"Bloodlands" by Timothy Snyder

     A few weeks ago we went to seminar at Georgetown University School of International Studies to hear a lecture on the Ukraine situation by Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale. When he was introduced, mention was made of his book "Bloodlands," which has apparently been translated into 15 languages. I got it from the DC Library, and immediately realized that I was not going to read it from cover to cover. I dipped around in it, and found it consists of an enormously detailed documentation, mostly drawn from first-hand sources, of the slaughter that took place in Eastern Europe--not people killed by military action but in other ways. His summary in the final chapter is as follows:

"Between them, the Nazi and Stalinist regimes murdered more than fourteen million people in the bloodlands. The killing began with a political famine that Stalin directed at Soviet Ukraine, which claimed more than three million lives. It continued with Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937 and 1938, in which some seven hundred thousand people were shot, most of them peasants or members of national minorities. The Soviets and the Germans then cooperated in the destruction of Poland and of its educated classes, killing some two hundred thousand people between 1939 and 1941. After Hitler betrayed Stalin and ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Germans starved the Soviet prisoners of war and the inhabitants of besieged Leningrad, taking the lives of more than four million people. In the occupied Soviet Union, occupied Poland, and the occupied Baltic States, the Germans shot and gassed 5.4 million Jews. The Germans and the Soviets provoked one another to ever greater crimes, as in the partisan wars for Belarus and Warsaw, where the Germans killed about half a million civilians.”