In Babelia (January 14th), the literary supplement of El País, Jorge M Reverte is reviewing Tierras de sangre. Europe entre Hitler y Stalin, the Spanish translation of Timothy Snyder’s well received Bloodlands (published by Vintage).

The book gives an account of the murders committed, between 1932 and 1945, in eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic republics, “the greatest crimes in the history of humanity”, Reverte writes. And yet not all of these crimes are well known, at least partly because one of them, the Holocaust, is both so well known and at the same time somewhat misrepresented, largely due to the dominance of the symbol of the death camp, and in particular Auschwitz. As Snyder shows in Bloodlands, many of the worst massacres of Jews took place far from Auschwitz, at an earlier period and in different and less “clinical” circumstances. He also draws our attention to the millions of deaths associated with the manmade famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s, the deaths of Polish civilians at the hands of Ukrainian nationalists, the deaths of Ukrainian civilians at the hands of Poles, the deaths of huge swathes of the Polish intelligentsia at the hands of the Gestapo and the NKVD (most notably at Katyn), and so on. One might even cavil with Snyder’s closing date: there was still considerable mopping up going on well after 1945, on both sides of the Iron Curtain indeed.

The politics of memory tends to be selective, Reverte writes, since it is, above all, political. The attempt to minimise, excuse or “contextualise” the murders of Stalin by comparing and contrasting them – in various ways – with those of Hitler is perhaps the most common way in which not quite innocent hands are laid on history and memory. But there are many other examples around, Reverte writes. And Spain is one of the best.

Certainly it often seems to be the case that no one (no one parti pris at any rate) wants to hear about the other side’s losses. And thus we have an intellectual phenomenon that seems to encompass both denial and accusation, a reflex that has sometimes been called “whataboutery”. So if one Spaniard tells another that new evidence is emerging of the extent of the massacres by anarchists of priests, nuns and the Catholic faithful at the outset of the Spanish Civil War, he will very likely, rather than being listened to, be asked what about the massacres perpetrated by the nationalists, not only of active Republicans but of people judged by their associations or merely their geography to be disloyal? But what about them indeed? Do the latter dissolve the former or the former the latter? Does the existence of a crime committed against “us” excuse us of the duty to consider crimes committed by “our side” against others?

Thank God we take a more mature attitude to our history in this country.

Reverte's review of Snyder (in Spanish)

Timothy Snyder in the New York Review on history and the Holocaust