roseweird posted:

cars posted:

fape posted:

Speaking of mensheviks, there's a lot of "socialists" these days that are looking to figures like Elon Musk to bring about socialism through technological obsoletion of wage labor, lol

what elon musk is funding is writing on catastrophic risk, one of the leading ways that nazi lies about the thread topic get spread in post-Cold War media. it gets broadcast on cable TV channels all night long, it's inconsequential because capitalism deals with long-term crisis planning through movies about the walking dead, it's also where all the oldest weirdest anti-communism goes. there is not a reader on the topic of catastrophic risk that does not rely on the material getting wrecked above.

wait so what does catastrophic risk have to do with nazi lies and anticommunism though. i didn't even know what 'catastrophic risk' referred to until i looked it up just now so pls walk me through this one if u can. and isn't elon musk also contracting with nasa to build rockets and not just funding think tanks. im not following u???

catastrophic risk is the wrecked capitalist cargo-cult way to talk about large problems capitalism can't plan to address. it involves a bunch of weirdos, only some of whom are idiots, talking about how to define and discuss risks that could KO a nation or a planet, and then doing nothing because no one cares about them except the press. their general conclusion is that we should upload our brains into the matrix to solve the problem. they discuss the topic of the thread in terms lifted from nazi propaganda as detailed itt. this is a handy way to inject the idea into low-budget cable TV programming that stalin is a lovecraft space god to be discussed alongside nanorobots eating everything and, le zombies.

roseweird posted:

An oppressive government may gain power over a substantial part of the world. Technological progress could worsen this risk by improving the tools of such a government to wage war and monitor and control citizens

we'd better look out for that one, it sounds like a baaaaad sceeeeeeene

...in the second, during the German-Soviet alliance (1939-1941), the killing was balanced. (155)

How could the Soviets make an alliance with the Nazis? (155)

What was it about the Nazi and Soviet systems that permitted mutually advantageous cooperation, between 1939 and 1941, but also the most destructive war in human history between 1941 and 1945? (156)

After this ideological compromise ("socialism in one country"), Stalin's alliance with Hitler was a detail. (157)

Here Snyder assumes that Leon Trotsky was correct in claiming that "socialism in one country" was in opposition to Lenin's ideas. He does not even allude to the well-known debate over this question. Evidently Snyder is eager to seize upon any argument that is "anti-Stalin."

The allied Soviet Union had rejected Germany's proposal to import two million Jews. (160-161)

We have discussed this falsehood in the preceding chapter. In addition, we should note that all the Western capitalist countries had "mutually advantageous cooperation" with Nazi Germany. What else was the Munich Accord, or the trade agreements between the U.K. and Germany?

The Lie that the USSR Wanted to "Destroy the Polish Upper Classes"

Thus it was legitimate to destroy the Polish upper classes (Stalinism)... (156)

Snyder cites no evidence whatsoever that the Soviets wanted to "destroy the Polish upper classes" - because, of course, they did not. Nothing of the kind occurred. Polish "settlers" (osadnicy) and the Polish imperialist officials were not "detroyed" - they were deported from the lands they had occupied, Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine.

Snyder Equates Nazi Imperialism with Soviet Anti-Imperialism

Hitler wanted the Germans to become an imperial people; Stalin wanted the Soviets to endure the imperial stage of history, however long it lasted. The contradiction here was less of principle than of territory. (157)

If this convoluted statement means anything at all it suggests that genocidal and imperialist Nazism and Soviet anti-imperialism are basically the same. If you want to "endure the imperial stage of history" - that is, to survive it - you are somehow similar to those who want to impose it! True nonsense.

In reality, Nazi imperialism was fundamentally similar to the imperialism of Great Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Portugal, and Japan. The difference was that Hitler wanted an empire in Europe - specifically, Eastern Europe and the USSR - while the Western imperialists had imposed their imperial rule on other continents. The worldwide communist movement was the single most significant force opposing all of these imperialisms.

Hitler's Garden of Eden, the pure past to be found in the near future, was Stalin's Promised Land, a territory mastered at great cost, about which a canonical history had already been written (Stalin's Short Course of 1938). (157)

If this means anything, it is that the racist and genocidal Nazi Aryan empire, in which all except ethnic Germans would be killed off or reduced to slavery, was the same as the Soviet ideal of a multiracial state free of exploitation - a breathtakingly cynical statement.

Snyder is also wrong on elementary facts. Stalin's Short Course was a history of the Bolshevik Party, not a history of the USSR. Its title is History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks). Short Course. Either Snyder is deliberately misleading his readers, or he has never read the book and does not know what he is talking about.

Was Collectivization of Agriculture a Form of Colonialism?

The secret of collectivization (as Stalin had noted long before) was that it was an alternative to expansive colonization, which is to say a form of internal colonization. (159)

This is not only nonsense - it is yet another dishonest attempt to equate the USSR with Nazi Germany. There is no such thing as "internal colonization." And where did Stalin "note" that collectivization was "an alternative to colonization"? Snyder does not even attempt to document this claim, which is no more than name-calling. Basically, Snyder assumes, without evidence, that the purpose and function of collectivization was exploitation. This is false, as Tauger has argued. (Tauger 2006)

Collectivization had brought starvation to Soviet Ukraine, first as an unintended result of inefficiencies and unrealistic grain targets, and then as an intended consequence of the vengeful extractions of late 1932 and early 1933. (162)

Snyder is relating two distinct falsehoods here. First, collectivization did not cause the famine. Snyder does not even attempt to prove that it did; he simply asserts it. In reality, as we have seen, collectivization put an end to the age-old cycle of famines caused by Russia's and Ukraine's extreme vulnerability to natural disasters and the primitive - actually, medieval - methods of traditional Russian and Ukrainian peasant agriculture. Second, there was no "intended" famine or "vengeful extraction." We have examined this question in Chapter One.

Stalin himself received more than a hundred such indications {that Hitler would invade the USSR in 1941}, but chose to ignore them. (165)

This is false. Everybody makes mistakes of judgment; Stalin unquestionably made them as well. As, of course, did the British and French, who were caught totally unprepared when Hitler sent his army against them in May 1940, even though they had officially been at war for more than eight months.

But Stalin did not make this specific error. We now have a great deal of evidence that Stalin and the Soviet leadership were expecting a German attack around June 21, 1941. I have collected many of them in Khrushchev Lied. We also have American sources, such as the following:

In Moscow on June 20, Steinhardt received a cable from Washington that advised him to evacuate all American citizens from Russia. On June 21 a United States diplomatic official traveling east to Vladisvostok observed between 200 and 220 westbound trains, of twenty-five cars each, partially loaded with troops and army supplies. The same day, Nikita S. Khrushchev, Ukrainian Communist Party leader, lifted the phone in his Kiev office to hear Stalin alert him that the Nazis might begin military operations against Russia the next day, June 22.
Robert H. Jones. The Roads to Russia: United States Lend Lease To The Soviet Union, Norman, University of Oklahoma, 1969, 31-32.

We now know that the Red Army commanders were instructed to go to battle stations on June 18, 1941, though some failed to do so. This question was the source of an interesting and acrimonious debate in a leading Soviet / Russian military journal 20 years ago. General Dmitrii Pavlov, commander of the Belorussian front, was tried and executed for failing to bring his army to battle readiness. The very partial evidence in his case that has been released suggested that there is some evidence that he was deliberately aiding Hitler.

The Red Army did indeed suffer serious defeat during the early months of the German invasion. This was certainly a mistake - it was not supposed to happen. However, the same is true of the other armies that Hitler's forces had attacked. At the war's outset none of the Allied armies were prepared to deal with the German Blitzkrieg. The entire French army was smashed in less than six weeks and Paris occupied. The British expeditionary force on the continent was routed, barely saving some of its remnants at Dunkirk thanks to bad weather for the Luftwaffe and indecisiveness on the part of the German commander. American forces were badly defeated in their first battle with German forces by German Field Marshal Rommel's Afrika Korps in February 1943 at the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia.

