 |
Hitler vs.
Stalin: Who Killed More?
Who was
worse, Hitler or Stalin?
Timothy
Snyder MARCH 10, 2011 ISSUE
In the
second half of the twentieth century, Americans were taught to see both Nazi
Germany and the Soviet Union as the greatest of evils. Hitler was worse,
because his regime propagated the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust, the
attempt to eradicate an entire people on racial grounds. Yet Stalin was also
worse, because his regime killed far, far more people, tens of millions it was
often claimed, in the endless wastes of the Gulag. For decades, and even today,
this confidence about the difference between the two regimes—quality versus
quantity—has set the ground rules for the politics of memory. Even historians
of the Holocaust generally take for granted that Stalin killed more people than
Hitler, thus placing themselves under greater pressure to stress the special
character of the Holocaust, since this is what made the Nazi regime worse than
the Stalinist one.
Discussion
of numbers can blunt our sense of the horrific personal character of each
killing and the irreducible tragedy of each death. As anyone who has lost a
loved one knows, the difference between zero and one is an infinity. Though we
have a harder time grasping this, the same is true for the difference between,
say, 780,862 and 780,863—which happens to be the best estimate of the number of
people murdered at Treblinka. Large numbers matter because they are an
accumulation of small numbers: that is, precious individual lives. Today, after
two decades of access to Eastern European archives, and thanks to the work of
German, Russian, Israeli, and other scholars, we can resolve the question of
numbers. The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans—about 11
million—is roughly what we had thought. The total number of civilians killed by
the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now
that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did. That said, the issue
of quality is more complex than was once thought. Mass murder in the Soviet
Union sometimes involved motivations, especially national and ethnic ones, that
can be disconcertingly close to Nazi motivations.
It turns
out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people
who entered the Gulag left alive. Judging from the Soviet records we now have,
the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both
Stalin and Hitler were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit
more. The total figure for the entire Stalinist period is likely between two
million and three million. The Great Terror and other shooting actions killed
no more than a million people, probably a bit fewer. The largest human
catastrophe of Stalinism was the famine of 1930–1933, in which more than five
million people died.
Of those
who starved, the 3.3 million or so inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine who died in
1932 and 1933 were victims of a deliberate killing policy related to
nationality. In early 1930, Stalin had announced his intention to “liquidate”
prosperous peasants (“kulaks”) as a class so that the state could control agriculture
and use capital extracted from the countryside to build industry. Tens of
thousands of people were shot by Soviet state police and hundreds of thousands
deported. Those who remained lost their land and often went hungry as the state
requisitioned food for export. The first victims of starvation were the nomads
of Soviet Kazakhstan, where about 1.3 million people died. The famine spread to
Soviet Russia and peaked in Soviet Ukraine. Stalin requisitioned grain in
Soviet Ukraine knowing that such a policy would kill millions. Blaming
Ukrainians for the failure of his own policy, he ordered a series of
measures—such as sealing the borders of that Soviet republic—that ensured mass
death.
In 1937, as
his vision of modernization faltered, Stalin ordered the Great Terror. Because
we now have the killing orders and the death quotas, inaccessible so long as
the Soviet Union existed, we now know that the number of victims was not in the
millions. We also know that, as in the early 1930s, the main victims were the
peasants, many of them survivors of hunger and of concentration camps. The
highest Soviet authorities ordered 386,798 people shot in the “Kulak Operation”
of 1937–1938. The other major “enemies” during these years were people
belonging to national minorities who could be associated with states bordering
the Soviet Union: some 247,157 Soviet citizens were killed by the NKVD in
ethnic shooting actions.
In the
largest of these, the “Polish Operation” that began in August 1937, 111,091
people accused of espionage for Poland were shot. In all, 682,691 people were
killed during the Great Terror, to which might be added a few hundred thousand
more Soviet citizens shot in smaller actions. The total figure of civilians
deliberately killed under Stalinism, around six million, is of course horribly
high. But it is far lower than the estimates of twenty million or more made
before we had access to Soviet sources. At the same time, we see that the
motives of these killing actions were sometimes far more often national, or
even ethnic, than we had assumed. Indeed it was Stalin, not Hitler, who
initiated the first ethnic killing campaigns in interwar Europe.
