Bloodlands

Snyder put the total death toll in the "Bloodlands" at 14 million victims of both Stalin and Hitler, including Jewish civilians transported to German camps in occupied Poland during World War II, Polish intelligentsia killed in war crimes such as in the Katyn massacre, disarmed military personnel in occupied countries and prisoners of war. Snyder pointed out that "I am not counting soldiers who died on the fields of battle", saying this "is not a complete reckoning of all the death that Soviet and German power brought to the region." Snyder identifies those victims killed as a result of "deliberate policies of mass murder" by governments, such as executions, deliberate famine and death camps. Snyder said that he "generally excludes from the count" deaths due to exertion, disease, or malnutrition in concentration camps; deportations, forced labor, evacuations; people who died of hunger as a result of wartime shortfalls, and civilians killed by bombings or other acts of war. The geographic area covered by the "Bloodlands" is limited to Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states and western Russian regions occupied by Germany. Regarding the figures, Snyder noted that his reckoning is "on the conservative side."[11]

Snyder provided a summary of the 14 million victims as follows:[12]

• 3.3 million victims of "the Soviet Famines", using the term for the famines in which the victims were "mostly Ukrainians", as he does not use the term Holodomor. According to Snyder, Stalin wanted to exterminate by famine those Ukrainians and ethnic Poles who resisted collectivization in the Soviet Union.
• 300,000 victims in the Great Purge in the Soviet Union from 1937–1938, using the term "national terror", which targeted "mostly Poles and Ukrainians", killed because of their ethnic origins (the figure does not include an additional 400,000 Great Purge deaths in areas outside the "Bloodlands"). According to Snyder, Stalin considered ethnic Poles in the western Soviet Union as a potential agents of the Second Polish Republic; Ukrainian kulaks who survived the famine of 1933 were also considered to be potentially hostile to the Soviet regime in a future conflict.
• 200,000 Poles were killed between 1939 and 1941 in occupied Poland, with each regime responsible for about half of those deaths. The deaths included civilians and military prisoners of war killed in the Katyn massacre.[13] Most of the victims were the intellectual and political elite of Poland. According to Snyder, both Stalin and Hitler worked to eliminate the leadership of the Polish nation.
• 4.2 million victims of the German Hunger Plan in the Soviet Union, "largely Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians"; Snyder does not include famine deaths outside the Soviet Union.[14] According to Snyder, Hitler intended eventually to exterminate up to 45 million Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Czechs by planned famine as part of Generalplan Ost.[15]
• 5.4 million Jewish victims in the Holocaust (does not include an additional 300,000 deaths outside the Bloodlands).[11]
• 700,000 civilians, "mostly Belarusians and Poles", shot by the Germans "in reprisals" during the occupation of Belarus by Nazi Germany and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.[16]

A review of the book in the Ottawa Citizen summarized the number of victims, stating that Bloodlands is "a chilling and instructive story of how 14 million unarmed men, women and children were murdered. The death toll includes two familiar victim groups – 5.7 million Jews in the Holocaust and 3.3 million Ukrainians during the 1932-1933 famine engineered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin – along with lesser-known victims that include three million Soviet prisoners of war who were deliberately starved to death."[17]

The book received several criticism in academic reviews.[4] Historian Amir Weiner states that Snyder is not an expert either on Soviet or Nazi history. In a critical review, Weiner concludes: "Long on promises and short on delivery, replete with equations that are often baseless and at times tasteless, Bloodlands ends up as a bloody nose to history."[18] Omer Bartov states that the book is " permeated by a consistent pro-Polish bias", eliding darker aspects of Polish–Jewish relations, and his heavy emphasis on German and Soviet occupation policies glosses over interethnic violence. "By equating partisans and occupiers, Soviet and Nazi occupation, Wehrmacht and Red Army criminality, and evading interethnic violence, Snyder drains the war of much of its moral content and inadvertently adopts the apologists’ argument that where everyone is a criminal no one can be blamed."[19]

Historian Dan Michman writes that "[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 jüdische Geist. Perhaps the bluntest example for this development is Timothy Snyder's book Bloodlands, which has been hailed on the one hand for its innovative perspective, but also extremely criticized by world-renowned experts on both Nazism and Stalin's Soviet Union."[20] In his 2012 review, Michman wrote that "Bloodlands has not convinced me that there was a territory of 'bloodlands' which provides a historical explanation for murder, least of all for the Holocaust."[21]

