© AP Photo, Mark Schiefelbein

The famous American Russophobe historian Timothy Snyder, in an interview with El Pais, shares his thoughts on the fact that the Internet is excellent at manipulating people. One of the most simple ways such manipulation is an attempt to divide the world into “strangers” and “us”. The information space can be completely filled with lies and, with the help of “fakes,” distract people from the real state of affairs. And it works great on the Internet.

El País (Spain): “The Internet is great at manipulating people” - Timothy Snyder

Few people's opinions on Central and Eastern Europe carry more weight than those of expert Timothy Snyder. In his new book, the Yale University professor offers a revealing portrait of the presidents of the United States and Russia. Snyder argues that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are solely concerned with personal enrichment and the well-being of their immediate circle. And both found a way to achieve what they were looking for - by manipulating emotions through the Internet

Timothy Snyder was born in Ohio (USA). This 49-year-old Don Quixote fights for the truth in politics and journalism, manipulated by the most powerful governments through the Internet. He lectures and researches in Vienna and is an expert on European history, like his friend Tony Judt.

The author of On Tyranny (2016), a manifesto in which he calls for being on guard against the fake news that brought Donald Trump to the presidency, is releasing in Spain The Path to Unfreedom, where he collects all the modern demons he scourges with the greatest tenacity, the aforementioned Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The historian presents this latter as a real satrap, who by cunning invaded Ukraine in order to take possession of it, presenting everything in such a way that the seizure he planned was allegedly carried out by the Ukrainians themselves. Snyder's new book is full of details and hard facts.

The American intellectual is very shy to pose for photographs. He comes to the interview from school, where he took his eight-year-old son. The first line of his latest book is about how his son was born. This is where we start the conversation.

“El Pais”: You no longer mention your son in the book, but it seems that you are writing for today’s boys and girls, warning them against future disappointments...

Timothy Snyder: I began with the scene of the birth of my son, under the impression of shock: here it began new life, and other people I knew were dying. It was 2010, a lot of things changed dramatically then: the financial crisis happened, the Internet turned into social networks. History is a sequence of events that have already happened. It should be understood this way. To explain a story, you must understand what is happening to you at the moment you do it.

— Your other book, “ Bloodlands”, talks about the massacres of the twentieth century. In this century, the invasion of Ukraine is a continuation of those horrors... Mary McMillan, historian, says you warn because you know history...

“It’s true, my books talk to each other.” Bloodlands shows that in the 20th century mass murder was even worse, that the politics of murder was more dominant than ever. And these murders did not occur because some secret machines appeared. Some people just killed others. In the books “On Tyranny” and “The Path to Unfreedom,” I am trying to warn only that ordinary people, like you and me, are capable of such things. And Ukraine in this sense is an important connecting point between the 20th and 21st centuries. To understand what happened in the twentieth century, you need to turn to Ukraine. Stalin committed a terrible crime there, and for Hitler this territory was very important. Ukraine is at the very center of the tangle of reasons why the Second World War was unleashed. World War. Thanks to Ukraine, I understood a lot when I wrote “On Tyranny,” about truth and the Internet. And here, in “The Path to Unfreedom,” I document these things. What already happened to Putin in 2010 in Ukraine is what happened to Trump in 2016. Even then, Putin used the Internet to fool people. And since we did not understand this right away, we became victims of deception a second time.

— Here you insist that the victims have names.

“History works according to patterns that we must explain in order to understand how mass murder is possible. But we always talk about specific people. And that means about morality. History helps us diagnose problems and reminds us that each victim is a specific person. Photographs and newsreels make us shudder at first, but then the feeling dulls and we see the masses. And they kill people who lived and stopped living.

— In your books you talk about phenomena that are repeated today: extermination, repression, deportation...

- Story modern world is the history of imperialism. Imperialism is associated with these phenomena. The history of my country, like yours, is full of documentary evidence of this. My books are about what happens when imperialism or colonialism returns to Europe. The most amazing thing about Hitler is that he considered European countries as possible colonies. Ukraine was Africa for him, he says so himself. And Stalin says: unlike England or France, I do not have a naval power, so I must treat my own territory as colonial. So both books, Bloodlands and Blacklands, are about the imperialist history of Europe. The imperialist way of thinking and attitude towards people returns to Europe and very quickly leads to mass murder, because the continent is overpopulated, and the Russians and Germans still have plans for certain territories. The Russian-Ukrainian war of 2014 was from the same series: very big country, with a very large army, attacked a very small country in its moment of weakness.

— In previous books you talked about the past. About a cruel, terrible past. Hitler, Stalin, and now Putin were cruel. The number of losses is different, but the brutality of the reprisals is similar.

— A person’s ability to be cruel does not change over time. Nor does it change people's ability to believe that cruelty serves the greater good. Some have the amazing ability to enjoy cruelty and not rebel against it, and such is the President of the United States, a very cruel man who delights in evil as such. He takes pleasure in deceiving his followers simply from the process itself. Causing pain is the goal. We can look into the past to learn something. Or we can choose another path - lie about the past. Putin does this. And he knows he's lying.

— Lies about the history of his country.

— Yes, about the crimes of the Soviet regime. What at first he considered it necessary to talk about can now not even be mentioned, it is equivalent to a crime. Russian foreign policy follows this instruction. On the other hand, just like Hitler and Stalin, who trampled on borders and states, Putin captured Ukraine. Using ethnic criteria, like his predecessors.

— Trump is reviving white supremacy, building walls. Putin quotes a fascist philosopher. Invades Ukraine. Together they use “throw-ins.” This is a coalition, just like it used to be in European wars.