Eight years before, it had taken a strong Soviet state to starve Soviet Ukraine.... Under his rule, people in Soviet Ukraine (and elsewhere) stooped over their own bulging bellies to harvest a few sheaves of wheat that they were not allowed to eat. (172)

This is a grotesque idea, false in every detail, as we have shown in Chapter One. The image of starving peasants harvesting grain that they could not eat is absurd. Needless to say, Snyder did not document any examples of this. All of the available documentation shows that those who were working in the fields had a priority claim on whatever limited food was available during 1932 and 1933.

It was near Kharkiv that starving peasant children in 1933 had eaten each other alive in a makeshift orphanage. (172)

There was a serious famine, so of course terrible things occurred. But Snyder gave no evidence for this statement in his chapter on the famine and cites none here.

During the Great Terror, Stalin had made sure that Finns were targeted for one of the deadliest of the national actions, believing that Finland might one day lay claim to Leningrad. (172)

Not only does Snyder state as a fact that Stalin "targeted" Soviet Finns but also claims that he knows the reason Stalin supposedly did so. Yet he gives not a single citation to any evidence, or any document of any kind, to substantiate his claims. There is no evidence that Stalin even knew at the time about Ezhov's murder of thousands of ethnic Finns.

During the interrogations in 1939 Ezhov admitted that he deceived the Soviet government concerning these national actions:

The government, understandably, had no conception of our conspiratorial plans and in the present case proceeded solely on the basis of the necessity to prolong the operation without going into the essence of how it was carried out.

In this sense, of course, we were deceiving the government in the most blatant manner.
Nikita Petrov, Marc Jansen. Stalinskii pitomets - Nikolai Ezhov. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008, p. 368. "No. 21. From the transcript of the interrogation of the accused Ezhov Nikolai Ivanovich. August 4, 1939."

Was Stalin's "No Retreat" Order Similar to Nazi-type Racism?

By treating Soviet soldiers horribly, he {Hitler} wished to ensure that German soldiers would fear the same from the Soviets, and so fight desperately to prevent themselves from falling into the hands of the enemy. It seems that he could not bear the idea of soldiers of the master race surrendering to the subhumans of the Red Army. Stalin took much the same view: that Red Army soldiers should not allow themselves to be taken alive. He could not counsel the possibility that Soviet soldiers would retreat and surrender. They were supposed to advance and kill and die. .... This tyranny of the offensive in Soviet planning caused Soviet soldiers to be captured. Soviet commanders were fearful of ordering withdrawals, lest they be personally blamed (purged, and executed). Thus their soldiers held positions for too long, and were encircled and taken prisoner. The policies of Hitler and Stalin conspired to turn Soviet soldiers into prisoners of war and then prisoners of war into non-people. (175. Emphasis added.)

This is false, yet another attempt by Snyder to yoke the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany. Specifically, Snyder is trying to blame Stalin for Hitler's mass murder of Soviet POWs.

In one of his published articles Snyder writes:

Germans took so many Soviet prisoners of war in part because Stalin ordered his generals not to retreat. (2011-1)

Stalin's "No Retreat" Order and Those of the Allies in 1918 Compared

There are more similarities between the policies of Hitler and Great Britain than between those of Hitler and the USSR. Stalin's orders not to retreat recall that given by Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, on April 11, 1918, which reads in part:

There is no other course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement {= retreat}. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end.
http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/backstothewall.htm

At the same time Sir Arthur Currie, Commander of the Canadian Corps, issued a similar order:

...I place my trust in the Canadian Corps, knowing that where Canadians are engaged there can be no giving way.

Under the orders of your devoted officers in the coming battle you will advance or fall where you stand facing the enemy.
http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/lys_currie.htm

Stalin's orders were the same as these Allied commanders in 1918 - no retreat, fight till death. Both Haig and Currie ordered "fight on to the end", "fall where you stand," no retreat.

But there is a big difference between Stalin's orders and those of Haig and Currie. British and Canadian troops were being told to fight to the end, without retreat, simply to hold a given position at a given time. The British and Canadians were fighting on the soil of France. Their homes and families were not at all threatened in the case of a German victory. Even French homes and families were not threatened, any more than were German homes and families when the Allies won the war.

But for Red Army soldiers the situation was far different. They really were fighting for their homes and families. The Germans were bent on mass extermination. Hitler had already murdered millions of Soviet citizens. Even Snyder admits that Hitler planned to murder tens of millions more Soviet people if Germany were victorious. Snyder fails to make this distinction or to even inform his readers about World War I precedents for Stalin's order.

For hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, this was the second political famine in Ukraine in the space of eight years. (181)

And:

As during the Soviet starvation campaign of 1933...

Snyder is just repeating his falsehoods. As we demonstrated in our examination of Chapter One, there was no "political famine in Ukraine" or "Soviet starvation campaign of 1933." Snyder falsifies his "evidence" at every turn. In fact, he has no real evidence to support his contention of "political famine."

At Buchenwald in November 1941, the SS arranged a method of mass murder of Soviet prisoners that strikingly resembled Soviet methods in the Great Terror, though exhibiting greater duplicity and sophistication. Prisoners were led into a room in the middle of a stable, where the surroundings were rather loud. They found themselves in what seemed to be a clinical examination room, surrounded by men in white coats - SS-men, pretending to be doctors. They would have the prisoner stand against the wall at a certain place, supposedly to measure his height. Running though the wall was a vertical slit, which the prisoner's neck would cover. In an adjoining room was another SS-man with a pistol. When he saw the neck through the slit, he would fire. The corpse would then be thrown into a third room, the "examination room," be quickly cleaned, and the next prisoner invited inside. Batches of thirty-five to forty corpses would be taken by truck to a crematorium: a technical advance over Soviet practices. (182-3)

Snyder's sole source (n. 58 p. 483): Streim, Behandlung, 102-106.

The only reference Snyder cites here refers to German murders. Snyder has no evidence whatever to support his statement that "Soviet methods in the Great Terror" resembled those of the Nazis. Evidently this is another cheap attempt to associate the USSR with Nazi Germany.

Moreover, there were no "Soviet methods in the Great Terror" because these were Ezhov's unauthorized mass murders, not those of the Soviet government, for which he and many of his men were tried and executed. But Snyder has no evidence, not even phony evidence, for this spurious claim.

Again the Lie that Stalin Rejected Jews from Germany

By late 1941 the Nazi leadership had already considered, and been forced to abandon, four distinct versions of the Final Solution. THe Lublin plan for a reservation in eastern Poland failed by November 1939 because the General Government was too close and too complicated; the consensual Soviet plan by February 1940 because Stalin was not interested in Jewish emigrations;... (185. Emphasis added).

There was no such plan for Jewish emigration to the USSR. We have examined this falsehood of Snyder's in a previous chapter.

* *
*

Bloodlands Chapter 6

This chapter is mainly about the Germans. It makes very limited reference to the Soviets. However, Snyder continues his attempt to put the Nazis and the Soviets side by side.

...in June 1940, eastern Poland had been annexed by the Soviets nine months before that, in September 1939. Here the Germans found evidence of a social transformation. Industry had been nationalized, some farms had been collectivized, and a native elite had been all but destroyed... (194, Emphasis added, GF)

This statement exposes Snyder's own elitist assumptions. The Soviets did not "destroy" any "native elite." The Poles deported from Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine were not "native" to those lands at all. They were mainly osadnicy, the Polish imperialist "settlers."

The Soviets also had what may be termed a "class-conscious understanding" of what an "elite" was - and it wasn't the same as Snyder's. For the Soviets, the "elite" consisted of leading Party members and advanced workers such as Stakhanovites, as well as intellectuals.

