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Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin…
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Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (original 2010; edition 2010)

by Timothy Snyder (Author)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
2,014698,034 (4.27)148
In extraordinary detail Snyder goes over pretty much every single one of the fourteen million civilian murders between 1932 and 1945 in the lands between the overlapping control, invasions and occupations of the Soviet Union and Germany; the Baltics, Poland, Ukraine, and their edges. It covers the forced starvations, purges and deportations, and the rounding up and shootings.

It is, obviously, utterly horrific. It's an amazing book to keep reading, many, many examples of mass murders of ten to twenty thousand people within just two days. Interesting notes like this,
"A team of just twelve Moscow NKVD men shot 20,761 people at Butovo, on the outskirts of Moscow, in 1937 and 1938."

It is a hard subject and a dense book to read. It is also modestly annoyingly repetitive. However, it is absolutely recommended if one thinks one knows anything at all about those years and that region. ( )
  tmph | Sep 13, 2020 |
English (60)  German (2)  French (2)  Spanish (1)  Hebrew (1)  Dutch (1)  All languages (67)
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This still ranks as one of the greatest works of scholarship I have ever read. ( )
  MylesKesten | Jan 23, 2024 |
1-2024
Cuando se habla de los muertos en la segunda guerra mundial, siempre pensamos en los campos de concentración alemanes. Siempre pensé que era donde más seres humanos habían muerto. Pero no, he estado equivocada durante años.

Las "tierras de sangre" son todas aquellas zonas, países o parte de países, entre Alemania y la URSS, donde Stalin y Hitler decidieron que les sobraban gente. Regaron de sangre esas tierras, desde mucho antes de empezar la guerra y mucho después de terminar.

Mucho antes de empezar la 2° guerra mundial, por 1931 Stalin empezó sus "matanzas". Su idea de modernizar el país pasaba por hacer desaparecer a los trabajadores del campo y en especial a los ucranianos. Pero no únicamente a ellos, polacos y rusos también cayeron con el hambre que provocó. Recogió las cosechas y el grano que se usaba para la siembra siguiente. Dejo que murieran de hambre sin ningún cargo de conciencia. Todo con vistas, o la escusa, de una industrialización del país.

Y así empieza el libro, en ese año y contándote las políticas de ambos líderes políticos.

Cuando más leo sobre este periodo de la historia, más me doy cuenta de lo que desconozco.

Lo recomiendo a todo aquel que disfrute de este periodo de la historia y quiera conocer un poco más.

Lo que hicieron con Polonia y con Ucrania me parece demencial. Y ya no solo por Stalin y Hitler, me refiero al resto del mundo, miro hacia otro lado y los dejaron hacer. Tan criminal fue la acción de asesinar a tantos seres humanos, como la inacción por parte del resto.

Saber, más o menos, la cantidad de personas que murieron en esta zona, durante esos años (y después de 1945), que superan con mucho los asesinados en los campos de concentración, más los militares que murieron luchando de todos los países, indica que son cifras inimaginables.

Tanto Hitler, como Stalin ñ, tenían fijación con eliminar a los judíos. Pero no asesinaron judíos. Estás tierras regadas con tanta sangre, eran de civiles masacrados por ambos bandos y en muchas ocasiones, ayudados por vecinos de las víctimas.