- Exactly. And it is very important to remember that at one time fascism developed internationally. Some learned from others. Usually we remember only Germany and consider the Nazis as our only enemies. But in 1941, the USSR was attacked not only by the Germans, but also by Italian, Spanish, Romanian volunteers... Something similar is happening today. This happens in Hungary, Poland, the USA, Russia, Italy, Sweden... And we can talk not just about similarities, but also about connections. And connections are possible, first of all, through the Internet. The Internet has become a much more powerful tool for the right than for the left, at least for now. this moment. But some things are very different, especially if you look at Putin and Trump. Namely, that this type of political right is exclusively associated with wealth. Whatever we may think of Mussolini and Hitler, they were not particularly concerned about personal well-being. While Putin is paranoid about capital - his own and his associates and loved ones. Trump is also obsessed with increasing the wealth of the people who bear his name. How is Russia governed? A group of people who control most resources and television, and therefore can very effectively create an alternative reality. How was Trump elected? These Russians gave some money to influence the flow of information into the United States. And, unfortunately, they do this with great success.

- That is, they unite to manipulate.

— Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica are using a person's wealth to go online and try to influence human emotions and force someone to vote or not, depending on interests. This is a kind of marriage between colossal capital and the desire to preserve it by manipulating emotions on the Internet with the help of “fakes” and other things. One of the easiest ways to manipulate people and keep them away from information is to divide the world into “strangers” and “us”. And the internet does it great: click this link and you'll feel great. This, of course, brings us back to fascism, which is precisely based on the idea of ​​opposition - “they” and “us”.

— In the book “On Tyranny” you talk about the difficult moment that journalism is going through. Why would anyone want to end her life?

— We usually think that if we say something on the radio, television or in newspapers, then there is freedom of speech, and therefore democracy. But that's not true. Both Putin and Trump are well aware that information space can be completely filled with lies. So that it seems like there is a conversation going on, because different people they say different things. But conversation is not journalism; a good journalist looks for facts. Of course, it is much easier to fill space with lies. Putin and Trump fear and hate journalists because they understand what we should all understand: to be free, we must use facts. If we don’t talk about facts and don’t believe in them, we are just victims of another deception.

— Why are you so concerned about journalism?

Context

The war of the future will begin on the Internet

Süddeutsche Zeitung 05/02/2018

Are modern Internet millionaires the heirs of Rockefeller?

Atlantico 07/29/2018

Russia may cut off internet to NATO countries

The Guardian 12/15/2017

How Facebook makes excuses

Nihon Keizai 10.20.2017 - I am from the province, we have always had several local newspapers competing with each other. Now this is gone. When local newspapers die, democracy dies. In this sense, it is useful to pay attention to what is happening in Russia. Local news there dies earlier than in other countries. When local news dies, people start talking about the media, which means the situation is out of control because no one trusts the media. Why should I, living in Nebraska, believe a reporter from Los Angeles or New York who has never been to Nebraska? I don't believe. Russia shows us what happens in such cases - people do not believe what the media tells them, and the authorities make sure that they do not believe everyone else. This is what Trump is trying to achieve - total distrust. He says: don't trust the media, hate journalists, trust your feelings. And then he reveals to you what these feelings are: fear, hatred, arrogance. Part of the reason I place such importance on journalism, especially in the field, is because I see what happens when it disappears. When journalists, especially local ones, disappear, authorities are able to govern from a position of mistrust. Thanks to journalists, we know about global war, about global inequality. To combat global inequality, nothing is more powerful than first-hand news.

- IN last book You say that when the order of things is disturbed, the lost virtues return...

— In “The Path to Unfreedom” it seemed necessary to me to write about ethics. Show that we have inherited institutions such as journalism or European cooperation that help us to be more worthy people. And when these institutions are challenged, morality emerges momentarily from the shadows before disappearing. The institutions I'm talking about must be preserved, but new ones must be created.

- Europe is now threatened by two things - Brexit and the Catalan issue. What do you think of it?

- Firstly, there is one thing general rule: You can't force people to be together when they don't want to. This is clear to me. Secondly, World War II showed us that the so-called nation state is largely a fiction. And if it did exist, it has long since sunk into oblivion: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Lithuania... There is a history of empires and Europe... And the function of Europe is to help states. And people often make mistakes (I'm talking about Great Britain now) because they don't understand that Europe helps them to be a state. This is a big mistake. Almost no one in the UK admits this. And the risk is that when things start to fall apart, they keep falling apart. Not only will the UK leave the EU, but the UK itself will no longer be what people expect it to be. She will talk face to face with Russia, with the USA, with China in a completely different way than when she is part of Europe and the cozy European globalization.

- And Catalonia?

“I’m not familiar enough with the situation to have a clear position.” I think it is very important in the case of modern secessionist movements - whether in Catalonia or in Scotland - to make sure that the debate is not controlled by external factors. If the Russians are interested in Catalonia, as they are interested in Scotland, as they are interested in everything that can weaken Spain and Europe as a whole, this does not mean that the Catalans do not have the right to decide their own destiny. But when making such a decision, people must understand that they have nowhere to go except on the “big voyage.” Either you go to a world where there is Russia, America and China, or you go to Europe. It is impossible to be alone, it is an illusion. I don't want to talk about Catalonia because I haven't lived there, I'm not sure I understand its history, but my general idea is that if you leave somewhere, you should know where you are going, because otherwise , someone else will decide it for you.

— You think of Eliot and Orwell when you talk about the shadows of the twentieth century. Our century is also a century of shadows...

