The much anticipated book by Timothy Snyder, Professor of History at Yale, has appeared. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is reviewed in the current issue of the New York Review of Books by Anne Applebaum (herself the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Gulag: A History).She writes apropos the book's title:

The title of this book, Bloodlands, is not a metaphor. Snyders bloodlands, which others have called borderlands, run from Poznan in the West to Smolensk in the East, encompassing modern Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, and the edge of western Russia. This is the region that experienced not one but twoand sometimes threewartime occupations. This is also the region that suffered the most casualties and endured the worst physical destruction.

And continues:

This region was also the site of most of the politically motivated killing in Europekilling that began not in 1939 with the invasion of Poland, but in 1933, with the famine in Ukraine. Between 1933 and 1945, fourteen million people died there, not in combat but because someone made a deliberate decision to murder them. These deaths took place in the bloodlands, and not accidentally so: Hitler and Stalin rose to power in Berlin and Moscow, writes Snyder, but their visions of transformation concerned above all the lands between.

And her conclusion is stark and unsettling:

If nothing else, a reassessment of what we know about Europe in the years between 1933 and 1953 could finally cure us of that lack of imagination that so appalled Czesaw Miosz almost sixty years ago. When considered in isolation, Auschwitz can be easily compartmentalized, characterized as belonging to a specific place and time, or explained away as the result of Germanys unique history or particular culture. But if Auschwitz was not the only mass atrocity, if mass murder was simultaneously taking place across a multinational landscape and with the support of many different kinds of people, then it is not so easy to compartmentalize or explain away. The more we learn about the twentieth century, the harder it will be to draw easy lessons or make simple judgments about the people who lived through itand the easier it will be to empathize with and understand them.

The whole review is here.