in this conference and at least you know 40 of you. .

They were paying attention because I'm looking I said 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? To forget it, what is the technique you use to forget it? How do you keep these things out of the rest of your analysis? I would suggest that it is impossible that when we look at these things there are natural comparisons and that helps us understand the perspective, but the most important thing is that we are now getting to the heart of the problem, since both regimes were present in both territories, everyone who lived in a single territory, so everyone who lived in this territory. as long as they were alive they had experience and anticipation of bothall Ukrainian Jews below the Russians surveys Russian Lithuanians Latvians it doesn't matter everyone had experience of both everyone made comparisons if you were Jewish and worse in September 1939 and Vermont is approaching don't tell yourself I'm imposing a prohibition in comparison, which will 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 east to the Soviet Union. but you don't find any Jew who says that I can't think about the comparison because it should be a taboo subject, which would be grotesque and absurd given the real historical situation; it is true for all the yellow russian families during the anti-partisan campaigns where one son was captured by the germans to fight in the police and the other son was captured by the soviet partisans where on both sides there was a loyalty test that said you had to kill to your own family if necessary, those people naturally compared the Soviet prisoners of war. who were from Ukraine and found themselves in German starvation camps in 1941, naturally compared their experience to that of surviving in 1933.

How could they not do that? That would be absurd, so the point is that the comparison is not something we impose from outside the country. The taboo comparison is something we impose from the outside, but the comparison is within this story, it is within these sources, to demand that people who experience both systems not compare is to forcibly extract all humanity from what really happened, now I understand this. This will be the last point I will make. I understand that there is a reason why people insist on taboos. Taboos try to preserve some element of a social structure.

I understand that the reason for trying to impose a taboo on these comparisons is that there is a desire to preserve the special status of the Holocaust. I understand that there is an opinion that says that if we really knew history it would be bad for us. I am against that opinion. I'm old-fashioned. freedom of expression in a sense, but I also think that the consequences are not what we think they are going to be. The idea that good history is bad for us and bad history is good for us is something 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 without worrying about the taboos that are artifacts of our own moment helps us understand very crucial questions about this history, whether it's colonization or collaboration, it also helps. so that we understand the holocaust this will be my topic next time it allows us to see the holocaust where it occurred it allows us to see the victims as they are and not just how the Nazis saw them, which is the main way we see them it allows us to try to explain the holocaust in relation to its historical context again, this will be my topic next time and also allows us, if we want, and as I emphasize, this is not really my interest and I devoted about a sentence to this in the book.

If we want, it allows us to compare the Holocaust with the crimes, it allows us to argue that the Holocaust was actually unprecedented. In fact, this book, if anyone reads it this far, I think presents the most radical argument for the unprecedented nature of the Holocaust ever made in three ways. The first is that this book allows us to avoid hegemonic minimization. well 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 the holocaust took place in auschwitz alistar was a terrible facility that claimed a million lives, but that is a sixth part of the holocaust, five-sixths of the holocaust took place elsewhere, mainly in the east, why is auschwitz a comfortable synonym for most people most of the time? the holocaust i will tell you why the idea that the germans didn't know about the holocaust is absurd german soldiers and police and thousands of other secretaries, administrators, you name it, saw the holocaust 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 mostly a face to face shooting that took place in public in a german empire run or carried out by germans the 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, what is the German myth that continues to this day?

The question is falsely phrased, did they know about Auschwitz or not? That's not the right question. They may or may not have known 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 takes care of itself. Auschwitz is also very convenient for the Soviets if the holocaust is Auschwitz and Auschwitz is the holocaust then problems can be avoided such as the fact that the holocaust began in Soviet-occupied territories, that a large number, in fact, the majority of the perpetrators of the holocaust were Soviet citizens, that the Germans were able to attract collaborators from Soviet territory everywhere they went, those are just basic facts that become immediately obvious when you look at the territory, but they are not convenient facts for Soviet history or today for Russian history, so if you put that, if you put the Holocaust in Auschwitz, you are indulging in a very comfortable minimization, the same applies to all of us, to all humans, to the extent that we think of Auschwitz as a kind of mechanized factory or we think of auschwitz as an end point of modernity, it's not a real place in time where real humans who others did real things to other real humans, it distances us all, so if you look at the history of In this way, if you look at the territory in its entire population, you will find a holocaust that cannot be minimized, that is the first and the second.

