Bloodlands summary

While Stalin’s forced collectivization and economic plans took their toll on the population, they also helped to spur rapid economic growth in the Soviet Union.

Yet as many people had become dispossessed as a result of such policies, Stalin lived in fear of challenges to his rule in the form of social uprisings. So he decided to take measures against anyone he feared might act against the state.

Before Nazi troops invaded Poland, Stalin's government was the only threat to the Polish people living in the bloodlands. This all changed in 1939.

In a move that shocked the world, Hitler made a pact with Stalin, his ideological enemy. Both states agreed to invade Poland; Germany from the west, Russia from the east.

The Red Army wasn’t the only fighting force that invaded Poland. Stalin also sent in agents of the NKVD, essentially the Soviet Union’s secret service.

Stalin wanted to absorb eastern Poland into the Soviet Union as quickly as possible, and the job of NKVD officers was to squash any potential resistance.

Hitler added some 20 million Poles, 6 million Czechs and 2 million Jews to the war empire of Nazi Germany when he began his occupation of Poland. By the end of 1939, Germany had become Europe's second-largest multinational state, after the Soviet Union.

Hitler however couldn't deport these “undesirables” to a distant labor camp like Stalin could, so he had to find other methods of suppression.

As we’ve seen, life was difficult for ethnic minorities in Stalin's Soviet Union. Many thought that Nazi Germany would offer some sort of salvation; yet when the Nazis showed up, things just got worse.

When Nazi Germany broke the pact it negotiated with Soviet Russia in 1941, the goal was to clear the way for the creation of a new German lebensraum, or living space for the German race. Little concern was shown for the inhabitants of these soon-to-be bloodlands; Hitler considered the people living to the east to be Germany’s natural enemies.

While Nazi German forces made significant progress in their initial push against the Soviet Union, victory still wasn’t in sight by the fall of 1941, prompting Hitler to change his strategy.

Hitler had believed that in attacking the Soviets, Germany would gain supply lines and raw materials for its war machine; yet instead of solving economic problems, the push only created new ones.

As Nazi Germany's fortunes shifted, so too did plans for the Jewish people living in the occupied territories to the east.

While the Nazis originally planned to deport all Jews from the newly expanded German Reich, ideas gradually evolved into something far more sinister. Over the course of the war, Germany's final solution for the Jews shifted from deportation to mass extermination.

It was only a matter of time before armed resistance groups came together in the German-occupied territories. Resisting the Nazis was extremely dangerous, however, and often resulted in death.

It was difficult for people in the bloodlands to fight their foreign occupiers. If they opposed the Nazis, for instance, they risked strengthening the Soviets.

As the Red Army made gains against the German forces, a few partisans eager to see the backs of the Nazis tried to collaborate with the Soviets.

Soviet soldiers under Stalin’s orders were no saviors, however. Partisans more often than not were fighting for independence; yet Stalin wanted instead to annex the territories for the Soviet Union.

The war still wasn't over by February 1945, but Germany was nearly defeated.

Allied powers preemptively agreed that post-war Germany would be confined to a small area in the middle of Europe, and all Germans living abroad would be resettled there.

With Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945, the war ended.  

Yet the suffering in the bloodlands wasn't over. Stalin had overseen large numbers of deportations before the war, and with its end, deportations continued.