Bloodlands

A magisterial history of the lands that lie between Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany - where 14 million civilians were murdered during the years 1933-1944Under Hitler and Stalin the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered fourteen million people in the bloodlands between Berlin and Moscow.The killing fields extended from central Polads to western Russia. For twelve savage years, on this bloodsoaked soil an average of one million individuals - mostly women, children and the aged - were murdered every year. Though in 1939 these lands became battlefields, not one of these fourteen million was killed in combat. They were victims of a murderous policy, not casualties of war.Int his deeply unsettling and revelatory book, Timothy Snyder gives voice to the testimony of the victims through the letters home, the notes flung from trains, the diaries on corpses. It is a brilliantly researched, profoundly humane and authoritative bok that demands we pay attention to those that history is in danger of forgetting.

“A hugely important historian of this nightmarish era. Nobody has explained it this way before”

-- William Leith Evening Standard

'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 TimesTimothy 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.

'A superb work of scholarship, full of revealing detail... Snyder does justice to the horror of his subject through the power of his storytelling' Sunday Times 'Superb and harrowing' Financial Times, Books of the Year 'A brave and original history' Anne Applebaum, New York Review of Books 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, 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. 'Snyder's painstaking arithmetic helps us acknowledge the anonymous dead and makes European history clearer' Sunday Herald '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 Magazine

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