Bloodlands
“A startling new interpretation of the period…A stunning book.”
New Yorker
A Literary Hub Pick of Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade
Winner of the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature
Winner of the Hannah Arendt Prize in Political Thought
Winner of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal
Winner of the Leipzig Award for European Understanding
Winner of the Emerson Prize in the Humanities
The definitive history of Hitler and Stalin's politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century, from the author of the international bestseller, On Tyranny.
Americans call the Second World War "the Good War." But before it even began, America's ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens, and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war's end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness.
Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, 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 story. Bloodlands is a required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.
Praise