In a host of ways, this fine collection of two dozen articles is the antidote to Timothy Snyder's popular Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2012). Whereas the earlier book makes a relatively straightforward argument attributing the massive violence and killing of the 1930s and 1940s in Eastern Europe to the persons and personalities of Hitler and Stalin, Shatterzone of Empires takes a more contextual and even environmental approach to the contest of empires and nationalist movements and states, broadening the chronological sweep to nearly two centuries and the geographical frame to include the all-important case of the Ottoman Empire. Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, both historians of Germany and genocidal violence, have put together a collection that demonstrates that although much of the bloodshed was initiated by state actors, much was generated by ordinary people settling ethnic, social, and ideological scores. The principal cause of violence was not specific tyrants or political systems but the complex in-betweenness of the region, caught in the vortex of empires and nation-states with modernizing and nationalizing ambitions. Nationalism appears to be the principal culprit, but nationalism comes in many guises. State centralization, the programs of particular imperial nations, and the aims of nationalist activists all produced shifts in identity, destabilizing processes, and desperate insecurities. Once the Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns, Ottomans, and Romanovs were out of the picture, what fragile stability their empires provided gave way to vicious struggles for supremacy, territorial acquisition, demographic dominance, and ideological purity.
Although there is no overall argument in the book, nor a single explanation for either imperial coexistence of diverse populations or the breakdown of that coexistence and the eruption of violence, various chapters suggest answers to why states or ordinary people turn to mass killing. In an exemplary exploration of violence by one Christian people against another, Greeks and Bulgarians mutually slaughtering each other while engaged in a larger struggle against the Ottomans in the Second Balkan War, Keith Brown turns away from naturalistic explanations of atavistic human barbarism to suggest that perpetrators construct victims as the cause of deserved violence. The killer becomes the instrument of a righteous retribution. That shifting of responsibility and blame is reflected in the pieces by Eyal Ginio on Ottoman attitudes toward Balkan Christians, Taner Akçam on the Armenian Genocide, and David Gaunt on the Assyrian Genocide. Peter Holquist as well restores history to older models where geography or even geology—shatterzones as the clash of tectonic civilizational plates—explained human violence. Holquist distinguishes Russian occupation policies and practices during World War I, driven by “generic institutional concerns of the military,” from the more ideologically determined expulsions and massacres committed by the Ottomans against Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks (343). He further argues that while Russian soldiers engaged in violence, rape, and pillage against civilians in the Caucasus, northern Anatolia, Persia, and Galicia, some of that violence was sanctioned by authorities, but other acts were not. Ordinary soldiers acted brutally at times, whereas a number of their commanders made efforts to prevent excesses.
In making arguments, one of the easiest gambits is to say “things are more complicated than that.” True, things are always more complicated than any single statement, article, or even book might attempt to explain. The task of the historian is to reconcile complexity with explanation, to make general statements that transform myriad details into answers to difficult questions. One of the most ethnically and religiously complex regions in all of Europe, what was Galicia in the Habsburg Empire and in interwar Poland, and was eastern Ukraine in the postwar Soviet Union and in independent Ukraine today, is the subject of chapters by Yaroslav Hrytsak, Alexander V. Prusin, John-Paul Himka, Omer Bartov, and Kai Struve. This particular shatterzone was relatively peaceful before World War I, but war, occupation by the Russian army, and revolution unleashed the omnipresent anti-Semitism and hostility between Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews. Pogroms followed the movement of armies, and the retreating Russians forcibly deported hundreds of thousands of Jews. Even greater devastation came with World War II, once again feeding on the existing ideological and emotional construction of other ethnicities and even more deliberately instigated and magnified by those most powerful. What is simple is what happened: spontaneous violence metastasized into mass killing on a genocidal scale, deliberately fostered and organized by the Nazi regime. Why it happened remains complicated enough to employ historians for many decades to come.
