Bloodlands

Bloodlands

THE book to help you understand today’s Eastern Europe

Summary

A powerful and revelatory history book about the bloodlands - the lands that lie between Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany - where 14 million people were killed during the years 1933 - 1944.

In the middle of Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered fourteen million people in the bloodlands between Berlin and Moscow. In a twelve-year-period, in these killing fields - today's Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Western Russia and the eastern Baltic coast - an average of more than one million citizens were slaughtered every year, as a result of deliberate policies unrelated to combat.

In this book Timothy Snyder offers a ground-breaking investigation into the motives and methods of Stalin and Hitler and, using scholarly literature and primary sources, pays special attention to the testimony of the victims, including the letters home, the notes flung from trains, the diaries on corpses. The result is a brilliantly researched, profoundly humane, authoritative and original book that forces us to re-examine one of the greatest tragedies in European history and re-think our past.

Reviews

  • A hugely important historian of this nightmarish era. Nobody has explained it this way before
    William Leith, Evening Standard

About the author

Timothy Snyder

Timothy Snyder has been called ‘the leading interpreter of our dark times’. As a historian, he has given us startling reinterpretations of political collapse and mass killing. As a public intellectual, he has turned that knowledge towards counsel and prediction, working against authoritarians and populists.


He teaches history and global affairs at Yale University and his books, which have been published in over forty languages, include Bloodlands, Black Earth, On Tyranny, Road to Unfreedom and Our Malady. His work has inspired poster campaigns and exhibitions, sculptures, a punk rock song, a rap song, a play and an opera, and he has appeared in over fifty films and documentaries.
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