Anne Applebaum's Blog, page 48

Why WikiLeaks' latest disclosures won't change much.

I am sure the Russian people will be shocked – shocked! – to discover that U.S. diplomats think the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, "plays Robin to Putin's Batman." Italians will be equally horrified to learn that their prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is considered "feckless, vain and ineffective as a modern European leader," just as the French will be stunned to hear President Nicolas Sarkozy called "thin-skinned and authoritarian." As for the Afghans, they will be appalled to read that their president, Hamid Karzai, has been described as "an extremely weak man who did not listen to facts."

And anyone perusing the semi-secret diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks this week will find more of the same. Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe is a "crazy old man." Moammar Gaddafi of Libya travels with a "voluptuous blonde" whom he describes as his "senior Ukrainian nurse." In the coming days, there will be many things to say about the details of these newly public documents. But before we get into all of that, let's not lose the main point: Above all, this leak contains a treasure trove of things people regularly say off the record. These aren't records of human rights abuses, they are accounts of conversations. And – just like July's WikiLeaks revelations about Afghanistan – this one confirms much that was publicly known, openly discussed and even written about before.

The cables "reveal," among other things, that the United States is (surprise!) lobbying others to organize sanctions against Iran; that South Korean diplomats have discussed what would happen if North Korea collapses; that U.S. diplomats have been bribing other countries to accept ex-prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. (I suppose it is "news" that the United States spies on the United Nations, but forgive me if I am not as horrified as I should be.) Germany's Der Spiegel concludes, furiously, that the United States "seeks to safeguard its influence around the world." I'd be a lot more worried if the opposite were true.

What is truly novel is not the information, much of which has been reported before, but the language. Normally poker-faced diplomats are quoted making unflattering and occasionally amusing assessments of their interlocutors. Not all of them are Americans: The Saudi king thinks the Pakistani president is "rotten." France's top diplomat thinks Iran is a "fascist state." Britain's national bank chairman thinks his prime minister is "shallow" and so on.

This is certainly embarrassing for those who made the remarks. I am less sure whether their revelation gets us anywhere: On the contrary, it seems that, in the name of "free speech," another blow has been struck against frank speech. Yet more ammunition has been given to those who favor greater circumspection, greater political correctness and greater hypocrisy.

Don't expect better government from these revelations; expect deeper secrets. Will the U.S. ambassador to Country X give Washington a frank assessment of the president of X if he knows that it could appear in tomorrow's newspaper? Not very likely. Will a foreign leader tell any U.S. diplomat what he really thinks about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad if he knows that it might show up on WikiLeaks, too? I doubt it. Diplomatic cables will presumably now go the way of snail mail: Oral communication will replace writing, as even off-the-record chats now have to take place outdoors, in the presence of heavy traffic, just in case anyone is listening.

In the modern world – at least the sloppy, open, hackable Western world – any other form of frank discussion will soon be impossible. The State Department isn't the first to learn this: No American general will ever again give a journalist full access as did the hapless Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Because he revealed that – like every other general in history – he sometimes disagrees with the politicians back home, and because his interlocutor chose to publish his grumbling, he had to resign.

The result: Very soon, only authoritarian leaders will be able to speak frankly with one another. A Russian official can keep a politically incorrect statement out of the newspapers. A Chinese general would never speak to a journalist anyway. Low-level officials in Iran don't leak sensitive information to WikiLeaks because the regime would kill them and torture their families. By contrast, the low-level U.S. official who apparently leaked this week's diplomatic cables will probably live to a ripe old age.

In fact, the world's real secrets – the secrets of regimes where there is no free speech and tight control on all information – have yet to be revealed. This stuff is awkward and embarrassing, but it doesn't fundamentally change very much. How about a leak of Chinese diplomatic documents? Or Russian military cables? How about some stuff we don't actually know, such as Iranian discussion of Iranian nuclear weapons or North Korean plans for invasion of the south? If the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, is serious about his pursuit of "Internet openness" – and if his goal isn't, in fact, embarrassing the United States – that's where he'll look next. Somehow, I won't be surprised if he doesn't.

In the name of 'free speech,' Wikileaks' Julian Assange is making sure it's not blunt.

In Afghanistan a couple of years ago, I flew in one plane with a Portuguese pilot and another plane with a German pilot. I met a Turk who worked in NATO's Kabul headquarters and a Dutch woman who lived on a NATO base in the south. During the course of a very short visit, I also met Frenchmen, Czechs and, of course, Americans. When the International Security Assistance Force leaves Afghanistan in 2014 or thereabouts – as last weekend's NATO summit has agreed – NATO's soldiers can return home having proved, if nothing else, that the Western military alliance still exists.

Not that future historians will call NATO's Afghan mission an unqualified success: NATO wasn't prepared to fight in Afghanistan and at first had no leadership and thus no clear objectives in Afghanistan, either. Some countries put large numbers of troops on the ground and fought hard. Others hid behind national "caveats," which dictated where, when and how their soldiers were allowed to fight. Almost all of the alliance governments avoided an honest discussion of the war with their voters.

NATO didn't fail, in other words, but neither did it shine. To save the alliance's honor – and possibly to save the alliance – its soldiers should therefore come home, unpack their duffel bags and start planning their next mission: the defense of democracy in Europe.

This, of course, is what NATO was set up to do. But while NATO has enlarged itself seven times since its creation in 1949, most recently in 2009, the placement of NATO forces and institutions has hardly changed in two decades. The alliance now has 28 members, including almost all of the states that used to be the Warsaw Pact, but the three joint forces commands are all still in the south and the west of the continent, in Portugal, southern Italy and the Netherlands. American forces are dispersed in odd ways as well. More than 50,000 U.S. troops are based in Germany – a country now surrounded on all sides by NATO allies – while Poland and Norway, countries with long, non-NATO borders, have 100 and 80, respectively.