What I found is that the Holocaust killed more people than any other policy at this time. I can say that based on my research, because in my research all the other policies are present. The standard view in Holocaust history that I emphasize has always been that the Germans killed fewer people than the Soviets but the Germans killed by race only half of that is true the Germans killed more people than the Soviets the Holocaust in It did kill more people than all the Soviet assassination policies put together but you can only say that if you've put all of Sofia's policies together correctly, which I have done, and then the final point, the third way, is that the holocaust is, in fact, the only attempt to try to eliminate the great peoples from the face of the earth.

I agree there, but by adding those other two elements I am presenting them with the strongest possible argument, I believe, in favor of the unprecedented nature of the Holocaust. I think good history is better for us. I think transnational history is better for us and I think the risk is worth it, but not this. what the book is fundamentally about and here I would like to return to a point that I very kindly made at the beginning it is important for us to be able to explain these policies it is important for us to have our own ways of interpreting it is important so that we can think about the methods and the taboos that dominate our time, but it is also important to be able to write about history as human history, it is important to know what the numbers are.

I try very hard to get them right, but big number a number like 14 million a number where I started any big number 6 million 3 million even 20,000 any big number is very difficult to understand we have to be able when we read and do history to think about 14 million as 14 million multiplied by one where 14 million means one over and over and over and over again and where that is not just a generic arithmetic unit where that is not a unit at all but it is a life in other words, we have to be able 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 the Life, it's not about death, and with that spirit what I do.

What I'd like to do at the end is go back to where I started and give you the names of the three people I talked about at the beginning because of course these aren't just three stories, each of the three people had a name like there. there are not only 14 million stories there are 14 million names the name of the ukrainian who dug his own grave was petroveldi the name of the polish who wrote the diary was adam solsky and the name of the young jew who left him a note father his mother in the wall of the synagogue was dobshikagan thank you very much right, thank you very much tour a powerful and very sophisticated lecture it certainly made a great impression on me and I am sure that all of us in this room have time for a few Questions at the end.

I wanted to start by asking you about the war and the impact of the war on these two sides, the Soviet and the German, because you made a comment that you make even more forceful in the book. It is a very sophisticated point. that on the Soviet side the advent of the war, if it did not put an end to the killings, reduced the numbers very dramatically on the German side, as we all know, this was what opened the floodgates for various projects and, in the first place , of course, for the mass extermination of the juryEuropean, so I'm wondering if you could take that parallel a little further because it is indeed a parallel, albeit inverted, is there something about the ideologies themselves that lead to this result?

I mean, does this go further? contingencies of war goes beyond the political calculation that is made at that particular moment. Is there something in these two projects that points in the direction of how they behave when war comes? Yes, I think that's the case in both examples. You can point to the ideology and then you can ask what happens when the ideology goes wrong when an implementation doesn't produce what you expect. The Soviets are starting with a revolution, as you know better than I, they are starting with a revolution that is not the same. revolution that they expected the revolution that the Soviets expect is a world revolution or at least the European revolution their revolution in 1917 is supposed to trigger um the spark in the proverbial powder keg is supposed to trigger a European revolution that doesn't happen um the the soviets are left with their own revolution and then they have a kind of problem to solve, which Lenin's successor heirs spend the 1920s arguing whether the Germans and the English, whether those working classes won't rush to help us in our development towards socialism, how are we going to help ourselves towards socialism and the answer that Stalin comes up with or the way Stalin, in a moment of carelessness, talks about his answer is internal colonialism?

So Stalin says, unlike the British, unlike the French, we don't have vast world empires. that we can exploit so we have no choice but to exploit ourselves now this comes directly from ideology because ideology says that there is a path in history that goes from feudalism to capitalism to capital socialism feudalism looks a certain way capitalism It is in a certain way socialism. In a certain way we have no choice but to reach something that looks like capitalism to reach socialism, how do we do it? So the answer is internal colonization, collectivization, what does that mean?

