Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Compact Disc)
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Staff Reviews
A comprehensive work of scholarship documenting the nightmarish history of the "bloodlands" that stretch from Poland to St. Petersburg and then southwest to where Ukraine runs into the Black Sea. In these areas the policies of Stalin and Hitler resulted in the deaths of 14 million people. Snyder asks -- how could so many human lives be brought to a violent end? Using primary sources in multiple languages, Snyder convincingly demonstrates that these deaths were the result not only of the policies of these leaders, but the convergence of their ideologies. He argues that National Socialism and Soviet Communism served as the perfect foils, allowing the totalitarian states to deflect blame on one another and on different ethnic groups living in these areas. He also questions whether in political terms a death can belong to anyone, and observes that at various times leaders of Ukraine, Russia, Germany, Poland, and Belarus have all engaged in "the politics of exaggeration" in an effort to exploit the numbers of dead from their countries to claim victimhood rather than responsibility.
— AmyDescription
From the bestselling author of On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler's and Stalin's wars against the civilians of Europe in World War TwoAmericans call the Second World War The Good War.But before it even began, America's wartime ally Josef Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens--and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was finally defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war's end, both the German and the Soviet killing sites fell behind the iron curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single history, in the time and place where they occurred: between Germany and Russia, when Hitler and Stalin both held power. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands will be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history. Bloodlands won twelve awards including the Emerson Prize in the Humanities, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Leipzig Award for European Understanding, and the Hannah Arendt Prize in Political Thought. It has been translated into more than thirty languages, was named to twelve book-of-the-year lists, and was a bestseller in six countries.