ИПИ Библиотека

A magisterial new history book about the bloodlands - the lands that lie between Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany - where 14 million people where killed during the years 1933 – 1944.
The central event of European history has been overlooked. In the middle of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes starved, shot, and gassed to death fourteen million people in borderlands between Berlin and Moscow. In these bloodlands, today's Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and the eastern Baltic coast, an average of more than a million civilians were killed annually by the Nazi and Soviet regimes during twelve years that both Hitler and Stalin were in power, from 1933 to 1944. nnTogether Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union ruled most of the Eurasian landmass, but they killed chiefly, indeed almost entirely, in the bloodlands. Beyond the bloodlands, the regimes of Hitler and Stalin together, in their vast domains from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, deliberately killed no more than three million civilians in these years. If the compact area of the bloodlands is included, the figure rises to seventeen million souls.nnThe centre of gravity of modern European history is here, in the frontier zones and lands between states advocating European ideologies, who assaulted European peoples, and eradicated an established European order. The center of gravity of modern European history is a black hole. Today Stalin's crimes are associated with Russia, and Hitler's with Germany: these countries were not the main sites of mass killing. People were killed in the lands between, where most of Europe's Jews lived, where Hitler and Stalin's plans overlapped, and where the Wehrmacht and the Red Army fought, and where the Soviet NKVD and the German SS concentrated their forces.

“The story of World War II, like that of most wars, usually gets told by the victors. Diplomatic and military accounts are set largely in the West and star the morally upright Allies—the U.S., Britain and Soviet Union—in battles against fascism. The Holocaust gets its own separate history, as a case apart in its genocidal intent and human tragedy. Timothy Snyder’sBloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin forces a dramatic shift in these perceptions…. Among his other goals in Bloodlands, Mr. Snyder attempts to put the Holocaust in context—to restore it, in a sense, to the history of the wider European conflict. This is a task that no historian can attempt without risking controversy. Yet far from minimizing Jewish suffering, Bloodlands gives a fuller picture of the Nazi killing machine.”
- The Wall Street Journal

“How Stalin and Hitler enabled each other’s crimes and killed 14m people between the Baltic and the Black Sea. A lifetime’s work by a Yale University historian who deserves to be read and reread.”
- The Economist, Books of the Year

“[A] superb and harrowing history…. Snyder presents material that is undeniably fresh – what’s more, it comes from sources in languages with which very few western academics are familiar. The success of Bloodlands really lies in its effective presentation of cold, hard scholarship, which is in abundance.”
- The Financial Times

“[A] brave and original history of mass killing in the twentieth century…. Snyder’s original contribution is to treat all of these episodes—the Ukrainian famine, the Holocaust, Stalin’s mass executions, the planned starvation of Soviet POWs, postwar ethnic cleansing—as different facets of the same phenomenon. Instead of studying Nazi atrocities or Soviet atrocities separately, as many others have done, he looks at them together. Yet Snyder does not exactly compare the two systems either. His intention, rather, is to show that the two systems committed the same kinds of crimes at the same times and in the same places, that they aided and abetted one another, and above all that their interaction with one another led to more mass killing than either might have carried out alone.”
- Anne Applebaum, New York Review of Books

Timothy Snyder

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.