In the middle of Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes starved, shot and gassed 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 Yale historian 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.