Muy interesante, nada pesado. ( )
  Akasha88 | Jan 14, 2024 |
A surprisingly brutal history of what I already knew was a brutal history. The purposefulness is shocking. The amount of pain suffered in Poland is being all comprehension. The plan to starve the ENTIRE population of the Soviet Union by Germany is so fantastically heinous…. Wow. “The human capacity for subjective victimhood is apparently limitless, and people who believe that they are victims can be motivated to perform acts of great violence” pp399/400 the conclusion of this book is brilliant. The first 400 pages are so hard to read (took me a year!) but to get to the conclusion one must consider the mountains of the dead.
  BookyMaven | Dec 6, 2023 |
There are so many different excerpts from this book that it would take pages and pages to fill out everything I find interesting or important. He is such a good writer that he can take something like this, which is widely written about, and make it interesting, shocking and at times brutal. There was only 1 very small part of a certain chapter that I got lost in the academia jargon but it seemed no other way to make it more simplistic. Almost the entire book is written for people who may not have vast knowledge of the Soviet and Nazi regimes in their peak of power. The Nazi brutality is more recognized and in popular literature/culture and it has to do with several things, mainly that they were a part of the "good guys" and fought alongside the British, American, French, ect. troops. Without the Soviet Union making a stand at the gates of Moscow and turning the tide to drive the Germans back westward, the outcome or length of the war would have been drastically different. The number of troop, and sadly civilians, who died in the Eastern Front is staggering and not easy to wrap your head around. I believe it's at the very top of any war for the amount of casualties in just the Eastern Front. So while Germanys war crimes and atrocities are more known in the West, I still knew the Soviets were ruthless killers too, but I misunderstood the severity and the destructiveness that the Soviets not only brought to the Germans but against their own people in the satellite soviet states and even Soviet Russia as well. Not just covering the time of WW2 between the 2 regimes, but it goes back and covers the Holomodor in mainly Ukraine between 1932-1933 that was a famine mainly Stalin-made and not naturally occuring. It breaks down their policies in a cold and straightforward way and can be a chilling read from start to finish. The amount of data and facts (numbers, locations of exact, or as close to it as they can get, numbers of people who died, including their nationalities and the particular way they ended up dying since there were several means of mass killing. Incredible book, if you haven't already picked that up by reading this far of my summary. ( )
  booksonbooksonbooks | Jul 24, 2023 |
There are so many different excerpts from this book that it would take pages and pages to fill out everything I find interesting or important. He is such a good writer that he can take something like this, which is widely written about, and make it interesting, shocking and at times brutal. There was only 1 very small part of a certain chapter that I got lost in the academia jargon but it seemed no other way to make it more simplistic. Almost the entire book is written for people who may not have vast knowledge of the Soviet and Nazi regimes in their peak of power. The Nazi brutality is more recognized and in popular literature/culture and it has to do with several things, mainly that they were a part of the "good guys" and fought alongside the British, American, French, ect. troops. Without the Soviet Union making a stand at the gates of Moscow and turning the tide to drive the Germans back westward, the outcome or length of the war would have been drastically different. The number of troop, and sadly civilians, who died in the Eastern Front is staggering and not easy to wrap your head around. I believe it's at the very top of any war for the amount of casualties in just the Eastern Front. So while Germanys war crimes and atrocities are more known in the West, I still knew the Soviets were ruthless killers too, but I misunderstood the severity and the destructiveness that the Soviets not only brought to the Germans but against their own people in the satellite soviet states and even Soviet Russia as well. Not just covering the time of WW2 between the 2 regimes, but it goes back and covers the Holomodor in mainly Ukraine between 1932-1933 that was a famine mainly Stalin-made and not naturally occuring. It breaks down their policies in a cold and straightforward way and can be a chilling read from start to finish. The amount of data and facts (numbers, locations of exact, or as close to it as they can get, numbers of people who died, including their nationalities and the particular way they ended up dying since there were several means of mass killing. Incredible book, if you haven't already picked that up by reading this far of my summary. ( )
  booksonbooksonbooks | Jul 24, 2023 |
Okolo "Bloodlands" (v češtině pod názvem "Krvavé země" vydala Paseka) byl před několika lety takový šrumec, jaký se u historických publikací moc často nevidí. Nutno podotknout, že šlo o zájem zasloužený. Za krvavé země označuje Snyder oblast mezi Německem a Ruskem, kde od konce první do konce druhé světové války zahynulo 14 milionů civilistů a válečných zajatců. Ve stejnojmenné publikaci se rozhodl vylíčit osud právě těchto lidí. Miliony jich zemřelo vinnou Stalinovy politiky, ještě než druhá světová válka vůbec započala, další umírali při Německo-sovětském spojenectví a smrt zbylých se postaraly Hitlerovy vyhlazovací plány.