“That’s why facts are needed.” Managing from the dark means telling people what they want to hear, keeping them in the emotional field. While the search for truth gives breadth and depth, because the result of the search is amazing. And this ability to be amazed makes us better citizens. 

InoSMI materials contain assessments exclusively of foreign media and do not reflect the position of the InoSMI editorial staff.

By Timothy Snyder Tim Duggan Books. 128 pp.

Timothy Snyder wrote a book against Donald Trump, but it went against the entire American society, conservatives and liberals.

In the middle of the “dashing 90s” I had the opportunity to live and work in Moscow. In 1996, at the height of “shock therapy,” Yeltsin was being re-elected for a second term in Russia. These were the only elections in the history of the Russian Federation that took place in two rounds. The president's rating was about 3%, but enthusiasm reigned in the circles of the “creative class”. There they repeated in different ways the phrase of Yeltsin’s bodyguard Korzhakov: “We won’t give up power.” Armed with black PR and disregarding professional ethics, Russian journalists mobilized for a propaganda war.

I was a member of NTV (then still Gusinsky), ORT (then Berezovsky) and other communities where Russian public opinion was created. I tried to explain to my colleagues that they were cutting the branch they were sitting on. He said that their propaganda leads to the hollowing out of civic values, to the loss of independence and freedom of the press. He said that the authorities would inevitably evaluate their betrayal of their profession and suppress freedom of speech. In response, they assured me that I didn’t understand anything, and sometimes I myself felt like a character in a joke from the genre “a foreigner came to Russia.”

In fact, it was then that the foundations of the current odious “Kiselevsky television” were laid. Then, under the friendly and massive propaganda of the liberal media, the rudiments of that same middle class, which alone could become the basis for the true democratization of Russia, were being uprooted. Therefore, when the same people who mobilized for Yeltsin in 1996 came to Bolotnaya in 2011, there was no longer a society in Russia capable of providing them with mass support. The authorities appreciated the importance of the media and simply took them for themselves.

Liberals in America, who also mobilized for Hillary Clinton, have not yet realized that they live “without feeling the country beneath them.” But conservative ideologists have already realized that after the election of Donald Trump, “their” electorate turned away from them. Neoconservative Robert Kagan, who had recently proclaimed the triumph of globalism, now burst out in the Washington Post with an article “How Fascism Came to America.”

He is echoed by former Bush speechwriter and author of the “axis of evil” David Frum, who in The Atlantic describes in broad strokes the picture of the end of liberal America. Voting is becoming increasingly difficult, self-censorship is rampant, Congress is subjugated, political power used for his own enrichment, the truth is becoming more and more obscure. Freedom is gradually being replaced “not by dictate and violence, but by a slow, demoralizing process of corruption and deceit,” he writes. And a group of more than 200 Holocaust researchers and Jewish history published “ open letter”, which laments the fragility of democracy and condemns “the agitators who are promoting their toxic views on the back of Trump’s neck”: “We call on all honest Americans to unequivocally condemn the speech of hatred, discrimination and threats.”

Timothy Snyder is also a Holocaust scholar, albeit a controversial one. His thesis that it is impossible to understand the Holocaust by taking it out of the overall context of the history of violence in Eastern Europe from the 1910s to the 1940s has attracted much criticism. (the historical establishment saw this as an attack on the concept of Holocaust exceptionalism). His A new book“About tyranny. 20 Lessons from the 20th Century” does not offer any alternative to the pessimism and despondency that now dominates the American intellectual elite. In it, Snyder tries to apply his historical insight to what is happening in America today, and the Washington Post critic calls this slim, pocket-sized book "the most remarkable work of the new resistance."

“Today’s Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who watched democracy give way to fascism, Nazism, and communism in the twentieth century,” Snyder writes. “Our advantage is that we can learn from their experience.”

Snyder is distinguished by the absence of the notorious sense of national superiority, or even God's chosenness, inherent in most American political writers and publicists.

The author tries to learn lessons from “everyday politics.” Long before Hitler invaded Austria, ordinary Austrians were ready to take part in the Anschluss, and local Nazis compiled lists of Jews ahead of time in order to seize their property. “The willingness to obey is a political tragedy,” writes Snyder. However, it is the readiness to obey that is fostered in Americans by family, school and “ corporate culture" What can a society count on, whose basis is bureaucratic corporations, the most totalitarian institution of Western civilization?

Snyder hopes for greater responsibility among professional elites—doctors, lawyers, businessmen. After all, even the most democratic institutions are not able to protect themselves. “It is difficult to undermine the rule of law without lawyers or to hold show trials without judges,” he writes. “Authoritarianism needs obedient civil servants, and concentration camp commanders are looking for businessmen interested in cheap labor.” This is precisely about the corporate political-bureaucratic elites of venture capitalism, who without hesitation practice outsourcing and downgriding, and consider people as a resource or fuel. This is how it is officially pronounced – “human resource”.

“Totalitarianism doesn’t come out of nowhere and suddenly become all-powerful,” Snyder said in a radio interview. - This doesn’t happen. Totalitarianism begins when the line between your public and private life becomes blurred.

If we cannot share information with our friends, family or loved ones without fear of it being made public, then we have no privacy. And if we don't have privacy, then in reality we are not free people.” We were talking about the leak and subsequent publication of correspondence between Hillary Clinton and Democratic Party functionaries, but the same applies to the monstrous system of total surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden, sanctioned by Presidents Bush and Obama.

“We must understand history, because fascism began with a detachment from reality,” Snyder reminds. – Fascism argued that facts are irrelevant. All that matters are impressions, emotions and myths.”