The alliance could also update its military plans for a new era. Europeans and Americans already cooperate over terrorism and are rightly adding cyber-terrorists to their list of joint enemies. NATO does now have contingency plans for the defense of some of its newer members, notably Poland and the Baltic states (the latter drawn up this year after the Obama administration finally noticed their absence).

But the alliance has not held serious military exercises for more than a decade. Once upon a time, NATO conducted a major annual exercise called "Reforger" ("Return of Forces to Germany") designed to prove that the United States could still move troops quickly into Europe if necessary. The last, anemic version of that exercise was conducted in 1993.

In times past, such exercises were meant to scare Russia. Now they should be renewed, not to scare Russia but rather to ensure that NATO's military establishments remain integrated, that American generals get to know their European counterparts and vice versa – and so that NATO's members and neighbors continue to believe that the alliance is real. The alliance's strength lies in its ability to project the image (and to maintain the reality) of strength, confidence and integration. Exercises, in reality and in cyberspace, can help achieve this. I can even imagine Russia being included, at some date. Who knows? One day we may find ourselves helping Russia defend its borders against China, so we might as well start practicing. It looks as though Russia has tentatively agreed to join in a missile defense pact, whatever that means.

Institutions should do what they are good at. And the expansion of NATO is one of the few true post-Cold-War foreign-policy success stories. By including some of NATO's old enemies inside its security umbrella, we ensured, at a minimal cost, the political, economic and ideological "Westernization" of an enormous swath of the continent.

We could continue that process. The stakes are lower – 2010 is not 1990, and the countries outside NATO are poorer and more turbulent than even those that have recently joined. Nevertheless, the very existence of a credible Western military alliance remains – yes, really – an encouragement to others on Europe's borders. This is a uniquely propitious moment. Right now there is a pro-Western government in Moldova; Ukraine's geopolitics are up in the air; elections are due to take place in Belarus in December. We in the West might have gone sour on ourselves, but Europeans on our borders still find us magnetically attractive. But we will only remain so if we try.

Throw your Euro-stereotypes out the window: Last weekend, a Greek government which has cut public-sector pay and lowered pensions won a clear victory in local elections. Despite strikes and violence, despite the fact that Greece's debt is still growing and more cuts are coming, there will be a Socialist mayor of Athens for the first time in 24 years. (And yes, in Greece the Socialists favor budget cuts and the conservatives oppose them.)

Nor are the Greeks alone. Last month, voters reelected a Latvian government that cut public sector workers' pay by 50 percent. The British government coalition, which is also trying to eliminate benefits and cut spending, remains strangely popular, too. Although – contrary to my previous observation – London witnessed its first continental-style, anti-austerity riot last week, too, there wasn't much general enthusiasm for the protesters. Some of their leaders wound up denouncing the riots, and they haven't hurt the government's poll numbers yet either.

It's too much to call it a pattern, and it may well not be a permanent change: I'm sure there are plenty of European politicians who won't survive their next encounter with voters. But there is something in the air. It almost seems as if at least a few Europeans have actually drawn some lessons from the recent recession and accompanying turbulence in the bond markets. They have realized, or are about to realize, that their state sectors are too big. They are about to discover that their public spending, which seemed justified in good economic times, has to be cut. The middle-class even knows in its heart of hearts that its subsidies, whether for mortgages, university tuition, or even health care, can't last. Some voters even know that their pay-as-you go pension systems aren't sustainable in the long term either.

I've described this mood swing before, but two American economists, Douglas Besharov and Douglas Call, recently substantiated it in the Wilson Quarterly. They write that most developed countries in Europe and Asia – not some, most – are moving, "however hesitantly," toward market-based government pension and health-care systems, at least for the middle class. Most now fund future pensions with investment funds and stock holdings, either instead of or in addition to pay-as-you-go plans. Even countries historically suspicious of the free market, such as Italy, Sweden and Poland, now use such schemes.

Though, as Besharov and Call write, the corrections and austerity budgets "aren't anywhere close to correcting the immense long-term imbalances these economies face," they represent a change of direction. Perhaps because the dollar isn't – yet – under international pressure, the United States has taken the opposite road. President Obama is trying to try to spend his way back into growth; Americans of all stripes still consider "privatization" of Social Security anathema; and even President Bush now regrets wasting the start of his second term on the patently hopeless cause of Social Security reform, which was unpopular even in his own party.

Our recent foray into health-care reform took us in the opposite direction from the rest of the developed world, too – not that we were really doing anything so different to start with. As Besharov and Call also note, Americans are wrong to think they currently enjoy "private" or "free-market" medicine. Even when it is not directly state-funded through Medicare or Medicaid, American health care is paid for by employers. And those employers, in turn, get a tax cut for providing health care to employees – in other words, a subsidy.

The result: Unlike, say, the Swiss, who pay for about 30 percent of their medical care themselves, or the Slovaks, who pay 26 percent, Americans pay only 13 percent. The rest comes from those subsidized employee programs or directly from the government. There are relatively few market mechanisms at work in our system, an absence that may explain, in part, why U.S. medicine is so expensive. And while we're on this subject, I can't help but note that the U.S. Postal Service lost $8.5 billion in the past year and may well go bankrupt next year. Why, in this age of multiple courier services, cheap phone calls and e-mail, is the U.S. Postal Service still a government-owned company? Germany privatized its postal service in 1995.

We remain, of course, the greatest propagandists for liberty and free markets. Our politicians – even Obama – can be eloquent in the defense of these ideals. But we haven't practiced what we preach for a long time, much longer than we generally recognize. Americans may be from Mars and Europeans from Venus, but would we reelect a president who cut government wages in half? I find it hard to imagine.