Pohled zpět často skýtá poučení, zejména když jde o pohled do relativně blízké historie. Z "Krvavých zemí" jsem si odnesl pocit, že proti totalitě lze bojovat spíše, když nastoupí naráz a nestihne tak roztrhat existující struktury (odboje proti nacismu v Polsku či Bělorusku), než když se objevuje krok po kroku, lidé stále doufají a režim mezitím rozleptá všechny vazby mezi těmi, kteří by byli schopní odporu (sovětská Ukrajina). To je dobrá a zároveň špatná zpráva.

Historické knihy, zejména ty popisující dění v tak velkém měřítku (miliony mrtvých si lze jen těžko představit jinak než jako statistiku), mívají tendenci být nudné, ne však "Krvavé země". Snyder popisuje osudy jednotlivců a skupiny do mnohdy odporných podrobností, které následně zasazuje do širšího rámce. Činí tak nesmírně obratně a s jazykovou hravostí („An oprhan was a child who had not been eaten by his parents.“), díky které se "Krvavé země" čtou jako skvěle napsaná fikce. Tou však bohužel nejsou. ( )
  zajus | Jul 13, 2023 |
My question before reading this book was wondering if a rehash of the Holocaust, the Great Terror, the Warsaw Uprising, etc. in which Fourteen million people were deliberately murdered by two regimes over twelve years would be worth the ensuing depression, just because the author organized his treatise based on the physical location of the events. The answer is yes, mostly because the book is more than that. His discussion does the following:

It attempts to accurately determine the number of lives lost and who was responsible for each stage of these crimes.

It highlights the crimes of the Soviets that are sometimes overlooked.

It compares and contrasts the motivations of Stalin and Hitler (if there were any in the usual sense).

It compares and contrasts the justifications needed by the actual physical murderers in the various scenarios in which they acted.

By itemizing, for example, the Holocaust deaths, it helps us understand the historical development of this tragedy.

It discusses alterations of the reported number of deaths that have been made for political purposes.

It tries to provide comparisons to help emphasize the magnitude of these crimes, for example, More Poles were killed during the Warsaw Uprising alone than Japanese died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ( )
  markm2315 | Jul 1, 2023 |
This book provides important new perspectives on WW II, the Holocaust, the history of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It helps understand the current war in Ukraine. What the book provides is a catalog of the horrific mass killings of Hitler and Stalin in Poland, Ukraine and Belarus. This catalog of brutality is deeply unsettling but serves to deepen understanding about what really happened and what actually happened to whom.

The Afterward of the 2nd edition is also a valuable discussion of the nature and importance of history. It includes a strong criticism of the recent laws in Florida prohibiting the teaching of Critical Race Theory by noting that Hitler's policies towards the Jews were strongly influenced by the Jim Crow Laws in the USA.