For the pre-war Polish ruling class, and for Snyder, the "elite" was the rich - the landowners, government officials, retired military men, and police commanders, together with the upper level of the intelligentsia. These people were not "destroyed" - killed - at all. They were "demoted" - their property confiscated, and they and their families subject to deportation so that the common people and the Soviets could be rid of them.

The Soviets had deported more than three hundred thousand Polish citizens and shot tens of thousands more. The German invasion prompted the NKVD to shoot some 9,817 imprisoned Polish citizens rather than allow them to fall into German hands. The Germans arrived in the western Soviet Union in summer 1941 to find NKVD prisons full of fresh corpses. These had to be cleared out before the Germans could use them for their own purposes.

Soviet mass murders provided the Germans with an occasion for propaganda. (194)

Sources (n. 16 p. 485):

* "The 9,817 count in Verbrechen is at 93."
* "See also Wnuk, Za pierwszego Sowieta, 371 (11,000-12,000)"
* Hryciuk, "Victims," 183 (9,400).

We have already pointed out that the figure of 300,000 Polish citizens deported is exaggerated by a factor of five to eight.

Böhler, Verbrechen, is not a work of scholarship but a catalog of an exhibition about German army crimes in Poland in September-October 1939. Böhler himself is a specialist on the German war and German crimes in Poland. He has not researched Soviet history.

Hryciuk, "Victims," does state that 9400 persons - not "Polish citizens" - were killed by the Soviets:

* In Western Ukraine, "Of 20,094 prisoners in custody on 10 June 1941 ... more than 8700 were murdered...";
* In Western Belorussia, "Of the 6,375 prisoners in custody as of 10 June 1941... over 700 were murdered (mainly those in prison in Glȩbokie)..."

However, Hryciuk provides no evidence for these figures.

Nazi propaganda claimed that the Soviet NKVD shot many prisoners in L'vov and elsewhere before retreating from the city. Other sources claim that Ukrainian Nationalists killed many communists and Jews when the German army occupied L'vov. There is a controversy about just what happened, with little agreement.
See "The Lviv pogroms controversy" and Alfred De Zayas' account, "The Lviv Massacre." De Zayas is well known as an apologist for the Nazis. Naturally, he is also a strong anticommunist, so other anticommunists continue to rely on his work.

Soviet documentary evidence exists, as does at least one article by the anticommunist "Memorial" association that examines that evidence: "The Evacuation of the Prisons 1941," by Aleksandr Gur'ianov and Aleksandr Kokurin. «Evakuatsiia tiurem 1941.» Both of these authors, like the "Memorial Society" itself, are extremely anti-Soviet and anticommunist. It is impossible that they would underestimate, let alone ignore, Soviet murders or crimes of any type.

According to the evidence cited and examined by Gur'ianov and Kokurin the only prisoners executed were those convicted of or, in some cases, under investigation for, capital crimes. Many or most of those were probably members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), active Nazi collaborators. This article is well documented from Soviet-era records and seems credible, though of course it cannot claim any precision in numbers of persons killed.

Other prisoners were shot while attempting to escape either from prisons under bombardment or from evacuation columns. A great many prisoners were either left in the prisons or set free by their NKVD guards. It is doubtful, therefore, whether Hryciuk's use of the term "murdered" here is legitimate.

We note in passing that Snyder fails to mention the murders of Ukrainian nationalists in Lviv after the Soviets had retreated. A good recent account is that by anticommunist but also anti-nationalist scholar John-Paul Himka: "The Lviv Pogrom of 1941" (2011). Himka concludes:

In sum, the Lviv pogrom was an action undertaken at German initiative, but carried out largely by the Ukrainian militia set up by the Bandera faction of the OUN {Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, allied with the German Nazis} as the policing arm of the newly proclaimed Ukrainian State. Mob participation supplemented the violence. The pogrom took place on 1 July 1941, a day after Lviv was occupied by the Germans and the Ukrainian nationalists declared statehood. The pogrom itself probably took dozens or at most hundreds of lives, but systematic executions during the pogrom and in its aftermath took thousands. In the executions, OUN militia were also active in the round up and beating of Jews, just as they had been during the pogrom preceding them.
Himka, Paper for ASN Convention, April 2011.

Snyder has done no research on these matters and evidently doesn't know anything about them. On the next page (197) he states:

The NKVD, usually discreet, had been revealed as the murderer of prisoners. Germans broke through the levels of mystification, secrecy, and dissimulation that had covered the (far greater) Soviet crimes of 1937-1938 and 1930-1933. The Germans (along with their allies) were the only power ever to penetrate the territory of the Soviet Union in this way, and so the only people in a position to present such direct evidence of Stalinist murder. Because it was the Germans who discovered these crimes, the prison murders were politics before they were history. Fact used as propaganda is all but impossible to disentangle from the politics of its original transmission.

A page after claiming that the Soviets shot roughly 10,000 prisoners, Snyder admits that it is impossible to extract the truth from German - that is Nazi - documents! Snyder has evidently not consulted, is ignorant of, or at least does not cite, the Soviet studies and documents that reveal that the killings were not "murders", as the Germans and Ukrainian Nationalists described them. And, of course, such logic applies to the Katyn Massacres, which were "politics before they were history."

The act of killing Jews as revenge for NKVD executions confirmed the Nazi understanding of the Soviet Union as a Jewish state. ...

Yet this psychic nazification would have been much more difficult without the palpable evidence of Soviet atrocities. The pogroms took place where the Soviets had recently arrived and where Soviet power was recently installed, where for the previous months Soviet organs of coercion had organized arrests, executions, and deportations. They were a joint production, a Nazi edition of a Soviet text. (196)

Here Snyder tries to make the Soviets share the blame for Nazi murders and pogroms! In reality Poles and Ukrainians had carried out antisemitic pogroms long before the Soviets came along.

Snyder's long footnote 21 (on pages 485-6 of Bloodlands) has to be read to be believed. It contains no sources or evidence, only a convulated "theoretical" argument with which Snyder tries to justify blaming the Nazi pogroms and murders on the Soviets. It is too long to reproduce here.

In reality, there is no evidence of "Soviet atrocities." To say this is not denial, or even defensiveness. It is the simple truth: we have no such evidence. The evidence cited by the "Memorial Society" authors above is of executions of prisoners convicted or under investigation for capital crimes, and shootings of prisoners while the NKVD guards suppressed prisons escapes and uprisings or escapes from evacuation convoys. These are not atrocities but acts under conditions of martial law, when normal judicial procedures do not apply.

Soviet atrocities would help German SS-men, policemen, and soldiers justify to themselves the policies to which they were soon summoned: the murder of Jewish women and children. Yet the prison shootings, significant as they were to the local people who suffered Soviet criminality, were for Nazi leaders rather catalyst than cause. (197)

It would be interesting if Snyder had cited some accounts from memoirs, or indeed from any primary source, of German "SS-men, policemen, and soldiers" who actually "justified to themselves" the mass murder of "Jewish women and children" with reference to "Soviet atrocities." Historical honesty should prevent him from making such a statement unless he had evidence to support it. Of course such self-justification would still be Nazi thinking, not sober historical analysis. But this is what Snyder is doing here - engaging in such Nazi thinking - and he is the only one doing it! Once again Snyder is trying to connect Nazi atrocities to the Soviets without even a fig-leaf of evidence.

There was a group whose activities at this time could validly be connected to Nazi atrocities, because they were engaged not only in aiding the Nazis in committing mass murders but were carrying out mass murders of their own. That group is the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. But the OUN is praised as "freedom fighters" and "heroes" in today's Ukraine. It was also the OUN that invented the "Holodomor" fabrication.

