I earlier had meant to link over to this holocaust article by Timothy Snyder published in the New York Review of Books, which although a few weeks old, still seems relevant given yesterday’s news of the Russian government shutting down yet another history resource, www.hrono.info.  Snyder’s article explores how certain dominant works skew our understanding of Germany’s war crimes toward Auschwitz and Birkenau and those of Joseph Stalin toward only the gulags of the East (given the hostile reception to the recent film Katyn, we can see that this is still a very contentious issue).  I only excerpt a relatively short amount here – I recommend readers visit NYRB for interesting arguments on the primacy of Soviet victims of Stalin.

Yet as Auschwitz draws attention away from the still greater horrors of Treblinka, the Gulag distracts us from the Soviet policies that killed people directly and purposefully, by starvation and bullets. Of the Stalinist killing policies, two were the most significant: the collectivization famines of 1930-1933 and the Great Terror of 1937-1938. It remains unclear whether the Kazakh famine of 1930-1932 was intentional, although it is clear that over a million Kazakhs died of starvation. It is established beyond reasonable doubt that Stalin intentionally starved to death Soviet Ukrainians in the winter of 1932-1933. Soviet documents reveal a series of orders of October-December 1932 with evident malice and intention to kill. By the end, more than three million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine had died.