Bloodlands
Rating: 2 / 5 stars
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High-Level Thoughts
A difficult book that takes a long time to digest. This tome was the first of books I didn’t finish due to the depth of its vocabulary and the amount of detail included. Overall, it’s insightful for a historian, but not something I would recommend to the casual reader.
“That resistance to socialism increases as its successes mount, because its foes resist with greater desperation as they contemplate their final defeat.”
Summary Notes
The Soviet Famines
“No matter what, don’t come. We are dying here. Better to hide, better to die there, but no matter what, don’t come here.” Ukranian peasants who yielded to collectivization chose, as one party activist understood, “to face starvation at home rather than banishment to the unknown.”
Stalin managed a nice reversal, imagining that it was the peasants, not him, who were using hunger as a weapon
Amartya Sen has argued that starvation is “a function of entitlements and not of food availability as such.”
In the face of starvation, some families divided, parent stunning against children, and children against one another. As the state police, the OGPU found itself obliged to record, in Soviet Ukraine “families kill their weakest members, usually children, and use the meat for eating.”
Cannibalism is a taboo of literature as well as life, as communities seek to protect their dignity by suppressing the record of this depserate mode of survival.
National Terror
Biographies became death sentences, as attachment to Polish culture or Roamn Catholicism became evidence of participation in international espionage.
The speed and quality of the work in discovering and arresting Polish spies will be the main consideration taken into account in the evaluation of each leader.
Japanese intentions were certainly aggressive in the 1930s, and the only question was about the direction of expansion: north or south.
The British Empire had been a central preoccupation of Stalin’s predecessor Lenin, who believed that imperialism artificially sustained capitalism.
