This debate on Timothy Snyder's book Bloodlands (2010) inaugurates a new venture: by bringing scholars together to discuss recent and not so recent books, we aim to contribute to the discussion about ways of writing and thinking about contemporary European history. Here, Mark Mazower (Columbia University), Dan Diner (Hebrew University/Simon-Dubnow-Institute Leipzig), Thomas Kühne (Clark University) and Jörg Baberowski (Humboldt University, Berlin) discuss Timothy Snyder's book Bloodlands. Tim Snyder (Yale University) responds to the comments in a detailed essay.

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.

Timothy Snyder's book on the conjoint, albeit opposing synergy between German National Socialism and Soviet Stalinism at the high point of the Second World War, and situated in the context of the East European lands lying between them, is tellingly, in a sense almost emblematically, entitled Bloodlands. The neologism that Snyder coined is a synthetic appellation for the murderous dynamics that unfolded there. Titles generally intend to lead the reader towards the book's core thesis, and this coinage seems, perhaps more than is usual, to be of special importance to the author.

Scholarship is not only about gaining new insights or establishing accurate knowledge but also about struggling for political impact and for market shares – shares of public or private funds, of academic jobs, of quotations by peers, and of media performances. Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands fights for recentring contemporary European history.1 No longer, his new book implies, should the centre of that history be Germany, which initiated two world wars and engaged with three genocides; even less should the centre be Western Europe, which historians for long have glorified as the trendsetter of modernity; and the Soviet Union, or Russia, does not qualify as ‘centre’ anyway. Introducing ‘to European history its central event’ (p. 380) means to focus on the eastern territories of Europe, the lands between Germany and Russia, which, according to Snyder, suffered more than any other part from systematic, politically motivated, mass murder in the twentieth century. The superior victimhood of the ‘bloodlands’ is a numerical one. Fourteen million people, Jewish and non-Jewish, in the territories of what is today most of Poland, the Ukraine, Belarus, western Russia, and the Baltic States did not become just casualties of war but victims of deliberate mass murder. Indeed, this is ‘a very large number’ (p. 411), one that stands many comparisons: ten million people perished in Soviet and German concentration camps (as opposed to the Nazi death camps, which were located within the ‘bloodlands’), 165,000 German Jews died during the Holocaust (p. ix), and even the number of war casualties most single countries or territories counted in the Second World War was smaller.

Twenty years ago it would have been unthinkable for a historian to combine the National Socialists’ murderous excesses and programme of extermination with Bolshevik atrocities in a single history. He would have been accused of ‘relativising’ one set of murderous crimes by relating it to the other. The comparison does indeed have a relativising effect in that it puts the events in a new light and so makes them, for the first time, comprehensible. But at that time, when historians still treated all historical questions as moral ones, nobody wanted to anything to do with that comparison because it ran counter to the political will. You could compare anything with anything, except the Holocaust, which had to remain unique. Nobody could write about the excesses of Stalinist violence without acknowledging that the Nazi murder programme was unique. Nonetheless everybody knew, even then, that uniqueness cannot be established without comparisons and contrasts.1 Since then, a view that used to be considered shocking has become a self-evident: no examination of state atrocities is now possible without a comparative element. But this change can also serve political ends: the Holocaust has become the sole yardstick for measuring state-organised crimes of violence. It seems that such crimes can only be taken seriously if they are comparable to Nazi atrocities.2

Not long ago I was discussing before a theatre audience in Philadelphia a performance of ‘Our Class’, Tadeusz Słobodziański's remarkable theatrical reinterpretation of Jan Gross's pioneering book Neighbors. It helped so very much that the discussion took place after rather than before the performance! It is a great honour to find my book at the centre of this discussion by colleagues, but it would be great vanity on my part to expect that every reader of this exchange will have first read my book. And yet without some general sense of the argument and substance of Bloodlands, I can hardly explain why the four responses are so different each from the other, what underlying concerns unite them, and how they might be answered. The book is a study of all German and Soviet mass killing policies in the lands between the Black and Baltic Seas from south to north and from Smolensk to Poznan from east to west. It begins from the observation that fourteen million non-combatants were deliberately killed in this zone between 1933 and 1945, when both Stalin and Hitler were in power. The figure is very high in its own right, and represents the vast majority of Soviet and German killing. The territory can be defined in terms of the number of murdered, or as the place where the Holocaust was perpetrated, or as the zone touched by both German and Soviet power: all three definitions generate the same map of the bloodlands.