It means that in practice the class war is an internal war. Right-wing collectivization is explicitly defined as a war against the peasants or a war against the kulaks. That word war in the 1930s is not used with the Germans. Stalin always hopes to find peace with the Germans. It is not used against the Germans until you know, until the summer of 1941, but it was used against the peasants all the time, so there is a kind of war that is going on, but it is internal and then when that fails, it leads to the terror, whereas if you start from Hitler's ideological background, if you start from Hitler's fundamental starting point.

You see the world as a finite space. About what races compete. There is a limit of territory. The territory matters because it is fertile. We all belong to races. What races do is compete. for this limited supply of territory for what he calls lebensraum, then naturally the superior races need to have more territory than the inferior races, what Germany is going to do is expand its natural reach by conquering the East now comes from ideology because The idea is that the Germans are architects. They have been artificially compressed mainly by the Jews, somewhat by bad luck, into this small piece of territory, when in reality they should have done so by virtue of their strength, which is axiomatic, of their superiority. was axiomatic, they should have a lot more territory, so there is 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, and that's What they do, I mean all these things that I just mentioned briefly: maintain the ss from the 20s to the 30s use the ss to penetrate police forces create hybrid organizations that are half state half racial that involve the police but they are mainly dedicated to carrying out terrorism abroad.

Vermont to these improbable dimensions, this is all a preparation for this racial campaign that will be in the future, so yes, I mean that this difference between killing at home and calling abroad arises from different ideologies 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 in the back, hold the microphone, please be brief because we don't have much time to argue at the end, so take two together. there and someone up there, yes, the gentleman from there start with youtube please may I suggest that you also need to extend this notion of

bloodlands

to the past and future because there is a similar conflict in the final stages of the first world war. and during the Russian civil war in exactly the same area there was conflict between the Poles and the Russians in that area that area is where Poland was destroyed in the 18th century it is where the new states were created after Versailles and now it is also where it was created the European Union and Mr.

Putin are competing for the same territory that is not over, thank you above, yes please, okay. In your comments you said that both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were driven by an economic imperative, which meant they were focused on Ukraine, I believe. I understand why Nazi Germany focused on Ukraine, but I really can't fully understand how Ukraine was essential to the modernization of the Soviet Union. Could you explain a little more about that? Thanks, take it to Tim, yeah. So the first question is about the

origins

and heritage of this territory that I call the Bloodlands.

It is a very good point and it is one that I try to make clear in the first chapter of the book that there are certain precedents in in the 19th century and in the great war, it is very true that this territory since the partitions of Poland from 1772 to 1795 , which you mentioned, until the 20th century, has never been governed by a coherent state unity law and that seems to be quite important, it never existed, Poland was not a centralized state in the modern sense, so you could still carry the point further back in the past if you wanted, there was no coherent state, um, and the second thing that sort of predates all of this. and what is, so to speak, objective is that there is a myth in the reality of Ukraine as a breadbasket.

I'm foreshadowing a little my answer to the second question. This is something that everyone interested in this part of the world knows. world forever, today we don't think about it as much, although maybe we should, because of global warming, I mean Ukraine, if you look at the grain export charts, Ukraine, although it looks like a disaster in every other way, you know, we are us, canada. Brazil and then who will be next no Russia Ukraine is quite extraordinary in any case there are these precedents and I think an important one probably the most important is the legacy of German colonialism in the great war so the Germans have this idea that they actually carry to out the creation of a chain of puppet states the Baltic states Belarus Ukraine do it, I mean the Bolshevik revolution, this historical, this world historical event, it's a German provocation, I mean, they send this guy, you know, Ulyanov, whom no one has listened to. on a train and suddenly there is a revolution that was a German idea, of course, 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 ideas were equally crazy and one of them worked and that was the idea of ​​the Russian revolution.

