Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin - Timothy Snyder

This 2010 New York Times Bestseller is a painful look back at some of humanity's most violent years, precipitated by two of history's most diabolical tyrants.
    Though not ground breaking in terms of revealing new pivotal historical facts, Timothy Snyder's five-hundred page volume is a unique and important study of the overlapping times of Hitler and Stalin from 1933 to 1945. In those twelve short years, in the "Bloodlands" -- the area that extends, Snyder explains, from central Poland to western Russia, through the Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic States -- murder-by-government took on proportions difficult to imagine, when fourteen million innocents perished, many as a consequence of nothing more sinister than simple government regulation.
Snyder -- whose research for the book was done in ten languages, including Yiddish -- documents that Hitler was responsible for two thirds of the total, but adds that the two regimes unwittingly collaborated to increase the death toll, even while they fought each other after 1941.
    It is critical to understand that Snyder's count, which he insists is conservative, does not include government-sanctioned battlefield deaths, deaths by malnutrition due to wartime shortages, non-combatant deaths by bombs, or even deaths by forced labour. No, only deliberate mass murders perpetrated against innocent civilians or prisoners of war are considered part of Snyder's Bloodlands summation.
    Where current World War II textbooks and movies retell the horrors of the Holocaust that took place in such hellholes as Auschwitz and Sobibor, Snyder talks about much else: the inadvertent, then forced starvation of more than three million Ukrainians beginning in 1933; the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938, where some 300,000 additional innocents, mainly Poles in Ukraine and Ukrainian peasant leaders, were killed for their ethnicity or potential hostility to the Soviet regime;  the mass killings in Babi Yar and Belarus; and other atrocities carried out by the Nazis, both in Poland and in those sections they occupied in the Soviet Union from 1941. Snyder's exhaustive research confirms that almost half the Holocaust happened, not in the gas chambers in Poland, but at the side of huge ditches turned into mass graves, often with single bullets for single victims.
    Snyder, a professor of history at Yale with five other award-winning non-fiction titles to his name, is a perfect example of why a doctorate from a distinguished university -- he earned his from Oxford -- is the unwritten prerequisite for writing excellent history. This historian's prose in Bloodlands - peppered with countless compelling statistics -- is highly readable and heartrending. His vivid imagination "leads him to see combinations, similarities and general trends where others would see only chaos and confusions," says the New Republic's Istan Veak, who is one of ten reputable authors and publications endorsing the book.
    If there are any criticisms, it could be said that Snyder is a bit repetitive, and that the book is peppered with maps -- that add little to the reader's knowledge -- with lettering so small a magnifying glass is necessary to see the words. And some maps do not immediately seem to correspond to accompanying pages. Finally, Snyder's effort to singularize the enormity of the mass killings by occasionally quoting from the good bye notes of anguished individuals about to be murdered sometimes falls short of the mark, simply because, for this average reader at least, it seems a little pretentious to swing the mind from the one tragedy to the horrendous many.
Notwithstanding these minor issues, the book is well worth the read.

As with most books on Lynne Like's, you can get this on Amazon.ca.