Status Updates From Bloodlands: Europe Between ...

Polish independence became a threat to both Germany and Russia

At the end of WWI, Poland became its own independent state and for the first time was a threat to Russian power.

Same with the other Eastern European states

Germany released Lenin from prison in Switzerland in 1917, during the Russian peasant revolt, and became the secret weapon of Germany in an effort to win WWI.

By getting Russia out of the war, Germany lost a front to maintain and got a taste of Eastern European empire (Belarus, the Baltics, Ukraine, Poland) by occupying those lands.

For decades, national histories: Jewish, Polish, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Russian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian have resisted the Nazi and Soviet conceptualization of the atrocities.

The history of the bloodlands has been preserved by dividing the past into national parts and then by keeping these parts from touching one another.

George Kennan, 1944, Moscow: “Here men determine what is true and what is false. Is truth no more than a convention of power? Or can truthful historical accounts resist the gravity of politics?”

Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union sought to master history itself…12 years of Nazi and 70 years of Soviet power…