a book
Bloodlands
Timothy Snyder · 2010 · 544 pages
'A superb work of scholarship, full of riveting detail' Sunday Times
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, due to deliberate policies unrelated to combat.
Here, Timothy Snyder offers a ground-breaking investigation into the motives and methods of Stalin and Hitler. Using scholarly literature and primary sources, he pays special attention to the testimony of the victims, including the letters home, the notes flung from trains, the diaries on corpses.
Bloodlands 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.
'An original, wonderful and horrifying book... beautifully written and superbly researched' Anthony Beevor
recommended by 7 people
sourced from public statements

Peter Thiel
“Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands" is also just released in paperback. He tells how the Nazis and the Soviets drove each other to ever more murderous atrocities as they fought to dominate Eastern Europe in the 1930s and '40s. Even as he calculates the death toll painstakingly, Mr. Snyder reminds us that the most important number is one: Each victim was an individual whose life cannot be reduced to the violence that cut it short.”↗

Alan Cooper
“I just finished reading @TimothyDSnyder's amazing book "Bloodlands." I underlined about a third of the text. Not only was it relatively easy to read, I'd argue that it was the most important book of 20th Century history yet written. Awesome!!”↗
Mark Pitcavage
“Snyder also wrote another interesting book on an area I am interested in--the borderlands between central and eastern Europe, with mixed nationalities and shifting geographies. It's a complicated story. His Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin looks at the region broadly.”↗



