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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 March 2012
In the middle of the twentieth century, state-sponsored mass killing took place in Europe on a scale unknown before or since. Although the figures are contentious, around six million civilians are estimated to have been deliberately killed under Stalin; around eleven million under Hitler (p. xiii). What makes this phenomenon all the more striking is that not only was it severely circumscribed in time – it came to an end by the early 1950s – but it was also highly localised. Eastern Europe – in particular Poland, the Baltic states, Belarus and the Ukraine – was the epicentre, and its inhabitants among the chief victims. It is the story of these lands – the ‘Bloodlands'– that Timothy Snyder, one of our leading historians of eastern Europe, has singled out. If we are to see this extraordinary spate of murderousness as the central event of the century (as Snyder argues), then we need a much clearer view than we presently have of what happened in the Bloodlands. In particular, we need to jettison the view that modern mass murder took place chiefly in concentration camps – much of the killing happened through starvation or the shooting squad – and we need to appreciate the extent to which it happened as a consequence of the intimate relationship between the regimes of Hitler and Stalin. This, in a nutshell, is the rationale for this book.
1 Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951)Google Scholar.
2 Bullock, Alan, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (New York: Knopf, 1993)Google Scholar; Overy, Richard, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (London: Allen Lane, 2004)Google Scholar.
3 There is, of course, a large literature on the German planning for and occupation of the Ukraine: see in particular Kay, Alex J.: Exploitation, Resettlement, Mass Murder: Political and Economic Planning for German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1940–1941 (New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 2006)Google Scholar as well as the book by Gerlach, Christian, Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord: Forschungen zur deutschen Vernichtungspolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1998)Google Scholar and his Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrussland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1998) on Belarus. Snyder draws on this work but does not engage directly with its arguments.
4 After his brilliant historical sociology of the German occupation of Poland, Polish Society under German Occupation (Princeton UP: Princeton, 1979), Gross went on to explore this subject in several major works: Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton UP: Princeton, 1988) and Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (Princeton UP: Princeton, 2001). Snyder's closest engagement with Gross's ideas is found in a footnote (fn. 21 on p. 485). Pinchuk, Ben Cion, Shtetl Jews under Soviet Rule: Eastern Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1990)Google Scholar, also explores the impact of Sovietisation. See too Chodakiewicz's, Marek Jan local study, Between Nazis and Soviets: Occupation Politics in Poland, 1939–1947 (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2004)Google Scholar. Neither engages explicitly with the spill-over from one occupation to the next in the way that Gross does.
5 Snyder's key work includes two articles ‘The Causes of Ukrainian-Polish Ethnic Cleansing, 1943’, Past and Present, 179 (2003), 197–234CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘“To Resolve the Ukrainian Problem Once and for All”: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukrainians in Poland, 1943–1947’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 1, 2 (1999), 86–120, and two books: Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005) and The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
6 On Croatia, see especially the work of Tomislav Dulic, notably his 2005 dissertation: Utopias of Nation: Local Mass Killing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1941–42, PhD thesis, Studia Historica Upsaliensia, 218 (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2005), and his 2006 article ‘Mass Killing in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941–45: A Case for Comparative Research’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8, 3 (2006), 255–81; on Vladimir Solonari, Romania, Purifying the Nation: Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing in Nazi-Allied Romania (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; on Donald Bloxham, Anatolia, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Akcam, Taner, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (London: Picador, 2007)Google Scholar and more generally, the comparative analysis of Bloxham, Donald, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Levene, Mark, Genocide in the Age of the Nation-State, 2 vols. (London and New York: Routledge, 2005)Google Scholar; Roshwald, Aviel, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914–1923 (London: Routledge, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.