Summary Of Bloodlands By Timothy Snyder

Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder focuses on the center of the violence during one of Europe’s most violent periods of time: the mass killing committed by the Soviet Union and the Nazis of Germany in the borderlands of Eastern Europe. Snyder claims that between the 1930s and 1945, aside from the deaths occurring from battle, the Soviets killed four million people in the borderland region and the Nazis killed ten million people in the region (p. xiii). He also illuminates the effects of animosity toward race in Nazism and hatred directed at classes in Stalinism causing one of the darkest periods in history. Snyder goes on to explain how the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany use starvation, labor camps, gas chambers, ethnic and social cleansing to advance

He depicts that the violence of the Soviets during the 1930s, which included man-made famine, mass shootings, and ethnic cleansing, largely transpired in the western part of the Soviet Union. The victims of these tactics were generally from countries of these areas, most of which had large Jewish populations. Snyder goes even further, illustrating that the concept Soviet west and the Nazi east are directly connected, as well as similar. Snyder provides examples of how this is true throughout the

The author breaks up the book into chronologically sections focusing on the events and actions taken in each period making it easy for the reader to understand the sequence of events. The book seems to have been well researched and supported by looking at the expansive bibliography in the book. To support his thesis, the author uses personal and public works, firsthand accounts and cultural examples. The book seems to be structured as story of the horrific actions committed by Hitler and Stalin, as well as how they implemented their plans and were able to commit these heinous acts. Snyder does a good job of illuminating the German dehumanization of Jewish populations, and Stalin’s murderous policies of “cleansing”. Both are described as an introduction to the author’s main focus of the book, which is the death of millions of people in the lands bordering Germany to the East, and Russia to the West, which Snyder dubs the