However, the most effective American marketer in the world has been cultivating feelings and emotions for half a century, and with him all kinds of left and right, liberal and conservative, racial, gender, national and religious politicians. American students at elite liberal universities, seeking the dismissal of professors and all kinds of restrictions on freedom of speech, are not much different from religious conservatives fighting against “insulting the feelings of believers.”

“When descending from the world of facts into the world of emotions, the first thing is to create an alternative reality that does not correspond to reality,” Snyder said at a meeting with readers. – Regardless of whether you are the Russian media or Breitbart (a right-wing radical online publication that supported Trump. – MD). Then they tell us that we are all smeared with the same world. This is a special kind of cynicism that claims that you can’t trust anyone, because everyone is pursuing selfish interests, everyone has their own share in the game. And then, as this belief spreads throughout society, we suddenly find ourselves in a world that is ripe for totalitarianism.

Snyder warns against the dangers of using patriotic slogans and meaningless repetition of political constructs. “When we repeat words and phrases broadcast by the media, we allow a narrowing vocabulary and think that it only plays into the hands of a “strong leader.”

“Come up with your own way of speaking!“, he advises the reader. And absolutely revolutionary for America, obsessively in love with electronic gadgets, is Snyder’s call: “Throw away your screens and surround yourself with books... The characters of Orwell and Bradbury did not have this opportunity, but you and I are still capable of this.”

The book contains advice that is new to Americans, but well known to Europeans and Russians. They all already passed in the 20th century, and they are going through it again now. “Beware of symbols of loyalty - be it a sticker or a bandage, or even a cap, no matter how harmless they may seem... When everyone follows the same logic and a society is covered in symbols of loyalty, then resistance becomes impossible.” “Hitler's language rejected the legitimacy of the opposition. The words “people” and “people” did not mean all of them, but only some. Disputes and clashes of opinions have always been portrayed as war. Any attempt by free people to understand the world in their own way was considered defamation and slander of the leader.”

Like the Soviet people who believed in social progress, Americans, especially young people, were also raised in faith. They believe that the free market pushes history in the right direction. Trump’s victory shocked many, not only rational thinkers, but also those who believe in emotions and rely on the omnipotence of reflection of “offended feelings.” Snyder suggests that from the usual “everything will be fine,” American society may swing in the other direction, deciding for itself that now everything will be “very bad.”

"After " cold war“We were fascinated by the “politics of inevitability,” the idea that history had already ended with the victory of liberal democracy. We have let our guard down and are now moving towards a “politics of eternity” in which our past appears as a vast, foggy courtyard filled with obscure monuments to national sacrifice. Inevitability was like a coma, eternity was like hypnosis... The Path least resistance leads from inevitability to eternity." “The danger we now face is the transition from a naive and amoral democratic republic to a confused and cynical fascist oligarchy,” Snyder concludes.

History is made up of what each of us does in our place. Today's twenty-year-olds have a chance to become the generation that changes history. Among the other pieces of advice Snyder gives, however, is one ominously succinct one: “Make sure you and your family have foreign passports.”

For the first time on March 24, 2017 in the publication Orthodoxy.ru #Territory of Life

Michael Dorfman © 2017
Michael Dorfman © 2017

Timothy Snyder born on August 18, 1969 in the American state of Ohio in the family of a veterinarian. After graduating from school, he continued his education at prestigious universities in the country. Received a bachelor's degree humanities in History and Political Science from Brown University. Further the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and modern history in 1997 at Oxford University, where Timothy Snyder (Timothy Snyder) studied from 1991 to 1994. (thanks to the prestigious Marshall Scholarship, which allows gifted American students to study at prestigious universities in the UK). By the time he received his Ph.D., Snyder's resume already included work in scientific centers France and Austria. He also earned an academic scholarship to Harvard.

Since 2001, Snyder has been a professor at Yale University, and over the past twenty years he has been an emeritus teacher or had practice at a number of universities in Europe, in particular in Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and London. Timonati Snyder can speak and write fluently English , French, German , Polish And Ukrainian languages, as well as read in Czech, Slovak, Belarusian and Russian, which helped him in working with original sources and cooperation with researchers of European history. Timothy Snyder is a member of the editorial boards and committees of journals, institutes for Holocaust studies, and the largest Center for the Study of the Holocaust (USHMM). To date, Professor Timothy Snyder has written five full-length monographs, two co-authored books, and dozens of scientific papers.

Positive criticism of Bloodlands

Following the release of Timothy Snyder's book in 2010, received generally favorable criticism from both the professional press and scholars of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Bloodlands quickly topped the lists of a number of reputable publishers and print media. Based on the results of that year, the monograph « Bloodlands » was recognized as a bestseller by twelve authoritative lists in six countries, including such media mastodons as The New York Times, The Economist, and the Financial Times. "Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin" also became the winner of nine prestigious book awards in the New and Old Worlds, in particular the Prize for Understanding of Europe at the annual Leipzig Fair and also, in 2013, the award named after. Hannah Arendt in the field of political thought - Timothy Snyder more than once refers to the works of the writer, in particular on the topic of totalitarian regimes. As of 2017 « Bloodlands » have already been translated into 30 languages.

