Before we begin_A scene from Europe
Introduction_Hitler and Stalin

Chapter 1: Stalin Starves the Soviet Union
Chapter 2: Stalin's Terror Against the Class
Chapter 3: Stalin's Terrorism Against the Nation
Chapter 4: The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and Europe
Chapter 5: The Economics of Destruction
Chapter 6: The Final Solution
Chapter 7: The Holocaust and Revenge
Chapter 8: Hitler Runs the Killing Factory
Chapter 9: Those Who Resist, Those Who Burn
Chapter 10: Ethnic Cleansing Before and After the War
Chapter 11: Stalin's Anti-Semitism

Conclusion: A Question About Humanity
Translator's Note
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"An absolute must-read! No historian has ever written a book like this."

A new chronologically and geographically constructed study
Scouring 16 archives in 10 languages
A remarkable scholarly study, the destruction of many myths, and a starting point for revisiting European history.
Massive amounts of data, chilling descriptions.
A detailed, complete, and powerful narrative
An account that shines with compassion, fairness, and insight.
A bold, brilliant, and uncomfortable book
An incredibly original book

Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, Leipzig Book Award, Condill Award, Wayne S.
Winner of the Businich Book Award and the Gustav Lanis International Book Award! Finalist for the UK's Duff Cooper Award, the Society for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the NDR Book Award, and the Austrian Academic Book Award! Book of the Year by The Telegraph, The Economist, The Independent, and The New Statesman! A New Republic Editors' Choice Best Book of 2010, Jewish Forward's Top 5 Nonfiction of 2010, Reason's Best Book, and Kirkus' Notable Book!

Groundbreaking research with data from 10 languages ​​and 16 archives

Timothy Snyder's "The Ground Soaked in Blood" is considered a landmark in the study of World War II.
It won five awards in its first year of publication and was a finalist for four others.
Not only was it named a "Book of the Year" by eight leading media outlets in each country, but Antony Beevor, Samuel Moyn, and Anne Applebaum praised it as a work of superb research and writing.
Snyder delved into 16 archives, poring over materials in English, German, Yiddish, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Russian, and French, to paint a complete picture of World War II.

When international collective memory of the Holocaust emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, the focus was on the experiences of German and Western European Jews, and on a small subset of victims: Auschwitz (where only one in six Jews were killed).
Western and American historians and memorial activists have simply overlooked the five million Jews who perished east of Auschwitz and the five million non-Jewish victims who were killed by the Nazis.
Also, by the end of the war, American and British forces had not reached the Bloodlands at all and had not witnessed any major slaughter.
But if we do not take into account the fact that many Jews died in the East and the geographical conditions in the West, the Holocaust cannot be considered to have found its proper place in European history.
The data collected by Westerners so far has failed to shed even a fraction of light on what happened in the Bloodlands.

The atrocities of Stalin and Hitler took place in one era, on one land.
In 'Bloodlands' from 1933 to 1945.
The Bloodlands stretched from central Poland to western Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states, where 14 million people died.
Bloodlands was a land where Nazi and Soviet power and malice intertwined.
This place is important not only because most of the victims came from there, but also because it became the center of a policy of genocide carried out by people from other places.
For example, Germany killed 5.4 million Jews, more than 4 million of whom came from the Bloodlands.
Non-Jewish victims were either born in the Bloodlands or were taken there and killed.
Germany starved to death more than 4 million people in prisoner-of-war camps and in Leningrad and other cities, most of whom were born in the Bloodlands.
Victims of Stalin's genocidal policies came from all corners of the Soviet Union, but the decisive blow fell on the Bloodlands, the Soviet Union's western border.

This book attempts to reveal the full picture of the political massacre in a way that most closely approximates the "truth" by poring over materials from each country and encompassing military, political, economic, social, cultural, and intellectual history.
In particular, it provides a thorough 'fact check' by supplementing the realities that Hannah Arendt's words, such as 'symbols of profound darkness', cannot contain, the truth beyond the records of survivors like Primo Levi, and the loopholes that are missed when Hitler and Stalin are discussed separately.
There are three research methods.
First, no past event can transcend historical understanding, so we must examine it within that framework.
Second, we must consider whether there were clear alternatives available to people at the time.
Third, we must carefully examine the policies of Stalin and the Nazis, who massacred countless civilians and prisoners of war.
The third, in particular, is the crucial issue of reconstructing the geography of the victims.