Alaska is darker in winter, colder all year and less densely populated than any other state. Alaskans are unique, too: They enjoy a higher level of per capita federal spending than anyone else in the union, as well as a state constitution that they think allows them to defy the Supreme Court. Yet for all of its anomalies – or perhaps because of them – Alaska's current electoral morass might well be a harbinger of the Republican Party's future.

For whatever the reason, the hypocrisy at the heart of the party – and at the heart of American politics – is at its starkest in Alaska. For decades, Alaskans have lived off federal welfare. Taxpayers' money subsidizes everything from Alaska's roads and bridges to its myriad programs for Native Americans. Federal funding accounts for one-third of Alaskan jobs. Nevertheless, Alaskans love to think of themselves as the last frontiersmen, the inhabitants of a land "beyond the horizon of urban clutter," a state with no use for Washington and its wicked ways.

Though they are usually not bothered by this contradiction, in the recent Senate race, Alaska's split personality finally split the Alaskan Republican Party. The party's official candidate, Joe Miller, campaigned as the candidate for the Alaska of would-be rugged individuals. Although endorsed by Sarah Palin and the Tea Party Express, Miller proved an exceptionally poor choice for this role. He said all the right things about fiscal insanity, the repeal of Obamacare, lower taxes and slashing welfare spending. But like many of his comrades in arms, he gave no specifics and offered no plan for how to reach fiscal sanity or replace Obamacare. During the campaign, it also emerged that he had once collected farm subsidies; that his wife had once collected unemployment benefits; and that his family had received state health benefits. Perhaps it's just hard for Alaskans to avoid feeding from the federal trough.

The incumbent and write-in candidate, Lisa Murkowski, represented Alaska-as-federally-funded-paradise. The scion of a political family, Murkowski had no need for hypocrisy. "I will not apologize for seeking more funding for Alaska," she declared when re-launching her campaign. She pointed out that her senatorial seniority gives her a higher rank on committees, which dispense money. She talked up her friendship with the late Sen. Ted Stevens, whose ability to send cash to Alaska was legendary.

And she won: Even if some legal obstacle prevents her from becoming senator, Murkowski's write-in campaign got the most votes. When offered a direct choice, in other words, the majority of Alaskans chose the corrupt, big-spending Republican Party of Murkowski over the shallow, hypocritical radicalism of Miller.

If nothing else, Alaskans' interesting choice must be keeping the Republican leadership awake at night: When faced with the reality of actual funding cuts, a year or two from now, might not other Republican voters suddenly feel they need someone like Murkowski, too? This must be a particular dilemma for the new Republican speaker, John Boehner. During his two-decade career as a Washington insider, Boehner has resembled Murkowski a lot more than Miller. As chairman of the House Education Committee, for example, one of his primary tasks was to entertain and indulge the companies that make hundreds of millions of dollars from federally funded student loan programs and that have been major donors to his campaigns.

At the same time, Boehner owes his new job to the anti-government rhetoric of candidates like Miller. So do many of his colleagues: Despite its profligate spending policies of the past decade, the Republican establishment attached itself to this year's wave of anti-establishment resentment and must at least pay lip service to its goals. Poor Boehner must feel pulled in two directions, particularly because so many Republicans – and so many Americans – don't practice what they preach. They want lower taxes, higher defense spending, more Social Security and, yes, balanced budgets. They want the government to leave them alone, but at the same time they aren't averse to the odd federal subsidy. They like the way Miller talks, but, in the end, will they vote for Murkowski? Which path will Boehner follow?

In theory, there could be a third way. If the Republican Party were serious about the deficit its leaders could, just for example, eliminate subsidies for farmers and homeowners. They could raise the retirement age and "privatize" Social Security. They could simplify our hideously complex income tax. They could impose a carbon tax instead. They could even do some of this together with President Obama. In practice, I'm afraid that for the next two years, we'll be watching the Millers and the Murkowskis struggle for the soul of the party. As Alaska goes, so goes the nation.

Here is the bad news: Last week, terrorists linked to an al-Qaeda cell in Yemen disguised powerful explosives as printer cartridges, inserted them into packages, and smuggled them onto cargo planes bound for the United States. The packages are clearly the work of someone with expertise: The president's counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, has declared that "The individual who has been making these bombs . . . is a very dangerous individual, clearly somebody who has a fair amount of training and experience."

Now here is the good news: The explosive chemical inserted into the package was PETN, pentaerythritol tetranitrate. PETN was first synthesized in 1891, was patented in Germany in 1912 and has been in use since World War I. PETN has been around a long time, in other words – and it still isn't that easy for would-be terrorists to manipulate. PETN was the explosive that the shoe bomber, Richard Reid, failed to set off in 2001. PETN was also the explosive which the underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, failed to set off last Christmas. These latest bombs may also have failed: They seem to have been configured as "cellphone" bombs, not as ordinary package bombs, yet no phone signal would have been able to reach them over the Atlantic. Investigators are still trying to understand how the bombs were meant to be detonated. But it is possible that they simply didn't work as planned.

PETN, in other words, isn't a weapon of mass destruction. It can take down a plane, but not a city. It requires "a fair amount of training and experience" to deploy, but not advanced degrees in chemistry or physics. It is far from fail-safe. Which is exactly my point: If al-Qaeda terrorists are stuffing PETN into underwear or packages, that must mean that they do not have access to cutting-edge biological research or nuclear bomb components. On the contrary, they remain strangely fixated on airplanes and far behind the technological times.

Clearly, this latest incarnation of al-Qaeda is not benign: Islamic fundamentalist terrorism remains a threat, and the terrorists responsible for this latest attempt appear to be looking for weaknesses in the international aviation system. One day they may succeed. Yet although they are dangerous, although they are ruthless, these package bombs prove that al-Qaeda, at least in its desert hideouts on the Arabian Peninsula, does not pose a serious, existential security challenge to the United States.

