Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

Tim Snyder’s ambitious Bloodlands set out to place the murderous regimes of the Third Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union in their overlapping European contexts. Snyder proceeded from the central observation that the annihilation fantasies of Hitler and Stalin were to a large part played out in the same space: ‘in the middle of Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some 14 million people. The place where all of the victims died, the bloodlands, extends from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states’ (pp. vii-viii) And yet, Snyder argued, these histories were seldom considered together – not least because the Holocaust overshadows all as a result of its dominance in modern memory cultures, preventing understanding of a wider culture and history of murder and annihilation.