--- product_id: 221535 title: "Bloodlands" price: "€ 46.07" currency: EUR in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.be/products/221535-bloodlands store_origin: BE region: Belgium --- # Bloodlands **Price:** € 46.07 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** Bloodlands - **How much does it cost?** € 46.07 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.be](https://www.desertcart.be/products/221535-bloodlands) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny , the definitive history of Hitler's and Stalin's politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century. Americans call the Second World War "the Good War." But before it even began, America's ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens-and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war's end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, 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 story. Bloodlands is a required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today. Review: AN EXEMPLARY HISTORY THAT MAKES ONE THINK ... AND FEEL - "Each of the living bore a name." If there is a theme to this admirable book, that's it. "Each of the living bore a name." That's how Yale history professor Timothy Snyder starts his concluding chapter: "Conclusion: Humanity." Then he names a few: a toddler who imagined he saw wheat in the fields before he died; a Polish Jew who foresaw that he would only be reunited with his beloved wife "under the ground"; an eleven-year-old Russian girl who kept a diary as she starved to death in a besieged Leningrad in 1941; a twelve-year-old Jewish girl, Junita Vishniatskaia, who wrote to her father in Belarus in 1942 and told him about the death pits where Junita and her mother would soon be killed together. " `Farewell forever' was the last line of her last letter to him. `I kiss you, I kiss you.' " I'd never come across professor Snyder's work until I read, for review, his collaborative conversation with Tony Judt, one of my favorite contemporary historians, now, alas, dead, in Thinking the Twentieth Century (due out in February, 2012). I was intrigued by Snyder's comments in that book, by a perspective on twentieth century European history that leaned much more on what had occurred in eastern Europe than the westernized history I'd absorbed in graduate school. Judt obviously admired Snyder's book. I thought, why not?, let's read it. I'm glad I did. Bloodlands isn't easy to read. It talks of horrific deeds, horrible people. But the picture it paints differs from the picture of the Holocaust I learned, both by predating the killing and by moving the largest portion of it eastward. We think we know what happened to the victims in the Second World War but most of our knowledge, Snyder emphasizes, comes from Americans' experience of the western rim of the National Socialist world. There is little awareness of what took place in the true killing grounds of the 1930s and 40s, the zone between Germany and Russia -the Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, etc.- where fourteen million people died as first the Soviets, then the Germans, then the Soviets again, and then their puppet states, swept over the area, killing or displacing people for no other reason than that they belonged to the wrong ethnic group. Snyder is uniquely qualified to write this history. There is first of all the breadth and depth of his research: he has read widely in ten languages: German, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Yiddish, Czech, Slovak, French and English. There is also the exemplary clarity of the narrative: a tangled and complicated history, with many parties, has been presented in linear order. Furthermore, Snyder discusses fully both the ideological underpinnings that drove otherwise sane human beings to perform unspeakable deeds and the muddled actions that resulted as they attempted to bring to life despicable beliefs. A final virtue is passion. Snyder narrates the facts neutrally as a good historian should but his indignation breaks through the surface time and again, redeeming the surface dispassion of a horrific narrative. Books like this redeem history from any charge of dilettantism. History should change people, or at least inform them, so they can make more humane choices in the future. If any serious work of history can do that, it might be Snyder's. I've not read a book that moved me to think about its subject as much or as long as this one since long ago I read -and could not forget-- Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jewry (1st ed., 1961; 3rd ed., 2003) Review: Evils of Socialism/Communism Combined - Well written, lots of factual data and full of personal and anecdotal stories. Coming from Eastern Europe and family that escaped Romanian communism, one pet peeve or historical complaint is the use of incorrect maps of Romania, probably 80% of the time they are wrong and show the Habsburg empire Romania pre-WW1 which took much of northwestern part and Transylvania away even though ethnically dominated by Romanians. Since this book is of WW2 era, maps should be correct and display Romania after its land was returned post WW1. Excellent for American Democrats to understand the roots of their ideology from Socialism and Communism, Stalin’s exponentially higher evil compared to Hitler’s; one focused on racial killing a certain group and the other killed everyone, Ukrainians, Baltics, his own people and eventually out of favour party members in the tens of millions, similar to today’s Progressives who eventually eat their own. Book allows one to see how the Communists could harbour completely contradictory ideas at the same time, similar to today’s Liberals. ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #1,203,937 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #38 in History of Civilization & Culture #71 in World War II History (Books) #80 in Jewish Holocaust History | | Customer Reviews | 4.6 out of 5 stars 3,320 Reviews | ## Images ![Bloodlands - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81tPeiigRgL.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ AN EXEMPLARY HISTORY THAT MAKES ONE THINK ... AND FEEL *by D***R on November 21, 2011* "Each of the living bore a name." If there is a theme to this admirable book, that's it. "Each of the living bore a name." That's how Yale history professor Timothy Snyder starts his concluding chapter: "Conclusion: Humanity." Then he names a few: a toddler who imagined he saw wheat in the fields before he died; a Polish Jew who foresaw that he would only be reunited with his beloved wife "under the ground"; an eleven-year-old Russian girl who kept a diary as she starved to death in a besieged Leningrad in 1941; a twelve-year-old Jewish girl, Junita Vishniatskaia, who wrote to her father in Belarus in 1942 and told him about the death pits where Junita and her mother would soon be killed together. " `Farewell forever' was the last line of her last letter to him. `I kiss you, I kiss you.' " I'd never come across professor Snyder's work until I read, for review, his collaborative conversation with Tony Judt, one of my favorite contemporary historians, now, alas, dead, in Thinking the Twentieth Century (due out in February, 2012). I was intrigued by Snyder's comments in that book, by a perspective on twentieth century European history that leaned much more on what had occurred in eastern Europe than the westernized history I'd absorbed in graduate school. Judt obviously admired Snyder's book. I thought, why not?, let's read it. I'm glad I did. Bloodlands isn't easy to read. It talks of horrific deeds, horrible people. But the picture it paints differs from the picture of the Holocaust I learned, both by predating the killing and by moving the largest portion of it eastward. We think we know what happened to the victims in the Second World War but most of our knowledge, Snyder emphasizes, comes from Americans' experience of the western rim of the National Socialist world. There is little awareness of what took place in the true killing grounds of the 1930s and 40s, the zone between Germany and Russia -the Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, etc.- where fourteen million people died as first the Soviets, then the Germans, then the Soviets again, and then their puppet states, swept over the area, killing or displacing people for no other reason than that they belonged to the wrong ethnic group. Snyder is uniquely qualified to write this history. There is first of all the breadth and depth of his research: he has read widely in ten languages: German, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Yiddish, Czech, Slovak, French and English. There is also the exemplary clarity of the narrative: a tangled and complicated history, with many parties, has been presented in linear order. Furthermore, Snyder discusses fully both the ideological underpinnings that drove otherwise sane human beings to perform unspeakable deeds and the muddled actions that resulted as they attempted to bring to life despicable beliefs. A final virtue is passion. Snyder narrates the facts neutrally as a good historian should but his indignation breaks through the surface time and again, redeeming the surface dispassion of a horrific narrative. Books like this redeem history from any charge of dilettantism. History should change people, or at least inform them, so they can make more humane choices in the future. If any serious work of history can do that, it might be Snyder's. I've not read a book that moved me to think about its subject as much or as long as this one since long ago I read -and could not forget-- Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jewry (1st ed., 1961; 3rd ed., 2003) ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Evils of Socialism/Communism Combined *by A***R on March 28, 2026* Well written, lots of factual data and full of personal and anecdotal stories. Coming from Eastern Europe and family that escaped Romanian communism, one pet peeve or historical complaint is the use of incorrect maps of Romania, probably 80% of the time they are wrong and show the Habsburg empire Romania pre-WW1 which took much of northwestern part and Transylvania away even though ethnically dominated by Romanians. Since this book is of WW2 era, maps should be correct and display Romania after its land was returned post WW1. Excellent for American Democrats to understand the roots of their ideology from Socialism and Communism, Stalin’s exponentially higher evil compared to Hitler’s; one focused on racial killing a certain group and the other killed everyone, Ukrainians, Baltics, his own people and eventually out of favour party members in the tens of millions, similar to today’s Progressives who eventually eat their own. Book allows one to see how the Communists could harbour completely contradictory ideas at the same time, similar to today’s Liberals. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ An important book, especially for Americans *by B***E on October 27, 2014* This is an important book for Americans to read. We have a lot of romance surrounding World War II, for several reasons. First, the US and its allies won the war–in a relatively short period of time (Dec 1941 to August 1945). Second, it is the last war Americans can point to that nearly everyone agrees was a "just war" on our end. Indeed, my grandfather joined the Marines because he grew up admiring his older cousins who had served in WWII–though my grandfather’s experience in war (Vietnam) turned out very differently. Third, Americans’ sympathy for the Jews and their plight (as well as our historic support for the state of Israel) makes the Holocaust loom large in our cultural memory of WWII, and we like to think of ourselves as having liberated the Jews from a regime of consummate evil: Nazi Germany. This manifests itself in both serious movies about WWII (e.g., Saving Private Ryan) and films with more stereotyped portraits of Nazis (Indiana Jones movies and Inglourious Basterds come immediately to mind). Snyder’s book does not minimize the horror and gravity of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust. Rather, his book carefully situates the various persecutions and murders of Jews within the larger historical context of two powerful regimes: first, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and second, Hitler’s rising Germany. He tells the story of Stalin’s plan to starve a third of Ukrainians in 1931, of the Molotov-Riggentrop Pact which carved up Poland and other states into spheres of Nazi and Soviet exploitation and oppression, and of the horrible loss of civilians and soldiers in Belarus, Poland, the Baltics, Ukraine, and Russia after Hitler violated the pact. The Eastern European front was far more bloody and horrific than the Western front. Snyder tells the big-picture narrative using shocking statistics of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions killed–but he also includes personal testimonies that humanize the individuals behind these numbingly high figures. The sufferings of these nations (and their constituent Jewish populations) are each unique, and Snyder treats them that way. Snyder presents to an English-speaking audience the cultural and geopolitical factors that led to the Holocaust. He speaks of how the Allies betrayed Eastern Europe, especially Poland and the Baltics, allowing them to fall under Soviet influence. (Perhaps the West didn’t know at the time how bad Soviet communism was, but there were signs that Western leaders should not have ignored.) It is all well and good to say, "Never again," but unless we understand the cultural and political backdrop of these atrocities, they will happen again. Bloodlands has helped me understand the historical backdrop of the setting in which I’m teaching (Northeastern Europe, within the "Bloodlands"). A third of my current students are American, a third are German, and a third are from former Soviet states, including Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, and Moldova. As helpful as history can be, I also must resist the temptation to superimpose the histories of these countries on the individuals with which I am interacting. Most of my students are under 22, so they have no personal memory of life in their countries before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. In his sobering conclusion, Snyder writes of the responsibility of the contemporary reader of historiography, especially the Western reader: "Ideologies also tempt those who reject them. Ideology, when stripped by time or partisanship of its political and economic connections, becomes a moralizing form of explanation for mass killing, one that comfortably separates the people who explain from the people who kill. It is convenient to see the perpetrator just as someone who holds the wrong idea and is therefore different for that reason. It is reassuring to ignore the importance of economics and the complications of politics, factors that might in fact be common to historical perpetrators and those who later contemplate their actions. It is far more inviting, at least today in the West, to identify with the victims than to understand the historical setting that they shared with perpetrators and bystanders in the bloodlands. The identification with the victim affirms a radical separation from the perpetrator. The Treblinka guard who starts the engine or the NKVD officer who pulls the trigger is not me, he is the person who kills someone like myself. Yet it is unclear whether this identification with victims brings much knowledge, or whether this kind of alienation from the murderer is an ethical stance. It is not at all obvious that reducing history to morality plays makes anyone moral." 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