Bloodlands is popular among today's Ukrainian Nationalists. Snyder has been honored repeatedly by Ukrainian nationalist groups in Ukraine and elsewhere. It is no wonder, then, that Snyder has virtually nothing to say about their atrocities. Instead, he fabricates Soviet crimes that did not happen.

The Reichskommissar {of the Ukraine}, Erich Koch, was a man known for his brutality. Hitler's advisors called Koch a "second Stalin," and they meant it as a compliment.... (222)

Snyder has evidently invented this falsehood too, as he has so many others. He does not cite any evidence to support it. It is not made in any of the sources Snyder cites in his footnote 70. I have tracked it down in a biography of Erich Koch:

...als „brauner Zar" der Ukraine soll er sich als „zweiter Stalin" geriert haben... (12)

... as "Brown Tsar" of the Ukraine he is said to have boasted of himself as "a second Stalin."
Ralph Meindl, Ostpreußens Gauleiter: Erich Koch - eine politische Biographie. Osnabrück: fibre Verlag, 2007. In his note Meindl cites a report of September 1941 to Alfred Rosenberg.

It is not at all a reference to Koch's brutality - something Hitler's advisors would not object to in any case. Nor was it a "compliment." Rather it was Koch's own arrogant posturing. The Ukraine was once ruled by the Tsar, then by Stalin, and now by "the brown Tsar" and "second Stalin." It means only that Koch saw himself as the successor to the other two.

In November 1941 Stalin was thus preparing an ideological as well as a military defense of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was not a state of the Jews, as the Nazis claimed; it was a state of the Soviet peoples, first among whom were the Russians. On 7 November, as the Jews marched through Minsk to their deaths, Stalin reviewed a military parade in Moscow. To raise the spirits of his Soviet peoples and to communicate his confidence to the Germans, he had actually recalled Red Army divisions from their defensive positions west of Moscow, and had them march through its boulevards. In his address that day he called upon the Soviet people to follow the example of their "great ancestors," mentioning six prerevolutionary martial heroes - all of them Russians. At a time of desperation, the Soviet leader appealed to Russian nationalism. (227)

Source (n. 5 p. 489): Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, 118-119.

Properly speaking this is not an anti-Soviet statement. Apparently Snyder included it so he could accuse Stalin of being "pro-Russian" instead of simply "pro-Soviet."

Brandenberger says: "...all of Stalin's examples were defenders of the old regime if not outright counterrevolutionaries." (118) Brandenberger is correct to note the appeals to Russian nationalism in Soviet rhetoric during the war. But this specific statement is nonsense. It is an anachronism and thus an absurdity to call these historical figures of centuries ago "counterrevolutionaries", as though they were living in the 20th century.
Brandenberger does note the establishment in 1943 of the order of Bogdan Khmel'nitskii, awarded to Ukrainians in the Ukrainian language. This caused much dissatisfaction because of the anti-Jewish pogroms carried out by Khmel'nitskii's men in the mid-17th century. Along with his Ukrainian provenance Khmel'nitskii's alliance with the Tsar and organizing the struggle of Ukrainian peasants against Polish exploiters appear to have been the reason for the award.

Stalin's speech on November 7 1941 mentions six traditional Russian military heroes. One might suspect that Stalin referred to Russian heroes because he spoke in Moscow, the historic capital of Russia that in November 1941 was again threatened with capture as it had been in earlier wars. All six leaders were relevant to the situation the USSR found itself in on November 7, 1941: defeating an invader, or fighting successful retreats (Suvorov) as the Red Army had been forced to do since June 22, 1941.

* Alexander Nevsky, who defeated the Teutonic Knights (Germans) and later the Finns
* Dmitry Donskoy, who defeated the Mongols at Kulikovo when they tried to conquer Moscow in 1380.
* Kuz'ma Minin, who raised a volunteer army (opol'chenie) in Nizhnii Novgorod and worked with Pozharsky (see below). During World War 2 the Soviet "home guard" of those unfit for service in the regular Red Army were also called "opol'chenie."
* Dmitry Pozharsky: Minin's army led by Pozharsky cleared the Kremlin of Polish-Lithuanian forces in 1612.
* Alexander Suvorov, who led a great strategic retreat across the Alps in 1799.
* Mikhail Kutuzov, who fought the French army at Borodino and then drove the Grand Army out of Russia in 1812. This war was also referred to as the "Patriotic War" (Otechestvennaia), as the war against the Nazis was already being called.

The Marxist view of history is that the Tsars were indeed imperialist exploiters, but also that the great land empire they had built laid the basis for socialism to seize one-sixth of the world. In the latter task the Tsars' expansion was progressive in both the bourgeois and Marxist senses of the word, as were all the bourgeois imperialist expansions from the 16th century on. Similarly, Ivan IV ("the Terrible") and Henry VII of England were progressive in unifying their kingdoms and suppressing the power of the feudal nobility because by doing so they laid the political basis for the development of capitalism and the capitalist class, precursor to socialism and communism.

The vast majority of Muscovites (as well as of Russians and Soviet citizens generally) were not communists. They had to fight and, in many cases, die for something - not for communism, then, but for their country. For all these reasons an appeal to traditional Russian patriotism at that critical time must have seemed logical.

Snyder continues:

People who had distinguished themselves in the Minsk of the 1930s had been shot by the NKVD at Kuropaty. ...Left to themselves, they would have endured Hitler for fear of Stalin. (231)

His source (n. 13 p. 490): Epstein, Minsk, 130.
Kuropaty (Russian) / Kurapaty (Belarusian) is an area outside Minsk, Belarus, where an unknown number of persons shot by the NKVD, probably in 1937-1938 under Ezhov, plus an unknown number of other victims including, possibly, victims of the Nazis, may have been buried. It has never been thoroughly excavated and studied. Estimates of the total number of persons buried there vary from 7000 to 250,000. The higher numbers are promoted by anticommunist Belarusian nationalists.

This is another fraudulent reference. There is nothing about Kuropaty in Epstein's whole book, let alone on this page. Neither Snyder nor anyone else knows who was "shot by the NKVD at Kuropaty," much less whether the victims buried there were "people who had distinguished themselves in the Minsk of the 1930s." Kuropaty has never been thoroughly studied and there is no list of identified victims. If Snyder had written: "It is a reasonable surmise that some people who had distinguished themselves..." he would have been on firmer ground.

Snyder also fabricated - invented - this "fact":

Left to themselves, they would have endured Hitler for fear of Stalin.

On the very page Snyder cites for this statement Epstein stresses that the Minsk underground did not act out of fear. On the contrary, "they supported the Soviet concept of authority..." (130).

Did Soviet Partisans Cause Nazi Atrocities?

Hitler, who saw partisan warfare as a chance to destroy potential opposition, reacted energetically when Stalin urged local communists to resist the Germans in July. Even before the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler had already relieved his soldiers of legal responsibility for actions taken against civilians. Now he wanted soldiers and police to kill anyone who "even looks at us askance." (234)

Source (n. 20 p. 490): "...Quotation: Lück, "Partisanbekämpfung," 228.

Here Snyder tries to blame Soviet partisans, and therefore Stalin, for Hitler's murder of civilians. He implies that Hitler stepped up his killing of civilians because of Stalin's setting up of partisan warfare. Snyder does this repeatedly in the last part of his book.

The citation from Lück is from Martin Bormann's notes of a discussion in Hitler's HQ of July 16, 1941. Bormann quotes Hitler as saying:

Die Russen haben jetzt einan Befehl zum Partisanen-Krieg hinter unserer Front gegeben. Dieser Partisanenkrieg hat auch wieder seinen Vorteil: er gibt uns die Möglichkeit, auszurotten, was sich gegen uns stellt.
Martin Bormanns. Abschrift einer Besprechung im Führerhauptquartier (16 Juli 1941).

Translated:

Now the Russians have given the order for a partisan war behind our front. This partisan war also has an advantage: it gives us the possibility to exterminate anything that opposes us.

