Black Earth(55)
An empire on Nazi principles required an open subordination of inferior races, and thus an extravagantly visible difference between the political existence of Germans and that of others. Soviet empire involved the territorial extension of the Soviet Union as it already was. In eastern Poland, occupied by the Soviet Union, higher Polish officials were treated much as they were in the German zone. But, for a time at least, their place was taken by people of humble social origins or even by imprisoned members of local communist parties. In one town after another, the political prisoners became the local authorities. This was a temporary but important phase in the change of regime, since it transferred the appearance of the responsibility for the Soviet revolution to local people. Some Polish citizens were thus implicated in Soviet-style class warfare: the decapitation of the bourgeois or feudal leadership of the enemy, the promotion of workers and peasants, and then the subordination of everyone to a larger order that proclaimed its own egalitarianism.
The Soviet decapitation of society was accompanied by a zombification of the social body. The Soviets took the possibility of Polish resistance much more seriously than the Germans did, since for them it represented one instance of the formidable power of international capitalism rather than the last gasps of a suffocating race. The NKVD applied far more sophisticated methods than the German Gestapo, usually observing resistance groups, arresting and recruiting their members one by one, and slowly trying to break the whole organization or, ideally, turn it to the Soviet side without its members realizing what was happening. Since resistance was for the Soviets by definition part of an international plot, the Soviet hope was always to follow the links from the Polish underground back to the Polish government-in-exile and to its British and French allies. In practice, Soviet rule meant the cultivation of distrust, as Polish citizens ready for conspiratorial work became unsure of one another and incapable of discerning which underground groups were legitimate and which were fronts for the NKVD. Thus equality in the Soviet sense emerged in occupied eastern Poland: Polish citizens learned to distrust one another equally. Everyone became a potential traitor, and appearances were not to be believed. This new reality undermined the old in a matter of weeks.
Whereas Germans excluded Polish citizens from participation in their new order, the Soviets forced Polish citizens to take part in Soviet political rituals, presented as exercises in liberation. The Soviets introduced their own version of democracy, in which participation was open and mandatory, and voters had no alternatives. On October 22, 1939, inhabitants of what had been eastern Poland were called upon to elect their representatives to national assemblies. In the Soviet zone of occupation, Poles were the largest national group, but not a majority. Ukrainians were a majority in the south, Belarusians in the north, and Jews were numerous everywhere. The Soviet notion was to divide most of the occupied lands between a Ukrainian zone in the south and a Belarusian zone in the north, which would then be attached to the existing Soviet Ukrainian and Soviet Belarusian republics. This is indeed what transpired.
After the obligatory, humiliating, and falsified vote, the national assemblies, meeting in the first days of November 1939, proclaimed the desire that their lands be incorporated into the Soviet Union. This opened the way for Soviet citizenship to be extended to all inhabitants of eastern Poland, a symbolic expression of equality that would have been unthinkable in the Nazi empire. Of course, it also opened the way for the arrival of thousands of Soviet officials from further east, mostly Russians and Ukrainians, who would hold the real power. Local people, usually communists and members of the Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Jewish minorities, had been useful as ostensible self-liberators. But their liberation simply meant inclusion in a powerful system with its own priorities, one of which was maintaining the alliance with Nazi Germany. To take one striking example: Jewish butchers lost ownership of their slaughterhouses and found themselves, as Soviet state employees, packing meat for the German troops fighting against the western democracies.
The Soviets behaved as if eastern Poland had been joined to their homeland of socialism forever. Of course, this would not be the case, since the leaders of Nazi Germany, the Soviet ally that allowed the new disposition of territory, were intending to attack the Soviet Union at the first opportunity. Stalin expected Hitler’s betrayal, but believed in 1939, 1940, and even 1941 that his ally could be placated with outspoken loyalty and regular deliveries of goods. Thus the Soviet Union supplied Germany not only with security in the east but also with some of the physical resources used to fight the wars in western Europe in 1940: the oil, the minerals, the grain. The Royal Air Force proposed to bomb Soviet airfields as a way to slow Hitler’s advance through western Europe. The peasants in Soviet Ukraine sang:
Timothy Snyder's Books
- Where Shadows Meet
- Destiny Mine (Tormentor Mine #3)
- A Covert Affair (Deadly Ops #5)
- Save the Date
- Part-Time Lover (Part-Time Lover #1)
- My Plain Jane (The Lady Janies #2)
- Getting Schooled (Getting Some #1)
- Midnight Wolf (Shifters Unbound #11)
- Speakeasy (True North #5)
- The Good Luck Sister (Wildstone #1.5)