Collecting the voices of the dying

“(A stranger) lost the backpack he had before.
The rags I was wearing disappeared.
It turned out that he was only wearing underwear.
I became naked.
“He was ‘sitting’ like a skeleton with his intestines spilling out.”
- From the diary of Vera Kostravitskaya

One of the virtues of this book is that, while accurately calculating historical statistics and figures, it attempts to see the human face of the countless victims of totalitarianism.
The voices of the dying echo throughout the book, as if bones or ghosts had walked out of their graves, and the sobs of those on the verge of death permeate the book.
Let's take a look at some of the final moments of those who died under Stalin's policies.
A group of boys from a school were fishing in a pond when they found the severed head of their classmate.
Did the family eat the child, or did the villagers kill him?
Such questions were common in Ukraine in 1933.
A mother killed and cooked her son to eat for herself and her daughter.
Another six-year-old girl was rescued by relatives, and the last thing she saw was her father sharpening a knife to kill her.
Some families preyed on their daughters-in-law.
Her in-laws roasted her body, held a feast, and then threw her head into pig food.

There was an order to death, the good people dying first.
They died because they did not steal from others or sell their bodies.
Those who refused to eat the corpses of others also had to die first.
Parents who refused to tolerate cannibalism among family members died in front of their children.
The bodies of boys and girls, wrapped in rags, were strewn everywhere, eating their own excrement as a last meal before they died.

“One day, all of a sudden, the kids became quiet.
When I went out, I saw that they were eating the youngest child, poor Petrus.
They were tearing off pieces of the child's flesh and chewing on them.
What about Petrus? He was the same.
He was tearing off pieces of flesh from his own body and mumbling about.
“Other children sucked the blood from Petrus’s torn body with their mouths,” said a woman who looked after children in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.

A black market for buying and selling human flesh also opened.
Even cannibalism was incorporated into the official economic system, with police investigating sellers of cannibalism and state agencies closely monitoring merchants who killed people and cut up the meat for sale.
Even so, cannibalism was a strong taboo, so in Ukraine, then and now, people are eager to hide stories of cannibalism so as not to tarnish their reputation.
In fact, most people, even at the height of the famine, were extremely angry when cannibalism was discovered, and the suspects were beaten and thrown into the fire.
Many people struggled to resist the temptation of cannibalism, and many orphaned children were left behind by parents who refused to eat their own children (some even wished their parents were dead, as orphans would have provided them with food rations).
There were also cases where mothers forced their children to eat themselves.
“My mom said so.
“When you return, you have to eat your mother.”
Stalin's collectivization policies resulted in the execution of tens of thousands of citizens, the deportation of hundreds of thousands, and the near-starvation of millions more.
Stalin's assassination policy in the late 1930s far surpassed Hitler's capabilities in the 1930s.
Stalin's policies clearly benefited Hitler.
Because it allowed for similar political logic to be developed.
Stalin, who pushed for collectivization and artificial famine, unknowingly helped Hitler strengthen his power in many ways.


The brutal history of Stalinist socialism: The distorted truth

One of the key things to see in the history of World War II is the atrocities under Stalin's socialist empire.
This is because Hitler took his cue from Stalin and became a killing machine by competing with Stalin.
Therefore, the author emphasizes that we can only know the true history of Europe by looking at the period between Hitler and Stalin.

In the final weeks of 1932, with no external security threats or internal challenges, Stalin decided to kill millions of Soviet Ukrainians.
Stalin approached the situation as part of a class struggle and a nationalist struggle, taking the position that the Ukrainian peasants were the perpetrators and he himself was the victim.
The Seven Major Policies, implemented in late 1932 and early 1933, applied only to Soviet Ukraine, and all measures required murder.
(Meanwhile, the Communist Party activists in charge of collecting grain at the time left a deathly silence.) Stalin, who was no less private about politics than anyone else, also approached the Ukrainian famine on a personal level, and the policy he adhered to was that 'the hunger of the Ukrainian peasants was a betrayal by the members of the Ukrainian Communist Party.'
Also, in the summer of 1932, more than a million people starved to death in Soviet Kazakhstan.

The mass famine of 1933 was a product of Stalin's first Five-Year Plan (1928–1932).
During this period, Stalin seized control of the top ranks of the Communist Party, pushed ahead with policies of industrialization and collectivization, and emerged as a fearsome father figure who would lead the defeated people.
He turned the markets into planned economies, the peasants into slaves, and the wastelands of Siberia and Kazakhstan into concentration camp complexes.
His policies resulted in tens of thousands of executions, hundreds of thousands of deaths from exhaustion, and millions of starvation.
One thing to note is 'Order 00447'.
This was carried out by a three-person commission (troika) that devastated the Soviet countryside in the early 1930s: a representative of the local People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, a representative of the local Communist Party, and a district prosecutor.
The Troika's role was to convert their assigned quota into actual corpses, and they were given one minute per citizen to decide on their execution.
The people who suffered the most at this time were Ukrainians and Poles.
Poland suffered particularly because of the rich peasant class (kulaks), with countless corpses floating down the valley of death.