However, Lück notes that this was nothing new for Hitler:

...diese "Strategie" hatte die SS ohnehin schon längst angewendet... (Lück 228 n. 17)

Translated:

...this "strategy" had long been used by the SS...

Snyder suggests that Hitler's words should be taken literally: that he needed an "opportunity" to take murderous action against civilians, an "excuse" that Hitler did not have before. That is to say, Snyder is suggesting that if the Soviets had not begun partisan warfare Hitler would not have exterminated so many people! But Lück, Snyder's own source, makes it clear to his readers that in reality Hitler had been exterminating people long before Stalin's order for partisan warfare.

Hitler also made the second statement claimed by Snyder - to "kill anyone 'who even looks at us askance'":

Der Riesenraum müsse natürlich so rasch wie möglich befriedet werden; dies geschehe am besten daduch, daß man Jeden, der nur schief schaue, totschieße. Ibid.

Translated:

Naturally the huge area had to be pacified as quickly as possible and the best way to do this is to shoot dead anybody who looks wrong.

It is not true, as Snyder suggests, that Hitler also made this statement in relation to Soviet declaration of partisan warfare. Rather, Hitler just suggested that shooting as many people as possible on any pretext at all was the best way to "pacify this gigantic area."

By Snyder's logic all the Allies were facilitating Nazi mass murders, for French, Czech, Italian, and other partisans also fought the Nazis. Polish partisans fought the Nazis too, though the Polish underground generally considered Jews and communists just as much their enemies as the Germans and Ukrainian nationalists. But Snyder never raises this issue in connection with them. Snyder's goal is to associate the Soviet Union, but not Poland or the Allies, with Nazi atrocities.

Snyder does the same thing in the following passage:

Partisan operations, effective as they sometimes were, brought inevitable destruction to the Belarusian civilian population, Jewish and gentile alike. When the Soviet partisans prevented peasants from giving food to the Germans, they all but guaranteed that the Germans would kill the peasants. A Soviet gun threatened a peasant, and then a German gun killed him. Once the Germans believed that they had lost control of a given village to the partisans, they would simply torch houses and fields. If they could not reliably get grain, they could keep it from the Soviets by seeing that it was never harvested. When Soviet partisans sabotaged trains, they were in effect ensuring that the population near the site would be exterminated. When Soviet partisans laid mines, they knew that some would detonate under the bodies of Soviet citizens. The Germans swept minds by forcing locals, Belarusians and Jews, to walk hand in hand over minefields. In general, such loss of human life was of little concern to the Soviet leadership. The people who died had been under German occupation, and were therefore suspect and perhaps even more expendable than the average Soviet citizen. German reprisals also ensured that the ranks of the partisans swelled, as survivors often had no home, no livelihood, and no family to which to return. (238-9)

Sources (n. 34 p. 491):

* Musial, Mythos, 189, 202;
* Lück, "Partisanbekämpfung," 238;
* Ingrao, Chasseurs, 131;
* Verbrechen, 495.

Lück, Ingrao, and the volume "Verbrechen der Wehrmacht" do not discuss Soviet partisans at all, much less blame them for German atrocities. Musial, an intensely anticommunist Polish nationalist historian, notes that the communist partisans forced the Belorussian peasants to feed them and "often" robbed them, while the German forces murdered them. But even Musial does not claim that the German murders were due to the Soviet partisans - the claim that Snyder makes here.

Once again Snyder is trying to blame the Soviet partisans, and therefore Stalin and the Soviet leadership, in part for Nazi atrocities against civilians. Again Snyder fails to acknowledge that all the Allies, including the Polish nationalist Home Army, to whom Snyder is sympathetic, supported partisan groups and therefore were, in Snyder's sense, all as "responsible" for Nazi atrocities as were the pro-Soviet partisans.

It must be noted that Soviet partisans could not "take control of a given village" - only pro-German Ukrainians or Polish partisans working with the Germans could do that.

The logic of the Soviet system was always to resist independent initiatives and to value human life very cheaply...

Snyder cites no evidence to support his statement that the Soviets "valued human life very cheaply." There is evidence to the contrary, as witness this exchange between Marshal Vasilevskii and Stalin concerning a military operation to liberate Leningrad:

On January 10 Stalin and Marshal Vasilevsky talked with him {Marshal Meretskov} by direct wire. They expressed the frank opinion that the operation would not be ready even by January 11 and that it would be better to put it off another two or three days. 'There's a Russian proverb,' Stalin said. 'Haste makes waste. It will be the same with you: hurry to the attack and not prepare it and you will waste people'.
Harrison Salisbury. The 900 Days. The Siege of Leningrad. New York: Harper & Row, 1969, p. 559.

The same thing - "valuing human life very cheaply" - was said of American commanders in World War 2 - for example, in the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific, where tens of thousands of American soldiers were killed in frontal assaults on islands that could have been bypassed, leaving the Japanese garrisons to starve or surrender. And what about the "over-the-top" tactics of the commanders on all sides of the First World War, when they could think of no better way of dealing with trench warfare than to order suicidal charges against barbed wire and machine guns at the enemies' trenches, often losing thousands of men in a day? Here, as elsewhere, Snyder's judgment is ruined by his strong anticommunist bias.

The Polish Home Army leadership that unleashed the Warsaw Uprising without a hope of victory and led to the deaths of a quarter million Polish civilians at Nazi hands, was far more guilty of "valuing human life very cheaply" than the Soviets. We will discuss the Warsaw Uprising later.

The previous hesitation of local Minsk communists turned out to be justified: their resistance organization was treated as a front of the Gestapo by the Central Staff of the Partisan Movement in Moscow. The people who rescued Minsk Jews and supplied Soviet partisans were labeled a tool of Hitler.

Source: (n. 35, p. 491): Slepyan, Guerillas, 17, 42.

Slepyan, Guerillas, pages 17 and 42, is a phony reference; Slepyan has nothing to say about anything in this passage of Snyder's.

But Barbara Epstein's book, which Snyder recommends elsewhere, does indeed discuss the Soviet authorities' suspicion against the Minsk Ghetto partisans and the persecution of its surviving members. What Epstein writes concerning this tragic and mistaken suspicion is worth quoting:

Why did Ponomarenko and others want to discredit the Minsk underground, and why did they continue their campaign against it for so many years? The simplest answer is that Ponomarenko honestly thought that the Minsk underground was a nest of German spies, and was determined to protect partisan units in the Minsk region from betrayal by its members. Ponomarenko was doubt informed of the mass arrests of underground members that took place in late September and early October 1942. He no doubt heard that all the members of the City Committee had been arrested, that Kovalyov and some others were providing the names of other underground members, and that photographs apparently of Kovalyov giving a speech to factory workers in which he urged them to drop their resistance to the Germans appeared in the Minsker Zeitung, that the City Committee had been created by the Germans to lure Soviet patriots and lead to just such a mass arrest. Certainly the second failure of the Minsk underground could be used to bolster such a view, as could the first failure, which had similar features: leaders of the Military Council, under arrest, had given the Germans names, and a mass arrest of underground members had followed. (244-245. Emphasis added.)
During most of the war Pantaleimon Kondrat'evich Ponomarenko, first secretary of the Communist Party of Belorussia, was head of the Central Staff of the Partisan Movement.

However tragically mistaken he may have been in this case Ponomarenko had reason to suspect a Gestapo connection. Ponomarenko has been called an anti-Semite. However, Epstein's book, the latest and very thorough study of the Minsk partisan movement, gives no evidence that he was one.

Snyder writes:

Since both sides knew that their membership was largely accidental, they would subject new recruits to grotesque tests of loyalty, such as killing friends or family members who had been captured fighting on the other side. (244)

Sources (n. 45 p. 491):

* Szybieka, Historia, 345, 352;
* Mironowicz, Białoruś, 159.

