All rights reserved. The first is in the rejection of the over-theorisation of Holocaust studies as he sees it not least the idea that the Holocaust reveals (in general terms) something about the logic of modernity (or as Zygmunt Bauman described it, that it revealed the truth of modernity). Please select Ok if you would like to proceed with this request anyway. It's the equation that I find highly troubling. [8], Bloodlands won a number of awards, including the Cundill Prize Recognition of Excellence, Le Prix du livre d'Histoire de l'Europe 2013, Moczarski Prize in History, Literature Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding, Phi Beta Kappa Society Emerson Book Award, Gustav Ranis International History Prize, Prakhina Foundation International Book Prize (honorable mention), Jean-Charles Velge Prize, Tadeusz Walendowski Book Prize, and Wacaw Jdrzejewicz History Medal, and was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize, the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize (ASEEES), the Austrian Scholarly Book of the Year, the NDR Kultur Sachbuchpreis 2011, and the Jury commendation Bristol Festival of Ideas. Indeed, towards the end of the war Snyder argues that Stalinist violence was enabled by Hitlers policies for example the relationship between the attempted Germanisation of Europe under the Third Reich and the deportation of that German population at the hands of the Soviet Union. Yet Snyder does not exactly compare the two systems either. You can easilycreate a free account. "[26], Mark Roseman wrote that "the book's core achievement is to tell the story of Nazi and Soviet violence in a way that renders that savage chapter anew, and enduringly changes what we see. Snyder proceeded from the central observation that the annihilation fantasies of Hitler and Stalin were to a large part played out in the same space: in the middle of Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some 14 million people. The novelty was therefore not so much the aim of contextualisation but in the choice of context in this case a geographical space. Perhaps the discovery of geography has come late to Holocaust studies, but we know, thanks to the work of scholars such as Tim Cole, that the landscape itself was an important protagonist in Holocaust history. If we have recently witnessed the spatial turn in Holocaust studies, it is not really evident in Snyders book even though it is explicitly concerned with a particular space. But what it does that is different and wholly original is show the ways that Hitler and Stalin echoed one another, at times working together and other times fighting one another. He is not writing about the fate of soldiers or bombing victims in the second world war, and neither is he confining himself to the Jewish Holocaust. I have never seen a book like it. ", "A magisterial work. Snyder's account in engaging, encyclopedic. "[9] He re-examines numerous points of the war and postwar years such as the MolotovRibbentrop Pact of 1939, the rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust, and the Soviet persecution of the Polish Underground State, cursed soldiers, and their own prisoners of war after the war. Like all historical falsifications, Snyders are sustained by bizarre claims and outright lies. [6][10] 3.3 millions died during the Ukrainian starvation of 1933. [3] Despite these points, Smelin stated that Bloodlands is one of those books that "change the way we look at a period in history. This is a theme that he recently returned to in his provocative history of the Holocaust entitled Black Earth which argues very clearly that the Shoah cannot be considered as a consequence of the development of the nation-state, perhaps the central story of modern European history, and the effort to remake such a state but in fact can only really be understood in terms of the absence of the state. The history of Holocaust historiography is in some senses a history of a discourse precisely concerned with the question of context from the idea that anti-Jewish policy needed to be understood alongside German population policy more generally; to efforts to understand Nazi violence as part of a history of totalitarianism; to the assertion that the Holocausts only context was the history of a peculiar form of antisemitism; to the reassertion of a totalitarianism thesis and the suggestion that Nazism was a response to Soviet violence. Just fill in your details. Yet Snyders attempts to think about Nazi and Soviet violence together is also from the outset somewhat curious, and the events he wishes to relate Nazi violence to appear somewhat arbitrary. Snyder is more willing to tie his understanding of the central event of European history to the currents of European imperialism than to a more general modernisation or the emergence of nation states. "Foreign Affairs"Gripping and comprehensive. Mr. Snyder's book is revisionist history of the best kind: in spare, closely argued prose, with meticulous use of statistics, he makes the reader rethink some of the best-known episodes in Europe's modern history. His Hunger Plan was followed by massive depopulation in the forms of deportation, shooting, forced labor and, eventually, the death factories. It is about mass murders committed during World War II in territories controlled by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. This is a welcome argument, notwithstanding the links between that imperialism and the Enlightenment, but it is a contextualisation that requires a history beginning long before 1933, and as such Snyder really only begins to ask the question about how we might situate these events within our understanding of the violence exported from Europe rather