Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler's and Stalin's politics of mass killing

Americans call the Second World War "the Good War." But before it even began, America's ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens — and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war's end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness.

Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, 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 story. With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.

“[Snyder] tears the historical narrative from the hands of Stalin and Hitler, and places it in the hands of the victims. This is all underscored by Snyder’s powerful prose….a sharp and moving writer.” The Kyiv Post

“Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands is not a book whose time has come; it is a book whose time is long overdue.” The Moscow News

“A brilliant, important and highly original look at a swath of territory that includes not only Poland but also Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic states.” The Jewish Journal

“For over a decade in the middle of the twentieth century, the lands between Russia and Germany were the killing fields of Europe. Tens of millions of civilians from Poland to Ukraine, Lithuania to Belarus were starved, beaten, shot and gassed to death by the authorities and armies of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. We think we know this story and we assign it shorthand labels: Auschwitz, the Gulag. In his path-breaking and often courageous study of Europe’s ‘bloodlands,’ Timothy Snyder shows how very much more complicated the story was. His account of the methods and motives of murderous regimes, both at home and in foreign war, will radically revise our appreciation of the implications of mass extermination in the recent past. Bloodlands — impeccably researched and appropriately sensitive to its volatile material — is the most important book to appear on this subject for decades and will surely become the reference in its field.” Tony Judt, author of Postwar and Ill Fares the Land

“Timothy Snyder has written a nuanced, original and penetrating analysis of Europe’s twentieth century killing fields between Russia and Germany, drawing on many little-known sources. History of a high order, Bloodlands may also point us towards lessons for our own time.” Timothy Garton Ash, Professor of European Studies, University of Oxford, and author of The File

Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. The author of thirteen books, including the bestsellers On Tyranny and  Black Earth, his work has been translated into forty languages. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.