Negative criticism of the book Bloodlands

On the author's page Timothy Snyder and books « Bloodlands » The Wiki contains excerpts from a small amount of criticism - and even more can be found by searching in English. This is not surprising, as is the case with any known work on the Second World War. The more attention to the monograph and the more positive reviews, the more criticism in varying proportions - the most iconic authors of the subject have been subjected to it for decades, and Timothy Snyder « big » I'm still new to the literature on World War II. To be fair, the critics' arguments themselves seem unconvincing - on closer inspection they point to points that, according to them, the author missed, but this is not the case in the book. The cause-and-effect relationships between the Stalinist and Nazi regimes are also not presented so superficially. It was as if those criticizing had read another book or had not done it carefully enough and were deliberately biased.

In total, after finishing the main text of the book Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder gives 17 archives , the sources of which he used for writing and also an impressive list of, attention, 730 sources . Although citing archives is common practice for books and documentaries about the Second World War, their indication does not give an understanding of the depth of research, because the USHMM archives alone today deal with hundreds of terabytes of digitized data and entire floors of original materials: books, letters, photographs, films, documents. The most common criticism leveled at Bloodlands concerns not so much the comparison between the regimes of Stalin and Hitler as Snyder's use of secondary rather than original sources.

Footnotes in the text of the book "Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin" quite frequent and refer both to original documents, such as memos, orders and instructions, to the testimony of defendants or witnesses in post-war trials on war crimes, and to numerous works of other researchers. It is on them that author Timothy Snyder mostly relies in his work, which makes Bloodlands not an original study, despite all the objective advantages of the book. When viewed objectively, the most questions are raised by the almost categorical figures given by Snyder, again, from third-party sources - which does not give the impression that the author independently worked with the original ones.

Geography of the Bloodlands

An interesting feature of the book "Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin" What sets it apart from most monographs on World War II is Timothy Snyder's methodological emphasis not so much on the chronology of years, but on the fate of specific territories in Eastern Europe. The author considers the territories of modern states in retrospect of the twentieth century as the area of ​​Europe that suffered the largest number of civilian casualties - Snyder uses the figure of 14 million people. Over the course of reading 500 pages of a book "Bloodlands" this abstract figure acquires practical and human meaning. Author Timothy Snyder repeatedly emphasizes that one should not multiply common person, the average Jew or representative of other nationalities by impressive figures. 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust is not the average Jew multiplied by 6 million - but such a number of unique destinies and personalities. The 3 million victims of the Holodomor are not the average Ukrainian peasant, but 3 million individual destinies. The methodology and calculation of Professor Timothy Snyder can be roughly divided as follows:

3.3 million Holodomor victims on the territory of the then Ukrainian SSR. Timothy Snyder takes only this part of the USSR, which is part of the Bloodlands, but mentions the famine in other republics, in particular the 1 million dead in Kazakhstan.

300,000 victims Great Terror Stalin's repressions 1937-1938 and ethnic cleansing in the Bloodlands of 680,000 throughout the entire Soviet Union.

200,000 Polish citizens , including Polish intelligentsia and prisoners of war exterminated by the Germans and Soviets after the occupation of Poland between 1939 and 1941.

4.2 million civilian casualties who died from a famine artificially created by the Germans in the territory of the occupied Soviet Republics. Among them are 3.1 million Soviet prisoners of war and 1 million residents of besieged Leningrad.

5.4 million Jews , victims of the Holocaust. The victims of the death camps in occupied Poland are considered, as well as more than a million Soviet Jews killed by punitive detachments east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line.

700,000 civilians , killed by the Germans during acts of retaliation in the fight against partisans in Belarus and Ukraine, and during the uprisings in Warsaw in 1943-1944.

As for geography itself "Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin", Timothy Snyder cites two community cards and, as the text develops, other schemes for the territorial changes of these lands. Its methodologists included the territories of the following modern states:

Poland

Ukraine

Lithuania

Latvia

Estonia

Belarus

Moldova

Western part of Russia

Some interesting passages from the book

Occupying German forces renamed the historic Market Square in Krakow Adolf Hitler Platz

In February 1940, the NKVD transported 140,000 Poles from the territory of Poland occupied by the Red Army to Kazakhstan. 5,000 of them died en route in cattle cars

In June 1940, 78,000 Poles, 84% of them Jews from the former Eastern Poland, were deported to Kazakhstan, especially for refusing to obtain a Soviet passport.

The Germans first tried euthanasia for the mentally ill in the territory of occupied Poland - in November 1939, Polish mentally ill people were gassed - 7,000 people died.

The 4,410 Polish officers executed by the Soviets in the Katyn Forest were just one of the actions taken at the same time. Another 6,314 unfortunates were killed near Tver and 3,739 near Kharkov.

In Germany, in 1943, a tourist guide to the so-called General Government in Poland was printed. and German travelers even visited the ghetto in Warsaw.

Most of the nearly 400,000 Jews that could be accommodated Warsaw ghetto at the peak of their fullness, they were brought there from the suburbs and other occupied territories - it was among the newcomers, and not the native Jews of Warsaw, that the highest mortality rate was observed.

In the autumn of 1941, Lenin's body was removed from the Mausoleum in anticipation of the Wehrmacht's rapid advance towards the capital.

On August 28, 1941, Staley signed a decree on the deportation of 438,700 Soviet Germans to Kazakhstan - an action that was carried out in early September.

Useful article? Tell about her!

In the comments to one of the previous postings it was suggested: “ some only learned about the Volyn tragedy from your posting " I don’t know if this is true, but even for those who are informed about it, I think it will be useful to have on hand a text about ethnic cleansing in Western Ukraine, written by one of the best modern historians, a great friend of Ukraine, Yale University professor Timothy Snyder. Below in several postings follows A. Sobchenko’s translation into Russian of the eighth chapter from T. Snyder’s book “Rebuilding Nations” ( Timothy Snyder. The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus in 1569-1999. Yale University Press, 2003 ).

