Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin - Hardcover

Timothy Snyder

4.38

16,587 ratings by Goodreads

9780224081412: Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224081411 ISBN 13: 9780224081412

Publisher: Bodley Head, 2010

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* In the middle of Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered fourteen million people in a zone of death between Berlin and Moscow. * These were the bloodlands - today's Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, western Russia and the eastern Baltic coast. In a twelve-year period - 1933 to 1945 - as a result of deliberate polices unrelated to combat, an average of more than a million civilians were murdered annually. At the end of the Second World War the bloodlands fell behind the iron curtain, leaving their history in darkness. * In this revelatory book Timothy Snyder offers a groundbreaking investigation of Europe's killing fields and a sustained explanation of the motives and methods of both Hitler and Stalin. He anchors the history of Hitler's Holocaust and Stalin's Terror in their time and place and provides a fresh account of the relationship between the two regimes. Using scholarly literature and primary sources in all relevant languages, Snyder pays special attention to the testimony of the victims: the letters home, the notes flung from trains, the diaries found on corpses. * Brilliantly researched, profoundly humane, authoritative and original, Bloodlands re-examines the greatest tragedy in European history and forces us to rethink our past.

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About the Author:

Timothy Snyder received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1997. He has held fellowships in Paris and Vienna, and an Academy Scholarship at Harvard. He has written and edited a number of critically-acclaimed and prize-winning books about twentieth-century European history, including The Reconstruction of Nations, Sketches from a Secret War and The Red Prince. He is Professor of History at Yale University.

From Booklist:

If there is an explanation for the political killing perpetrated in eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, historian Snyder roots it in agriculture. Stalin wanted to collectivize farmers; Hitler wanted to eliminate them so Germans could colonize the land. The dictators wielded frightening power to advance such fantasies toward reality, and the despots toted up about 14 million corpses between them, so stupefying a figure that Snyder sets himself three goals here: to break down the number into the various actions of murder that comprise it, from liquidation of the kulaks to the final solution; to restore humanity to the victims via surviving testimony to their fates; and to deny Hitler and Stalin any historical justification for their policies, which at the time had legions of supporters and have some even today. Such scope may render Snyder’s project too imposing to casual readers, but it would engage those exposed to the period’s chronology and major interpretive issues, such as the extent to which the Nazi and Soviet systems may be compared. Solid and judicious scholarship for large WWII collections. --Gilbert Taylor

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