42
" Демокрациите умират, когато хората престават да вярват, че гласуването има значение. Въпросът не е в това дали се организират избори, а дали те са свободни и честни. Ако е така, демокрацията поражда усещане за време и очаквания за бъдещето, които успокояват настоящето. Смисълът на всеки демократичен избирателен процес е обещанието за следващия. Ако очакваме, че ще се състоят други пълноценни избори, ние знаем, че следващия път ще можем да коригираме грешките си, които междувременно стоварваме върху хората, които сме избрали. По този начин демокрацията преобразува човешката погрешимост в политическа предвидимост и ни помага да преживяваме времето като движение напред към едно бъдеще, върху което имаме някакво влияние. Ако смятаме, че изборите са просто един повтарящ ритуал на подкрепа, демокрацията губи своя смисъл. "
― Timothy Snyder , The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
43
" Political calculation and local suffering do not entirely explain the participation in these pogroms. Violence against Jews served to bring the Germans and elements of the local non-Jewish populations closer together. Anger was directed, as the Germans wished, toward the Jews, rather than against collaborators with the Soviet regime as such. People who reacted to the Germans' urging knew that they were pleasing their new masters, whether or not they believed that the Jews were responsible for their own woes. By their actions they were confirming the Nazi worldview. The act of killing Jews as revenge for NKVD executions confirmed the Nazi understanding of the Soviet Union as a Jewish state. Violence against Jews also allowed local Estonians, Latvian, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Poles who had themselves cooperated with the Soviet regime to escape any such taint. The idea that only Jews served communists was convenient not just for the occupiers but for some of the occupied as well.
Yet this psychic nazification would have been much more difficult without the palpable evidence of Soviet atrocities. The pogroms took place where the Soviets had recently arrived and where Soviet power was recently installed, where for the previous months Soviet organs of coercion had organized arrests, executions, and deportations. They were a joint production, a Nazi edition of a Soviet text.
P. 196 "
― Timothy Snyder , Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
45
" In October 1941, Mahilue became teh first substantial city in occupied Soviet Belarus where almost all Jews were killed. A German (Austrian) policeman wrote to his wife of his feelings and experiences shooting the city's Jews in the first days of the month. 'During the first try, my hand trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets used to it. By the tenth try I aimed calmly and shot surely at the many women, children, and infants. I kept in mind that I have two infants at home, whom these hordes would treat just the same, if not ten times worse. The death that we gave them was a beautiful quick death, compared to the hellish torments of thousands and thousands in the jails of the GPU. Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to pieces in flight, before their bodies fell into the pit and into the water.'
pp. 205-206 "
― Timothy Snyder , Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
51
" В Германии практически каждый знал о Холокосте — ведь он начался с массовых убийств в Восточной Европе, в которых приняли непосредственное участие десятки тысяч немцев. Сотни тысяч, если не миллионы, знали об этом; вероятно, чуть ли не каждый немецкий солдат на Восточном фронте. И мы знаем, что они писали об этом домой. Я полагаю, что Холокост как факт был широко известен задолго до того, как был устроен Освенцим. А после войны пришли американцы и британцы и обнаружили лагеря смерти. И они спросили у немцев: "Вы знали об этом?" И получили вполне правдивый ответ: "Нет, мы не знали точно, что там происходило". Так лагеря заслонили собой Холокост. И по сегодняшний день Холокост у немцев ассоциируется прежде всего с лагерями смерти, хотя на самом деле он был сравнительно мало связан с ними [161]. "
― Timothy Snyder , Украинская история, российская политика, европейское будущее