Timothy Snyder

On his book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

Cover Interview of November 28, 2010

In a nutshell

Between 1933 and 1945, when both Hitler and Stalin were in power, their two regimes murdered some fourteen million people in the lands between Berlin and Moscow, which I call the Bloodlands.

This region then fell into shadow. Because the lands where Hitler killed during the war—Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics, western Russia—all became part of Stalin’s empire thereafter.

I argue that the killing in the Bloodlands is the central event of the twentieth century. My book is its history.

history / europe / violence / 20th century / wwii / soviet union / holocaust / stalin joseph / eastern europe / hitler adolph /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009