Snyder at NIU

By Dr. Myron Kuropas

I finally met the revisionist academic who has turned Modern European History on its ear. Never again will World War II be viewed solely through the prism of the Holocaust. This has disturbed some people.

Dr. Timothy Snyder, award-winning historian of Europe, spoke at Northern Illinois University (NIU) on September 19, 2012 to deliver a presentation titled “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin”, also the title of his best-selling book.

The “Bloodlands” are found between the Baltic and the Black Seas. They include present day Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine. Beginning with the Holodomor in 1933 until 1945, a time period of just 12 years, some 14 million innocent men, women and children were killed in this area of the world.

Professor Snyder mentions “Holodomor” in his book Bloodlands but prefers not to use it, “not because the term is less precise than the Holocaust but because it is unfamiliar to almost all readers of English.” During his lecture, Snyder mentioned that the term “holocaust” was originally used to refer to the “nuclear holocaust”. Jews used to call their genocide the Final Solution or Shoah. It was not until much later that “holocaust” came to be associated with the Jewish genocide.

In Bloodlands, Prof. Snyder mentions the fact that the term “genocide” was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1943 to refer to the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933. I asked the good professor why he was reticent to call the Holodomor a genocide in his book. “I didn’t call the Holocaust a genocide either,” he responded. The term has been politicized to the point that it has become meaningless.

And what about the total dead in the Holodomor? During the 1980s, Ukrainians in the US were able to convince Jews here that it was around seven million. We ran with that figure for years. “Between 2005 and 2009, Ukrainian historians connected to state institutions repeated the figure of ten million deaths,” wrote Snyder in Bloodlands, “without any attempt at demonstration. In early 2010, the official estimation of starvation deaths fell discreetly to 3.94 million.” “We can’t exaggerate numbers,” stated Prof. Snyder during his lecture. Otherwise, we write about the “death of ghosts.”

Some recent Western historians have attempted to justify Stalin’s horrors by emphasizing the victorious Soviet Red Army’s fight against Hitler in the Second World War. “We can’t explain 1933 in Ukraine with Soviet victories in 1945”, stated Professor Snyder. They are not at all related.

Soviets and Nazis killed in different places and in different times. Nazis killed in wartime, outside of Germany. Soviets killed in peace time, on their own soil, explained Prof. Snyder. After World War II, “Soviet policies merely continued Nazi policies”. At the center of the mass killing was Ukraine.

Unlike many professors I have heard, especially those from Ukraine, Prof. Snyder is a dynamic speaker who engages his audience from the get-go. There are three kinds of histories, Dr. Snyder explained: national, victimology histories, and the Holocaust. These histories are exclusive. They don’t know each other. Ukrainian histories of the Famine, for example, don’t mention Jews who also suffered and perished. Victimology histories are about the suffering of a particular group to the exclusion of others. Holocaust histories, for example, rarely mention Ukrainians killed by Hitler.

Prof. Snyder takes a revisionist approach to the Second World War, avoiding the pitfalls of all three types of histories which, while valuable in their own right, do not tell the whole story. In the words of a reviewer for The Financial Times, “Mr. Snyder presents material that is undeniably fresh - what’s more, it comes from sources with which very few Western academics are familiar.”

Like many Ukrainians, I read Bloodlands when it first came out in 2010. I was mightily impressed. I have read three of Snyder’s books since then, including The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Prince, the story of Vasyl Vishivani. Dr. Snyder is totally familiar with Ukraine, especially Volynia. He reads and speaks our language. He has authored numerous articles and essays on the region, including “The Ethnic Cleansing of Volynia, 1943”.

“Among his other goals in Bloodlands,” wrote a reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Snyder attempts to put the Holocaust in context, to restore it, in a sense, to the history of the wider European conflict. This is a task that no historian can attempt without risking controversy.” As predicted, Bloodlands has reaped dissent. In an article titled “The Equivalency Canard”, which appeared in the Israeli gazette Haaretz, Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff lamented the fact that Snyder “has written a book that, while innovative and monumental, will ultimately be misused by those intent on distorting the annals of the worst tragedy in human history.” Zuroff wasn’t writing about Holodomor!

Bloodlands is available in 20 languages but not, to my knowledge, in Ukrainian as yet.