The book is very well written and also includes several useful maps which are even readable in the e-book edition. ( )
  M_Clark | Dec 1, 2022 |
This is not an easy book to read but probably the best book written to account for the horrors involving the Holocaust and the Great Soviet Terror. As someone who served in the military for a large part of my career, this is a must read for senior leaders, especially in regards to the Russian invasion into Ukrainian in February of 2022. ( )
  John_Hughel | Jun 18, 2022 |
Hræðileg saga sem er umfjöllunarefni Blóðlendna Timothy Snyders. Hann greinir af nærgætni en án þess að draga nokkuð undan frá skipulögðum og markvissum fjöldamorðum sem unnin voru að skipun Stalíns og Hitlers á 12 ára tímabili, 1933-45.
Blóðlendur vísa til svæðanna í A.-Evrópu þar sem flest morðin fóru fram óháð landamærum enda færðust þau til og frá bæði fyrir og eftir styrjöldina.
Snyder fjallar um morðin, ástæður þeirra, framkvæmd, óhugnað og afleiðingar út frá nýjustu heimildum og ber þær saman við eldri framsetningu út frá pólitísku og sögulegu samhengi. En hann gleymir þó ekki fórnarlömbunum sjálfum og við fáum að kynnast lítillega þolendum og eftirlifendum.
Djúpt snortinn eftir lesturinn. ( )
  SkuliSael | Apr 28, 2022 |
There are so many different excerpts from this book that it would take pages and pages to fill out everything I find interesting or important. He is such a good writer that he can take something like this, which is widely written about, and make it interesting, shocking and at times brutal. There was only 1 very small part of a certain chapter that I got lost in the academia jargon but it seemed no other way to make it more simplistic. Almost the entire book is written for people who may not have vast knowledge of the Soviet and Nazi regimes in their peak of power. The Nazi brutality is more recognized and in popular literature/culture and it has to do with several things, mainly that they were a part of the "good guys" and fought alongside the British, American, French, ect. troops. Without the Soviet Union making a stand at the gates of Moscow and turning the tide to drive the Germans back westward, the outcome or length of the war would have been drastically different. The number of troop, and sadly civilians, who died in the Eastern Front is staggering and not easy to wrap your head around. I believe it's at the very top of any war for the amount of casualties in just the Eastern Front. So while Germanys war crimes and atrocities are more known in the West, I still knew the Soviets were ruthless killers too, but I misunderstood the severity and the destructiveness that the Soviets not only brought to the Germans but against their own people in the satellite soviet states and even Soviet Russia as well. Not just covering the time of WW2 between the 2 regimes, but it goes back and covers the Holomodor in mainly Ukraine between 1932-1933 that was a famine mainly Stalin-made and not naturally occuring. It breaks down their policies in a cold and straightforward way and can be a chilling read from start to finish. The amount of data and facts (numbers, locations of exact, or as close to it as they can get, numbers of people who died, including their nationalities and the particular way they ended up dying since there were several means of mass killing. Incredible book, if you haven't already picked that up by reading this far of my summary. ( )
1 vote swmproblems | Mar 16, 2022 |
Well done, but a bit wordy and repetitive. ( )
  dhaxton | Mar 11, 2022 |
I read this for a history class focused on eastern Europe in World War II. It was more depressing than I would have expected, surprisingly, because I didn't know about some of the more egregious atrocities that the Soviets carried out.

That said, Snyder is too hyperbolic. He can let the text that he quotes speak for himself without adding adjectives to tell me how to interpret the readings. I found Evans' Third Reich at War, Mazower's Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe, and Friedländer's Nazi Germany and the Jews: the Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 more impactful because I could interpret the atrocities myself rather than experience them in exactly the way Snyder wanted me to.

He had a few stories from reporters (it's been seven years, I no longer remember the specifics) that I remember not seeing in the other books. Other stories were repeated through all four books. Then again, primary sources from Polish Jews didn't really survive the war. And the Soviets suppressed the rest.

If you're okay with tell-don't-show, Snyder may be for you. If you're capable of forming empathy for yourself, he may annoy you as much as he did me. ( )
  Tikimoof | Feb 17, 2022 |
Couldn't finish it, I'm disappointed to say. But how many different ways can you say, "a lot of people died in the 20s, 30s, and 40s in east-central Europe?" The author also tends to repeat himself, as if he also knows he only has enough material for 200 pages and he needs to stretch it out to over 450. ( )
  Jeff.Rosendahl | Sep 21, 2021 |
A really good book about a really terrible time. I knew very little about this history, despite my formal education. Everything I knew was about the gas chambers at the concentration camps liberated by the Americans after the Second World War. But this book details the majority of killing that occurred before that, mostly on Polish and Ukrainian lands, by both Stalin and Hitler. ( )
  Pferdina | Feb 21, 2021 |
UN libro definitivo y contundente que despeja dudas acerca de lo terrible que fue la segunda guerra mundial. Comienza inmediatamente en la guerra, así que se pierde el contexto que tiene por ejemplo el "Descenso a los infiernos"de Kershaw, pero es un libro impresionante.