Until World
War II, Stalin’s regime was by far the more murderous of the two. Nazi Germany
began to kill on the Soviet scale only after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in the
summer of 1939 and the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland that September.
About 200,000 Polish civilians were killed between 1939 and 1941, with each
regime responsible for about half of those deaths. This figure includes about
50,000 Polish citizens shot by German security police and soldiers in the fall
of 1939, the 21,892 Polish citizens shot by the Soviet NKVD in the Katyn
massacres of spring 1940, and the 9,817 Polish citizens shot in June 1941 in a
hasty NKVD operation after Hitler betrayed Stalin and Germany attacked the
USSR. Under cover of the war and the occupation of Poland, the Nazi regime also
killed the handicapped and others deemed unfit in a large-scale “euthanasia”
program that accounts for 200,000 deaths. It was this policy that brought
asphyxiation by carbon monoxide to the fore as a killing technique.
Beyond the
numbers killed remains the question of intent. Most of the Soviet killing took
place in times of peace, and was related more or less distantly to an
ideologically informed vision of modernization. Germany bears the chief
responsibility for the war, and killed civilians almost exclusively in
connection with the practice of racial imperialism. Germany invaded the Soviet
Union with elaborate colonization plans. Thirty million Soviet citizens were to
starve, and tens of millions more were to be shot, deported, enslaved, or
assimilated.
Such plans,
though unfulfilled, provided the rationale for the bloodiest occupation in the
history of the world. The Germans placed Soviet prisoners of war in starvation
camps, where 2.6 million perished from hunger and another half-million
(disproportionately Soviet Jews) were shot. A million Soviet citizens also
starved during the siege of Leningrad. In “reprisals” for partisan actions, the
Germans killed about 700,000 civilians in grotesque mass executions, most of
them Belarusians and Poles. At the war’s end the Soviets killed tens of
thousands of people in their own “reprisals,” especially in the Baltic states,
Belarus, and Ukraine. Some 363,000 German soldiers died in Soviet captivity.
Hitler came
to power with the intention of eliminating the Jews from Europe; the war in the
east showed that this could be achieved by mass killing. Within weeks of the
attack by Germany (and its Finnish, Romanian, Hungarian, Italian, and other
allies) on the USSR, Germans, with local help, were exterminating entire Jewish
communities. By December 1941, when it appears that Hitler communicated his
wish that all Jews be murdered, perhaps a million Jews were already dead in the
occupied Soviet Union. Most had been shot over pits, but thousands were
asphyxiated in gas vans. From 1942, carbon monoxide was used at the death
factories Chełmno, Bełz˙ec, Sobibór, and Treblinka to kill Polish and some
other European Jews. As the Holocaust spread to the rest of occupied Europe,
other Jews were gassed by hydrogen cyanide at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Overall,
the Germans, with much local assistance, deliberately murdered about 5.4
million Jews, roughly 2.6 million by shooting and 2.8 million by gassing (about
a million at Auschwitz, 780,863 at Treblinka, 434,508 at Bełz˙ec, about 180,000
at Sobibór, 150,000 at Chełmno, 59,000 at Majdanek, and many of the rest in gas
vans in occupied Serbia and the occupied Soviet Union). A few hundred thousand
more Jews died during deportations to ghettos or of hunger or disease in
ghettos. Another 300,000 Jews were murdered by Germany’s ally Romania. Most
Holocaust victims had been Polish or Soviet citizens before the war (3.2
million and one million respectively). The Germans also killed more than a
hundred thousand Roma.
