BLOODLANDS is about Stalin and Hitlers murder of fourteen million non-combatants between the early 1930's and 1945. The Bloodlands refer to the lands between eastern Germany and the part of Russia that Hitler invaded in 1941 when he broke the alliance with Russia.

Where to begin. Ideology and megalomania, if not psychosis, play a role. In the early thirties Stalin began his five-year plans by creating agricultural communes in the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, the Ukraine. Private farmers called kulaks lived there; it's not clear whether Stalin even asked them if they wanted to join communes. He just starved them out. Author Timothy Snyder claims 3.3 million peasants were murdered during that time. Stalin wanted to industrialize the USSR, and the big factory cities needed the grain. He also exported grain while his people were starving. Coincidentally perhaps (although I doubt it) his wife committed suicide at the same time.

Next came the great Terror of 1937-38. Westerners are familiar with the purge of intellectuals and political adversaries during this period, but Stalin also eliminated a further 700,000 national minorities. If you were sent to the Gulags in the early thirties you were lucky, but if you returned to the Ukraine in 1937, having served your time, you were targeted again.

Hitler had a utopian idea that he would invade Russia, kill or starve the Slavs living there and move German farmers into the area. That's the principal reason for breaking the pact, besides hating communists. The first part of the invasion of Russia was a blitzkrieg, just like his rapid defeat of the lowlands and France. Hitler's army took hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners and starved them to death in prison camps, that is unless he needed slave labor. Prior to the invasion of the USSR, Hitler had invaded Poland. He had to split Poland with the Soviets, but they both tried to eliminate the leadership: politicians, university professors, scientists, high school and elementary teachers.

Hitler had originally planned to deport the Jews. Snyder mentions Madagascar as a possible destination. That became an unrealistic destination once the war started because England ruled the seas. Something Americans don't realize is that there were very few jews in Germany, not even a million, but once Hitler invaded Poland and Russia he suddenly held sway over five million of them. Shooting Jews was the principal method of extermination during the original invasion of the USSR; they then moved to gassing them, using portable vans and carbon monoxide.

Around 1941, Hitler realized he wasn't going to be able to defeat the Soviets; they were starting to push back. But he could get rid of the jews, by gassing them. That was Himmler's idea and Hitler approved. Americans soldiers did release prisoners at several concentration camps where jews were gassed, but according to Snyder they didn't see the worst of it. That happened in the Bloodlands. Treblinka was not a concentration camp; it was built to kill jews. Auschwitz, the most famous of the concentration camps, was originally intended to be a work camp. I.G. Farbin needed slave laborers; only later were the gas chambers and crematoriums added. To realize the significance of the fourteen million number, which doesn't even include soldiers, that number is thirteen million more people than all of the deaths in all of the wars America has fought in its entire history.

At one point Snyder tries to explain how this mass murder could happen. He criticizes himself in that numbers are mentioned too much; the nazis killed eleven million people, about six million jews, and five million others, but the human mind can't grasp such a large figure. After a while it doesn't mean anything. Snyder recommends we try to individualize the people that died, and he makes a half-hearted attempt at doing so. A Jewish girl leaves a message for her mother on the wall of a synagogue as she's being burned alive. There's too little of that in this book. It's mostly depressing. The poor Ukrainians were massacred four times, in the early thirties by Stalin, again during the Great Terror, by Hitler who wanted “living room” for his farmers, and once again by Stalin who was afraid the Ukrainian partisans would be hard to control after the war.

You really can't explain how two monsters like Stalin and Hitler happened to exist at the same time in almost the same place, but several authors have taken a crack at it. Snyder recommends Hannah Arendt, author of ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM and novelist Vasily Grossman, author of LIFE AND FATE and the incomplete EVERYTHING FLOWS. Grossman especially has become more and more popular throughout the years. LIFE AND FATE was published abroad in 1980.