In Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder has reconceived Europe's most violent epoch by looking into the heart of this violence: the mass murders carried out by Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany in the borderlands between the two empires. According to Snyder, battle deaths aside, between the early 1930s and 1945 Soviet Russia killed about four million human beings in this region, Nazi Germany about ten million. Snyder mobilizes a vast array of archival and printed primary materials, in nearly all the languages of the “bloodlands,” working within the recent historiographies of both the Holocaust and the Stalinist terror. The result is a detailed study emphasizing the extent to which Soviet Russia's mass killing was centered in its “west” and the extent to which the Third Reich's killing was centered in its “east.”

In exploring this theme, the author has rethought the historiography of the Holocaust in terms of, and in connection with, the deadly terror of Stalin. Hence, on the one hand, the almost demographic violence of the Soviet regime in the thirties—mass shootings, state-engineered famine, violent “cleansing” of Soviet borderlands—was visited largely on the western Soviet Union, its victims disproportionately Belarusians, Ukrainians, Poles, and others (including, in each area, a dense population of Jews). The east and its role in Nazi thinking is evident to historians of central Europe. But Snyder demonstrates that in essence, the Soviet west was the Nazi east.

This intertwining of histories produces striking interconnections. Poland is an example. An eighth of the Great Terror's victims were ethnic Poles. The Molotov-Ribbentrop boundary (which looms large throughout the book) and the outbreak of the war led to massacres of Poles in both German-occupied and Russian-occupied Poland. The connections between Stalin's anti-Polish terror and the killings by both Germans and Russians from 1939 to 1941 were often direct. Snyder has adduced some cases in which one family member was murdered as a result of orders from Moscow, another on orders from Berlin. Partisan fighting, infighting, and reprisal killings led to more interaction between the policies of Berlin and Moscow. Snyder establishes a number of clear linkages between the Soviet Union, or perceptions of it, and the deaths of three million Polish Jews. The war ended with highly violent Soviet ethnic cleansing of Poles and Ukrainians in eastern Poland and ethnic cleansing of German populations in western Poland.

This dynamic of interaction is even clearer in Belarus. Decimated by NKVD famine and terror by 1941, Belarus became first a zone of massive killing of Jews (500,000 in all), then of draconian occupation marked by partisan warfare and inflicted with constant German reprisals. Reconquering the country in 1944, the Soviets meted out punishment for “crimes” of collaboration. More than two million people were killed in Belarus during the war, not counting battle deaths. Snyder points out that with massive Soviet deportations, forced labor extractions, and flight, Belarus had lost half its population by 1945 (p. 251). Soviet and Nazi policies acted upon each other at many levels, with results that usually increased the death toll.

The author demonstrates that Jews could and did fall victim to Stalin's terror in many ways, even before Stalin's postwar move against Jewish “doctors.” Yet the number of Jewish deaths on the Soviet side of a given border hardly registers statistically in comparison with the killings of the Jews in the rear of the Barbarossa army. Of the 5.4 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust, according to the author's calculations, more than four million were natives of the “bloodlands.” Snyder's careful depiction of “final solution” policy owes somewhat more to functionalist than to intentionalist approaches, and his interpretation of the stages of the Final Solution allow him to integrate the countermoves and dynamics of the war, Stalinist legacies, and local perceptions of Soviet Russia into his account. One of his most striking sub-themes is a kind of relocation of the map of the Holocaust eastward. Calculating the destruction of Jews throughout Europe, he finds the epicenter of killing somewhere in the eastern sectors of the “bloodlands.” Snyder points out that in sheer numbers, “The Jews killed in the Holocaust were about as likely to be shot as to be gassed” (p. xiv). To imagine a locus of such a profile of death, Snyder tells us, we have to look farther east than the narrative that is associated with western and central European Jews in their path to Auschwitz. On an individual scale, Snyder shows us, the last minutes of life were very, very frequently experienced awaiting a bullet on the edge of a mass grave at a place like Babi Yar or Ponary.

The likelihood of death for non-Jewish inhabitants of the “bloodlands” was much lower, but still high. Counting more than three million Soviet prisoners starved to death by the Germans, the gassing of hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish civilians, reprisal shootings, and other murders, Snyder finds that the Germans killed roughly the same number of non-Jewish individuals as Jewish ones (though at a much lower ratio). Including Soviet killings and internal partisan killings of civilians and each other, the toll of non-Holocaust deaths is indeed enormous.

Death totals are central to Snyder's work, and he discusses his sources for and use of numbers throughout the book. Yet he views these persons turned into numbers as human beings, with names, families, intentions, hopes. Hence, he acquaints us throughout with individuals who were victims, with their impressions—often recorded in their last living act—of the tragedy they were suffering. Of the many virtues of this work, surely not the least is Snyder's plea for the historian to understand the murdered masses as “unique lives”: “We must be able not only to reckon the number of deaths but to reckon each victim as an individual” (p. 407).

This is an important and moving book, a profound study of a terrible subject, a detailed work that will speak not only to specialists in the field, but to a broader educated public. Specialists will no doubt challenge some details, some interpretations. But the book presents an important step forward in the discussion of the nature of the twentieth century. Bloodlands should take its place not only alongside the great histories of the Holocaust, but also within the growing historiography that attempts to grapple with the meaning of violence in the most violent century in human history.