There are plenty of such challenges around. Nuclear technology has spread to Iran, North Korea and Pakistan, among others. Radioactive chemicals are widely available – and have indeed been used, probably by Russian agents, in the poisoning of ex-KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 – as are other forms of poison gas. The recent discovery of Stuxnet, a computer worm designed to target critical infrastructure, might also herald the coming of the age of cyberwarfare. Already, hundreds of what appear to be coordinated attacks on sensitive cybertargets in the United States and Europe are repulsed every week, and many seem to come from Russia or China. Richard Clarke, one of Brennan's predecessors, has written that China has "systematically done all the things a nation would do if it contemplated having an offensive cyber war capability," even if doesn't intend to launch such a war right now.

It's a list that needn't frighten anybody, but it should lend some perspective to the debate about al-Qaeda, Yemen, airport and cargo security that will surely follow this week's midterm elections. If the best al-Qaeda's remaining cells can do is hide PETN, a 19th-century explosive, inside a printer cartridge, then perhaps we have already succeeded – far more than we usually realize – in destabilizing at least this particular terrorist threat. We should continue to support the security services and counterterrorism experts who prevented this tragedy and who will prevent others. But we shouldn't let al-Qaeda take too much public attention, diplomatic energy and government funding from the more complicated, and more dangerous, challenges of the future.

Crimea: The Last Crusade

by Orlando Figes

Allen Lane, 575pp, £30

First, a disclaimer: this review will not touch upon some recent, odd behaviour of this book's author, Orlando Figes, because I can't see that it's relevant. The history of the Crimean war is far removed in time and in space from contemporary literary politics, and I think we should keep it that way.

Second, an unexpected fact. Although the Crimean war is also far removed in time and space from contemporary American politics, while reading this excellent book I could not help but marvel at the many parallels with the present. Figes's goal, in writing about the Crimean war, was to take the subject away from the military historians who have 'constantly retold the same stories (the Charge of the Light Brigade, the bungling of the English commanders, Florence Nightingale)' and to put it back into its political context. He is fascinated by, among other things, the Russophobia of the English, the messianism of the Russians, and the obsession everybody had with the complicated politics of Palestine. He argues that subsequent characterisations of the Crimean war as 'senseless' or 'unnecessary' don't take into account the importance that these kinds of issues had at the time.

Above all, he paints the Crimean war as an early example of what we now call liberal interventionism. When Lord Palmerston announced he was sending warships to the Dardanelles to help the Turks stand up to the bullying Czar, the British public was delighted. The 'readiness to intervene in any place around the world in defence of British liberal values' was exactly what the middle classes expected from their government at that time. If you think that makes 19th- century Britain sound like 21st-century America, you would be absolutely correct. The only difference is that the British didn't stick around after the fighting, as the Americans did in Iraq, to bring democracy to the Ottoman empire.

This may have been a result of British racism, rather than the lack of British willpower. As Palmerston himself once put it, he would not be disappointed to

see the Turk kicked out of Europe and compelled to go and sit cross-legged, smoke his pipe, chew his opium and cut off heads on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus.

Queen Victoria also expressed, privately, the wish that the Turks would one day all become Christians. Nevertheless, Palmerston's crusade against the Russians and in favour of the Turks won him the support of what we would now call the tabloid press, at a moment when the tabloid press was just beginning to matter. His commitment to foreign intervention 'reinforced their John Bull view that Britain was the greatest country in the world'. Which also sounds familiar, no?

Figes describes at length the role that nationalist and particularly religious fanaticism played in the run-up to the war. We sometimes see these things as cancers of the present, imagining all past statesmen as sober realists, men who only went to war when it was in the national interest to do so. But the Russian motivation in the Crimea, as in the Caucuses, was religious above all else. The Czars' brutal war against the Chechens, which involved burning crops and villages and cutting down forests (another series of events with echoes in the present) was justified as a fight against the infidel.

Both the Russians and the British, to a degree hardly imaginable now, were also captivated by the dispute over which religious denominations should control the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, where Jesus was allegedly buried. The desire to take back the Holy Land for Western Christianity also motivated the French to take an interest in the Middle East in general, and to oppose Russia in particular. Stories of Russian persecution of Catholics caused outrage in 19th-century Paris, which was then the home of many prominent exiled Polish aristocrats. Figes, perhaps because he is a scholar of Russia, is not entirely sympathetic to these exiles, who by supplying such stories helped foster an image of Russia in France as simultaneously aggressive and backward. Perhaps because I am a sometime resident of Poland, and thus steeped in Polish history, I am more inclined to see their point.

I am also uncertain whether the classification of the Crimean war as 'senseless' or 'unnecessary' is really so inaccurate. Figes's explanation of why the war was fought, and what motivated those who did the fighting, is excellent. But it's hard for me to see, 150 years later, how a war fought at least in part for control of the Holy Sepulchre was 'necessary'. Though once again, that surely reflects my distance in time and space. A century or two from now, I'm sure people will find our wars equally absurd.

Bloodlands

by Timothy Snyder

Basic Books, 524 pages, $29.95

and Stalin's Genocides

by Norman M. Naimark

Princeton University Press, 163 pp., $26.95

Once, in an attempt to explain the history of his country to outsiders, the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz described the impact of war, occupation, and the Holocaust on ordinary morality.  Mass violence, he explained, could shatter a man's sense of natural justice. In normal times,

had he stumbled upon a corpse on the street, he would have called the police. A crowd would have gathered, and much talk and comment would have ensued. Now he knows he must avoid the dark body lying in the gutter, and refrain from asking unnecessary questions….

Murder became ordinary during wartime, wrote Miłosz, and was even regarded as legitimate if it was carried out on behalf of the resistance. In the name of patriotism, young boys from law-abiding, middle-class families became hardened criminals, thugs for whom "the killing of a man presents no great moral problem." Theft became ordinary too, as did falsehood and fabrication. People learned to sleep through sounds that would once have roused the whole neighborhood: the rattle of machine-gun fire, the cries of men in agony, the cursing of the policeman dragging the neighbors away.