Historian Thomas Kühne writes that "Snyder is not the first to think about what Hitler and Stalin had in common and how their murderous politics related to each other. The more provocative historians were in doing so and the more they thereby questioned the uniqueness, or the peculiarity, of the Holocaust, the more their work was met with resistance or even disgust, most prominently and controversially the German Ernst Nolte in the 1980s. Snyder's move to link Soviet and Nazi crimes is as politically tricky today as it was then. As it seems to reduce the responsibility of the Nazis and their collaborators, supporters and claqueurs, it is welcomed in rightist circles of various types: German conservatives in the 1980s, who wanted to 'normalise' the German past, and East European and ultranationalists today, who downplay Nazi crimes and up-play Communist crimes in order to promote a common European memory that merges Nazism and Stalinism into a 'double-genocide' theory that prioritises East European suffering over Jewish suffering, obfuscates the distinction between perpetrators and victims, and provides relief from the bitter legacy of East Europeans' collaboration in the Nazi genocide."[22]

The book received favourable reviews in BBC History,[23] The Seattle Times,[24] The New York Observer[25] and has been described as "an impeccably researched history of mass killings in the eastern part of mid-20th-century Europe" by Robert Gerwarth in the Irish Times.[26]

Neal Pease, a professor of history at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, wrote: "Many books are useful; a handful can be called important; Bloodlands does no less than change the way we think of 20th century history, and of the deadly human cost of the totalitarian utopianism that was among its most distinctive characteristics."[27]

Writing in the Financial Times, Guy Walters said he found the book disturbing, stating:

Some may find Snyder's staking-out of the area of the bloodlands too arbitrary for their tastes, and might accuse him of creating a questionable geographical delineation. Agree with it or not, in a sense it does not matter, because Snyder presents material that is undeniably fresh – what's more, it comes from sources in languages with which very few western academics are familiar. The success of Bloodlands really lies in its effective presentation of cold, hard scholarship, which is in abundance.[5]

Writing for The New York Review of Books, Anne Applebaum said:

Snyder's original contribution is to treat all of these episodes—the Ukrainian famine, the Holocaust, Stalin’s mass executions, the planned starvation of Soviet POWs, postwar ethnic cleansing—as different facets of the same phenomenon. Instead of studying Nazi atrocities or Soviet atrocities separately, as many others have done, he looks at them together. Yet Snyder does not exactly compare the two systems either. His intention, rather, is to show that the two systems committed the same kinds of crimes at the same times and in the same places, that they aided and abetted one another, and above all that their interaction with one another led to more mass killing than either might have carried out alone.[2]

Writing for The Guardian, Neal Ascherson said:

In this book, he seems to have set himself three labours. The first was to bring together the enormous mass of fresh research – some of it his own – into Soviet and Nazi killing, and produce something like a final and definitive account. (Since the fall of communism, archives have continued to open and witnesses – Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian especially – have continued to break silence.) But Snyder's second job was to limit his own scope, by subject and by place. 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. His subject is the deliberate mass murder of civilians – Jewish and non-Jewish – in a particular zone of Europe in a particular time-frame.[10]

The book has been criticized for its suggestion of a moral equivalence between Soviet mass murders and the Nazi Holocaust.[28][29] Cambridge professor Richard J. Evans, who wrote a "blistering review"[30] of the book, commented: "It seems to me that he is simply equating Nazi genocide with the mass murders carried out in the Soviet Union under Stalin. [...] There is nothing wrong with comparing. It's the equation that I find highly troubling."[31] Charles Coutinho suggested that some of Evans' response was due to Snyder's critical review the year before in The New York Review of Books of the Evans' The Third Reich at War.[32][33] This point was conceded by Evans.[33]

Dovid Katz, a historian of Lithuanian Jewry, commented that "Snyder flirts with the very wrong moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin. [...] None of these incidents besides the Holocaust involved the willful massacre of a whole race. There is something very different going on, beyond politics, when people try to murder all the babies of a race."[30] Other historians to take issue with Snyder's arguments and methods include Thomas Kühne,[34] Omer Bartov,[35] Dan Diner,[36] Christian Ingrao, Dariusz Stola[37] and Jürgen Zarusky.[38]

Bloodlands was named a book of the year for 2010 by The Atlantic,[39] The Economist,[40] The Financial Times,[41] The Jewish Daily Forward,[42] The Independent,[43] The New Republic,[44] New Statesman,[45] Reason,[46] The Seattle Times[47] and The Daily Telegraph.[48]

Bloodlands won a number of awards, including 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; Wacław Jędrzejewicz History Medal; shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize; shortlisted for the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize (ASEEES); shortlisted for the Austrian Scholarly Book of the Year; shortlisted for the NDR Kultur Sachbuchpreis 2011; and Jury commendation, Bristol Festival of Ideas. The book was also awarded the 2013 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.