Uncommon Knowledge: Part 1: Stephen Kotkin on Stalin’s Rise to Power
Recorded on July 29, 2015 Part 1: Stalin was born in a small town in Georgia in which he was educated to become a priest. After succeeding in school and becoming a devout follower of the faith, Stalin left the priesthood and became a communist revolutionary. World War I and the revolutions of 1917 set the stage for Stalin and the Communists to take power in Russia.
Russia And the West, How the West Won the Cold War but Lost the Peace
If one reads the history of political relations between Russia and Europe for the last 200 years, it is Russia that has had to fear Europe and with good reason.
In 1991, the American historian Christopher Browning wrote a book called Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland about the Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) Reserve Unit 101. The book detailed in a very psychologically plausible manner the terrible transformation of conventional and essentially well-socialized working men—most with families—into killers capable of taking naked pregnant women into the Polish countryside and executing them with a pistol shot to the back of the head. Such a book is best read with caution—and, more importantly (with that caution firmly in mind), read as a potential perpetrator, rather than as a hypothetical victim or, worse, hero. The men of Police Battalion 101 were tasked with mopping up after the Nazis had marched through and subdued Poland. Their commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, was by all accounts a decent man, considering the times. Furthermore, the men in the battalion were all middle-aged citizens of Hamburg with no military experience, drafted but found ineligible for regular duty, who had matured prior to the intense propagandizing of young people typifying the Hitler Youth. They were not abnormally cruel, nor were they were in the main ardent anti-Semites. No simple explanations (sadism; prejudice) were going to suffice as Browning attempted to account for their behavior. Within the unit were a few professionally trained SS men, cruel and psychopathic, who tended to regard their commander Trapp as weak, unmilitary, and prone to interfere inappropriately in the duties of his officers. A few others were reservists, rather than career policemen. The majority, however, were working-class men of the less professionalized sort, warehouse and construction workers, machine operators, waiters, and seamen, among others. They averaged almost forty years in age—too old for general conscription. They weren’t even particularly likely to be Nazi party members (about 25% percent). As Browning points out, “these men would not seem to have been a very promising group from which to recruit mass murderers on behalf of the Nazi vision of a racial utopia free of Jews.” Some of them, after being informed to a certain degree of the intensity of what they might be required to do in a now-subdued country, asked to be released from their work and placed elsewhere—and the option to leave appears to have been offered to them by their commander. Indeed, Browning even recounts the story of a police officer who requested and was granted his release, and who obtained a promotion on his return to Germany. Nonetheless, only 12 men in the 500-man strong battalion would choose to withdraw as they learned the true nature of the jobs. Furthermore, by all accounts, the majority of them would suffer terribly as they transformed themselves into the monsters they would soon become.Ordinary Men is horrifying not least because of its graphic accounts of the actions undertaken by the now-policemen, once transported to Poland. But what makes it truly terrible is its aforementioned psychological plausibility. These men were indeed “ordinary.” They weren’t following orders under threat of punishment. With this firmly in mind, Browning confronts and articulates the moral conundrums associated with the study of history. It is all-too-tempting (and also something that provides a certain degree of naïve psychological security) to read the past and to cast the villains as all-villainous and the heroes as all-virtuous. But that’s propaganda, not history. Even in the literary world, the work of quality presents the ever-present moral battle not as raging between purely evil states and good, or purely evil people and good, but as a consequence of the complex and paradoxical forces of good and evil working themselves out in terrible conflict within each soul, between individuals, and in the battle between states. This is not to say that darker forces do not sometimes dominate at one or more of these levels. I’m not equating the Axis powers with the Allies, or the Soviet or Maoist communists with the free West. But the temptation toward deceit, arrogance, resentment, ideological possession, and the projection of all evil onto something conveniently other than a combination of self, compatriot, family, and state is dangerously alluring. At the very least, it interferes with the kind of introspection that might produce genuine moral progress—which is something still required, no matter how good the current state—on the part of individual and society alike. The Order Police were placed under the auspices of four special mobile units of the SS known as Einsatzgruppen, described by