Coloca en perspectiva todas las matanzas a escala industrial llevadas a cabo primero por los sovieticos, luego nazis y sovieticos y finalmente las limpiezas étnicas postguerra. Terrible. ( )
  sergiouribe | Nov 16, 2020 |
Perhaps I'm coming to this too late (eight years after publication), but many of the facts were familiar to me from other work on the war and its aftermath. That said, I was pleasantly surprised. Snyder's presentation was clear, as was his argument, even if the latter wasn't entirely convincing. In a strange way, this is an inversion of great-man history: evil-man history. The mass murders that took place in eastern Europe, for Snyder, often seem to come down to an interaction of Hitler and Stalin's brains, which I can't help but think is a little too simplistic. Perhaps this was just a rhetorical move (it's easier to say "Stalin xed" than it is to lay out everything that went into that x), but the effect is a little confounding.

That wouldn't at all matter, except that Western historians and Eastern European journalists and public figures have recently made a lot of hay out of not being Nazis (e.g., in law, the Poles never did anything to Jews, even if some things were done to Jews in Polish places), and not being Soviets. Snyder does well in his conclusion to warn against victimhood as an important part of injustice (if you're a victim, your deeds are ipso facto just, even if they're, say, starving Ukrainian peasants to death); that is not a lesson that will be taken from his work by the Anne Appelabums of the world. And, to judge by his own more recent public interventions, Snyder probably didn't take it all that much to heart, either.

So, this is a solid book, well worth reading, particularly if you're somehow still in the grips of the History Channel's version of the war. It should be balanced by this review:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/09/timothy-snyders-lies/

which is less balanced than Snyder's book (and is tiresome in its wish to see any criticism of Stalin-and-Hitler as red baiting), but as imbalanced as Snyder's more recent work , and will at least make it clear that those who were caught between the twin horrors of Stalin and Hitler were not small children passively suffering or actively resisting evil. In fact, lots of Eastern Europeans were horrifying human beings before 'Stalin' arrived, while he was there, while 'Hitler' was there, and after 'Stalin' came back. In that, they're like the rest of us, even Timothy Snyder.

(To give one example of the imbalance here: Snyder quite rightly rejects the idea of calling Jewish people 'Soviet Jews' just because they were in Eastern European countries when those countries were swallowed by the Soviets. But he's very comfortable indeed with calling non-Jewish people Soviets when they're doing bad things, as if pogroms were caused by and carried out by Soviets who happened to be Polish against Jews who happened to be Soviets, rather than Poles against Jews.

Or, despite his universalist humanist plea in the conclusion, consider that Snyder sees the problem with Hitler and Stalin as being their desire for a utopia--that boogeyman of the individualist American--and not that they were both nationalists (and, indeed, one wonders why the Eastern European nationalists who wanted to ethnically cleanse their 'homelands' were somehow less utopian than the Germans and Russian soviets).) ( )
  stillatim | Oct 23, 2020 |
In extraordinary detail Snyder goes over pretty much every single one of the fourteen million civilian murders between 1932 and 1945 in the lands between the overlapping control, invasions and occupations of the Soviet Union and Germany; the Baltics, Poland, Ukraine, and their edges. It covers the forced starvations, purges and deportations, and the rounding up and shootings.

It is, obviously, utterly horrific. It's an amazing book to keep reading, many, many examples of mass murders of ten to twenty thousand people within just two days. Interesting notes like this,
"A team of just twelve Moscow NKVD men shot 20,761 people at Butovo, on the outskirts of Moscow, in 1937 and 1938."

It is a hard subject and a dense book to read. It is also modestly annoyingly repetitive. However, it is absolutely recommended if one thinks one knows anything at all about those years and that region. ( )
  tmph | Sep 13, 2020 |
awestruck history ( )
  triley60 | Mar 22, 2020 |
This harrowing account of Europe's history between 1933 and 1945 turns numbers into people. Its effect on me was similar to [b:A Little Life|22822858|A Little Life|Hanya Yanagihara|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1446469353s/22822858.jpg|42375710] (except this is non-fiction, of course) - I could only read one chapter at a time. ( )
  LubicaP | Mar 21, 2020 |
This book looks at Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s political policies, mostly in the years leading up to and including the 2nd World War. Stalin took over many of the Baltic states, and – via policy – starved many of the peasants in the Ukraine: even as they were growing food for others, they were left to starve. I didn’t know any of this, so this part was particularly interesting to me. Both Stalin and Hitler wanted to take over Poland, and of course, we ended up with the Holocaust and World War II.

