Bloodlands T. Snyder

26.03.2024

Biography

He received his doctorate in 1997 from Oxford. He worked at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS, France in 1994-1995), as well as at the Vienna Institute of Human Sciences (Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen).

Selected works

Monographs

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Basic Books/Random House, 2010. Translated into 12 languages.
The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke, Basic Books/Random House, 2008.
Times of London notable book. American Association of Ukrainian Studies prize. Translated into 9 languages.
Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine,

Yale University Press, 2005. Pro Historia Polonorum Prize. Translated into 2 languages.

The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus,1569-1999,

Yale University Press, 2003. Philadelphia Enquirer notable book. Five prizes. Translated into 3 languages.

Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: A Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, 1872-1905,
Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and Harvard University Press, 1997. Halecki Prize. One translation.
The Economic Crisis of Perestroika, Council on Economic Priorities, 1991.

Co-authored publications

Stalinism and Europe: Terror, War, and Domination, 1937-1947, forthcoming 2011, coedited with Ray Brandon.
The Wall Around the West: State Borders and Immigration Controls in Europe and North America, Rowman and Littlefield, 2000, coedited with Peter Andreas.

Sections in collective works

Lieven, Cambridge History of Russia;
Brandon, Shoah in Ukraine;
Salvatici, Confini;
Jasiewicz, Swiat nie pożegnany;
Pisuliński, Akcja Wisła;
Chiari, Geschichte und Mythos der polnischen Heimatarmee;
Müller, Memory and Power in Postwar Europe;
King, Nations Abroad;
Williamson, Economic Consequences of Soviet Disintegration;

Articles in scientific journals

"The Causes of Ukrainian-Polish Ethnic Cleansing, 1943," Past and Present, 179 (2003), 197-234. 1a and 1b.
“To Resolve the Ukrainian Problem Once and for All’: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukrainians in Poland, 1943-1947,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Volume 1, 2 (1999), 86-120.
"Leben und Sterben der Juden in Wolhynien," Osteuropa, 57, 4, (2007), 123-142.
“Memory of Sovereignty and Sovereignty Over Memory: Twentieth-Century Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania” in Jan-Werner Müller, ed., Memory and Power in Postwar Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 39-58.
"Die Armia Krajowa aus ukrainischer Perspektive," in Bernard Chiari and Jerzy Kochanowski, eds., Auf der Suche nach nationaler Identität: Geschichte und Mythos der polnischen Heimatarmee, Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2003.
"A Polish Socialist For Jewish Nationality: Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (1872-1905), " Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, 12 (1999), 257-271.
"Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (1872-1905): A pioneering scholar of modern nationalism," Nations and Nationalism, 3, 2 (1997), 1-20.
"The Poles: Western Aspirations, Eastern Minorities," in Charles King and Neil Melvin, eds., Nations Abroad: Diasporas and National Identity in the Former Soviet Union, Boulder: Westview, 1998, 179-208.
"Soviet Monopoly," in John Williamson, ed., Economic Consequences of Soviet Disintegration, Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1993, 176-243.
"Three Endings and a Beginning: Shimon Redlich's Galicia," on Shimon Redlich, Together and Apart In Brzezany: Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, 1919-1945, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002, in Yad Vashem Studies, 34, 2006.
"Pourquoi le socialisme marxist a-t-il méconnu l'importance du phénomène national? A la lumiere des enseignements que l'on peut tirer du congres de Londres (1896) de la IIe Internationale," Revue des Études Slaves, 71, 2 (1999 ), 243-262.
"Akcja "Wisla" a homogenicznosc polskiego spoleczenstwa." in Jan Pisulinski et al eds, Akcja Wisla, Warsaw: Instytut Pamieci Narodowej, 2003, 49-56.

Articles in general journals

Holocaust: The Ignored Reality," New York Review of Books, 16 July 2009
“In the Shadow of Emperors and General Secretaries: On the origins of the nations of East Central Europe” (“W cieniu cesaerzy i sekretarzy”), Tygodnik Powszechny, 27 July 2008, 24-25.
"Ukraine: The Orange Revolution," with Timothy Garton Ash, New York Review of Books, 28 April 2005, 28-32.
"War is Peace," Prospect, Number 104, November 2004, 32-37.
“A Legend of Freedom: Solidarity,” (“Legenda o wolnosci”), Tygodnik Powszechny, special edition on Solidarity, 4 September 2005.
"The Ethnic Cleansing of Volhynia, 1943" ("Wolyn, rok 1943), " Tygodnik Powszechny (Cracow), 11 May 2003, 1, 7.
"Five Centuries and Eight Years: Operation Vistula and the homogeneity of Polish society" (Piec wieków i osiem lat: ""Akcja "Wisla" a homogenicznosc polskiego spoleczenstwa"), Tygodnik Powszechny, April 2002.
"Poles and Czechs, Ten Years On," Prospect, February 1999, 54-57.