This is a phony citation. Neither Szybieka nor Mironowicz say anything at all about "killing friends or family members" or any such "grotesque tests of loyalty." Szybieka does state that many Belorussians fought in the ranks of Soviet partisans, seeing the USSR as the only way to defeat the Nazis. He also describes battles between Belorussian partisans and the Polish Home Army.

It Was the Polish Home Army Who Massacred the Belorussian "Elite"

Both Mironowicz and Szybieka are virulently anti-Soviet. Their sympathies are with the far-right Belorussian nationalists who paid lip service to "independence for Belorussia" - that is, with the Nazi collaborators. A further problem with both of these books (Szybieka's is a translation from the Belarusian) is that they contain few footnotes or other evidentiary information.

Szybieka - this is the Polish spelling of his Belarussian surname; the proper English transliteration is "Shybeka" - is a Belarusian professor. Mironowicz is a Polish professor who specializes in Belarusian history. He too is strongly anticommunist and respectful of the Nazi collaborators who presented themselves as "nationalists."

However, according to Mironowicz it was not the Soviet partisans but the Polish Home Army that was responsible for massacring Belorussian teachers and other "elites":

Urzędnicy białoruscy w przypadku konfliktu interesów z reguły wydawali decyzje niekorzystne dla Polaków. Chętniej także wysyłali na przymusowe roboty do Niemiec młodzież polską niż białoruską (wcześniej czynili tak urzędnicy polscy wobec młodzieży białoruskiej). Na narastającą dominację białoruską w strukturach władzy okupacyjnej AK odpowiedziała antybiałoruskim terrorem. W okręgu lidzkim konflikt przerodził się w wojnę na wyniszczenie elit. W współdiałanie AK i dominującej w tym okręgu polskiej policji pomocniczej doprowadziło do fizycznej likwidacji znacznej części organizatorów białoruskiego życia narodowego - nauczycieli, urzędników i działaczy Związku Młodzieży Białoruskiej. Współpraca z policją była tak widoczna, że miejscowi Białorusini postrzegali AK jako ugrupowanie militarne realizujące dyrektywy władz niemieckich. Niemiecki historyk pisze, że spółpracujący z AK policjanci polscy zastrzelili kilkuset Białorusinów, w lidzkim komisariacie rejonowym. Komendant nowogródzkiego okręgu AK pisał natomiast, że jego żołnierze w drugiej połowie 1943 r. wykonali ponad 300 wyroków śmierci na Białorusinach, a 80 zadenuncjowali na gestapo jako komunistów. Źródła białoruskie podają liczbę 1200 Białorusinów zabitych w 1943 r. przez polskie podziemie jedynie w rejonie lidzkim. Według historyków białoruskich podczas okupacji z rąk żołnierzy AK miało zginąć około 10 tys. Białorusinów.
Mironowicz, Bialorus, 217-218.

Translated:

Belarusian officials in the event of a conflict of interest as a rule made decisions unfavorable to the Poles. Also they were more likely to send Polish rather than Belarusian youth to forced labor in Germany (previously Polish officials had done the same to Belarusian youth). To the growing Belarusian dominance in the structures of the occupying power the AK responded with an anti-Belarusian terror. In the district of Lida the conflict escalated into a war of the annihilation of elites. In cooperation of the AK with the Polish auxiliary police who were dominant in the sub-district this led to the physical liquidation of a large part of the organizers of Belarusian national life - teachers, officials and activists of the Belarusian Youth Union. Cooperation with the police was so apparent that the Belarusian locals saw the AK as a military group implementing the directives of the German authorities. A German historian writes that the Polish police, in cooperation with the AK, shot and killed hundreds of Belarusians in the Lida police district. The commander of the AK in the Novgorod district, however, wrote that his troops in the second half of 1943 carried out more than 300 death sentences against Belarusians, and denounced 80 to the Gestapo as communists. Belarusian sources cite the number of 1200 Belarusians killed in 1943 by the Polish underground in the region of Lida alone. According to Belarusian historians, during the occupation about ten thousand Belarusians perished at the hands of AK soldiers. (Emphasis added.)

Snyder cites Moronowicz's book elsewhere - but not this passage, in which Mironowicz claims to expose mass murders by the Polish Home Army of Belorussians, including of "elites"! This fact serve to remind us once again that Snyder's book is not historiography, but "propaganda with footnotes."

Snyder Falsifies the Nalibocki Incident

Polish civilians were massacred by Soviet partisans when Polish forces did not subordinate themselves to Moscow. In Naliboki on 8 May 1943, for example, Soviet partisans shot 127 Poles. (247)

Sources (n. 50 p. 492):

* "On the shooting of 127 Poles, see Musial, Mythos, 210."
* "See also Jasiewicz, Zagłada, 264-265."

As in the case of the Katyn Massacres there is a scholarly dispute about Nalibocki. And as in the former case Snyder conceals the dispute from his readers and presents the anti-Soviet version as the only version. Everyone agrees that the Soviet partisans attacked a fortified police outpost in Nalibocki. However, this armed outpost could not have existed without German permission and German-supplied weapons. Snyder does not mention this important fact to his readers. A Russian language source states:

Б отчете советских партизан было указано, что в бою в селе разбит немецкий гарнизон самообороны. Было также установлено, что вооружённой ячейки Армии крайовой действовали под контролем оккупационных властей и сотрудничали с ними. По воспоминаниям узника минского гетто Михаила Окуня, в 1943 году «очень много партизан погибло от рук этих аковцев, и с ними началась война.»
At http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Массовое_убийство_в_Налибоках Accessed on December 1, 2012. Since then the last sentence, quoting Okun, has been removed. This page is highly contested.

Translated:

In the report of the Soviet partisans it was stated that in the battle in the village German self-defense garrison was smashed. It was also found that the self-defense forces in Naliboki, an armed cell of the Armia Krajowa (Polish Home Army) were functioning under the control of the occupying authorities and cooperating with them. According to the memoirs of Minsk ghetto prisoner Mikhail Okun, in 1943, "a lot of guerrillas were killed by these AKers {akovtsev} and we began a war with them."

German historian Bernhard Chiari has documented the collaboration between the Home Army and the German army against their mutual enemy, the Red Army. We will return to Chiari's research later in this book.

Bogdan Musial is an anticommunist Polish nationalist historian. But even one of Musial's books records a different version from Snyder's account. According to this account the Nalibocki attack was

...einen überraschenden Angriff auf die deutsche Garnison der Selbstverteidigung in der Ortschaft Nalibocki {und zerstorten sie}.
Musial, ed. Sowjetische Partisanen in Weißrussland, 116 Doc. 2 - Soviet partisan report.

Translated:

...a sudden attack against the German self-defense garrison in the village of Nalibocki {and destroyed it}.

In a note Musial claims that 128 "unbeteiligte Zivilisten" - "civilians not involved in the fight" - were killed and the village "plundered and burned." However, Musial's only source is interviews with surviving villagers. He made no effort to get the surviving Soviet partisans' accounts, as anyone would who was interested in the truth rather than simply in writing anticommunist propaganda.

The different perspectives on the Nalibocki affair can be illustrated by comparing the pages from different language versions of Wikipedia. For example, on the English Wikipedia page there's no ambiguity - the Soviet partisans broke an agreement with the Polish Home Army and slaughtered the townspeople. But the Russian Wikipedia says that the Soviet partisans attacked a unit of the Home Army that was armed and collaborating with the German army, and quotes Mikhail Okun, a veteran of the Minsk ghetto who states that these Home Army men ("akovtsev") killed many Soviet partisans, so the Soviet partisans fought them.
The source of Okun's account is the excerpt from his memoirs "106-I evreiskii partizanskii..." (106th Jewish Partisan Unit) at the Mark Solonin site.

