Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

by Timothy Snyder

Overview

Americans call the Second World War “The Good War.” But before it even began, America’s wartime ally Josef Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was finally defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, both the German and the Soviet killing sites fell behind the iron curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness.

Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single history, in the time and place where they occurred: between Germany and Russia, when Hitler and Stalin both held power. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands will be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465031474
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	10/02/2012
Edition description:	First Trade Paper Edition
Pages:	560
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.50(d)
Age Range:	13 - 18 Years

About the Author

Timothy Snyder is Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of The Reconstruction of Nations, Sketches from a Secret War, and The Red Prince. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

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 Anti-Semitism 339

Conclusion: Humanity 379

Numbers and Terms 409

Abstract 415

Acknowledgments 419

Bibliography 423

Notes 463

Index 507

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