Links

Timothy Snyder: official page on the website of the University of Else (English) - through the message on this page you can access the full text of scientific articles in the original
Timothy Snyder: A Fascist Hero in Democratic Kiev - Timothy Snyder “A Fascist Hero in Democratic Kiev.” Publication on the blog section of the New York Review of Books website
Timothy Snyder: “History is the weakest place of the EU”, interview (Ukrainian)
Timothy Snyder: “Yanukovych will stop the Holodomor as an action directed against the Ukrainians. Ale tse bulo same so" (Ukrainian)
Timothy Snyder. The Red Prince. The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke. New York: Basic Books, 2008. RUR 344 - Romantic “Prince of Reds” by Timothy Snyder (Ukrainian)
About Timothy Snyder's open lecture at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy (Ukrainian)
The romantic “Prince of Reds” by Timothy Snyder, review (Ukrainian)

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Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and a fellow of the Institute for the Humanities. In 1997, he defended his doctoral dissertation at Oxford University and won the prestigious Marshall Scholarship. Before starting his teaching career at Yale University (in 2001), Snyder won a number of research grants in Paris, Vienna, Warsaw, and also received an Academic Fellowship at Harvard University. Snyder spent about ten years in Europe and speaks five (and reads ten) European languages.

Snyder is the author of several scholarly monographs: Nationalism, Marxism, and Modern Central Europe: The Biography of Kazimierz Kelles-Krause (1998), Reconstructing Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus, 1569-1999 (2003), Sketches of a Secret War : A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine" (2005), "Red Prince: The Secret Lives of the Habsburg Archduke" (2008) and "Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin" (2010), "Black Land: The Holocaust as History and Warning" (2015).

T. Snyder's books have received numerous awards and have been translated into many languages of the world. Bloodlands has received nine first prizes, including the Emerson Prize for the Humanities, the Academy of Arts and Letters Literary Prize, the Leipzig Prize for European Understanding, and the Leipzig Prize for European Understanding. Hannah Arendt in the field of political thought. Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands was named Book of the Year by twelve literary lists.

The book was published in translation into thirty languages, including Ukrainian (K.: Grani-T, 2011, translation by M. Klimchuk and P. Gritsak), was recognized as the book of the year according to the results of twelve different lists and became a bestseller in six countries.

Snyder co-authored The Wall Around the West: National Borders and Immigration Control in Europe and North America (2001), Stalin and Europe: Terror, War, Dominance (2013), Pondering the Twentieth Century (2012, with Tony Judt). Snyder's articles on the Ukrainian revolution were published in September 2014 in Russian and Ukrainian and formed the book “Ukrainian History, Russian Politics, European Future.”

To understand the exceptionality of the period from 1933 to 1945, from the first program of mass extermination I describe (the political famine in Ukraine) to the last (the Holocaust in Eastern Europe), archival materials in Russian, as well as historical publications in Russian, are irreplaceable.

Timothy Snyder - Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin

Kyiv: Dulibi, 2015 – 584 p.

ISBN 978-966-8910-97-5

Timothy Snyder - Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin - Contents

Introduction to the Ukrainian Russian-language edition

Preface: Europe

Introduction. Hitler and Stalin

Section 1. Famine in the Soviet Union

Section 2. Class terror

Section 3. National terror

Section 4. Europe of Molotov-Ribbentrop

Section 5. Economics of the Apocalypse

Section 6. Final Decision

Section 7. Holocaust and Revenge

Section 8. Nazi death factories

Section 9. Resistance and Incineration

Section 10. Ethnic cleansing

Section 11. Stalinist anti-Semitism

Conclusion: Humanity

Bibliography

Reviews of Timothy Snyder's book "Bloodlands"

