Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

by Timothy Snyder

Overview

Hardcover first published in 2010; paperback first published in 2012.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541600065
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	04/26/2022
Pages:	592
Sales rank:	32,365
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Timothy Snyder is the Housum Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1997, where he was a British Marshall Scholar. Before joining the faculty at Yale in 2001, he held fellowships in Paris, Vienna, and Warsaw, and an Academy Scholarship at Harvard.

He has spent some ten years in Europe, and speaks five and reads ten European languages. Among his publications are several award-winning books, all of which have been translated: Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz; The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999; Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine; The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke; On Tyranny; and The Road to Unfreedom. He has written for publications including the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, the Times Literary Supplement, Nation, the New Republic, the International Herald Tribune, and the Wall Street Journal.

Table of Contents

Preface: Europe vii

Introduction: Hitler and Stalin 1

1 The Soviet Famines 21

2 Class Terror 59

3 National Terror 89

4 Molotov-Ribbentrop Europe 119

5 The Economics of Apocalypse 155

6 Final Solution 187

7 Holocaust and Revenge 225

8 The Nazi Death Factories 253

9 Resistance and Incineration 277

10 Ethnic Cleansings 313

11 Stalinist Antisemitism 339

Conclusion: Humanity 379

Afterword to the Second Paperback Edition 409

Numbers and Terms 427

Abstract 435

Acknowledgments 439

Bibliography 443

Notes 483

Index 527

Editorial Reviews

Snyder's research is careful and thorough, his narrative powerful, if inevitably restrained. His interpretation of the events he describes is less confident, however. He is clear that the influence of "modernity," as some have theorized, is hardly an adequate explanation for the Holocaust. But in attributing the Nazi shift from shooting to gassing to the gas chamber's supposedly greater "efficiency," he overlooks the very evidence he cites.
—The Washington Post

Richard Rhodes

"A startling new interpretation of the period ... a stunning book."—David Denby, New Yorker

"A superb and harrowing history."—Financial Times

"Genuinely shattering.... I have never seen a book like it."—Istvan Deak, New Republic

"A brave and original history of mass killing in the twentieth century."—Anne Applebaum, New York Review of Books

"A magisterial work.... Snyder's account in engaging, encyclopedic."—Foreign Affairs

"Gripping and comprehensive.... Mr. Snyder's book is revisionist history of the best kind: in spare, closely argued prose, with meticulous use of statistics, he makes the reader rethink some of the best-known episodes in Europe's modern history."—Economist

"Snyder...compels us to look squarely at the full range of destruction committed first by Stalin's regime and then by Hitler's Reich.... A comprehensive and eloquent account."—New York Times Book Revew

"A superb work of scholarship, full of revealing detail, cleverly compiled...and in places beautifully written.... Snyder does justice to the horror of his subject through the power of storytelling."—The Sunday Times (London)

“A gigantic achievement in modern history.”—Rachel Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show

From the Publisher

01/01/2017
In a thorough analysis that illuminates the historical underpinnings of modern-day conflicts, Snyder analyzes the effects of the repeated Nazi and Soviet occupations of Poland and Ukraine before, during, and after World War II.

Library Journal

Snyder recounts the fascinating but horrific history of Eastern Europe before, during, and shortly after WWII, when the region was suffering under Hitler's and Stalin’s murderous ambitions. Ralph Cosham keeps his tone objective but narrates with a controlled excitement and brisk pace, giving events the urgency they deserve without adding dynamics they don’t need. However, he maintains his objective tone even when the text exhibits withering scorn for Nazi and Soviet brutality and thereby blunts Snyder’s effect. Otherwise, his reading is intelligent and sensitive. Technically, too many words and sentences, edited in after the fact, distract by sounding different from their aural context, especially some difficult place-names, replaced often and obviously. But a few flaws can’t spoil this subtly compelling narration of a significant history. W.M. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2011 - AudioFile

A chillingly systematic study of the mass murder mutually perpetrated by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

From 1933 to 1945, 14 million people were murdered between the two regimes, as Stalin and Hitler consolidated power, jointly occupied Poland and waged war against each other. The region of mass slaughter was largely contained between the two, from central Poland to western Russia and including Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states—a region Snyder (History/Yale Univ.;The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Duke, 2008, etc.) terms the "bloodlands." The author asserts that the fuzzy understanding of the death camps has skewed the truth about the mass killing, only hinting at their terrifying extent. "The horror of the twentieth century is thought to be located in the camps," he writes. "But the concentration camps are not where most of the victims of National Socialism and Stalinism died." Half of the killings within this period were caused by starvation, as a result of Stalin's starvation policy of the early '30s (a five-year plan of "industrial development at the price of popular misery") and Hitler's deliberate starvation of Soviet prisoners of war. Snyder traces how Stalin's focus on collectivization and famine "had unwittingly performed much of the ideological work that helped Hitler come to power." Stalin had already been secretly practicing mass murder on the Polish population during the Great Terror, well before the "large open pogrom" of Kristallnacht. Hitler recognized their joint "common desire to get rid of the old equilibrium" and neatly divide and destroy Poland at the Molotov-Ribbentrop line. His Hunger Plan was followed by massive depopulation in the forms of deportation, shooting, forced labor and, eventually, the death factories. Snyder devotes ample space to the partisan efforts, the incineration of Warsaw and Stalin's eager postwar ethnic-cleansing sweep. In the concluding chapter, "Humanity," the author urges readers to join him in a clear-eyed reexamination of this comparative history of mass murder and widespread suffering.

A significant work of staggering figures and scholarship.

Kirkus Reviews