It is somewhat obvious that since the Berlin Wall came down and the West has been able to access Soviet records of what the so-called communists under Stalin got up to domestically as well as what the Red Army found on their march to Berlin in WWII. New facts and new perspectives on the horrors of it all would emerge.
And why not?
What better way for the victims to be recognised and remembered? The innocents who have suffered because of the inbuilt ignorance and prejudice of the state proponents of hate. They deserve to have their story told and Snyder's naming of the some of the victims is more than just a sentimental literary device - it is a form of justice of which he should be proud and of which the reader should be mindful.
And what better person to evaluate it all than a non-European such as Timothy Snyder? His gaze is unrelenting, his conclusions comprehensive as well as humane. Snyder's national objectivity is put to good use and is fair in its conclusions as he turns over the historical record.
The sheer scale of human suffering - firstly explored under Stalin and then under Hitler from the years 1933 to 1945 - is simply staggering to the point of overwhelming. The people caught in the lands between Berlin and Moscow were subjected to what a can only be described as the ideological sausage machines dominating the West and East at the time.
I have always been pro European but understood that Europe itself (Western to central Europe and right up to the Russian border) can be seen as one mass graveyard of human beings, of nations even. This is what has made the EU so important to me - I'd rather Europe be a place of fields of plenty for all (food) rather than killing fields as history points out to us it has been far too many times previously.
It is also clear that the Europe before WWII was a place of inter-woven peoples that almost made the notion of statehood look somewhat ridiculous, even superfluous, artificial even. German speaking Czechs and Poles, Polish speaking Germans or Ukrainians - the sheer mixture of peoples and ethnicities (diversity) is staggering and thought provoking.
It is nationalism itself that Snyder tells us is the culprit - nationalism is the unnatural, inhuman law at work here make no mistake about it. People will live where they can live - not where so-called leaders put imaginary lines on maps. They will speak the language they need to speak, till the good land that they can find and work with their neighbours to survive and worship their God as they see fit. To live and be happy.
And then there are the Jews. Today Poland is seen as a Roman Catholic country but I had no idea that before WWII Poland was a major Jewish settlement - a centre for Jewry in Europe. Incredible to think when you look at it now. And as for Poland - it needs and deserves a thorough account of what happened during these times caught between these two titanic forces - Nazism and Soviet style cod communism.
And now as others have noted (Keith Lowe in 'The Fear & the Freedom' or E.M Douglas 'Orderly and Humane' for example) we actually have less ethnic diversity (heterogeneity) in Europe and more homogeneous populations that seem ripe and easy prey for excessive and dangerous nationalism in countries that are now under pressure from migrants from Africa and the near East.
It's a heady brew - basically both Hitler and Stalin somehow live on in Europe in the scars created by the nations left behind by their polices after the conflict subsided.
Did it ever really end? Perhaps not - perhaps we Europeans even now are walking with tigers? But how well do we understand this?
Snyder is philosophical about this and sets an example of what we should be thinking when confronted with evaluating the likes of Hitler and Stalin. He repudiates revenge and an eye for an eye and says instead (p. 400):
'To yield to this temptation, to find other people to be inhuman, is to take a step toward not away from, the Nazi position. To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history.'
Indeed. That is where we need to start with the most basic and simple question when confronted by potentially destructive ideology: Why?
Highly recommended without reservation.
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Of the fourteen million civilians and prisoners of war killed in the bloodlands between 1933 and 1945, more than half died because they were denied food.Highlighted by 204 Kindle readers- For both Hitler and Stalin, Ukraine was more than a source of food. It was the place that would enable them to break the rules of traditional economics, rescue their countries from poverty and isolation, and remake the continent in their own image.Highlighted by 194 Kindle readers
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