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A prize-winning historian fundamentally revises the history of modern Europe and its central catastrophe: the thirteen million people killed by the totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin in the lands between Berlin and Moscow.
Americans think of World War II as ''The Good War,'' a moment when the forces of good resoundingly triumphed over evil. Yet the war was not decided by D-Day. It was decided in the East, by the Red Army and Joseph Stalin. While conventional wisdom locates the horrors of WWII in the six million Jews killed in German concentration camps, the reality is even grimmer. In thirteen years, the Nazi and Soviet regimes killed thirteen million people in the lands between Germany and Russia. The majority of these deaths occurred in Eastern Europe, not Germany.
In the groundbreaking long-view style of Tony Judt and Niall Ferguson, Tim Snyder, one of America's foremost historians of Eastern Europe, has written a new history of Europe that focuses on the battleground of Eastern Europe, which suffered the worst crimes of Hitler and Stalin. Based upon scholarly literature and primary sources in all of the relevant languages, Bloodlands pays special attention to the sources left by those who were killed: the letters home, the notes flung from trains, the diaries found on corpses.
This is a new kind of European history, one more concerned with suffering than with intention, one that recognizes how stories of progress or victory have excluded the most salient human experience, and one focused on the extreme predicament of the tens of millions of Europeans who found themselves between Hitler and Stalin.
The scale of destruction in the lands between Germany and Russia has eluded historians and baffles the cynicism of our new century, but for these very reasons, Bloodlands offers the way forward to a sensible reconstruction of European history. Ultimately, in Snyder's matchless telling, the German and Soviet regimes appear not so much as totalitarian twins, but as rivals whose ruthless pursuit of similar goals doomed millions of innocents.
Americans think of World War II as ''The Good War,'' a moment when the forces of good resoundingly triumphed over evil. Yet the war was not decided by D-Day. It was decided in the East, by the Red Army and Joseph Stalin. While conventional wisdom locates the horrors of WWII in the six million Jews killed in German concentration camps, the reality is even grimmer. In thirteen years, the Nazi and Soviet regimes killed thirteen million people in the lands between Germany and Russia. The majority of these deaths occurred in Eastern Europe, not Germany.
In the groundbreaking long-view style of Tony Judt and Niall Ferguson, Tim Snyder, one of America's foremost historians of Eastern Europe, has written a new history of Europe that focuses on the battleground of Eastern Europe, which suffered the worst crimes of Hitler and Stalin. Based upon scholarly literature and primary sources in all of the relevant languages, Bloodlands pays special attention to the sources left by those who were killed: the letters home, the notes flung from trains, the diaries found on corpses.
This is a new kind of European history, one more concerned with suffering than with intention, one that recognizes how stories of progress or victory have excluded the most salient human experience, and one focused on the extreme predicament of the tens of millions of Europeans who found themselves between Hitler and Stalin.
The scale of destruction in the lands between Germany and Russia has eluded historians and baffles the cynicism of our new century, but for these very reasons, Bloodlands offers the way forward to a sensible reconstruction of European history. Ultimately, in Snyder's matchless telling, the German and Soviet regimes appear not so much as totalitarian twins, but as rivals whose ruthless pursuit of similar goals doomed millions of innocents.
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About the Author:
TIMOTHY SNYDER is professor of history at Yale University. He has held fellowships in Paris, Vienna, Warsaw, and at Harvard, and he won the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association for his book The Reconstruction of Nations. His book Sketches from a Secret War was awarded the Pro Historia Polonorum by the First Congress of Foreign Researchers of Poland. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
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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- PublisherBlackstone Pub
- Publication date2010
- ISBN 10 1441761519
- ISBN 13 9781441761514
- BindingPreloaded Digital Audio Player
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