At the time, the Soviet concentration camps were 25 times larger than the German concentration camps, and they were incomparable not only in scale but also in lethality.
In Hitler's Germany, there was no comparable incident in the Soviet Union where 400,000 people were executed over 18 months because of Order 00447.
In Germany, 267 people were executed in 1937-1938, while in the Soviet Union, 378,326 people were executed in the extermination of the (Polish) kulaks alone.
Taking into account the difference in population size, the probability of a Soviet citizen being executed in a purge of the kulaks was 700 times greater than the probability of a German citizen being executed as a criminal under Nazi rule.
Moreover, in the late 1930s, the most persecuted European minority was not the 4 million German Jews, but the 6 million Soviet Poles.
Stalin was the pioneer of genocide, and Poles were the most tragic victims.
Conservative estimates suggest that in 1937–1938, Soviet Poles were 34 times more likely to be arrested than other Soviets.

By the end of 1938, the Soviet Union had executed over 1,000 times more people because of their ethnic origin than Nazi Germany.
In the process, the Soviets killed far more Jews than the Nazis did.
Although Jews were not actually targeted for genocide, thousands died during the Great Terror and the Ukrainian famine.
They lost their lives not because they were Jews, but because they were citizens of the most brutal regime.
However, these massacres and forced deportations carried out in the Soviet Union went unnoticed in Western Europe.
The Great Terror itself received little attention, and the whole affair was seen as nothing more than a political trial and a purge of political parties and the military.


A proper look at Hitler's slaughter

The author points out that “it is an illusion to see the German concentration camps as the worst element of National Socialism.”
In the early months of 1945, as Germany collapsed, non-Jewish prisoners in concentration camps run by the Nazi SS died in large numbers.
Some victims of starvation were also featured in Anglo-American documentary films, images that contributed to a misleading view of the German regime.
Although the concentration camps claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in the final days of the war, they were not part of a deliberate program of mass murder.
Although some Jews were sent to the camps as political prisoners or workers, the camps were not primarily designed for Jews.
The Jews who were sent to the concentration camps were the incredibly lucky ones who survived, and they are now testifying on behalf of the camp residents who worked there for so long that they eventually died.
The German policy of annihilating European Jewry was carried out not in concentration camps, but in pits, gas tanks, and killing factories at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz.

The killing machines of both the Soviet Union and Germany were concentrated in a third territory, the Bloodlands, where the Jewish population of Germany was less than 1 percent when Hitler came to power in 1933, and less than a quarter at the outbreak of World War II.
During Hitler's first six years in power, German Jews were allowed to emigrate and most lived long lives.
Of course, 165,000 people were murdered, but this was less than 3 percent of the total victims of the Holocaust, a drop in the bucket compared to the tragedy of Europe as a whole.
It was only when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and the Soviet Union in 1941 that Hitler's vision of "driving the Jews out of Europe" connected with the two largest factions of European Jewry.
His dream of eradicating European Jewry could only be realized on European soil where Jews lived.
The two allies, the Soviet Union and Germany, uprooted the fruits of European enlightenment that had blossomed in Poland by exterminating vast numbers of well-educated Poles.
This allowed the Soviet Union to pursue its own version of 'equality', and Nazi Germany to draw up its own racist designs.

June 22, 1941, is one of the most significant dates in European history.
On this day, Operation Barbarossa began, and Germany invaded the Soviet Union. This was the beginning of a catastrophe of such magnitude that it was beyond words and went beyond changes in the German-Soviet alliance.
The fighting between the German Wehrmacht and the Red Army claimed the lives of over 10 million soldiers (not including civilian deaths).
Germany also systematically murdered more than 10 million people during this period.
So why did Germany break the alliance and strike the Soviet Union in the back of the head?
In the author's view, both Hitler and Stalin sought to follow in the footsteps of 19th-century Britain in achieving imperialism and maritime dominance, and for Hitler, Eastern Europe was the land that would make his empire a reality.
Therefore, Hitler had to completely wipe out the Soviet Union to create his own 'Garden of Eden', and so he finally transformed into the most horrific killing machine in history as he tried to purge his ally, the Soviet Union.


