When Hell Came to Earth.

Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder is a well-written, thoroughly-documented investigation into the Hell on Earth that was the "Bloodlands," basically Poland, Belarus and the Ukraine during the era of Stalin and Hitler. Snyder's attention to details - the individual deaths and the grotesque mass murder - focuses the reader's attentions onto the quite literal "enormity" - the extreme evil or moral offensiveness - of which totalitarian societies - whether fascist or communist are capable.


The fact that there were two monsters at work in the Bloodlands has come as something of a surprise to moderns who have tended to ignore the fact that the democratic West was allied with a psychopathic mass murderer of the first water. In his review of "Bloodlands" for Slate, Ron Rosenbaum, author of "Explaining Hitler: the Search for the Origins of His Evil", commented that after reading the accounts of cannibalism during the Ukrainian Famine, which had been engineered by Stalin, he was "jolted me out of any illusion that meaningful distinctions could be made between Stalin and Hitler." The fact that it took this book to jolt someone who had written a book about the evils out of Hitler into thinking about the evils of Stalin, speaks volumes about why Snyder's book is a book that should be read by anyone with an interest in history, or, for that matter, by anyone who is interested in the mystery of human nature or of good and evil.

Snyder does at least five things in this book that make it well worth reading.

First, he breaks down the mostly artificial division that has been made between the experience of National Socialism and Communism for the people who were its chief victims. Most books consider one or the other - with the vast majority concerned only with the former, resulting in the naivety that Rosenbaum expressed in his review. As a consequence of the "fallacy of publicity" - i.e, that which gets the most publicity is most true - the victims of Stalinism, the hundreds of thousands of Poles who were shot for being Polish, have been reduced to non-existence.
 
Review continued here.