From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny the definitive history of Hitler’s
and Stalin’s politics of mass killing explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western
history for the last century. 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. With
a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of
democracy Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy
of modern history and its meaning today.