All in all,
the Germans deliberately killed about 11 million noncombatants, a figure that
rises to more than 12 million if foreseeable deaths from deportation, hunger,
and sentences in concentration camps are included. For the Soviets during the
Stalin period, the analogous figures are approximately six million and nine
million. These figures are of course subject to revision, but it is very
unlikely that the consensus will change again as radically as it has since the
opening of Eastern European archives in the 1990s. Since the Germans killed
chiefly in lands that later fell behind the Iron Curtain, access to Eastern
European sources has been almost as important to our new understanding of Nazi
Germany as it has been to research on the Soviet Union itself. (The Nazi regime
killed approximately 165,000 German Jews.)
Apart from
the inaccessibility of archives, why were our earlier assumptions so wrong? One
explanation is the cold war. Our wartime and postwar European alliances, after
all, required a certain amount of moral and thus historical flexibility. In
1939 Germany and the Soviet Union were military allies. By the end of 1941,
after the Germans had attacked the Soviet Union and Japan the United States,
Moscow in effect had traded Berlin for Washington. By 1949, the alliances had
switched again, with the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany
together in NATO, facing off against the Soviet Union and its Eastern European
allies, including the smaller German Democratic Republic. During the cold war,
it was sometimes hard for Americans to see clearly the particular evils of
Nazis and Soviets. Hitler had brought about a Holocaust: but Germans were now
our allies. Stalin too had killed millions of people: but some of the worst
episodes, taking place as they had before the war, had already been downplayed
in wartime US propaganda, when we were on the same side.
We formed
an alliance with Stalin right at the end of the most murderous years of
Stalinism, and then allied with a West German state a few years after the
Holocaust. It was perhaps not surprising that in this intellectual environment
a certain compromise position about the evils of Hitler and Stalin—that both,
in effect, were worse—emerged and became the conventional wisdom.
New
understandings of numbers, of course, are only a part of any comparison, and in
themselves pose new questions of both quantity and quality. How to count the
battlefield casualties of World War II in Europe, not considered here? It was a
war that Hitler wanted, and so German responsibility must predominate; but in
the event it began with a German-Soviet alliance and a cooperative invasion of
Poland in 1939. Somewhere near the Stalinist ledger must belong the thirty
million or more Chinese starved during the Great Leap Forward, as Mao followed
Stalin’s model of collectivization.* The special quality of Nazi racism is not
diluted by the historical observation that Stalin’s motivations were sometimes
national or ethnic. The pool of evil simply grows deeper.
The most
fundamental proximity of the two regimes, in my view, is not ideological but
geographical. Given that the Nazis and the Stalinists tended to kill in the
same places, in the lands between Berlin and Moscow, and given that they were,
at different times, rivals, allies, and enemies, we must take seriously the
possibility that some of the death and destruction wrought in the lands between
was their mutual responsibility. What can we make of the fact, for example,
that the lands that suffered most during the war were those occupied not once
or twice but three times: by the Soviets in 1939, the Germans in 1941, and the
Soviets again in 1944?
The
Holocaust began when the Germans provoked pogroms in June and July 1941, in
which some 24,000 Jews were killed, on territories in Poland annexed by the
Soviets less than two years before. The Nazis planned to eliminate the Jews in
any case, but the prior killings by the NKVD certainly made it easier for local
gentiles to justify their own participation in such campaigns. As I have
written in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), where all of
the major Nazi and Soviet atrocities are discussed, we see, even during the
German-Soviet war, episodes of belligerent complicity in which one side killed
more because provoked or in some sense aided by the other. Germans took so many
Soviet prisoners of war in part because Stalin ordered his generals not to
retreat. The Germans shot so many civilians in part because Soviet partisans
deliberately provoked reprisals. The Germans shot more than a hundred thousand
civilians in Warsaw in 1944 after the Soviets urged the locals to rise up and
then declined to help them. In Stalin’s Gulag some 516,543 people died between
1941 and 1943, sentenced by the Soviets to labor, but deprived of food by the
German invasion.
Were these
people victims of Stalin or of Hitler? Or both?
|
PCP
Jerónimo de
Sousa reafirma que “o socialismo e o comunismo são o futuro da humanidade”
PCP
celebrou os cem anos da “Revolução de Outubro” e garante que “o socialismo não
é incompatível com a democracia”.