Browning as “the thin cutting edge of German units that became involved in political and racial mass murder in Russia” and elsewhere. In 1941, after the staggering initial successes of the Nazi blitzkrieg, Hitler ordered an intensification of the pacification program behind advancing German lines—part of his desire to create a permanent “Garden of Eden” for the Aryan race east of Germany. The actions of Battalion 101 were to be part of that program, which involved, in Hitler’s own words, “shooting anyone who even looks askance at us.” The fundamental problem facing the giant bureaucracies overseeing the Final Solution was transport: the massive camps, equipped for mass murder, mostly in the form of poison gas, were set up in 1941 at Auschwitz/Birkenau, Chelmno, Birkenau (as well as Sobibor and Treblinka, a bit later). This raised the joint problems of staffing these enormous institutions, as well as moving those destined for work and death to the camps. There were 2,000,000 Jews under General Government command in what was once Poland, and 300,000 in the Lublin district alone. Himmler himself provided no resources to implement these programs; the man charged with a leading role in the Polish extermination project, Austrian Odilo Globocnik, was therefore forced to raise private armies to undertake the task himself. He buttressed his thin quasi-professional resources with the Trawnikis, non-Polish “auxiliaries” drawn primarily from the Ukrainian, Latvian, and Lithuanian POWs who were screened for anti-communism, offered a reprieve from starvation, and promised that they would not be sent as front-line combatants against the Soviets. It was into this milieu, replete with an oversupply of Jewish transportees brought in from other areas to replace those who had already been deported, that the men of Battalion 101 arrived in Lublin. Their orders indicated they would be performing guard duty. As Browning points out, “there is no indication whatsoever that even the officers suspected the true nature of the duties that awaited them.” The Battalion men began by collecting Jews in smaller settlements and consolidating them in larger camps and ghettos, sometimes using trucks, sometimes on foot. None of this involved mass execution, although Jews who were frail, old, and sick were shot, at least in some instances. That might be considered the beginning (although even the mass deportations constituted a clear step down a bad road). However, Globocnik quickly realized that the speed of merely collecting people was insufficient, and determined to hasten the eradication process with onsite mass execution by firing squad. Things changed dramatically for the worse in Józefów, a small town in east central Poland, which had at that time a population of about 1800 Jews. Globocnik or someone close to him informed Trapp that these people were to be rounded up, as usual, but that only the males capable of working were to be transported. The elderly, women, and children were to be executed on the spot. One Lieutenant Heinz Buchmann refused, forthrightly, stating that “he would in no case participate in such an action, in which defenseless women and children are shot.” Lieutenant Hagen, Trapp’s representative, agreed to reposition Buchmann and placed him in charge of the male Jews selected for work. This is a very telling episode, in my estimation. Buchmann made his move under very dire and dangerous personal circumstances, and was not punished for it: He was merely reassigned. Although there were undoubtedly times when moral objection to an unacceptable order (the massacre of unarmed women and children certainly topping the bill) would have resulted in extreme personal danger, and perhaps even danger to family members, we don’t know how common such retaliatory threats actually were, nor how often such malevolent orders could have been successfully refused. It may be, after all, that under such circumstances the resistor has such a clear upper hand, morally speaking, that it is difficult to effectively criticize or to discipline him. In any case, the next morning, when the truck convoy arrived in Józefów, Trapp made another extraordinary offer: “any of the older men who did not feel up to the task that lay before them could step out.” A dozen men abandoned the operation, after facing some abuse from Hoffmann. Is it too much to point out that a decision of that sort, even when accompanied by accusations of betrayal and cowardice, appears far preferable to outright participation in mass murder of the most conscience-betraying sort? And to note also how tiny the minority of men was who stepped voluntarily aside, and how few followed in their footsteps, even after the example of resistance had been made? The remaining men were ordered to surround the village, shoot any escapees, escort the Jews to the marketplace, and shoot all too resistant, sick, or frail to comply (as well as infants incapable of the journey). This meant the massacre of the weakest and least able to defend themselves. Something less in keeping with any sense of military honor could hardly be imagined. Trapp himself did not witness the executions: “Oh, God, why did I have to be given these orders,” he said, in a clearly heartfelt manner. His tears flowed copiously. He asked a subor...
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