Host Jonathan Judaken talks with Timothy Snyder about his acclaimed book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.
They discuss the 14 million targeted for death by these two brutal regimes, and how understanding their shared legacy informs us differently about the dark past of the 20th century.
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.
For more information about Timothy Snyder, visit his Yale University website. For more on Snyder's books, visit his profile on the New York Times Review of Books.