For all of these reasons, Miłosz explained, "the man of the East cannot take Americans [or other Westerners] seriously." Because they hadn't undergone such experiences, they couldn't seem to fathom what they meant, and couldn't seem to imagine how they had happened either. "Their resultant lack of imagination," he concluded, "is appalling."1

But Miłosz's bitter analysis did not go far enough. Almost sixty years after the poet wrote those words, it is no longer enough to say that we Westerners lack imagination. Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian whose past work has ranged from Habsburg Vienna to Stalinist Kiev, takes the point one step further. In Bloodlands, a brave and original history of mass killing in the twentieth century, he argues that we still lack any real knowledge of what happened in the eastern half of Europe in the twentieth century. And he is right: if we are American, we think "the war" was something that started with Pearl Harbor in 1941 and ended with the atomic bomb in 1945. If we are British, we remember the Blitz of 1940 (and indeed are commemorating it energetically this year) and the liberation of Belsen. If we are French, we remember Vichy and the Resistance. If we are Dutch we think of Anne Frank. Even if we are German we know only a part of the story.

Snyder's ambition is to persuade the West—and the rest of the world—to see the war in a broader perspective. He does so by disputing popular assumptions about victims, death tolls, and killing methods—of which more in a moment—but above all about dates and geography. The title of this book, Bloodlands, is not a metaphor. Snyder's "bloodlands," which others have called "borderlands," run from Poznan in the West to Smolensk in the East, encompassing modern Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, and the edge of western Russia (see map on page 10). This is the region that experienced not one but two—and sometimes three—wartime occupations. This is also the region that suffered the most casualties and endured the worst physical destruction.

More to the point, this is the region that experienced the worst of both Stalin's and Hitler's ideological madness. During the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, the lethal armies and vicious secret policemen of two totalitarian states marched back and forth across these territories, each time bringing about profound ethnic and political changes. In this period, the city of Lwów was occupied twice by the Red Army and once by the Wehrmacht. After the war ended it was called L'viv, not Lwów, it was no longer in eastern Poland but in western Ukraine, and its Polish and Jewish pre-war population had been murdered or deported and replaced by ethnic Ukrainians from the surrounding countryside. In this same period, the Ukrainian city of Odessa was occupied first by the Romanian army and then by the Wehrmacht before being reoccupied by the Soviet Union. Each time power changed hands there were battles and sieges, and each time an army re- treated from the city it blew up the harbor or massacred Jews. Similar stories can be told about almost any place in the region.

This region was also the site of most of the politically motivated killing in Europe—killing that began not in 1939 with the invasion of Poland, but in 1933, with the famine in Ukraine. Between 1933 and 1945, fourteen million people died there, not in combat but because someone made a deliberate decision to murder them. These deaths took place in the bloodlands, and not accidentally so: "Hitler and Stalin rose to power in Berlin and Moscow," writes Snyder, "but their visions of transformation concerned above all the lands between."

Beginning in the 1930s, Stalin conducted his first utopian agricultural experiment in Ukraine, where he collectivized the land and conducted a "war" for grain with the kulaks, the "wealthy" peasants (whose wealth sometimes consisted of a single cow). His campaign rapidly evolved into a war against Ukrainian peasant culture itself, culminating in a mass famine in 1933. In that same year, Hitler came to power and began dreaming of creating Lebensraum, living space, for German colonists in Poland and Ukraine, a project that could only be realized by eliminating the people who lived there.2 In 1941, the Nazis also devised the Hunger Plan, a scheme to feed German soldiers and civilians by starving Polish and Soviet citizens. Once again, the Nazis decided, the produce of Ukraine's collective farms would be confiscated and redistributed: "Socialism in one country would be supplanted by socialism for the German race."

Not accidentally, the fourteen million victims of these ethnic and political schemes were mostly not Russians or Germans, but the peoples who inhabited the lands in between. Stalin and Hitler shared a contempt for the very notions of Polish, Ukrainian, and Baltic independence, and jointly strove to eliminate the elites of those countries. Following their invasion of western Poland in 1939, the Germans arrested and murdered Polish professors, priests, intellectuals, and politicians. Following their invasion of eastern Poland in 1939, the Soviet secret police arrested and murdered Polish professors, priests, intellectuals, and politicians. A few months later, Stalin ordered the murder of some 20,000 Polish officers at Katyn and in other forests nearby as well.

Stalin and Hitler also shared a hatred for the Jews who had long flourished in this region, and who were far more numerous there than in Germany or anywhere else in Western Europe. Snyder points out that Jews were fewer than one percent of the German population when Hitler came to power in 1933, and many did manage to flee. Hitler's vision of a "Jew-free" Europe could thus only be realized when the Wehrmacht invaded the bloodlands, which is where most of the Jews of Europe actually lived. Of the 5.4 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, four million were from the bloodlands. The vast majority of the rest—including the 165,000 German Jews who did not escape—were taken to the bloodlands to be murdered. After the war, Stalin became paranoid about those Soviet Jews who remained, in part because they wanted to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust. At the end of his life he purged and arrested many thousands of them, though he died too soon to carry out another mass murder.

Above all, this was the region where Nazism and Soviet communism clashed. Although they had signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact in 1939, agreeing to divide the bloodlands between them, Stalin and Hitler also came to hate each other. This hatred proved fatal to both German and Soviet soldiers who had the bad luck to become prisoners of war. Both dictators treated captured enemies with deadly utilitarianism. For the Germans, Soviet POWs were expendable: they consumed calories needed by others and, unlike Western POWs, were considered to be subhuman. And so they were deliberately starved to death in hideous "camps" in Poland, Russia, and Belarus that were not camps but death zones. Penned behind barbed wire, often in open fields without food, medicine, shelter, or bedding, they died in extraordinary numbers and with great rapidity. On any given day in the autumn of 1941, as many Soviet POWs died as did British and American POWs during the entire war. In total more than three million perished, mostly within a period of a few months.