As a result of the Russian Revolution, the Germans were able to advance very quickly, very deeply to the east. in 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 in 1918 they won the war in the east they won the war in the east um and and the trip, you know, what's a of the reasons why the end of the war is so confusing for the Germans, they never lost in the east, they won, they won, all those soldiers marching backwards or marching backwards from victory, as far as they know, you know they don't I don't know anything about the defeat in France so, but the point is that there was a German empire in the east that existed and it didn't last long enough to fail, it only lasted a few months, the Germans had the idea that they were let's go to get millions and millions and millions of tons of grain from Ukraine that didn't really work in 1918 due to political instability communist sabotage nationalist and anarchist bandits are people with a general fetish for destroying railway lines, you know, etcetera, etcetera, etc etcetera, it didn't work um uh, but Hitler and others might think it might work and then what happens in the second war is strikingly similar to what happens in the first war, but the precedent of an empire in the east is very important, so I understand your point about the bloodlines continuing today, I mean, a lot of things have changed, but a couple of things have stayed the same, one of them has renewed importance, one of them was already mentioned, which is With whatever you want to call it, climate change, the world's major powers are much more concerned about food supplies than they were 20 years ago, so China, for example, tried to buy nine percent of all arable land in Ukraine, which It's a pretty big number.

Figure nine percent, I say I tried because trying to buy anything in Ukraine, even if you are Chinese, is difficult, which is why, by the way, in the recent problems in Ukraine, you know when, when, when, when Yanukovych goes to China, what do the Chinese do? Tell them to 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 will be rule of law in Ukraine and then maybe the Chinese can buy all the land um, but no, that's it. that actually happened, um uh, but just to make a little footnote to your point about how this contest continues.

This is what I find interesting: the European Union has expanded into post-Soviet territory in the Baltic states, but where the European Union has not reached is. on Soviet territory since the founding of the Soviet Union, all the territories that 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 one centimeter of that territory has been admitted into the European Union, that is a real line, not the Soviet 45 border, but that Soviet territory that was subject to these policies of the 1930s so far that line has not been crossed, Ukraine would be the first if it happened, but until Now it has not been crossed and that confirms to me not so much that there is a simple continuity but that what happened in the 1930s is still very important in the Soviet model, it is not, it is not very, it is not very complicated in Moscow they understood the same things that we understand um volga russia and ukraine are the most fertile territories to modernize we must be able to extract surpluses and they believe they can obtain the largest surplus from ukraine their failure to obtain a surplus from ukraine is what leads to the disaster that follows we have two questions more maybe I should start up top this time there's another one yes, right in front, there young lady, right at the brothers refund, please, thank you, about um.

Ukraine goes to China in China says there is no way to reach an agreement with the EU I am a little confused because I was I had the feeling that when Yanukovych went to China well actually because the IMF was not giving the money under its control well condition, so it was The easiest way to get the money would be China, if not Russia, as far as I understand, China actually didn't want to compromise Russia, which is a big regional ally. I don't know how you know that. it's the EU, uh, China would prefer Ukraine today a little bit on the side of the conversation, but you understand where the question is coming from, okay, you can answer just in a moment, whoever is down here, yes, right at the end, yes, please, hello.

I'd just like to know your opinion on the totalitarian paradigm popularized in the 1950s, as a result, I mean, based on your book, and how would you consider it extinct now and especially in light of comparative history and transnational history? The danger of trying to be interesting when someone asks a question, you say something interesting off-topic, and then you get questions about your answers rather than the talk itself. Actually, I can't tell you how I know, but I'm pretty. I'm sure it's like that, uh, yeah, we're not going to make this interesting or a methodology, no, I mean, Arno can tell you that the Chinese are much more sophisticated in general than we give them credit for being.

However, the most important point is that I would emphasize that if we can retain something from this discussion it is the interest in the Ukrainian soil, that is, five ten years ago, if I had said, you know, the fertile, the fertile bread basket Ukrainian, everyone would have laughed now, only half of the audience laughs because we are We are moving towards a different historical moment, let's give ourselvesWhether you realize it or not, most of our leaders realize this and very intense calculations are being made about what parts of the planet need to be controlled, which is something that you know is totally normal in Western history until the green revolution. of the 50s and 60s and we are all children, all of us really, I mean even those who were born before the 50s and 60s, we are all children of this green revolution where the children of irrigation, fertilization, hybridization, these things that make us who we are. making food not a problem in our lives that's the big world historical shift between our history our experience in the history that I'm trying to talk about that is and that's what because we don't have experience with that when it comes back we're going to to say oh this is new, this has never happened before, how can we deal with this when in fact food scarcity is the main one and the distribution of hunger is the main stream of Western history, that's what I would say ?

