Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin Book

Man. Oh, man.

This book is without a doubt the most depressing thing I've ever read. If there was ever a time and place that demonstrated man's inhumanity to man, it would be the "Bloodlands," the areas of Eastern Europe squashed flat two or three times by Hitler and Stalin. The author's accounts of casual starvation, brutal repression, and mass murder were horrifying not just because they happened, but because both victims and perpetrators were everyday, normal people.

This is why you read the epilogue in any history text: it's where the author makes their point. In this case, the author wanted to make clear exactly what happened to the 14 million people who died as a direct result of Soviet and Nazi policies before and during the Second World War. Specifically, he wanted to make it clear that it was actual people who died, and actual people who did the killing. He dips down into the masses and chooses one or two telling examples from each murder, each siege, each starvation.

It's people who died, the author says, and it's people who killed them. It's easy to dismiss the Nazis and the Stalinist as monsters, and in a sense they were. But that's a cop-out. The fact is, given the right time and circumstances, any of us might decide that it was in our best interest to cooperate in a program of mass killing. That's what the thousands of SS and NKVD men did. They're not so different from us. In acknowledging this, and in making plain what happened, Snyder make it ever so slightly less likely that it will ever happen again.

There are few history texts--few books of any kind--that have affected me as strongly as this book did. There were times I could barely keep listening, but I'm glad I did. Everyone should read this book. Not just historians or World War II enthusiasts (although the latter definitely should, if they only follow American history). Everyone should read this book, because everyone needs to hear its lesson. I don't mean to sound melodramatic, because I'm being entirely sincere. Read it.

Edit: corrected some embarrassingly bad grammar