In essence the Soviet attitude toward German POWs was no different. When, following the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army suddenly found itself with 90,000 prisoners, it also put them in open fields without any food or shelter. Over the next few months, at least half a million German and Axis soldiers would die in Soviet captivity. But as the Red Army began to win the war, it tried harder to keep captives alive, the better to deploy them as forced laborers. According to Soviet statistics, 2.3 million German soldiers and about a million of their allies (from Romania, Italy, Hungary, and Austria, but also France and Holland) eventually wound up in the labor camps of the Gulag, along with some 600,000 Japanese whose fate has been almost forgotten in their native land.3

Some were released after the war and others were released in the 1950s. There wasn't necessarily any political logic to these decisions. At one point in 1947, at the height of the postwar famine, the NKVD unexpectedly released several hundred thousand war prisoners. There was no political explanation: the Soviet leadership simply hadn't enough food to keep them all alive. And in the postwar world there were pressures—most of all from the USSR's new East German client state—to keep them alive. The Nazis had operated without such constraints.

Though some of the anecdotes and statistics may be surprising to those who don't know this part of the world, scholars will find nothing in Bloodlands that is startlingly new. Historians of the region certainly know that three million Soviet soldiers starved to death in Nazi camps, that most of the Holocaust took place in the East, and that Hitler's plans for Ukraine were no different from Stalin's. Snyder's original contribution is to treat all of these episodes—the Ukrainian famine, the Holocaust, Stalin's mass executions, the planned starvation of Soviet POWs, postwar ethnic cleansing—as different facets of the same phenomenon. Instead of studying Nazi atrocities or Soviet atrocities separately, as many others have done, he looks at them together. Yet Snyder does not exactly compare the two systems either. His intention, rather, is to show that the two systems committed the same kinds of crimes at the same times and in the same places, that they aided and abetted one another, and above all that their interaction with one another led to more mass killing than either might have carried out alone.

 

 

He also wants to show that this interaction had consequences for the inhabitants of the region. From a great distance in time and space, we in the West have the luxury of discussing the two systems in isolation, comparing and contrasting, judging and analyzing, engaging in theoretical arguments about which was worse. But people who lived under both of them, in Poland or in Ukraine, experienced them as part of a single historical moment. Snyder explains:

The Nazi and Soviet regimes were sometimes allies, as in the joint occupation of Poland [from 1939–1941]. They sometimes held compatible goals as foes: as when Stalin chose not to aid the rebels in Warsaw in 1944 [during the Warsaw uprising], thereby allowing the Germans to kill people who would later have resisted communist rule…. Often the Germans and the Soviets goaded each other into escalations that cost more lives than the policies of either state by itself would have.

In some cases, the atrocities carried out by one power eased the way for the other. When the Nazis marched into western Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltic states in 1941, they entered a region from which the Soviet secret police had deported hundreds of thousands of people in the previous few months, and shot thousands of prisoners in the previous few days. The conquering Germans were thus welcomed by some as "liberators" who might save the population from a genuinely murderous regime. They were also able to mobilize popular anger at these recent atrocities, and in some places to direct some of that anger at local Jews who had, in the public imagination—and sometimes in reality—collaborated with the Soviet Union. It is no accident that the acceleration of the Holocaust occurred at precisely this moment.

To look at the history of mid- twentieth-century Europe in this way also has consequences for Westerners. Among other things, Snyder asks his readers to think again about the most famous films and photographs taken at Belsen and Buchenwald by the British and American soldiers who liberated those camps. These pictures, which show starving, emaciated people, walking skeletons in striped uniforms, stacks of corpses piled up like wood, have become the most enduring images of the Holocaust. Yet the people in these photographs were mostly not Jews: they were forced laborers who had been kept alive because the German war machine needed them to produce weapons and uniforms. Only when the German state began to collapse in early 1945 did they begin to starve to death in large numbers.

The vast majority of Hitler's victims, Jewish and otherwise, never saw a concentration camp. Although about a million people died because they were sent to do forced labor in German concentration camps, some ten million died in killing fields in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia—that means they were taken to the woods, sometimes with the assistance of their neighbors, and shot—as well as in German starvation zones and German gas chambers. These gas chambers were not "camps," Snyder argues, though they were sometimes adjacent to camps, as at Auschwitz:

Under German rule, the concentration camps and the death factories operated under different principles. A sentence to the concentration camp Belsen was one thing, a transport to the death factory Bełz·ec something else. The first meant hunger and labor, but also the likelihood of survival; the second meant immediate and certain death by asphyxiation. This, ironically, is why people remember Belsen and forget Bełzec.

 

He makes a similar point about Stalin's victims, arguing that although a million died in the Soviet Gulag between 1933 and 1945, an additional six million died from politically induced Soviet famines and in Soviet killing fields. I happen to think Snyder's numbers are a little low—the figure for Gulag deaths is certainly higher than a million—but the proportions are probably correct. In the period between 1930 and 1953, the number of people who died in labor camps—from hunger, overwork, and cold, while living in wooden barracks behind barbed wire—is far lower than the number who died violently from machine-gun fire combined with the number who starved to death because their village was deprived of food.

The image we have of the prisoner in wooden shoes, dragging himself to work every morning, losing his humanity day by day—the image also created in the brilliant writings of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn—is in this sense somewhat misleading. In fact, prisoners who could work had at least a chance of staying alive. Prisoners who were too weak to work, or for whom work could not be organized because of war and chaos, were far more likely to die. The 5.4 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust mostly died instantly, in gas ovens or in silent forests. We have no photographs of them, or of their corpses.

