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"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)
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A carefully researched book about Hitler and Stalin’s genocides in Eastern Europe
As a history buff, I was aware of the genocides of Stalin in the Ukraine and elsewhere in Soviet controlled Eastern Europe before, during, and after World War Two, and Hitler’s ethnic cleansing as well, but Mr Snyder, the author of “Bloodlands,” gives us a more complete record of this period, the gravity of the matter, and the nature of totalitarian brutality. I cannot recommend this book more enthusiastically. We must all be well read to understand the history of humanity, and indeed, to be ignorant of the details of marked events renders one unable to have a perspective of the present. Regarding “Bloodlands,” remember the words of G. Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” John J. Flanagan
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- Graeme WebsterReviewed in Australia on February 14, 2022
A Dismal Reminder of A Period of the Grossest Inhumanity
- JOHN I. CAMPBELLReviewed in Canada on January 7, 2025
Everyone interested in peace and prevention of World War III should read Bloodlands
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- Mieczyslaw KasprzykReviewed in the United Kingdom on October 24, 2011
The True Horror.
