Bloodlands: THE book to help you understand today’s Eastern Europe

Timothy Snyder

Ago 2011 · Random House

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'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

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‘When Timothy Snyder’s book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin was published in 2010, it quickly established its author as one of the leading historians of his generation, a scholar who combined formidable linguistic skills — he reads or speaks 11 languages — with an elegant literary style, white-hot moral passion and a willingness to start arguments about some of the most fraught questions of the recent past.’ New York Times

Timothy Snyder is Levin Professor of History at Yale University, and has written and edited a number of critically acclaimed and prize-winning books about twentieth-century European history: Bloodlands won the Hannah Arendt Prize, the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award in the Humanities and the literature award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Black Earth was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

Snyder is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. He is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a permanent fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences, and sits on the advisory council of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research.