I feel like I would have liked this better if I hadn’t listened to the audio. I was afraid right from the start, though, when I heard the voice. Male voice (already a bad sign for me), and I’m sure I recognized it from another audio that didn’t hold my attention. There were parts that did, though, particularly about the starvation of the people in the Ukraine. Overall, I’m considering it ok. ( )
  LibraryCin | Nov 23, 2019 |
A history book I could not put down. Tells the story of the atrocities committed by both Hitler's Nazis and Stalin's Communists in the buffer countries of especially Poland and the Ukraine, but also the Baltics, Romania and other Eastern European countries. A must read for anyone who wants to understand the Europe of today. ( )
  geza.tatrallyay | Apr 10, 2019 |
This is a book about the "Bloodlands" which are the European countries of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, plus the western edge of Russia and a bit of Hungary, during the years leading up to World War II and through that war's conclusion. Now let's establish the book's scope further. "The fourteen million murdered over the course of only twelve years, between 1933 and 1945, while both Hitler and Stalin were in power." 14 million murdered. What are we saying? Murdered? Out of all the soldiers killed in the entire Second World War, about half died in the Bloodlands. Please note: none of those soldier deaths are included in the 14,000,000 deaths this book studies. The book concentrates solely on the non-combat deaths. For example, the monumental battle for Stalingrad is little more than a sentence in the book. (I recommend Anthony Beevor's book, Stalingrad, to get perspective on how much the author avoided.) Perhaps to a stronger degree than many other histories I have read, I could really sense the university professor coming through in the author's reporting and analysis. Relationships are laid out, similarities and differences are pointed out, and conclusions drawn. (Get your blue books ready for the essay questions.) As an example, the Nazi concentration camps, where people were "allowed" to die or "worked to death", depending on your choice of terms, and which the American and British troops primarily discovered as they advanced, were distinguished from the death facilities, such as Treblinka, at which the killing was so fluid that the time period between a train full of victims arriving and all the remains being disposed of could be less than two hours. Most of these super efficient death facilities, many of them already closed down, were discovered by advancing Soviet troops, diluting access to knowledge of them for Americans. Odds are very high that Holocaust survivors that have shared their experiences actually survived the concentration camps because the killing at the death facilities was so all encompassing. Auschwitz, which was uniquely both concentration camp and death facility is the rare exception. And yet, the Holocaust accounts for less than half the deaths in the Bloodlands. Are you as familiar with the Holodomor in which the Soviets intentionally starved to death millions of its own citizens? Perhaps you are more familiar with the Soviet gulags where the lucky citizens who weren't starved to death or killed outright were sent -- to still maybe die. The book's conclusion is the real guts of the historical analysis. In fact, it struck me that the concluding chapter may have been written first and the first 300+ pages of the book were written to make the conclusions more obvious to more readers. Perhaps the author's most profound point deals with the distinction between the raw numbers of all these deaths and the memories of those events. I highly recommend that readers not overlook his analysis. It is important for understanding how we find our way as a society to the most humane response to genocides and other mass murders without laying the groundwork for more of them. ( )
  larryerick | Mar 5, 2019 |
Incredibly difficult to finish. As I've gotten older, it becomes harder and harder not to hear numbers of dead and not thinking about that being my group of friends, my family, my hometown, my school, anything. But it's important, it's important for all of us to know what has happened to the Jews, Muslims, Romani, homosexual, I mean everyone. Communists and stargazers. The reading of the names must be done, so we don't forget how cruel we can be as a race and our capacity for joy. ( )
  adaorhell | Aug 24, 2018 |
Life in Ukraine and Belarus during WWII ( )
  JackSweeney | Jan 9, 2017 |
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