The chronological and geographical arguments presented in Bloodlands also complicate the debate over the proper use of the word "genocide." As not everybody now remembers, this word (from the Greek genos, tribe, and the French cide) was coined in 1943 by a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent, Raphael Lemkin, who had long been trying to draw the attention of the international community to what he at first called "the crime of barbarity." In 1933, inspired by news of the Armenian massacre, he had proposed that the League of Nations treat mass murder committed "out of hatred towards a racial, religious or social collectivity" as an international crime. After he fled Nazi-occupied Poland in 1940, Lemkin intensified his efforts. He persuaded the Nuremburg prosecutors to use the word "genocide" during the trials, though not in the verdict. He also got the new United Nations to draft a Convention on Genocide. Finally, after much debate, the General Assembly passed this convention in 1948.

As the Stanford historian Norman Naimark explains in Stalin's Genocides, the UN's definition of genocide was deliberately narrow: "Acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." This was because Soviet diplomats had demanded the exclusion of any reference to social, economic, and political groups. Had they left these categories in, prosecution of the USSR for the murder of aristocrats (a social group), kulaks (an economic group), or Trotskyites (a political group) would have been possible.

Although Lemkin himself continued to advocate a broader definition of the term, the idea that the word "genocide" can refer only to the mass murder of an ethnic group has stuck. In fact, until recently the term was used almost exclusively to refer to the Holocaust, the one "genocide" that is recognized as such by almost everybody: the international community, the former Allies, even the former perpetrators.

Perhaps because of that unusually universal recognition, the word has more recently acquired almost magical qualities. Nations nowadays campaign for their historical tragedies to be recognized as "genocide," and the term has become a political weapon both between and within countries. The disagreement between Armenians and Turks over whether the massacre of Armenians after World War I was "genocide" has been the subject of a resolution introduced in the US Congress. The leaders of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine campaigned to have the Ukrainian famine recognized as "genocide" in international courts (and in January 2010, a court in Kiev did convict Stalin and other high officials of "genocide" against the Ukrainian nation). But the campaign was deliberately dropped when their more pro-Russian (or post-Soviet) opponents came to power. They have since deleted a link to the genocide campaign from the presidential website.

As the story of Lemkin's genocide campaign well illustrates, this discussion of the proper use of the word has also been dogged by politics from the beginning. The reluctance of intellectuals on the left to condemn communism; the fact that Stalin was allied with Roosevelt and Churchill; the existence of German historians who tried to downplay the significance of the Holocaust by comparing it to Soviet crimes; all of that meant that, until recently, it was politically incorrect in the West to admit that we defeated one genocidal dictator with the help of another. Only now, with the publication of so much material from Soviet and Central European archives, has the extent of the Soviet Union's mass murders become better known in the West. In recent years, some in the former Soviet sphere of influence—most notably in the Baltic states and Ukraine—have begun to use the word "genocide" in legal documents to describe the Soviet Union's mass killings too.

Naimark's short book is a polemical contribution to this debate. Though he acknowledges the dubious political history of the UN convention, he goes on to argue that even under the current definition, Stalin's attack on the kulaks and on the Ukrainian peasants should count as genocide. So should Stalin's targeted campaigns against particular ethnic groups. At different times the Soviet secret police hunted down, arrested, and murdered ethnic Poles, Germans, and Koreans who happened to be living in the USSR, and of course they murdered 20,000 Polish officers within a few weeks. A number of small nations, notably the Chechens, were also arrested and deported en masse in the immediate postwar period: men, women, children, and grandparents were put on trains, and sent to live in Central Asia, where they were meant to die and eventually disappear as a nation. A similar fate met the Crimean Tatars.

Like Snyder's, Naimark's work has also ranged widely, from his groundbreaking book on the Soviet occupation of East Germany to studies of ethnic cleansing. As a result his argument is authoritative, clear, and hard to dispute. Yet if we take the perspective offered in Bloodlands seriously, we also have to ask whether the whole genocide debate itself—and in particular the long-standing argument over whether Stalin's murders "qualify"—is not a red herring. If Stalin's and Hitler's mass murders were different but not separate, and if neither would have happened in quite the same way without the other, then how can we talk about whether one is genocide and the other is not?

To the people who actually experienced both tyrannies, such definitions hardly mattered. Did the Polish merchant care whether he died because he was a Jew or because he was a capitalist? Did the starving Ukrainian child care whether she had been deprived of food in order to create a Communist paradise or in order to provide calories for the soldiers of the German Reich? Perhaps we need a new word, one that is broader than the current definition of genocide and means, simply, "mass murder carried out for political reasons." Or perhaps we should simply agree that the word "genocide" includes within its definition the notions of deliberate starvation as well as gas chambers and concentration camps, that it includes the mass murder of social groups as well as ethnic groups and be done with it.

Finally, the arguments of Bloodlands also complicate the modern notion of memory—memory, that is, as opposed to history. It is true, for example, that the modern German state "remembers" the Holocaust—in official documents, in public debates, in monuments, in school textbooks—and is often rightly lauded for doing so. But how comprehensive is this memory? How many Germans "remember" the deaths of three million Soviet POWs? How many know or care that the secret treaty signed between Hitler and Stalin not only condemned the inhabitants of western Poland to deportation, hunger, and often death in slave labor camps, but also condemned the inhabitants of eastern Poland to deportation, hunger, and often death in Soviet exile? The Katyn massacre really is, in this sense, partially Germany's responsibility: without Germany's collusion with the Soviet Union, it would not have happened. Yet modern Germany's very real sense of guilt about the Holocaust does not often extend to Soviet soldiers or even to Poles.

