BLOODLANDS: Europe Between Hitler And Stalin

Gripping and comprehensive&scrupulous and nuanced...revisionist history of the best kind: in spare, closely argued prose, with meticulous use of statistics, [Snyder] makes the reader rethink some of the best-known episodes in Europe' The Economist ;An excellent, authoritative and imaginative book, which tells the grim story of the greatest human and demographic tragedy in European history with exemplary clarity. Snyder set out to give a human face to the many millions of victims of totalitarianism. He has succeeded admirably' Roger Moorhouse, BBC History MagazineIn the middle of Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes starved, shot and gassed 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 murdered every year, as a result of deliberate policies unrelated to combat. In his revelatory book Timothy Snyder offers a ground-breaking investigation into the motives and methods of Stalin and Hitler and, using scholarly literature and primary sources, pays special attention to the testimony of the victims, including the letters home, the notes flung from trains, the diaries on corpses. The result is a brilliantly researched, profoundly humane, authoritative and original book that forces us to re-examine the greatest tragedy in European history and re-think our past. ;One of the most talented and innovative historians of Central and Eastern Europe' Niall Ferguson ;Timothy Snyder is one of the most remarkable and original historians of Eastern Europe in his generation' Timothy Garton Ash