The English page stresses that the Bielski Jewish partisan group was not involved in the Nalibocki attack. But the Polish Wikipedia page specifically accuses the Bielsky partisans of collaborating with the Soviet partisans in murder the innocent villagers, emphasizing that they were "of Jewish ethnicity" - "osób narodowósci żydowskiej." The reality is that not just the Bielski partisan group, but all Jewish partisan groups, collaborated with the Soviets since Polish partisans consistently murdered Jewish partisans, as well as Jewish civilians, whenever they could do so.

So there is a serious controversy - one with more than a little anti-Semitism by the Polish nationalists - about what happened at Nalibocki and why. Snyder ignores his responsibility as an historian to objectively explore the different versions, or even to inform his readers that they exist.

Jasiewicz, Zagłada, 264-265 claims that the Soviet partisans attacked pro-German Polish farms and killed some Poles, families included. Perhaps some communist partisans did consider pro-German civilians - that is German collaborators - to be fair targets, as French and Italian partisans did. But these allegations are anecdotal, like Musial's account of Nalibocki. Ukrainian insurgents also disguised themselves as Soviets and committed atrocities.

Snyder Claims that Collective Farms Were Similar to Nazi Racism

The collective farm was to be maintained to extract food; Kube proposed to dissolve it and allow Belarusians to farm as they wished. By undoing both Soviet and Nazi policies, Kube was revealing their basic similarity in the countryside. Both Soviet self-colonization and German racial colonization involved purposeful economic exploitation. (249)

The comparison is nonsense. Snyder again tries to force some similarity between Nazi and Soviet policies. If collective farms maintained by the Nazis to feed German troops and by the Soviets to feed the Soviet population had a "basic similarity," as Snyder claims, then so would individual farms, whether under Nazi or Soviet control.

Snyder hates collective farms - that's clear! So he tries to associate collective farms with Nazi genocide whenever he can. But there is no such things as "self-colonization." Collective farmers paid a tax on what they produced so that the rest of society could be fed, the army maintained, industry built. This has nothing in common with deliberately murderous German exploitation. Moreover, Soviet peasants benefitted immensely from collectivization, which put an end to the age-old cycle of deadly famines.

The Jews who became partisans were serving the Soviet regime, and were taking part in a Soviet policy to bring down retributions upon civilians. The partisan war in Belarus was a perversely interactive effort of Hitler and Stalin, who each ignored the laws of war and escalated the conflict behind the front lines. (250)

This is another instance of a lie that Snyder often repeats. The Soviets had no "policy to bring down retribution upon civilians" any more than did all the other Allies, including the London Polish government. Of course Snyder has no evidence to support his contention - and no responsible historian would make such a serious charge without at least some evidence. In addition, Snyder touches here on a point which he tries to avoid throughout: the fact that Jewish partisans always sided with communist partisans because they had no choice. The Home Army, loyal to the Polish government in exile in London, did not accept Jews in its ranks and normally murdered Jews whenever it could do so.

Partisan warfare was also carried on by the Polish Home Army and Ukrainian Nationalists, to say nothing of General De Gaulle's partisan forces in France. Snyder never makes this statement about the Home Army partisans, who also (sometimes) fought the Germans. Why not?

"Ponomarenko's Report" - Another Example of Snyder's Bias

Snyder:

Red Army officers invited Home Army officers to negotiate in summer 1943, and then murdered them on the way to the rendezvous points. The commander of the Soviet partisan movement believed that the way to deal with the Home Army was to denounce its men to the Germans, who would then shoot the Poles. (247)

Sources (n. 51 p. 492):

* Brakel, Unter Rotem Stern, 317;
* Gogun, Stalinskie komandos, 144.

Let's take a look at this interesting question.

Brakel does claim that at a session of the Central Committee on June 24, 1943 Paneleimon Ponomarenko, First Secretary of the Belorussian Party and head of the partisan movement in Belorussia, ordered that as much information as possible concerning Home Army units be collected and passed to the Germans, who would then presumably liquidate the Home Army partisans.

Zwei Tage später konkretisierte er {Ponomarenko} auf einer Sitzung des Büros des ZK KP(b) B seine Anweisungen nochindem er forderte, möglichst viel Informationen über die Einheiten der Heimatarmee zu sammeln und sie (wohl über Mittelmänner) bei den Deutschen zu denunzieren.

- n. 437 Stenogramm der Sitzung des Büros ZK KP(b)B vom 24.6.1943, zit. nach Dokumenty o stosunki, S. 233-245, hier S. 243.

Translated:

Two days later he {Ponomarenko} concretized his instructions at a meeting of the Bureau of the CC CP(b)B by demanding the collection of as much information about the units of the Home Army and the denunciation of these units (probably though intermediaries) to the Germans.

But Brakel has biased his account by significant omission. Here is the fuller context of Ponomarenko's remarks from the document published in the Polish journal from which Brakel took it:

Следовательно, сточки зрения предстояшей борьбы с польскими националистическими организациями и польскими соединениями, а она будет при вступлении на территорию Западной Белоруссии, при чем здесь разумеется очень широка борьба, здесь не исключена возможность, а нужно предвидеть, что польские подпольные боевые организации, для того, чтобы ослабить влияние партизанских отрядов и наших подпольных коммунистических организаций на массы, они обязательно будут ставить под удар немецких оккупантов наши партизанские отряды и партийные организации.

Это нужно предвидеть и поэтому сейчас нужно уже в своих указаниях, которые мы будем давать в части конспирации наших партийных организаций, в части контактов со стороны партизанских отрядов с различными представителями польскими, которые приходят для переговоров о совместной борьбе и т.д., а поляки очень умеют вести крепко разведывательную работу и умеют конспирировать своюдеятельность, - это нужно иметь в виду. Поэтому параллельна с этой работой нам нужно ориентировать наши партизанские отряды и партийные оргаинзации на то, чтобы все эти польские оргаинзации, польские соединания, которые создаются, их выявлять и всячески ставить под удар немецких оккупантов. Немцы не постесняются расстрелять, если узнают, что это организаторы польских соединеий или других боевых польских организаций.

Но тут нужна организация. Как это сделать? Методами тут не нужно стесняться. На это нужно идти широко, но обставлять нужно таким образом, чтобы это было гладко. Повидимому, прийдется поставить вопрос о разоружении польсних националистических патриотов, разоблачении их, как агентов Сикорского и предателей польского народа.
"Stenogramma zasedaniia biuro TsK KP(b)B of 24 iiunia 1943 goda." In Michal Gnatowski. "Dokumenty o stosunku radzeickiego kierownictwa do polskiej konspiracji niepodległościowej na północno - wschodnich kresach rzechypospolitej w latach 1943-1944." Studia Podlaskie (Białystock) V (1995), p. 243.

Translated:

Accordingly, from the point of view of the coming struggle with the Polish nationalist organizations and Polish units, and there will be one upon the entry {of the Red Army} into the territory of Western Belorussia - and by this we must understand a very broad struggle - here not only is it not impossible but it is necessary to foresee, in order to weaken the influence of our partisan detachments and our underground communist organizations upon the masses, that the Polish underground military organization will expose our partisans and party organizations to the German occupiers.

We need to anticipate this and so now it is necessary in the instructions that we will give in terms of the conspiratorial work of our Party organizations, in terms of contacts by guerrilla groups with various Polish representatives who arrive for talks concerning fighting together, etc., and the Poles are very skilled in the conduct of intelligence work and are able to keep their activities secret - you need to keep this in mind in mind. Therefore, in parallel with this work, we need to focus our partisan units and party organizations to ensure that all of these Polish organizations and Polish units that are being created should be discovered and exposed in every way to the blows of the German occupiers. The Germans will not hesitate to shoot them if they find that these are the organizers of the Polish units or other Polish fighting organizations.