Classification and liquidation of groups
As the name suggests, the actions of Ukrainians towards Poles, and Poles towards Ukrainians, cannot be considered only in terms of events that concerned only these two national groups, and cannot be understood in terms of only national history. From the point of view of transforming the relationship between Poles and Ukrainians, a more important role was played by the behavior of the occupiers, both Soviet and Nazi, who classified people into groups and deported or killed them according to the classification.
Both communists and fascists began issuing identity cards to everyone starting in 1939, which seemed like a fairly routine bureaucratic procedure, but had enormous consequences. In 1939, there was a joke in Lvov that “a person consists of a body, a soul and a passport.” As we will see, the identity card issued in 1939 very often determined whether the soul would remain in the body. Before the implementation of the “Final Solution” to the Jewish Question, German authorities transferred hundreds of thousands of people from and to occupied Poland under bizarre schemes that were never completed. These population movements created a pattern of sorts: in December 1941, some Ukrainian figures in the General Government decided that mutual ethnic cleansing would lead to a solution to Polish-Ukrainian territorial disputes. The leaders of the Ukrainian Central Committee even suggested that the Poles carry out a population exchange in the future “following the German model”. Between 1939 and 1941 the Soviet occupiers deported at least four hundred thousand people, approximately 3% of the population of these territories. Among those deported, the proportion of Jews and Poles was disproportionately high. These deportations only ended with the German invasion in June 1941. As German troops moved deeper into Ukrainian territory, NKVD officers hastily exterminated thousands of political prisoners, most of whom were Ukrainians. This action was presented by Ukrainian nationalists as a crime committed by Jews. At such a vulnerable moment, German troops arrived and presented the murders committed by the NKVD as a crime for which the Ukrainians should take revenge on the Jews. It is characteristic that this propaganda lie turned out to be effective.
Period 1939-1941 should be seen as the first stage of public acceptance of the idea that people should be classified into groups and treated according to the classification. Beginning in 1941, the "Final Solution" of the Jewish Question showed society that a group could be completely physically eliminated. At the end of 1941 and throughout 1942, several thousand Ukrainians participated in the implementation of the “Final Solution” as policemen in both Galicia and Volhynia. The genocide was carried out before the eyes of the Poles. The main manifestation of the Holocaust in Galicia and Volhynia was the cold-blooded murder of local Jews. Within certain historiographical traditions, the Holocaust (or Shoah) ended the continuous history of Jews in Europe and created the conditions for the creation of a Jewish state beyond its borders. This point of view is easy to understand. Other historiographical traditions have placed the Holocaust outside the mainstream of history, whether it is a story about communist revolution or national development. A critical examination of military and post-war history of Eastern Europe requires stepping back from both traditions and imagining a "final solution" within a series of events and their consequences for the society that either observed them or took part in them.
It is worth recalling that the German occupation of Volyn in the summer of 1941 was the second totalitarian regime for three years. It played an important role in shaping the character of many young Ukrainians, but it was not the baptism that opened for them political life. Many of the young Ukrainians who joined the Nazi auxiliary police units (Hilfspolizei) in 1941 served with Soviet power by policemen. There they underwent a political training course, in which the Polish-Ukrainian differences were presented to them as a class struggle, which had a national solution: the deportation of representatives of the educated class, who were predominantly Poles. Participation in the “Final Solution” since 1941 has been transformative for the participants; it has turned the Ukrainian boys from Volhynia into monsters that they would not have become under other circumstances. The Ukrainians who went to work for the German occupation administration and joined the German police in 1941 had a slightly different motivation: they wanted to continue doing what they were doing before; determine your own destiny; to appropriate someone else's property; kill Jews; improve your status; and also prepare for political events that will occur later. Since the Ukrainian state had yet to be created, while the Polish state had only to be recreated, Ukrainian nationalists were interested in cooperation with the Germans, they encouraged young Ukrainians to join the authorities created by the Germans. However, the everyday practice of cooperation with the German occupation authorities had little in common with the goal of the Ukrainian nationalists, which the Germans themselves opposed, and boiled down mainly to the murder of Jews - an important element of fascist policy. Let me remind you once again that the biggest change in Volyn society was the murder of 98.5% of Volyn Jews. However, our task is to study the consequences of the Holocaust for collaborators. The Nazis trained Ukrainian policemen not only to handle weapons, but also to hate Jews. The SS indoctrinated young Ukrainian recruits with anti-Semitic ideas in their native language. Understanding all this, Metropolitan Sheptytsky wrote a letter to Heinrich Himmler asking him not to use Ukrainian policemen in the execution of Jews. In November 1942, Sheptytsky made a pastoral appeal “Thou shalt not kill.” Sheptytsky’s message, read from the pulpits of all Greek Catholic churches, said that no earthly purpose could justify murder.
By this time, several thousand Ukrainians had already committed political murder in the name of a cause that was alien to them - in the name of Adolf Hitler's "thousand-year Reich". The Holocaust taught them that the mass murder of civilians can be accomplished through precise organization and presence at the right time and in in the right place people willing to shoot unarmed men, women and children. Although concentration camps deaths, such as Sobibor, were very close; at the end of 1941 and throughout 1942, the Jews of Volyn were not taken there; they were taken out into the open field and killed not with gas, but with bullets. Village by village, town by town ancient civilization was wiped off the face of the earth. Remember the Volyn town of Ostrog, mentioned earlier as the center of disputes over Christian reform that arose in the early modern period. Ostrog was also a historical center of Jewish education. Bohdan Khmelnytsky's 1648 uprising, which ended the East Slavic Renaissance, was described by Ostrog Yeshiva graduate Nathan of Hanover. His essay “The Bottomless Abyss” (Yaven metzula) turned out to be a terrible prophecy. Ostrog was one of the first Volyn towns to be affected by the “final solution”. By the end of 1941, even before the ghetto was created in Ostrog, two thirds of the local Jews had already been killed. In the second half of 1942, when the surviving Jewish population was locked in the ghetto, SS troops with the help of Ukrainian and German policemen. carried out major events. The city's Jews were taken from their ghettos to pits dug several kilometers from the town, they were ordered to remove all clothing and personal belongings and lie down, after which the SS men shot them with machine-gun fire. The duties of the Ukrainian police included killing Jews who tried to escape from the ghetto when its liquidation began, Jews who tried to escape on the way to the place of execution, as well as finishing off Jews who survived after machine gun fire. The implementation of genocide in small towns and villages is not so well documented, however, here too the Ukrainian police played a larger role. In total, twelve thousand Ukrainian policemen assisted approximately one thousand four hundred German policemen in the murder of approximately two hundred thousand Volyn Jews. Although their share in the actual executions is small, the actions of Ukrainian policemen made the Holocaust in Volyn possible. They continued to do their work until December 1942.
The following spring, in March-April 1943, almost all Ukrainian policemen left German service and joined partisan detachments Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). One of their main tasks in the ranks of the UPA was to clear Volyn of the Polish presence. Poles generally attribute the success of this UPA operation to the Ukrainians' inherent penchant for brutality, but this was more a result of their newly acquired experience. People do what they are trained to do, and if they do their job often, they do it well. The Ukrainian partisans who carried out the mass liquidation of Poles in 1943 used tactics that they had mastered while collaborating with the Germans to carry out the Holocaust in 1942, namely: detailed planning and selection of the target for the operation; careful reassurances to the local population before the event that they had no cause for concern; sudden encirclement of settlements and physical liquidation of people. Ukrainians learned the technology of mass destruction from the Germans. This is why the ethnic cleansing of the UPA turned out to be so effective, and why in 1943 the Volyn Poles turned out to be almost as helpless as the Volyn Jews in 1942. The campaign against the Poles began in Volyn, and not in Galicia, is connected, in particular, with the fact that in Volyn, Ukrainian police played a greater role in the implementation of the “final solution”. Thus, there is a relationship between the Holocaust of Jews and the massacre of Poles, since they are explained by the presence of thousands of Ukrainians in Volhynia who had experience in carrying out genocide. But why did Ukrainian nationalists decide to eliminate the Poles in Ukraine? In 1942, Ukrainian police received orders from the Germans to kill Jews. From whom did the UPA partisans, who were mostly former policemen, receive the order to kill Poles in 1943?