At the end of this extensive book, the author offers a significant perspective on how we should view the Bloodlands.
"Do you, the reader, identify with the victims of Bloodlands? If so, you risk becoming like the criminals and bystanders of Bloodlands.
If I were to view the employees who started the murderous engine as different from me, would that be an ethically sound approach? Unfortunately, identifying oneself as a victim is in itself an unethical choice.
In those days, everyone thought of themselves as victims.
There has never been a major war or massacre in the 20th century in which the aggressors or perpetrators did not initially claim innocence or that they were victims.
However, because the sense of victimhood seems to be limitless, those who believe themselves to be victims can be motivated to act extremely violently.
To this the author says:
“If you truly want to identify with the victims, you have to see their lives, not just their deaths.”
Also, understanding the actions of criminals is less attractive, but it is morally more important and should be given more attention.
This is because moral hazard arises when someone becomes a perpetrator or a bystander rather than a victim.
It is tempting to say, 'Nazi murderers are incomprehensible people.'
But if we deny humanity to humans, ethics becomes impossible.
To succumb to such temptations and to label others as less than human is to take a step closer to Nazism.
And that would perhaps betray history.


This book will make you completely rethink modern Europe and World War II.
- [New Republic]

Snyder's research is detailed and thorough.
His narrative is powerful.
- [Washington Post]

Snyder's book shakes up conventional wisdom.
He has captured the full extent of the Nazi killing machine, a task no historian could attempt without being prepared for considerable controversy.
- [Wall Street Journal]

This book, written as a life's work by a Yale University historian, is worth reading again and again.
- [The Economist]

Snyder attempted to present the nightmare Europe experienced in the mid-20th century accurately and clearly.
- [The Independent]

Snyder presents a mountain of new thinking and research findings.
This is truly a remarkable academic study, and it is bound to be the beginning of a new look at European history, destroying many myths.
- [New Statesman]

Among books written in English, "The Land Soaked in Blood" is the first to cover both the German and Soviet genocides.
- [Telegraph]

A remarkable book about the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Hitler and Stalin almost simultaneously.
- [Slate]

This book's unforgettable account of the Ukrainian famine makes it clear that Stalin was acutely aware of what was happening in his country's countryside and deliberately encouraged it.
- [Guardian]

Snyder's revisionist history offers a fresh perspective on the tragedy that occurred during World War II.
- [Roll Call]

Statistics are a key part of Snyder's narrative.
But he doesn't forget that every number is an individual human being.
- [Washington Times]

Needless to say, the research results were novel.
Moreover, these sources come from languages ​​that are completely unfamiliar to Western scholars.
- [Financial Times]

Faithful and appropriate research results.
- [Booklist]

A chillingly systematic study of the mass murder perpetrated jointly by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
Amazing numbers and academic insights.
- [Kirkus Review]

It combines a macroscopic narrative of Eastern Europe's unparalleled tragedy with an intimate approach to individual lives.
- [Irish Times]

An absolute must-read for anyone interested in 20th-century history.
- [Prague Post]

Very interesting and provocative.
- [Washington Monthly]

A surprising and important new book.
Snyder's writing is uncomfortably bold.
- [National]

A bold, brilliant, and uncomfortable book.
It is the best history book of the year.
- [History Today]

A definitive reference for scholars studying mid-20th-century Europe.
- [Michigan War Study Review]

A book that became a classic immediately after its publication.
- [Foreign Policy in Focus]

A book that is meticulously researched and has a generous perspective.
- [Ethics and International Affairs]

Interestingly, it twists the perspective and shows how inadequate the average Westerner's understanding of the Holocaust is.
- [National Review Online]

Great history book.
He changes many of our views on World War II.
- [McClance]

This book is the product of a very special scholarly effort.
The author combed through 16 archives.
- [Common Will]

This book will likely be Snyder's magnum opus.
- [Choice]

An incredibly original book.
- [Policy Review]

A bold, enlightening, moving, and intellectually challenging exploration of one of the most powerful and painful topics in 20th-century history.
- [Policy Review]

An excellent, important, and highly innovative book.
- [Jewish Journal]

No one has done a better job of analyzing it than Snyder.
- [Jewish Exponent]

A startling historical exploration of the 14 million people murdered by Hitler and Stalin's regimes.
- [Business Insider]

He wrote a unique work.
A new, fascinating and monumental work.
- [Wichita Eagle]

An important, well-researched, and heart-wrenching story.
- [Concorde Monitor]

Snyder's intellectual prowess shines as he depicts the horrors and tragedies that the Nazi and Soviet regimes perpetrated to perfect their respective societies.
- [Deseret Morning News]

It is written in beautiful, sometimes almost poetic sentences.
In addition to its historical and literary value, the book, which includes references in no less than ten languages, has also been a scholarly success.
- [War in History]

Snyder is not only a capable historian, easily digesting hundreds of sources in multiple languages, but also a brilliant and compelling writer.
- [Kyiv Post]

This book is great.
It reconstructs World War II chronologically and geographically, and allows us to view it from a new perspective.
- [Jewish Forward]