I would like to take away from this conversation about, you know, China, the EU and Russia, however, it could be that we are returning to, I think, a world that is more like this world than we would like to think about totalitarianism. I mean, if you've read the book, you know that it's a, I mean, to some extent, it's kind of, you know, a bittersweet love letter to Hannah Ahren, I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm a tremendous fan of hannah arendt. um, she pays by rereading um. again and again she knew many things at that time, which people I mean at the time she wrote the

origins

1948 1947, she knew many things at that time that people subsequently managed to forget, for example, the Polish terror to which makes multiple references. the Polish action of the great terror um that in the meantime she knew about it in 1948 and then it was forgotten for 60 years right, but somehow Orange knew about it um she makes repeated and sure references to the Ukrainian famine of 1933 that she refers to as the beginning of the story of alienation and I think I quite rightly want to say that there are some things that are more alienating than being in a position where you have to eat your neighbor or not, I mean there are some things that are more dramatic in human relationships than that, I think she was absolutely right about that, so I'm a fan of honor and I think there are some things in the analysis that are certainly right, I mean, I think she's her. her impassive indifference toward taboo is certainly very important.

Her focus in that book and also in contemporary works on the relationship with the individual in the state is very important. her understanding that individual rights are an empty concept without a relationship to the state. I think it's much more important to the Holocaust story than she realized because basically everyone who dies in the Holocaust is first stripped of their relationship to a state. The main way that is achieved, as I try to emphasize in the talk, is not by some kind of slow, step by step, German-style, Nuremberg laws, etc., the main way that is achieved is by 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, Jews in general are killed, so there are parts of the analysis that I think are extremely important .

I think her general point about the part about people remembering less about imperialism is certainly worth contemplating. Somehow, Hitler was able to think of something that many people in Europe and America find so strange that it is difficult for them to contemplate, I mean, even including the racists, he was able to come to a position where he saw to Eastern Europeans as Africans, right, how did that happen? You know, it's a matter of a lot. dispute, but surely Orient is right that it had something to do with the European experience in Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

That is a part of the analysis that I think is certainly worth considering and reflecting on the thesis of totalitarianism in and of itself, I have a couple of problems with the first problem is that if it were true, then the way in which one would proceed to kill would be from the center outwards, to the right, in a totalitarian system it would be expected that the murders would begin in the capital. in the metropolitan areas and then before the peripheries, in fact, empirically the opposite is true: the slaughter in the Soviet Union occurs in the Soviet periphery, the western part of which is my subject, the German slaughter is beyond Germany , um, almost all the way up to the end, I mean the last few weeks of the war, there are some killings within Germany itself.

There are the disabled, of course, which is significant, but for the most part the killings go beyond that. It's an imperial no man's land. That's not what one would expect if she. The theory was correct and the second thing, the second big disagreement I have is with the process, you know, it's with her whole phenomenological understanding of alienation, she believes that the way the killing occurs is that you and I first we are alienated from society at large, we concentrate metaphorically and then actually 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 exaggerated things, you know, that hana not type, like the people in the camps were dead even before they were killed, now we know you know that statement falsifies the whole statement because people survive in the camps.

I write memoirs about the camps and that's how we know about the camps, um, the camps may have changed them in certain fundamental ways, but they were still alive, they were still human, in fact, most killings happen without concentration, um, the Most killings happen without people concentrating first, so the whole sequence, the alienation, the concentration, the elimination, that dominates the discussion, is on our part and also on Hillberg's part, that whole sequence turns out not to be correct. , that's my second big disagreement, but I'd just close. just to emphasize my respect for her I don't think we would be where we are um in this, you know, to the extent that we try to talk theoretically and generally about these topics without Hana Tim signing copies of her book. here, after the event is over, the book is for sale outside and you can pick it up there and then bring it back here to sign.

The last conference in this series is approaching, they have already announced the topic on the holocaust, there are also a good number of other discussions, seminars, talks that are taking place on topics that have to do with historical and contemporary international affairs led by llc ideas. I highly recommend you check out the website and see what's coming. Up there among them I talk about the shifts in power and the rise of China, something that some of you might be interested in, but for now I have to thank Tim again for an extremely powerful lecture that will limit us for a long time to come even after this event ends thank you very much