Decapitation of civil society
The demoralization and beating of the Ukrainian and Polish elite was perhaps the most main reason Polish-Ukrainian conflict. The first Soviet occupation (1939-1941) led to the decapitation of Polish and Ukrainian society through the deportation and physical destruction of the elite. Although more Poles and Jews were deported and killed than Ukrainians, a number of educated Ukrainians were among the Communist victims. At least four hundred thousand Polish citizens were arrested and deported from the former territories of eastern Poland to Kazakhstan and Siberia.
First of all, government officials and intellectuals were subject to deportation, as a result of which in many villages there were no authoritative figures left who could play the role of a moral guide. On Stalin's orders, the NKVD executed more than twenty thousand educated Polish citizens captured by the Red Army in 1939, including almost half of the Polish officer corps. Of these, from seven to nine hundred were Jews, which, among other things, indicated the presence of Jewish officers in the Polish army. This crime is usually associated with the execution in the Katyn Forest, but executions were carried out in other places. When leaving Soviet troops from Galicia and Volyn after the outbreak of war in 1941, the NKVD shot several thousand more local Poles, Jews and Ukrainians.
On the German side, in the General Government, the Germans killed Polish intellectuals and imprisoned suspicious Ukrainians. German repression created the conditions for the following crimes motivated by revenge: for example, Polish guards (kapos) killed two brothers of the leader of Ukrainian nationalists Stepan Bandera in Auschwitz

Timothy Snyder

About tyranny. 20 lessons from the 20th century

© Timothy Snyder, 2017

© Nikolay Okhotin, translation into Russian, 2018

© A. Bondarenko, artistic design, layout, 2018 © AST Publishing House LLC, 2018

Publishing house CORPUS ®

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“In politics, the deceived have no excuses.”

Leszek Kolakowski

History and tyranny

History does not repeat itself, but it teaches. When the Founding Fathers discussed the American Constitution, they drew lessons from the history they knew. Fearing the collapse of their envisioned democratic republic, they studied the transformation of ancient democracies and republics into oligarchies and empires. As they knew, Aristotle warned that inequality led to instability, while Plato believed that demagogues became tyrants through free speech. By building a democratic republic based on the law and creating a system of checks and balances, the Founding Fathers sought to avoid the evil that they, following the ancient philosophers, called tyranny. In their minds, this meant the usurpation of power by an individual or a group of people, or the government's actions by circumventing the law to achieve its own goals. Much of the subsequent political debate in the United States concerned the issue of tyranny within American society: for example, against slaves and women.