SÃO JOSÉ ALMEIDA 8 de Novembro de 2017
“A Revolução de Outubro está aí como experiência concreta,
como fonte de inspiração, com os seus valores e ideais afirmando que outro
mundo é possível”, garantiu o secretário-geral do PCP, Jerónimo de Sousa, no
comício do Coliseu dos Recreios, em Lisboa, que teve a sala cheia e incluiu um
espectáculo com música e poesia e a exibição de um documentário.
No discurso
escrito a que o PÚBLICO teve acesso prévio, Jerónimo de Sousa classificou “a
Revolução de Outubro como a realização mais avançada no processo de libertação
da humanidade de todas as formas de exploração e opressão”. E proclamou a
identidade comunista do seu partido: “Celebramos na Revolução de Outubro o
combate que continua. O combate que precisa de um Partido Comunista forte e
permanentemente reforçado, assumindo o seu papel de vanguarda em estreita
ligação à classe operária, aos trabalhadores e ao povo. Um partido munido dos
instrumentos teóricos do marxismo-leninismo. Um partido que age e luta
permanente e quotidianamente em defesa dos interesses dos trabalhadores, do
povo e do país. Um partido patriótico e internacionalista.”
A validade
do regime soviético foi afirmada pelo líder do PCP, ainda que reconhecendo a
sua falência concreta. Isto porque, para Jerónimo, “fracassou um modelo
historicamente configurado de construção do socialismo, mas não o ideal e o
projecto comunista que continua válido, vivo e com futuro, transportando a
semente que a luta dos trabalhadores fará renascer.” Defendendo que o facto de
se celebrarem os cem anos da “Revolução de Outubro sem a existência de grande
parte da realidade que dela brotou”, não põe em causa nem “apaga a
enriquecedora experiência dessa primeira Revolução Socialista vitoriosa e a
demonstração prática da superioridade da nova sociedade”, construída na União
Soviética. Para prometer: “É com a profunda convicção de que o socialismo e o
comunismo são o futuro da humanidade que continuamos a nossa luta, reafirmando
que fomos, somos e seremos comunistas.”
É com esse
objectivo que o líder do PCP justifica o apoio dado pelo seu partido ao Governo
do PS. Isto apesar “das contradições resultantes da assumida opção do governo
do PS de não se libertar dos seus compromissos com os interesses do grande
capital e da sua postura de submissão e dependência externa”. Jerónimo de Sousa
sustentou que os “dois anos da nova fase da vida política nacional com a
destacada intervenção do PCP” são “uma vantagem para a vida” dos que tiveram
“já garantidas algumas respostas aos seus problemas mais urgentes”.
Sublinhando
que “a Revolução de Outubro foi sempre, desde o seu nascimento, objecto das
mais insidiosas e odiosas campanhas difamatórias”, o líder do PCP destacou que
“os centros ideológicos e doutrinários da grande burguesia internacional
incessantemente renovam” a acusação de que “a natureza do projecto comunista é
intrinsecamente perverso e antidemocrático”, para afirmar: “Não! O socialismo
não é incompatível com a democracia, nem teme a democracia.”
Jerónimo de
Sousa sustentou que “o mundo precisa do socialismo”. Advogando que o “dia 7 de
Novembro” foi “o primeiro dos dias de uma revolução nascente que vai não só
abalar o mundo assente na exploração e na opressão, mas transformá-lo e
marcá-lo profundamente, pela força do seu exemplo, das suas realizações
revolucionárias e progressistas, da acção coerente e de princípios do novo
poder proletário e camponês a favor dos trabalhadores e dos povos”, afirmou:
“Assinalamos e saudamos nesse inaugural acto libertador o início de uma nova
época histórica que permanece aberta no horizonte da luta dos trabalhadores e
dos povos – a época da passagem do capitalismo ao socialismo – e nele a
materialização de um milenar sonho de emancipação e de libertação de gerações
de explorados e oprimidos”.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário