Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
by Timothy Snyder
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From the author of the international bestseller "On Tyranny", the definitive history of Hitler's and Stalin's politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century. 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 show more 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. show lessTags
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Member Recommendations
mercure What Bloodlands does for a much larger area does this book for the city of Lemberg. The different level of granularity of Lemberg enhances Bloodlands well.
11
More than a Grain of Truth: The official true story behind the film Mr. Jones, starring James Norton by Margaret Siriol Colley
M_Clark Bloodlands quotes from Gareth Jones a lot so it is worth reading more about this fascinating character.
Member Reviews
A reframing of the mass slaughter of WWII, from the popular image of nazi gas chambers, to vast killing fields and starvation camps employed by both the communist and nazi regimes concentrated in a swath of eastern Europe. Much in the same vein the popular image of the war needs to recalibrate to 3/4th of the dying happening on the much less covered eastern front, there's a blind spot and deliberate retelling of events that tries to tell a simple moralistic story about the war. This book presents the problem in a wider perspective and one that doesn't let mass murder and antisemitism be a unique property of the nazi regime. Aided and abetted by many others, and mirrored by the paranoid purges of the Soviet, the lessons of 'never again' show more need to have a wider scope - as modern day parallels in China and elsewhere also feature anonymous detention camps and mysteriously vanishing "problem" groups, the idea that it's not industralized genocide until gas chambers and ovens are involved miss the mark. By that time, as Snyder makes clear, the majority of the death toll was already accomplished. show less
Hræðileg saga sem er umfjöllunarefni Blóðlendna Timothy Snyders. Hann greinir af nærgætni en án þess að draga nokkuð undan frá skipulögðum og markvissum fjöldamorðum sem unnin voru að skipun Stalíns og Hitlers á 12 ára tímabili, 1933-45.
Blóðlendur vísa til svæðanna í A.-Evrópu þar sem flest morðin fóru fram óháð landamærum enda færðust þau til og frá bæði fyrir og eftir styrjöldina.
Snyder fjallar um morðin, ástæður þeirra, framkvæmd, óhugnað og afleiðingar út frá nýjustu heimildum og ber þær saman við eldri framsetningu út frá pólitísku og sögulegu samhengi. En hann gleymir þó ekki fórnarlömbunum sjálfum og við fáum að kynnast lítillega þolendum og show more eftirlifendum.
Djúpt snortinn eftir lesturinn. show less
Blóðlendur vísa til svæðanna í A.-Evrópu þar sem flest morðin fóru fram óháð landamærum enda færðust þau til og frá bæði fyrir og eftir styrjöldina.
Snyder fjallar um morðin, ástæður þeirra, framkvæmd, óhugnað og afleiðingar út frá nýjustu heimildum og ber þær saman við eldri framsetningu út frá pólitísku og sögulegu samhengi. En hann gleymir þó ekki fórnarlömbunum sjálfum og við fáum að kynnast lítillega þolendum og show more eftirlifendum.
Djúpt snortinn eftir lesturinn. show less
Reviewing a book you love, can be as difficult as reviewing a book you hate. In the latter case, you want to be fair and not flaming. In the former, you want to be fair and not fawning. When it comes to this book, however, I can’t help but gush. I thought I knew a fair amount about the Holocaust: it’s history, it’s victims, and even the more subtle question of Why? But in [Bloodlands], Timothy Snyder takes everything I thought I knew and puts it in a new context that completely changes the way I view the entire period from 1933 to 1945.
The premise of the book is that in the area between the Molotov-Ribbentrop Line and the Urals lie territories that were under the control of both the Germans and the Russians at some point between show more 1933 and 1945, an area he calls the Bloodlands. It includes Latvia and Lithuania, eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia. In these lands, 14 million people were deliberately killed by a combination of Nazi and Soviet policies. This number does not include those who died of exertion, disease, or malnutrition in the camp or during deportment; forced laborers; civilians who died in bombings or wartime hunger; nor does it include the 12 million German and Soviet soldiers who died in WWII. It’s 14 million civilians who were murdered by deliberate policy in this strip of ground unfortunate enough to be occupied by the Germans and the Soviets (often undergoing three separate occupations: Soviet, German, then Soviet again).
So who were these 14 million people? To begin with, the 3 million Ukrainians that Stalin deliberately starved to death in pursuit of collectivization. Although I knew somewhat of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33, I was shocked by some of the policy decisions that makes this a premeditated mass murder. For instance, that Stalin had the borders of the country closed so that the starving peasants couldn’t escape; that after requisitioning all the food that they had and imposing a meat tax in order to take the livestock, he then black listed the villages so that they could not even trade for food with other villages; that he closed the Ukrainian cities so that peasants could not beg for food. And perhaps most astonishing of all, goes from calling the famine a plot by saboteurs, to a deliberate attack on him, Stalin, and the progression of the Soviet Union to a communist ideal. Stalin becomes the victim, and starvation becomes an aggressive act tied to Ukrainian nationalism that turns the starving into traitors subject to the death penalty.
Hitler too had a “Hunger Plan” even more ambitious than Stalin’s. Hitler had imperialist dreams, but had to confine them to Eastern Europe because of the British Navy’s supremacy on the seas. He started to see the Soviet Union as less of an ally and more of a future colony. His plan? Conquer the Soviet Union in a blitzkrieg, starve roughly 30 million Slavs to death in the first winter (1940-41), raze the cities, and create German settlements all the way to the Urals. The Ukrainian breadbasket only produced enough food for Germany, he lectured the Wehrmacht, so every time you shoot a woman or child (something ordinary soldiers had a hard time doing), you are putting food into the mouths of your own wives and children. It’s us or them. The first step in the plan, conquer the Soviet Union, was not the quick work Hitler had expected, however, and only those Slavs who fell under his direct control were starved: 4 million civilians, mostly in Leningrad, Kiev, and Kharkiv, as well as 3 million Soviet POWs (not counted in the 14 million).
As the war in the East bogged down, Hitler needed both a scapegoat and a new Final Solution to the “Jewish problem”. The first four versions of the Final Solution had to be abandoned: the idea of a giant reservation for Jews in the area of Lublin; sending the Jews to Stalin who could put them into his already existing gulag (after all Stalin had all that land east of the Urals); sending all the Jews to Madagascar; and conquering the Soviet Union and then putting all the Jews into the gulag. Himmler and Heydrich realized that Hitler needed a new plan that would reaffirm his genius and give him a new focus for the war. The new ultimate objective was not the subjugation of the Soviet Union, which was looking less likely, but the elimination of the Jews. Instead of working the Jews to death in a reservation or gulag, they were now to be systematically shot in every area the Germans conquered.
For many Americans and Western Europeans, the Holocaust has come to be symbolized by the concentration camp, particularly by Auschwitz. But the fact is more Jews were shot in the second half of 1941 alone, than were gassed at Auschwitz during the entire war. Another million were shot in 1942. The Nazis were able to convince many Ukrainians and Belorussians that the Soviet atrocities that had so recently been committed against them were in fact caused by Jewish communists. The Germans trained and armed them to assist in the monumental task of shooting millions of people. The Nazis were less willing to arm the Poles as accomplices, and wanting to save ammunition, after two years of occupation, the Germans began gassing Jews at extermination facilities: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Triblinka, Majdanek, and one part of Auschwitz.
It began in 1941 at Belzec. Guards were recruited from the Soviet populace (mostly Ukrainians) and trained at Trawniki, while Nazi specialists from Germany who had overseen the “euthanasia” program that had gassed 70,000 Germans deemed “life unfit for life” were brought in to supervise. Only 2 or 3 Jews who arrived at Belzec survived. 434,508 did not. And it is precisely because so few people survived the extermination facilities (combined with the fact that American and British armies did not liberate them, the Soviets did) that the concentration camp continues to loom large in our minds and places like Belzec do not. Auschwitz was actually built in 1940 to intimidate the Poles, and then to house Soviet POWs. When I.G. Farben decided the camp would be an ideal place to make synthetic rubber, Slovakia sent its Jews to be used as slave labor (all of them died). In 1942 the extermination facility was added and then expanded with the addition of Birkenau in 1943.
Auschwitz was the climax of the Holocaust, reached at a moment when most Soviet and Polish Jews under German rule were already dead.
But Jews from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands (1942); Greece and now occupied Italy (1943); and Hungary (1944) could and were sent to Auschwitz to die. Although no one survived the gas chambers, 100,000 people did survive the Auschwitz labor camp. (As opposed to less than a 100 people who survived the six extermination facilities.)
If this sounds too familiar, it is because of my ineptitude at summarizing my 62 pages of notes that is at fault, because Snyder brings to light hundreds of details that have not been previously published. His research in newly opened archives guarantees surprises. In addition, he draws conclusions about the nature of the killing and the psychology of victimhood in the double-occupied territories that are entirely his own. Simply reading the introductory and concluding chapters would provide much to consider. Even more than [Gulag: A History] changed the way I think about the Soviet camps, [Bloodlands] has changed the way I think about this region and this time period. Highly recommended. show less
The premise of the book is that in the area between the Molotov-Ribbentrop Line and the Urals lie territories that were under the control of both the Germans and the Russians at some point between show more 1933 and 1945, an area he calls the Bloodlands. It includes Latvia and Lithuania, eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia. In these lands, 14 million people were deliberately killed by a combination of Nazi and Soviet policies. This number does not include those who died of exertion, disease, or malnutrition in the camp or during deportment; forced laborers; civilians who died in bombings or wartime hunger; nor does it include the 12 million German and Soviet soldiers who died in WWII. It’s 14 million civilians who were murdered by deliberate policy in this strip of ground unfortunate enough to be occupied by the Germans and the Soviets (often undergoing three separate occupations: Soviet, German, then Soviet again).
So who were these 14 million people? To begin with, the 3 million Ukrainians that Stalin deliberately starved to death in pursuit of collectivization. Although I knew somewhat of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33, I was shocked by some of the policy decisions that makes this a premeditated mass murder. For instance, that Stalin had the borders of the country closed so that the starving peasants couldn’t escape; that after requisitioning all the food that they had and imposing a meat tax in order to take the livestock, he then black listed the villages so that they could not even trade for food with other villages; that he closed the Ukrainian cities so that peasants could not beg for food. And perhaps most astonishing of all, goes from calling the famine a plot by saboteurs, to a deliberate attack on him, Stalin, and the progression of the Soviet Union to a communist ideal. Stalin becomes the victim, and starvation becomes an aggressive act tied to Ukrainian nationalism that turns the starving into traitors subject to the death penalty.
Hitler too had a “Hunger Plan” even more ambitious than Stalin’s. Hitler had imperialist dreams, but had to confine them to Eastern Europe because of the British Navy’s supremacy on the seas. He started to see the Soviet Union as less of an ally and more of a future colony. His plan? Conquer the Soviet Union in a blitzkrieg, starve roughly 30 million Slavs to death in the first winter (1940-41), raze the cities, and create German settlements all the way to the Urals. The Ukrainian breadbasket only produced enough food for Germany, he lectured the Wehrmacht, so every time you shoot a woman or child (something ordinary soldiers had a hard time doing), you are putting food into the mouths of your own wives and children. It’s us or them. The first step in the plan, conquer the Soviet Union, was not the quick work Hitler had expected, however, and only those Slavs who fell under his direct control were starved: 4 million civilians, mostly in Leningrad, Kiev, and Kharkiv, as well as 3 million Soviet POWs (not counted in the 14 million).
As the war in the East bogged down, Hitler needed both a scapegoat and a new Final Solution to the “Jewish problem”. The first four versions of the Final Solution had to be abandoned: the idea of a giant reservation for Jews in the area of Lublin; sending the Jews to Stalin who could put them into his already existing gulag (after all Stalin had all that land east of the Urals); sending all the Jews to Madagascar; and conquering the Soviet Union and then putting all the Jews into the gulag. Himmler and Heydrich realized that Hitler needed a new plan that would reaffirm his genius and give him a new focus for the war. The new ultimate objective was not the subjugation of the Soviet Union, which was looking less likely, but the elimination of the Jews. Instead of working the Jews to death in a reservation or gulag, they were now to be systematically shot in every area the Germans conquered.
For many Americans and Western Europeans, the Holocaust has come to be symbolized by the concentration camp, particularly by Auschwitz. But the fact is more Jews were shot in the second half of 1941 alone, than were gassed at Auschwitz during the entire war. Another million were shot in 1942. The Nazis were able to convince many Ukrainians and Belorussians that the Soviet atrocities that had so recently been committed against them were in fact caused by Jewish communists. The Germans trained and armed them to assist in the monumental task of shooting millions of people. The Nazis were less willing to arm the Poles as accomplices, and wanting to save ammunition, after two years of occupation, the Germans began gassing Jews at extermination facilities: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Triblinka, Majdanek, and one part of Auschwitz.
It began in 1941 at Belzec. Guards were recruited from the Soviet populace (mostly Ukrainians) and trained at Trawniki, while Nazi specialists from Germany who had overseen the “euthanasia” program that had gassed 70,000 Germans deemed “life unfit for life” were brought in to supervise. Only 2 or 3 Jews who arrived at Belzec survived. 434,508 did not. And it is precisely because so few people survived the extermination facilities (combined with the fact that American and British armies did not liberate them, the Soviets did) that the concentration camp continues to loom large in our minds and places like Belzec do not. Auschwitz was actually built in 1940 to intimidate the Poles, and then to house Soviet POWs. When I.G. Farben decided the camp would be an ideal place to make synthetic rubber, Slovakia sent its Jews to be used as slave labor (all of them died). In 1942 the extermination facility was added and then expanded with the addition of Birkenau in 1943.
Auschwitz was the climax of the Holocaust, reached at a moment when most Soviet and Polish Jews under German rule were already dead.
But Jews from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands (1942); Greece and now occupied Italy (1943); and Hungary (1944) could and were sent to Auschwitz to die. Although no one survived the gas chambers, 100,000 people did survive the Auschwitz labor camp. (As opposed to less than a 100 people who survived the six extermination facilities.)
If this sounds too familiar, it is because of my ineptitude at summarizing my 62 pages of notes that is at fault, because Snyder brings to light hundreds of details that have not been previously published. His research in newly opened archives guarantees surprises. In addition, he draws conclusions about the nature of the killing and the psychology of victimhood in the double-occupied territories that are entirely his own. Simply reading the introductory and concluding chapters would provide much to consider. Even more than [Gulag: A History] changed the way I think about the Soviet camps, [Bloodlands] has changed the way I think about this region and this time period. Highly recommended. show less
From the opening words comes a quote from a young girl writing to say goodbye to her father that she ‘fears this death’ because she has heard that young children are thrown into the killing pits alive. One almost hopes her father was already dead himself before he read that chilling, plaintiff and brave note. These Bloodlands are the region between the Nazi terrors and death camps and the Communist purges and engineered famines, trod and fought over by both creeds until they were indeed soaked in the blood of an estimated minimum of fourteen million murdered souls (in total deaths however, the estimates show between 17,000,000 to 21,000,000!).
Poland, Ukraine and Belarus Slavic nations surged and were slaughtered between the show more advancing and retreating armies, between the chilling blood-lusts of two opposing nations, between Berlin and Moscow.
This period of history is well documented but the story of what was happening in these bitter Bloodlands is newly, if chillingly, told in greater detail than before in Professor Snyder’s book.
I do not think I will ever be able to forget that little girl’s note to her Daddy – it is Timothy Snyder’s skills in bringing forward many these human notes and tales in his narrative that make this book so dramatic - it should be required-reading for all peoples. show less
Poland, Ukraine and Belarus Slavic nations surged and were slaughtered between the show more advancing and retreating armies, between the chilling blood-lusts of two opposing nations, between Berlin and Moscow.
This period of history is well documented but the story of what was happening in these bitter Bloodlands is newly, if chillingly, told in greater detail than before in Professor Snyder’s book.
I do not think I will ever be able to forget that little girl’s note to her Daddy – it is Timothy Snyder’s skills in bringing forward many these human notes and tales in his narrative that make this book so dramatic - it should be required-reading for all peoples. show less
In this stunning and chilling book, Timothy Snyder, a Yale history professor, illuminates the darkest side of the years 1933 to 1945 in Europe by exploring the mass murders of conservatively (conservatively!) 14 million people in what he calls the "bloodlands," the countries from Poland in the west to western Russia in the east. This already shocking total includes civilians and prisoners of war but not soldiers killed directly in the war as Snyder is covering "deliberate mass murder." The countries of the bloodlands, as he defines them, are what are now eastern Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine, and western Russia.
Bloodlands takes the reader from the forced Ukrainian famines and collectivization of the early 1930s show more and the purges and great terror of the late 1930s in the Soviet Union through the early days of World War II when the Nazis and Soviets collaborated to take over Poland and "give" the Baltics to the Soviet Union, through the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, which opened up the east for the Nazi death camps, to the Nazi retreat and the bitter partisan fighting in many countries, at times encouraged by Stalin knowing it would lead the Germans to kill leaders who would otherwise live to make trouble for the Soviets, and winding up with post-1945 ethnic removals to make the countries that emerged from the war "pure" and the final Soviet purges, including the anti-Semitic "doctors plot." Throughout, in addition to the horrific details and statistics, Synder tries to emphasize that everyone who was killed -- by starvation, bullets, or gas -- was an individual human being, and includes quotes from people who left written records (sometimes on the walls of the buildings in which they were imprisoned prior to being killed).
Snyder makes several points. First, we as westerners have a distorted view of the bloodshed of these years partly because all the sites in the bloodlands where people were killed were liberated by Soviet troops and ended up behind the iron curtain; when we think of camps being liberated, we think of the skeletal survivors of the work camp at Dachau and when we read of the holocaust we read the stories of survivors. Second, almost all the countries in the bloodlands suffered from being occupied first by the Soviets, then by the Nazis, and then by the Soviets again. Not only was each occupation brutal in its own way, but people had complicated calculations to make about their degree of collaboration or resistance. Third, both the Soviets and the Nazis, but especially the Soviets, put a big priority on killing leaders, both military and intellectual, thereby not only reducing the ability to fight and resist but also impoverishing the population for years to come. Fourth, although we think of Jews being killed in the death camps by gas, and millions were, more were killed by bullets, millions of people killed one by one and thrown into pits.
This was not an easy book to read, because the horrors are so overwhelming. But I learned a lot, especially about the partisan fighting in Belarus and about the uprising first by Jews and then by the Polish Home Army in Warsaw, and much much more. This is an important book. show less
Bloodlands takes the reader from the forced Ukrainian famines and collectivization of the early 1930s show more and the purges and great terror of the late 1930s in the Soviet Union through the early days of World War II when the Nazis and Soviets collaborated to take over Poland and "give" the Baltics to the Soviet Union, through the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, which opened up the east for the Nazi death camps, to the Nazi retreat and the bitter partisan fighting in many countries, at times encouraged by Stalin knowing it would lead the Germans to kill leaders who would otherwise live to make trouble for the Soviets, and winding up with post-1945 ethnic removals to make the countries that emerged from the war "pure" and the final Soviet purges, including the anti-Semitic "doctors plot." Throughout, in addition to the horrific details and statistics, Synder tries to emphasize that everyone who was killed -- by starvation, bullets, or gas -- was an individual human being, and includes quotes from people who left written records (sometimes on the walls of the buildings in which they were imprisoned prior to being killed).
Snyder makes several points. First, we as westerners have a distorted view of the bloodshed of these years partly because all the sites in the bloodlands where people were killed were liberated by Soviet troops and ended up behind the iron curtain; when we think of camps being liberated, we think of the skeletal survivors of the work camp at Dachau and when we read of the holocaust we read the stories of survivors. Second, almost all the countries in the bloodlands suffered from being occupied first by the Soviets, then by the Nazis, and then by the Soviets again. Not only was each occupation brutal in its own way, but people had complicated calculations to make about their degree of collaboration or resistance. Third, both the Soviets and the Nazis, but especially the Soviets, put a big priority on killing leaders, both military and intellectual, thereby not only reducing the ability to fight and resist but also impoverishing the population for years to come. Fourth, although we think of Jews being killed in the death camps by gas, and millions were, more were killed by bullets, millions of people killed one by one and thrown into pits.
This was not an easy book to read, because the horrors are so overwhelming. But I learned a lot, especially about the partisan fighting in Belarus and about the uprising first by Jews and then by the Polish Home Army in Warsaw, and much much more. This is an important book. show less
In Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin Timothy Snyder looks at those lands that were occupied by both the Nazis and the Soviets, and how it impacted those places. He also, more importantly, seeks to both show how mass murder occurred and to make those horrifyingly large numbers represent real people. From the Baltic states, through eastern Poland, Belarus, the western edge of Russia and especially Ukraine, Snyder shows how these lands contained the vast majority of civilian deaths in the twelve years between 1933 to 1945.
Beginning with Stalin's Great Famine in the Ukraine, in which 3.3 people died, and continuing through final acts of ethnic cleansing that turned diverse and vibrant populations homogeneous, Snyder seeks to show more humanize the statistics, to explain the motivations of the perpetrators and to return to the dead the stories of their lives. He is too successful for this book to be easy reading.
People were perhaps alike in dying and in death, but each of them was different until that final moment, each had different preoccupations and presentiments until all was clear and all was black.
Snyder looks at why both Stalin and Hitler found it necessary to slaughter so many civilians, most who posed no political threat, many of whom were children. He's interested in the motivations of the guards, the policemen holding the guns, the soldiers obeying orders. He's also interested in the lives of those who died and the reasons for those deaths.
Only there in the ditch were these people reduced to nothing, or to their number, which was 33,761.
I took copious notes while reading this book, to absorb more of what I was learning, but also as a buffer against that relentless stream of information. Snyder writes well, has clearly done extensive research and has a passion for his subject. He wants the reader to be informed of the events of the past, the motivations and reasons, but most of all, he wants the reader to see each death as an individual story cut short. show less
Beginning with Stalin's Great Famine in the Ukraine, in which 3.3 people died, and continuing through final acts of ethnic cleansing that turned diverse and vibrant populations homogeneous, Snyder seeks to show more humanize the statistics, to explain the motivations of the perpetrators and to return to the dead the stories of their lives. He is too successful for this book to be easy reading.
People were perhaps alike in dying and in death, but each of them was different until that final moment, each had different preoccupations and presentiments until all was clear and all was black.
Snyder looks at why both Stalin and Hitler found it necessary to slaughter so many civilians, most who posed no political threat, many of whom were children. He's interested in the motivations of the guards, the policemen holding the guns, the soldiers obeying orders. He's also interested in the lives of those who died and the reasons for those deaths.
Only there in the ditch were these people reduced to nothing, or to their number, which was 33,761.
