Bloodlands

Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

Timothy Snyder | 4.43 | 11,849 ratings and reviews

Recommended by Eric Weinstein, Antony Beevor, Edward Lucas, and 4 others. See all reviews

Ranked #3 in German History, Ranked #3 in European History — see more rankings.

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.

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. less

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Reviews and Recommendations

We've comprehensively compiled reviews of Bloodlands from the world's leading experts.

Eric Weinstein Managing Director/Thiel Capital[Eric Weinstein recommended this book on Twitter.] (Source)

Antony Beevor This book is about…the Stalinist repression of the areas known as the borderlands, which Snyder has termed the bloodlands. Snyder is looking at the deliberate mass murder of civilians in a particular zone of Europe between about 1930, at the start of the second Ukraine famine, and 1945. (Source)

Edward Lucas Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin offers the best account of the most important and terrible years of the last century, when Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler jointly consigned the territories and people between their two empires to the meat-grinder. (Source)

Norman Naimark In Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder has painted an impressive and veracious historical canvas of murderous ideologies and mass killing in Eastern Europe between the Ukrainian famine in 1932-33 and the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign after World War II. The perpetrators are chiefly the Soviets and the Nazis. The victims, in addition to the Jews, are Ukrainians, Poles, Belarusians, Balts and Russians. (Source)

Rankings by Category

Bloodlands is ranked in the following categories:

#61 in British History
#11 in Communism
#27 in Democracy
#8 in Fascism
#21 in French History
#86 in History
#61 in Holocaust
#58 in Intelligence
#55 in International Relations
#5 in Italian History
#35 in Italy
#77 in Jewish
#56 in Military History
#16 in Modern History
#14 in Podcast
#16 in Poland
#16 in Propaganda
#10 in Russian History
#45 in Socialism
#52 in World History
#38 in World War II

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