Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

the 17 th century so that the South Siberian city of Irkutsk was at a
certain moment a majority catholic town. I should be careful here,
but I think this is something Western people have difficulty understanding.
The logistics of killing people is quite complicated. A
regime that is trying to kill several million people will run into technical
problems. The Germans resorted, if you like, to modern technology.
They had an actually scientific campaign, a research and
development program to find out how it would work. The Soviet
Union didn’t need such technology. The Soviets simply took people
so far away that they were certain they would never come back.
The one thing you are not allowed to do is put ethnic labels on categories
of criminals. You will find individuals or groups belonging to
every nationality involved in criminality or violence. What do you do
about the Jews who collaborated? The police in Warsaw were
Jewish. The people who drove Jews from the trains and took them
to the trains in the first place, were actually Jews. Were they not
collaborators? My view is that none of us, who has never been in
such a situation, should be quick to judge. To fully appreciate historical
events, a clear understanding of the context is necessary.
For example, do you know how the SS recruited their Ukrainian
camp guards? In 1941, the Wehrmacht captured some two million
soldiers in Western Soviet Union, most of them Ukrainians. They
were put into camps under conditions far worse than in Auschwitz,
no food, no water. They simply put barbed wire around them and
waited until they started eating each other. This was standard practice.
And than the SS would come in and say, ‘Now lads, would
you like a decent meal?’ These were the people the SS recruited
to run the concentration camps which were formed in 1941-42. To
say these Ukrainians were ‘collaborators’ is to neglect the circumstances
in which they were forcibly recruited.
Q: Certain historical interpretations of totalitarianism emphasise
the unique character of Stalinism and Nazis. Do you think such
horrors could happen again?
All sorts of things can happen again and I don’t know whether there
is any truth of history. One lesson of history is that it is full of surprises.
One might have guessed that in Russia, with its traditions of
cruelty going back to Ivan the Terrible, some horrendous regime
might have developed. Much less you would have predicted that it
53 Norman Davies