Latest publications by T. Snyder about Ukraine

Timothy Snyder

Timothy Snyder - Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin - Europe

“Now we will live!” - repeated the hungry boy, wandering along quiet roads and through empty fields, but the food he saw existed only in his imagination. All the wheat was taken away during inhumane requisitions, after which an era of mass destruction began in Europe. It was 1933, and Joseph Stalin was deliberately starving Soviet Ukraine. The little boy died, as more than three million other people died. “I will meet her underground,” the young man said of his wife. He turned out to be right: he was shot after her; they were buried among the seven hundred thousand victims of Stalin's terror of 1937–1938. “They asked about the wedding ring that I...” - the diary of a Polish officer shot by Soviet NKVD officers in 1940 ends with this phrase. He was one of two hundred thousand Polish citizens shot by the Soviet and German governments at the start of World War II while Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union jointly occupied his country. At the end of 1941, an eleven-year-old Leningrad girl concluded her simple diary with these words: “Only Tanya remains.” Adolf Hitler betrayed Stalin, Tanya's city was besieged by the Germans, and her family was among the four million Soviet citizens starved to death by the Germans. The following summer, a twelve-year-old Jewish girl from Belarus wrote her last letter to her father: “I say goodbye to you before I die. I am so afraid of this death because they throw little children into mass graves alive.” She was among more than five million Jews gassed or shot by the Germans.

In the middle of Europe in the mid-twentieth century, the Nazis and the Soviet regime together killed an estimated 14 million people. All these victims died in the “bloodlands”, which stretch from central Poland to Western Russia and are located in Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic countries. During the years of the consolidation of National Socialism and Stalinism (1933–1938), the joint German-Soviet occupation of Poland (1939–1941), and then the German-Soviet war (1941–1945), mass atrocities hit these lands hitherto unprecedented in history. Their victims were predominantly Jews, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Poles, Russians and Balts - the indigenous population of these lands. Fourteen million people were killed in just twelve years (1933–1945) while Hitler and Stalin were in power. Although the homelands of these people turned into battlefields in the middle of this period, they were victims not of war, but of murderous politics. The Second World War was the deadliest conflict in the history of warfare, and about half of the soldiers who died on battlefields around the world died here, on the “bloodlands.” But not one of the fourteen million people who died was a soldier doing his duty. Most of them were women, children and old people; none of them had weapons; Many were robbed of everything they had, even their clothes.

Auschwitz is the most famous extermination site in the “bloodlands.” Today Auschwitz is a symbol of the Holocaust, and the Holocaust is a symbol of the greatest evil of the century. Still, Auschwitz prisoners registered as labor had a chance to survive: the name of the camp is known through memoirs and fiction written by survivors. Many more Jews (mostly Polish) lost their lives in the gas chambers of other German death factories, almost all of whose prisoners died and whose names come to mind much less frequently: Treblinka, Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzec. Even more Jews (Polish, Soviet and Baltic) were shot above ditches and pits. Most of these Jews died near their place of residence in occupied Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Soviet Ukraine and Belarus. The Germans brought Jews from everywhere to exterminate them in the “bloodlands.” Jews arrived in Auschwitz by train from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Italy and Norway.

First published in the United States by Basic Books,

a member of the Perseus Books Group

published by Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group

Translation from English by Lukia Zurnadji

Published with the assistance of the US Embassy in Ukraine

Translation was carried out according to the edition:

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. New York:

Basic Books, 2010

The cover design uses a photograph from Life magazine.

Snyder T.

C 53 Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin / Timothy Snyder; [transl. from English by L. Zurnadzhi] – K.: Dulibi, 2015. – 584 p.

ISBN 978-966-8910-97-5

From 1933 to 1945, 14 million people were killed in Eastern Europe. The book by Yale University (USA) professor, brilliant historian and skillful storyteller Timothy Snyder, “Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin” is dedicated to the tragic pages in the history of Eastern Europe. Ukrainian Holodomor, Stalin's mass executions, the Holocaust, German executions of civilians during anti-partisan operations, deliberate starvation of Soviet prisoners of war, post-war ethnic cleansing... The two totalitarian systems committed the same crimes at the same time, in the same places, assisting each other. each other and inciting each other.

Timothy Snyder's book instantly became a world bestseller, going through 29 editions in 26 languages. Published in Russian for the first time.