I took copious notes while reading this book, to absorb more of what I was learning, but also as a buffer against that relentless stream of information. Snyder writes well, has clearly done extensive research and has a passion for his subject. He wants the reader to be informed of the events of the past, the motivations and reasons, but most of all, he wants the reader to see each death as an individual story cut short. show less
An incredibly important book which examines the period between 1933 and 1945 when the "Nazi and Soviet regimes starved, shot and gassed 14 million people in an area which today comprises Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, western Russia and the Baltic States". These deaths were not of soldiers in battle but of ordinary people. The numbers are incredible, the suffering of these nations during this time was unimaginable. While we all know some of this history there is much that fell behind the Iron Curtain at the end of WWII and is only now coming to light with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of various archives. I am an historian by instinct and I found Snyder's arguments compelling - we must not see these regimes or the people show more who operated within them as aberrant or inhuman because that "is to take a step toward, not away from, the Nazi position. To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history." (p.400). show less
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ThingScore 58
Snyder’s ambition is to persuade the West—and the rest of the world—to see the war in a broader perspective. He does so by disputing popular assumptions about victims, death tolls, and killing methods—of which more in a moment—but above all about dates and geography. The title of this book, Bloodlands, is not a metaphor. Snyder’s “bloodlands,” which others have called show more “borderlands,” run from Poznan in the West to Smolensk in the East, encompassing modern Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, and the edge of western Russia (see map on page 10). This is the region that experienced not one but two—and sometimes three—wartime occupations. This is also the region that suffered the most casualties and endured the worst physical destruction.
More to the point, this is the region that experienced the worst of both Stalin’s and Hitler’s ideological madness. show less
More to the point, this is the region that experienced the worst of both Stalin’s and Hitler’s ideological madness. show less
added by oregonobsessionz
Snyder claims that his purpose in describing 'all of the major killing policies in their common European historical setting' was 'to introduce to European history its central event'. But he has not described all the major killing policies and they did not all have a common setting. And to assert that they are the central event in the whole of European history is rhetorical overkill, to say the show more least. A number of other historians have written recently, and more perceptively, about this same topic, from Richard Overy in The Dictators to Robert Gellately in Lenin, Stalin and Hitler – some, like Norman Davies in Europe at War 1939-45, from a similar perspective to Snyder's own. Despite the widespread misapplication of Hitler's statement about the Armenians, few claims advanced in Snyder's book are less plausible nowadays than the assertion that 'beyond Poland, the extent of Polish suffering is underappreciated.' In fact, we know about the events Snyder describes already, despite his repeated assertions that we don't. What we need is not to be told yet again the facts about mass murder, but to understand why it took place and how people could carry it out, and in this task Snyder's book is of no use. show less
added by Cynfelyn
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.
added by ekorrhjulet
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Terres de sang. L'Europe entre Hitler et Staline
- Original title
- Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin
- Original publication date
- 2010
- People/Characters
- Adolf Hitler; Joseph Stalin
- Important places
- Baltic States; Belarus; Poland; Ukraine; Eastern Europe
- Important events
- Holodomor (1932 | 1933); Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; Holocaust; World War II
- Epigraph
- your golden hair Margarete,
your ashen hair Shulamit
Paul Celan
"Death Fugue"
Everything flows, everything changes.
You can't board the same prison train twice.
Vasily Grossman
Everything flows
A stranger drowned on the Black Sea alone
With no to hear his prayers for forgiveness.
"Storm on the Black Sea"
Ukranian traditional song
Whole cities disappear. In nature's stead
Only a white stead to counter nonexistence.
Tomas Venclova
"The shield of Achilles" - First words
- (Preface) "Now we will live!" This is what the hungry boy liked to say, as he walked along the quiet roadside, or through the empty fields.
The origins of the Nazi and the Soviet regimes, and of their encounter in the bloodlands, lie in the First World War of 1914-118. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)The Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers, some of which we can only estimate, some of which we can reconstruct with fair precision. It is for us as scholars to seek these numbers and to put them into perspective. It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people. If we cannot do that, then Hitler and Stalin have shaped not only our world, but our humanity.
- Blurbers
- Denby, David; Deák, István; Applebaum, Anne; Hochschild, Adam
- Original language
- English
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- Media
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- ISBNs
- 68
- ASINs
- 24