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Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler And Stalin (2010)

by Timothy Snyder(Favorite Author)

4.29 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0465002390 (ISBN13: 9780465002399)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Basic Books

review 1: FINALLY read this. Eye-opening, particularly given the current situation in Ukraine.From p. 52: "In fall 1933, in villages across Soviet Ukraine the harvest was brought in by Red Army soldiers, communist party activists, workers, and students. Forced to work even as they died, starving peasants had put down crops in spring 1933 that they would not live to harvest. Resettlers came from Soviet Russia to take over houses and villages, and saw that first they would have to remove the bodies of the previous inhabitants. Often the rotten corpses fell apart in their hands. Sometimes the newcomers would then return home, finding that no amount of scrubbing and painting could quite remove the stench. Yet sometimes they stayed. Ukraine's "ethnographic material," as one Soviet... more official told an Italian diplomat, had been altered. As earlier in Soviet Kazakhstan, where the change was even more dramatic, the demographic balance in Soviet Ukraine shifted in favor of Russians."And overall, (p. 408) "The Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers, some of which we can only estimate, some of which we can reconstruct with fair precision. It is for us as scholars to seek these numbers and put them into perspective. It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people. If we cannot do that, then Hitler and Stalin have shaped not only our world, but our humanity."
review 2: This book is an excellent treatment of an unpleasant subject, the murder of civilians in the areas of Central Europe occupied both by Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia. 400 plus pages of relentlessly depressing recounting and analysis, this book is nevertheless important. First, without minimizing the murder of Jews, this book places it in context, rather than as simply a subject of "lachrymose history" or Zionist self-justification. Second, Snyder makes clear that within the assumptions of the perpetrator, the murders were rational. These were not expressions of sickness, so much as implementations of conscious, if wicked, political programs. One leaves this work with a coldly realistic conclusion. Not "never again," but "how soon?" and where next. What the Nazis and Bolsheviks did, so can you. less

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