than finding any particular answers. "[33], In a January 2012 review in the Sarmatian Review, Raymond Gawronski described Bloodlands as "a book that must be read and digested, a very significant book that knits together what otherwise are discordant chunks of history, many of which are totally unknown in our culture", adding that "Snyder's sensitivity to the various peoples involved, their own motivations, situations, histories, relations, is remarkable and highly praiseworthy. For example he writes: Hitlers decision to kill Jews (rather than exploit their labour) was presumably [emphasis added] facilitated by his simultaneous decision to exploit the labor of Slavs (p. 215). But that was before he abandoned the principles of genuine historical research and became a propagandist for US policy in Ukraine. For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now. "[3] Smelin stated that several historians have criticized the chronological construction of events, the arbitrary geographical delimitation, Snyder's numbers on victims and violence, and a lack of focus on interactions between different actors. "[4] To this end, Snyder documents that many Jews were killed by mass shootings in villages or the countryside, in addition to those deaths suffered in the death camps. Lawson commented that on its own terms "Bloodlands was at best partially successful", but its substantive influence can be seen in the more recent "steady stream of scholars attempting to assert the wider contexts for Nazi violence in terms of the history of imperialism; the wider history of genocide or of inter-ethnic tensions beyond simply a history of German antisemitism. Some features of WorldCat will not be available. The place where all of the victims died, the bloodlands, extends from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states (pp. It stated that the bloodlands concept was influential in its attempt to assert the wider contexts for Nazi violence, genocide, and imperialism, without reducing it to antisemitism in Germany. [1][5], The combined efforts of the two regimes resulted in the deaths of an estimated 14 million noncombatants in the Eastern Europe "Bloodlands"; Snyder documents that Nazi Germany was responsible for about two thirds of the total number of deaths. In the New Directions in the History of the Jews in the Polish Lands (2018), Dan Michman wrote: [F]rom the perspective of today, one can say that the pendulum has even moved so far in emphasizing Eastern Europe from June 1941 onward, and first and foremost its killing sites as the locus of the Shoah, that one will find recent studies which entirely marginalize or even disregard the importance to the Holocaust of such essential issues as the 1930s in Germany and Austria; the persecution and murder of Western and Southern European Jewry; first steps of persecution in Tunisia and Libya; and other aspects of the Holocaust such as the enormous spoliation and the cultural warfare aimed at exorcising the jdische Geist. ", "Gripping and comprehensive. Mr. Snyder's book is revisionist history of the best kind: in spare, closely argued prose, with meticulous use of statistics, he makes the reader rethink some of the best-known episodes in Europe's modern history. [3][4], The Central and Eastern European regions that Snyder terms "the bloodlands" is the area where Hitler's vision of racial supremacy and Lebensraum, resulting in the Final Solution and other Nazi atrocities, met, sometimes in conflict, sometimes in cooperation, with Stalin's vision of a communist ideology that resulted in the deliberate starvation, imprisonment, and murder of innocent men, women and children in Gulags and elsewhere. "Economist"Snydercompels us to look squarely at the full range of destruction committed first by Stalin's regime and then by Hitler's Reich. A comprehensive and eloquent account. As American and British soldiers never entered Eastern Europe, the tragedy of those lands did not become well known to the American or British populace and led to the view of Western betrayal. Snyder once wrote at length about the crimes of the OUN. Both Nazi and Soviet regimes dreamed of empire, and both saw within empire the same possibilities namely economic security and self-sufficiency. Portraying the Holocaust as just one element of a territorially determined phenomenon of mass killing in Eastern Europe, Snyder plays down the extent of Western and Central European victims. Would you also like to submit a review for this item? From 1933 to 1945, 14 million people were murdered between the two regimes, as Stalin and Hitler consolidated power, jointly occupied Poland and waged war against each other. 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. Please enter the message. The book was also awarded the 2013 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. Reviews in History is part of the School of Advanced Study. It is also rather jarring precisely because at times it is difficult to discern the causal or analytical framework in which we are being invited to understand this litany of violence in such a fashion. [1] They collaborated in the killings of Poles such as Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles and Soviet repressions of Polish citizens (19391946); between the two of them, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union killed about 200,000 Polish citizens in the period 19391941. [2], The book was awarded numerous prizes, including the 2013 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, and stirred up a great deal of debate among historians. Hitler recognized their joint "common desire to get rid of the old equilibrium" and neatly divide and destroy Poland at the Molotov-Ribbentrop line.