Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler And Stalin By Timothy Snyder (Abee)

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler And Stalin By Timothy Snyder (Abee)
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Americans call the Second World War ΓÇ£The Good War.ΓÇ¥ But before it even began, AmericaΓÇÖs wartime ally Josef Stalin had killed millions of his own citizensΓÇöand 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 warΓÇÖs 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.

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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 SnyderΓÇÖs project too imposing to casual readers, but it would engage those exposed to the periodΓÇÖs 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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Paperback: 560 pages
Publisher: Basic Books; First Trade Paper Edition edition (October 2, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0465031471
ISBN-13: 978-0465031474

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