Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin [Audiolibro] [CD de audio]

Rarely have I encountered a history that is as enlightening and thought-provoking as Snyder's account of the impact of forced starvation, genocide, war, ethnic cleansing, and geographic re-location on the peoples of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic Republics, and the formerly German Reich over the two decades between 1933 and 1953, when Stalin died. Residents of the region of Europe he calls the Bloodlands experienced atrocities of an unprecedented nature and scope in this period. What is especially striking is how many people were victimized multiple times in this relatively brief period--first by the Soviet authorities, then by the Germans, and then again by the Soviets as Stalin and Hitler imposed their insane doctrines on civilian populations.

Snyder is an extremely skillful writer and holds the reader's attention throughout in what could easily have been a dry treatise on the demographic dimensions of human suffering. He skillfully weaves in the gripping stories of individual people caught in the maelstrom, giving a human face to the numbers. I have to disagree with one reviewer who alleges this is just another study of the similarities between Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism; Snyder is careful to compare and contrast these two tyrannical regimes.

This is an engrossing book, but may be a bit too ambitious for people without some familiarity with modern European history. However, it is certainly worth reading and gives valuable new perspectives on the impact of the 30s, World War II, and the Postwar Era on residents of Eastern Europe. I recommend it highly to anyone interested in the history of the period.

"Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin" by Timothy Snyder, is a book about the intentional mass murder of over 14 million people between 1930 and 1947 in a general area that encompasses what is now Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine, and western Russia. And by murder, I mean that. As part of that 14 million number, Mr. Snyder counts only those that were outright killed, intentionally starved, or otherwise were put to death outside of military actions or by being worked to death. If you were to include the deaths that could have been predictably forseen as a result of certain actions taken, that number jumps to between 17 and 21 million people who were killed.

The author breaks the killing periods into 5 general subsets ... Stalin starving the Ukrainian kulaks in 1932-1933, Stalin's Great Terror of 1937-1938, Hitler and Stalin murdering and otherwise removing Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian intelligentsias from 1939-1941, Hitler's murdering the Jewish population and "undesirables" of many countries, intentionally starving Russian POWs and Soviet civilians, and executing civilians as part of partisan reprisals in 1941 - 1945, and people who died as a result of forced resettlements in 1945-1947.

While I've read extensively about World War II, I learned a great deal from this book. As one example, there were no purely death camps in Germany proper, the Germans built those in occupied Poland. While there were concentrations camps in Germany and many of these camps contained extermination chambers, their primary function was as forced-labor camps. Personnel assigned to the labor camps had a slim chance of surviving. There were 6 death, or extermination, camps set up in Poland ... Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belzed, Majdanek, Soribor, and Treblinka. Only Auschwitz and Majdanek had labor camps attached to them, the other 4 existed purely to murder people. Of the people who arrived at the death camps other than Auschwitz (and for a time, Jewish prisoners at Majdanek), they were all usually killed within hours of arrival, and of those sent there, only about 100 people saw the inside of the camp and lived to tell of it. At Auschwitz, new arrivals were separated into those who would be killed immediately, and those who would work in the labor camp until they weakened and then they were killed. The survivor's tales from Auschwitz come from those assigned to the labor camps.

This book attempts, with great success, to show the vast scope of death in the bloodlands, and how Hitler's and Stalin's extermination policies were alike and how they differed. He also shows how the Wehrmacht was much more complicit in atrocities than the German soldiers of the time would have liked you to believe, and how international and allied policies overlooked much of the killing for a variety of reasons.

The book is grim reading, and while it is more of a scholarly study of the depredations of Hitler and Stalin, there are anecdotes contained within that are heartbreaking, such as the Polish-Jewish mother breastfeeding her infant mere seconds before they're shot, and a starving Ukrainian toddler hallucinating that he sees the food that will save his family's lives. It is not a sensationalist text; it calmly, objectively, and concisely discusses the horrors that occurred.

I highly recommend this book. It is the first book I've read that ties so many of the atrocities committed against the helpless into one highly readable and informative tome, and shows them as part of a larger tapestry against the framework of the times.

Prof Synder has made a valuable addition to the history of the geonocide of the eastern european people who were caught between the expanionist and ethnic evil of nazi germany and the totalitarian political evil of soviet untion in the 1930's and WWII. While we are all familiar with the loss of life in this area from the Holocaust and death camps, we are reminded how many many more people were systematically killed by these two evil regimes. The soviet deliberate starvation of the ukranian people is 1933, the division of poland between the two nations and the subsequent extinguishing of the polish intelligentsia by both regimes, followed by the ethnice cleansing of jews by the nazis, and the politcal executions of anyone who stalin felt opposed his power. This geographical area was the site of the worst of human nature in the 20th century and this book does justice to the many who died there simply by being in this area caught between two of the centuries most evil regimes.