If we remember the twentieth century for what it actually was, and not for what we imagine it to have been, the misuse of history for national political purposes also becomes more difficult. The modern Russian state often talks about the "twenty million Soviet dead" during World War II as a way of emphasizing its victimhood and martyrdom. But even if we accept that suspiciously large round number, it is still important to acknowledge that the majority of those were not Russians, did not live in modern Russia, and did not necessarily die because of German aggression. It is also important to acknowledge that Soviet citizens were just as likely to die during the war years because of decisions made by Stalin, or because of the interaction between Stalin and Hitler, as they were from the commands of Hitler alone.

For different reasons, the American popular memory of World War II is also due for some revision. In the past, we have sometimes described this as the "good war," at least when contrasted to the morally ambiguous wars that followed. At some level this is understandable: we did fight for human rights in Germany and Japan, we did leave democratic German and Japanese regimes in our wake, and we should be proud of having done so. But it is also true that while we were fighting for democracy and human rights in the lands of Western Europe, we ignored and then forgot what happened further east.

As a result, we liberated one half of Europe at the cost of enslaving the other half for fifty years. We really did win the war against one genocidal dictator with the help of another. There was a happy end for us, but not for everybody. This does not make us bad—there were limitations, reasons, legitimate explanations for what happened. But it does make us less exceptional. And it does make World War II less exceptional, more morally ambiguous, and thus more similar to the wars that followed.

If nothing else, a reassessment of what we know about Europe in the years between 1933 and 1953 could finally cure us of that "lack of imagination" that so appalled Czesław Miłosz almost sixty years ago. When considered in isolation, Auschwitz can be easily compartmentalized, characterized as belonging to a specific place and time, or explained away as the result of Germany's unique history or particular culture. But if Auschwitz was not the only mass atrocity, if mass murder was simultaneously taking place across a multinational landscape and with the support of many different kinds of people, then it is not so easy to compartmentalize or explain away. The more we learn about the twentieth century, the harder it will be to draw easy lessons or make simple judgments about the people who lived through it—and the easier it will be to empathize with and understand them.

Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind (1953; Penguin, 2001), pp. 26–29. 
Typical is the story of a house I own in northwest Poland: intending to "Germanize" the region, the Nazis evicted the Polish owners in 1939 and installed a German family from Lithuania in their place. These Germans were evicted again in 1944, and the house became state property. 
These figures come from Richard Overy, Russia's War (Penguin, 1997), p. 297, and from Voennoplennye v SSSR, 1939–1956: dokumenty i materialy , edited by M.M. Zagorul'ko (Moscow: Logos, 2000), pp. 331–333. 

I don't know about you, but my heart sank when I read about Jon Stewart's Million Moderate March, planned for the Mall next weekend. My heart sank further when I learned that liberal groups, lacking any better ideas, have decided to take this endeavor seriously. It's bad enough that the only way to drum up enthusiasm for a "Rally to Restore Sanity" is to make it into a television comedian's joke. But it's far worse that the "moderates" in attendance will have been bused in by Arianna Huffington and organized by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

This is how words, and then ideas, vanish from our political lexicon: Whatever connotations it once had, the word "moderate" has now come to mean "liberal" or even "left-wing" in American politics. It has been a long time since "moderate" Republicans were regarded as important, centrist assets by their party: Nowadays, they are far more likely to be regarded as closet lefties and potential traitors. "Moderate" Democrats, meanwhile, no longer exist: In their place, we have "conservative Democrats." Nobody pays attention to them either — unless, suddenly, one of them threatens to vote against health-care reform. And then he is vilified.

There is no lack of interesting people in the political center. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg — one of the few popular incumbents in the country — has not only declared himself a centrist but has also launched a campaign of support for other centrists. He flies around the country endorsing both Democrats and Republicans who he thinks show the ability to compromise and have the courage to depart from party orthodoxy on issues such as gun control (he is in favor) or more stringent financial regulation (he is against). He nearly lost me when he inexplicably endorsed Harry Reid, but never mind.

Others are trying, usually behind the scenes, to find solutions to problems that divide liberals and conservatives bitterly. Recently, Steve Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute (conservative) got together with Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution (liberalish) and two scholars from the Breakthrough Institute (further left) to talk about America's stalled energy policy. Their starting point: For two decades, the right has called climate change a figment of the United Nations' imagination and pretended that "drill, baby, drill" is a policy. For the same two decades, the left has been talking about the end of the world and pretending that wind and solar can replace oil and gas without massive subsidy. The result: gridlock, a lot of wasted money and an ever-growing American dependence on imported oil.

Working together, they came up with a report called "Post-Partisan Power" (read the whole thing at http://www.aei.org or http://thebreakthrough.org), which calls for the removal of wasteful subsidies and advocates investments designed to make "new clean energy sources" commercially viable. Just as important, though, is the point this group made by working together. In their introduction, they note that bipartisanship has helped create economic growth. And not only the distant past: Welfare reform was passed thanks to both Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich.

Bipartisanship is, of course, the source of plenty of disastrous ideas itself. Sometimes it produces worst-of-all-possible-worlds types of legislation, like those energy bills that subsidize gas, oil, wind, nuclear, coal, biofuels, hydrogen and anything else that might keep a swing state happy. Sometimes it produces agreements that are so centrist that one or the other party eventually rejects them. That's what happened to the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform, a bill I'm sure John McCain wishes he'd never laid eyes on.

Still, even if bipartisanship doesn't always work, even if "moderate" legislation is often weak, even if centrists sometimes fail completely, it doesn't matter: We are condemned to cross-party compromise. Without it, our system doesn't work: That's what "checks and balances" means. In American politics, if you don't want to cooperate with your political opponents — if you prefer to scorn them, shun them or call them names — that means that you don't, in fact, want to get anything done. Moderates often achieve less than they could. But extremists achieve nothing at all.

Which is why this Jon Stewart rally is such a gloomy development. I'm sure his Million Moderate March, if it happens, will be amusing, and I wouldn't want to spoil the fun by calling it "tragic." But if that's the best the center can do, then "blackly humorous" wouldn't be that far off.