When it seems that political system in danger, it has long been customary in the West to turn to history. If we are concerned today that the American experiment is threatened by tyranny, we can follow the example of the Founding Fathers and look at the history of other democracies and republics. We have an advantage. Fortunately, we can find more suitable and recent examples than ancient Greece and Rome. But alas, they demonstrate that history modern democracy is likewise a story of decline and destruction. Since the American colonies declared their independence from the British monarchy, which the founders considered “tyrannical,” there have been three democratic peaks in European history: after the First World War, in 1918; after World War II, in 1945; and after the collapse of communism, in 1989. Many of the democracies that arose along these frontiers have faded under circumstances that in many important respects resemble our own.

History can provide facts—and cautions. At the end of the nineteenth century, as at the end of the twentieth, the growth of world trade raised hopes for progress. At the beginning of the twentieth century, as at the beginning of the twenty-first, these expectations collided with a new phenomenon in mass politics, when a leader or party began to claim to be a direct expression of the will of the people. European democracies of the 1920s and 1930s slipped into right-wing authoritarianism and fascism. Communist Soviet Union, which originated in 1922, began to spread its model to Europe in the 1940s. The history of twentieth-century Europe shows us that societies easily disintegrate, democracies collapse, ethics recede and ordinary people find themselves on the edge of execution pits with machine guns in their hands. Today it would be useful to understand why this happens.

Both fascism and communism were reactions to globalization, to the inequality it caused, real and imaginary, and to the obvious helplessness of democracies in the face of this inequality. Fascism abandoned reason in the name of will and sacrificed objective truth to a bright myth, which was broadcast by leaders who supposedly became the voice of the people. To the complex challenges of globalization fascist regime attached the recognizable label of “conspiracy against the nation.” The fascists ruled for a couple of decades, completely discarding the intellectual heritage, the value of which has grown markedly since then. The communists ruled longer, almost seventy years in the Soviet Union and more than forty in large parts of Eastern Europe. Their model envisaged the power of a disciplined party elite with an ideological monopoly, which, according to the supposedly inviolable laws of history, was supposed to lead society to a certain future.

It is tempting to assume that our democratic heritage automatically protects us from such threats. You shouldn't give in to him. Our own tradition calls us to look to history to understand the underlying causes of tyranny and to develop the right response to it. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy give way to fascism, Nazism and communism in the twentieth century. Our only advantage is that we can learn from their experience. And now is the time for this.

This book contains twenty lessons from the twentieth century, adapted to today's circumstances.

1. Don't submit in advance.

IN TIMES LIKE THIS, MANY TRY TO PREDICT WHAT AN EVEN MORE REPRESSIVE GOVERNMENT MAY WANT AND GIVE UP POSITIONS BEFORE BEING ASKED.

A CITIZEN WHO ADJUSTS TO THE AUTHORITY IN THIS WAY GIVES IT A KNOWLEDGE OF WHAT SHE CAN ACHIEVE.

Premature obedience is a political tragedy. Perhaps rulers do not immediately understand that citizens are quite ready to give up some values ​​or principles. Perhaps the new regime initially does not have direct leverage over citizens in one way or another. Behind German elections Between the 1932 elections, which gave Hitler the opportunity to form a government, and the Czech elections of 1946, when the Communists won, an important stage of early obedience ensued. In both cases, enough of the population volunteered their services to the new leaders, allowing both Nazis and Communists to contemplate imminent regime change. The first imprudent gestures of conformity very quickly become irreversible.

In early 1938, Adolf Hitler, already firmly in power in Germany, began threatening to annex neighboring Austria. After the Austrian Chancellor surrendered, the early submission of the Austrians sealed the fate of the Austrian Jews. Local National Socialists arrested Jews and forced them to clear the streets of the symbols of independent Austria. But more importantly, the Austrians, who were not Nazis, looked at this with interest and curiosity. The Nazis, who had lists of property owned by Jews, took everything they could take. But more importantly, the Austrians, who were not Nazis, joined in the looting. As Hannah Arendt recalled, “when German troops invaded the country, yesterday’s neighbors began to riot in Jewish homes and Austrian Jews began to commit suicide.”

The early submission of the Austrians in March 1938 showed the Nazi leadership what was possible. In August of the same year, Adolf Eichmann created the Central Bureau of Jewish Emigration in Vienna. In November 1938, following the example of the Austrians in March, the German Nazis organized their pogrom - which became known as Kristallnacht.

In 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the SS, on its own initiative, began to develop methods of mass murder - it did not receive such orders. SS officers guessed the wishes of their superiors and demonstrated their capabilities. This was beyond Hitler's wildest dreams.

At first, early submission meant instinctive, without thinking, adaptation to a new situation. But are only Germans capable of such manifestations? American psychologist Stanley Milgram, reflecting on the atrocities of the Nazis, wanted to show that the explanation for the behavior of the Germans lies in a special authoritarian personality type. He designed an experiment to test his hypothesis, but was not given permission to conduct it in Germany. He then held it at Yale University in 1961, around the same time that Adolf Eichmann was tried in Jerusalem for his role in the Holocaust.

Milgram told his subjects (Yale students and New Haven residents) that as part of a training experiment they would have to administer electric shocks to other people. In fact, by agreement with Milgram, the people with wires attached on the other side of the glass only simulated shock. When the subjects subjected other participants in the experiment to electric shock (believing that all this was happening for real), they were greeted with a terrible sight. Strangers who had done nothing wrong to them clearly experienced great suffering - they knocked on the glass and complained of pain in their hearts. Despite this, most of the subjects followed Milgram's instructions and continued, as they believed, to administer electric shocks with ever-increasing force until their victims, as they believed, died. Even those who did not go as far as to (apparently) kill their fellows left without being interested in the health of the other participants in the experiment.