This article discusses British civil liberties organisations hoping to engage in a broader human rights politics during and immediately after the Second World War. It argues that various movements and organisations from sections of the British Left attempted to articulate a human rights politics which incorporated political, civil, social and economic rights during the 1940s and early 1950s. However, organisations were unable to express this and mobilise accordingly. This reflected the collapse of the popular-front-style alliances forged in the 1930s and the difficulties in articulating political positions distinct from the ideological polarisation that emerged with the onset of the Cold War.

Poland, whenever free and sovereign, has since 1918 implemented economic policies that emphasise free markets. This approach has failed to produce a rapid rate of economic growth, so the country is still substantially underdeveloped. Although significant government investment in 1936–9 resulted in strong economic growth and a higher standard of living, today's Poland continues to pursue neo-liberal economic policies. This paper links these policies to the nation's heritage, which stresses limited government. Such beliefs ruled the actions of the nation's ruling class before partitions in the eighteenth century and during the inter-war period, and continue to dominate economic policy now.

There has been a growing revival of interest in the subject of political religion in recent years. However, despite this tendency, the perspective of contemporary Italian Catholics on the subject has hardly been touched upon, except by Emilio Gentile and Renato Moro. This article addresses this gap, analysing the response to the phenomenon of political religions during the 1930s by the two intellectual branches of Italian Catholic Action, namely, the FUCI and the Movimento laureati. Indeed, it was during the 1930s that these intellectuals became most aware of the novelty and danger posed by the emergence of the political religions. The article follows the analyses provided by the FUCI and the Movimento laureati on Bolshevism, National Socialism and Italian Fascism. During the 1930s new concepts such as ‘political religions’, ‘religion of the blood’, ‘totalitarian religion’ and ‘new idols’, all expressed the effort of these Catholic intellectuals to come to terms with the new reality of the sacralisation of politics being carried out by the totalitarian experiments.

Using archival sources, film reviews, interviews, secondary sources and movies, this article examines a Polish nationalist-communist school of directors who supported the Communist Party regime in constructing a new ethos, which consisted of ethnocentric nationalism and authoritarian nation state ideology. It demonstrates how the party state tried to legitimise itself by endorsing popular culture, specifically mainstream cinema. It also argues that National Communism inevitably led to the nationalist-authoritarian fusion, which set up the conditions for a pluralist and polyphonic realm, outside, but also within the ruling camp.

The autonomous Soviet republic of the Crimea was established in October 1921 as part of the Russian Federative Republic. A few months later came the announcement that the new republic was to be ‘tatarised’, in accordance with a policy which was already being implemented in other territories but which was not systematised, in the form of ‘indigenisation’, until 1923. This article examines how the Bolsheviks imposed their authority in the Crimea. It analyses the dealings and negotiations among the principal actors in both Moscow and the Crimea, and traces the establishment of rules and agreements. It also examines the uncertainties and anxieties that troubled the Crimean Communist Party when the enthusiasm of some Crimean communists for indigenisation rapidly led to suspicions of nationalism. This article, written from the periphery, throws light on the construction of a multinational Soviet state by focusing on the actors and their actions.

‘Geography costs – why does the map of Europe never stay put?’ The American poet Carl Sandburg posed that question in 1940 as the European continent was engulfed by another great conflict, the second in a generation. The course and conduct of the two world wars continue to dominate publishers’ lists but several recent volumes offer stimulating interpretations of Europe's international history during the intervening twenty years. They shed a sobering light on the cost of geography and on the challenges of statecraft, because what moved the map were not only the tectonic forces of socio-economic change but also the decision-making of political leaders.

Fascism continues to fascinate scholars within the social sciences, perhaps as much as communism, that other great non-democratic ‘-ism’ of the twentieth century. The topic also seems to be of continuing interest to the student and commercial book markets. In some cases bland repetition is the norm, but the pressure from commercial publishers often results in some excellent syntheses, even if based on secondary material, and that is not to mention the biography genre, which is always attentive to charismatic leaders and dictators — the more cruel the better. Moreover, the already voluminous academic literature on contemporary dictatorships often returns to the fascist and dictatorial regimes of the inter-war period. It is therefore only natural that Fascism should be incorporated in a series of handbooks published by Oxford University Press.