Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
A history of the roughly 14 million civilians deliberately killed between 1933 and 1945 in the lands between Berlin and Moscow — Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, and the western edge of Russia — arguing that the Nazi and Soviet killing policies must be understood as one interacting story rather than two separate ones. Pages refer to the current standard in-print edition: the Basic Books second trade paperback (April 26, 2022, ISBN 9781541600065, 592 pp., with a new afterword); the original 2010 hardcover ran 544 pp.
Somewhere in the fifth hundred page you start hunting for the argument that never arrives: "it's extraordinarily thin on analysis and interpretation," one finisher writes. Another: "massacre follows massacre, and the unending parade of human cruelty continues." The juxtaposition does work the prose never defends, and a rereader concluded that "Snyder seems rather intent on blaming the Soviets in general, and Stalin in particular, for Hitler's choices," the same charge academic critics pressed in print. Readers who traced the notes behind the most lurid anecdotes came back distrusting them: "To put it mildly, Snyder plays fast and loose with his sources." And the material was never new: "Readers familiar with the works of Robert Conquest, Daniel Goldhagen, Anne Applebaum, or Halik Kochanski have read it all before."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
