Bloodlands
Americans call the Second World War "The Good War." But before it even began, America's wartime ally Josef Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens -- and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was finally defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war's end, both the German and the Soviet killing sites fell behind the iron curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness.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 history, in the time and place where they occurred: between Germany and Russia, when Hitler and Stalin both held power. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands will be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history. - Publisher.
Stats for nerds
27recommend
48mentions
39people
2010–2026years
60% recommend40% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I have two thoughts here. First, I'm surprised that you're calling out Eastern Europe specifically. This is one of my favorite videos about Europe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJjhNVpSQzw
The entire continent was basically in a constant state of flux (and perpetual wars) through most of its history, ending with WWII in the West, with the fall of the USSR in most of the Central and Eastern Europe, and then continuing with some regional score-settling in the Balkans.
And even this is a bit reductionist: Spain was a dictatorship until about 1975! How crazy is that. This is basically the recent past of the EU.
For the misery of Central and Eastern Europe specifically, "Bloodlands" by Snyder is a good book. And this gets me to my second point: I think you're veering too far into relativism. Yes, every country did some shitty things - that's the history of the world for ya - but the Russian Empire and the German / Austrian / Prussian Empire can be singled out as especially awful when you look at the past 300-500 years. Even just by the simplest metric of the number of people displaced and killed, it's many orders of magnitude worse than what anyone else has done. This distinction is important because the legacy of bloody imperialism continues on the Russian side today - beyond Ukraine - and it's most certainly not excused by the fact that, dunno, Poland occupied Moscow once.
- Am I? I was born under Russian occupation, before my parents migrated. I know all this very well, and much better than I’d want to. As much as I can fluently understand and speak Russian. As much as I can blend in, even despite the fact I haven’t been there for a very long time. Their culture didn’t change much for generations.
Everyone else reading this nonsense, go read Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, where he writes exactly that very time frame. You’d learn a lot of new things about the USSR and its attitude towards minorities.
- Historian Timothy Snider has some lectures online and wrote some great books. I’m reading his book Bloodlands now. Then there is Anne Applebaum.
But this is a wide topic, I suppose various biographies would help. Older books could help, e.g. “Prince” is old but a classic.
You could also lookup reading lists in best known universities under political science and international relations.
- I highly recommend Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, if you have the stomach for it. It's an absolutely brutal book that made me appreciate truly liberal democratic governance, for all its many flaws. Things could get so much worse, and often do, under autocrats, even in our current world. Even if they don't quite match the suffering of Belarus, Poland and Ukraine under the power of autocrats.
When I was younger I never had the patience to learn from history. Now that most of my life is about understanding people rather than understanding code, I can't get enough history.
- > I highly recommend Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, if you have the stomach for it.
Ditto:
> In this book, Snyder examines the political, cultural, and ideological context tied to a specific region of Central and Eastern Europe, where Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany committed mass murders of an estimated 14 million noncombatants between 1933 and 1945, the majority outside the death camps of the Holocaust. Snyder's thesis delineates the "bloodlands" as a region that now comprises Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), northeastern Romania, and the westernmost fringes of Russia; in this region, Stalin and Hitler's regimes, despite their conflicting goals, interacted to increase suffering and bloodshed beyond what each regime would have inflicted independently.[1]
[…]
> 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. Reviews ranged from highly critical to "rapturous".[4][5]
- Fair enough!
(And if you want a good history of horror in broadly-speaking early-middle 20th century Eastern Europe, I suggest reading Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder.)