But here organization is necessary. How to do it? We must not restrict ourselves in the way of method. We must take this on broadly, but we must arrange things so that they go smoothly. Evidently we will have to raise the question of disarming the Polish nationalist patriots, of exposing them as agents of Sikorski and traitors to the Polish people. (Emphasis added)

Brakel is quoting a document in a Belarusian archive published by a Polish journal. Several issues with this document should excite our suspicions about it. In the notes immediately before this one Brakel cites another document by Ponomarenko dated June 22, 1943, from a Russian archival source. Evidently he could not locate the June 24, 1943 report in question in a Russian archive or the June 22 document in a Belarusian archive.

Another account of this same June 24 meeting records it differently:

24 июня 1943 года состоялось заседание бюро Центрального Комитета Компартии Белоруссии. Обсуждался один вопрос - «О разрушении железнодорожных коммуникаций». С небольшим докладом выступил П. К. Пономаренко.

- Задача состоит в том, чтобы за короткий период подорвать как можно больше железнодорожных путей, - подчеркнул он. - Противник вынужден будет проводить огромные трудоемкие работы по замене рельсов. Потребуется колоссальное количество стали, проката, которых у немцев теперь не так уж много...

В принятом постановлении отмечалось, что железные дороги в Беиоруссии почти на всем протяжении находятся под контролем партизан, а это имеет огромное значение для срыва оперативных и стратегических замыслов противника.
Petr Zakhkarovich Kalinin. Partizanskaia respublika. M.: Voenizdat, 1964. Part 3: "Partizanskaia razvedka", p. 292.

Translated:

On June 24, 1943 there took place a meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus. One question was discussed: "Concerning the destruction of rail communications." P. K. Ponomarenko made a short report.

- The task is to blow up as many railroad lines as possible in a short period of time. - he stressed. The enemy will be forced to carry out huge time-consuming works to replace the rails. That will require an enormous amount of steel and rolling stock, of which the Germans do not now have very much...

It was noted in the adopted resolution that the railways in Belorussia throughout most of their length are controlled by the guerillas, and that fact is of great importance for the disruption of the operational and strategic plans of the enemy.

The assertion that there was only one topic discussed at this meeting - the question "Concerning the destruction of rail communications" - is repeated in Vladimir P. Ilin, Partizany ne zdaiutsia! (Moscow: Eksmo, 2007) Chapter 3, p. 375.

Brakel's source is a Polish collection of supposedly Soviet documents. A more detailed account of this same meeting is widely cited with all citations coming back to the book by Bogdan Musial, Sowjetische Partisanen in Weißrussland (Munich, 2004), p. 223. Musial cites a Russian archive but also cites the same Polish source as Brakel.
An article by Musial translated into Russian from the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine includes what is supposed to be a quotation from Ponomarenko's directive to pass information about the AK on to the Germans:

В выборе средств можете не стесняться. Операцию нужно провести это широко и гладко.

Translated:

We must not restrict ourselves in the way of method. We must take this on broadly, but we must arrange things so that they go smoothly.

These two sentences, but no more of Ponomarenko's directive, are widely reproduced on the Internet. They do not correspond to the text of the document we cite above. Evidently they are a re-translation back into Russian of the German-language passage quoted by Musial himself in Sowjetische Partisanen:

Bei der Wahl der Mittel dürft ihr keine Skrupel haben. Dies muß breit angelegt werden und so, dag es glatt vor sich geht. (223)

Like Brakel Musial does not quote the actual document, much less the context of the quotation.

Musial has been described as an anti-Semitic writer who strives in his research to blame all Polish anti-Semitism on the fact that Jews were "pro-Soviet" - essentially the Nazi "Judaeo-Bolshevism" argument. Joanna B. Michlic. "Anti-Polish and Pro-Soviet? 1939-1941 and the Stereotyping of the Jew in Polish Historiography." Shared History - Divided Memory. Jews and Others in Soviet-Occupied Poland, 1939-1941. (Leipzig, 2007), 67-101, at 85 ff.

There are a number of points about this document that are relevant to our evaluation of Snyder's book:

First: Is the lengthy account from the Belorussian archive of the June 24, 1943 meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belorussia genuine? There are reasons to question its authenticity:

* The two accounts by Kalinin and Ilin claim that there was only one topic discussed at the meeting, and that Ponomarenko's report was short. The Studia Podlaskie document (pages 233-245 in the journal), and Ponomarenko's remarks are part of a discussion, not of a report.

* In this document Ponomarenko calls the Polish underground "patriots." But it is unlikely that the real Ponomarenko would have used the word "patriots" to refer to the anticommunist Polish underground. By this time the Soviets had already formed a pro-Soviet Polish organization and military. The Home Army was attacking and murdering Soviet and Jewish partisans. Ponomarenko might well call pro-Soviet Polish partisans "patriots." But how could he also call these hostile, anticommunist forces "patriots"? This ought to awaken the suspicions of any competent historian.

Second: Even if it is genuine Brakel - and, therefore, Snyder - have omitted a number of important facts necessary to evaluate Ponomarenko's statement:

* Ponomarenko claims that the Polish underground will expose the Soviet Party organizations and pro-Soviet partisans to the Germans, and therefore the Soviet forces must plan to do the same thing to the Polish underground. Brakel, like Musial, omits this context.

* Brakel and Snyder know that the Home Army was extremely hostile to communists as well as to Jews. The Polish Government-in-exile in London regarded the Soviets as an enemy just as much as they did the Germans. By February 1943 the massive German defeat at Stalingrad had already taken place, and everyone recognized that Germany would eventually lose the war. The Soviets suspected Polish collaboration with the Germans over the Katyn affair in April, 1943, when the London Poles worked closely with the Germans in a manner that completely undermined any sense of alliance with the Soviet Union. Soviet partisans would have regarded Katyn as a Nazi-Polish government-in-exile provocation, since this was Moscow's position.

With eventual German defeat inevitable and a pro-Soviet Polish leadership and army already set up, by June 1943 it was obvious that the Home Army would begin to fight the Soviets in any way they could. This is the context for Ponomarenko's remarks - assuming they are genuine, and they may not be. By the end of 1943 at the latest some officers of the Home Army were beginning direct military collaboration with the Germany Army against the Soviets.

Gogun, Stalinskie komandos, 144: Snyder gets this all wrong. The page is 145, not 144; the time is not "summer 1943" but November 6, 1943; the Polish nationalists were allegedly shot not before but after the meeting took place; and they are not identified as Home Army men.

Gogun claims that a commander of the guerrilla band of the famous Soviet Ukrainian partisan leader Aleksei Fedorov invited three Polish nationalist commanders to a celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution and then asked them to join the Soviet partisans. The Polish nationalist partisans refused and then left, whereupon the Soviet partisans shot them in the back and hid their bodies.

Did this event happen this way? Snyder did not check. Gogun cites two sources. One is a Polish nationalist history of an Home Army unit to which we do not have access. The other is the diary of the Soviet partisan commander - but this is unpublished, cited from an archive. Moreover, the Soviet commander's diary says only this:

«Тов. Зубко (заместитель Балицкого. - А. Г.) организовал убийство польских националистов - заядлые были нашей советской Родины.»

Translated:

"Comrade Zybko (Balitsky's assistant - A.G.) organized the killing of Polish nationalists - they were inveterate enemies of our Soviet Motherland."

It is Gogun who identifies the event referred to in this statement as the same murder described by a Polish nationalist source, asserting that they are "obviously" the same. But he cites no evidence that this is so. Evidently, neither source describes what took place at the meeting.

Other works on Soviet partisans and on the Home Army note occasions when Home Army forces killed pro-Soviet partisans. For example, there are several such accounts in the collection of essays edited by Bernhard Chiari, Die Polnische Heimatarmee in which Snyder himself has an essay. Snyder does not mention them.