ISBN 978-966-8910-97-5

Introduction to the Ukrainian Russian-language edition

“Bloodlands” is a place where Russian was (and continues to be) spoken, and for this reason alone I am very happy about the Russian-language edition. In the vastness from the Baltic to the Black Sea, from Berlin to Moscow, people who spoke Russian were among the victims, eyewitnesses and perpetrators of the crimes to which this book is dedicated. To understand the exceptionality of the period from 1933 to 1945, from the first program of mass extermination I describe (the political famine in Ukraine) to the last (the Holocaust in Eastern Europe), archival materials in Russian, as well as historical publications in Russian, are irreplaceable. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Russian scholars who, through their work with original sources, paved the way for some of my own interpretations.

Without Russian literature, I would never have come to the topic of mass extermination under Hitler and Stalin and would not have thought of using the territorial method of research and explanation that I use here. Vasily Grossman was my intellectual companion for fifteen years while I was hatching this project. It was his personal experience, presented on the pages of the books “Life and Fate” and “Everything Flows,” that helped me understand that the experience of Nazi and Soviet terror was, first of all, human history. That a writer and eyewitness of this level of talent and courage could describe the lives of several people touched by both the Nazi and Soviet systems allowed me to conceive of a larger story of the lives of all the people touched by both regimes. The fate of Grossman's family, friends and acquaintances was not exceptional, but he recorded it with exceptional care. In fact, it was typical: in the "bloodlands" both systems affected tens of millions of people, and about thirteen million were destroyed by the deliberate policies of one of them. In some cases, such as the deportations and murders that followed the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, it is impossible to tell the story of the victims of one system without mentioning the other system.

Even the title of the book is Russian. No one in the West noticed the allusion, but several astute Ukrainian readers guessed it (the book was published in Ukrainian and all other languages of the “bloodlands” before appearing in Russian). Many Russian-speaking readers, no doubt, have already made a connection with the work of Anna Akhmatova. Her experiences appear in the book, and at several points excerpts from her “Requiem” give direction to my impressions. Lines from the poem “You will never live,” written in 1921 after the arrest of her husband Nikolai Gumilyov, served as a source for the title of my book: “Loves, loves blood / Russian land.” When I begin to think about the moment at which Russian words and thoughts brought me closer to my own interests and tasks, my sense of duty only intensifies. I was brought to Akhmatova by Isaiah Berlin, one of my teachers at Oxford University, who always encouraged me to take Russian intellectual history seriously. I owe a lot to Isaiah Berlin, who, of course, among other things, was himself a Russian thinker. Thus, my debt to the world of Russian thought is enormous.

The main method of the book is to start with the people, with all those who lived in European lands touched by both Nazi and Stalinist power. This means that this book is not a national history. It is about many nations, but also about many people who may not have considered themselves members of any nation. It touches on the basic issues of national histories, but is neither a collection of national histories, nor an attempt to find a compromise between them, nor to resolve disputes between them. It talks about state power, but is not the history of any state. Four states (Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) collapse as the story unfolds. The borders of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany are changing. The politics of the "bloodlands" change depending on the different forms of contact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany: first anticipation, then alliance and finally enmity.

Although the history of a territory, its peoples, and mass political destruction is not a national history, it does bring new perspectives and knowledge to national histories. No national history, no matter how extensive, can provide all the answers or even ask all the questions. Many of the major themes of modern Russian history, such as political mass destruction, transcend the political boundaries of the state and the emotional boundaries of the nation. When Russians died in campaigns of political mass destruction, others died along with them. Russian history is incomplete without the experiences of Ukrainians, Poles, Belarusians, Jews and people of other nationalities who lived together with Russians in the most dangerous place on earth.

A few days after I completed this book, in the spring of 2010, a Polish plane carrying many members of Poland's political elite crashed near Smolensk and all its passengers were killed. They rushed to commemorate the thousands of Polish citizens executed by the Soviet NKVD in Katyn in 1940, perhaps the most notorious Soviet crime of the Soviet-German alliance. Russian leaders expressed sympathy for their tragic deaths. The Katyn crime, which had been hushed up in Russian public memory for so long, began to be widely discussed. Five years later, a lot has changed. The tone and content of official Russian commemoration has changed radically. The President of the Russian Federation has now officially rehabilitated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which the Soviet Union concluded with Nazi Germany and which, among other things, directly led to the Katyn massacre. The rehabilitation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact means the rehabilitation of everything accomplished by Stalin up to the moment he signed the agreement with Hitler. This calls into question the European consensus that the Second World War was a disaster. Since one of the subjects of this book is precisely Soviet-German relations, this can help in the modern assessment of the significance of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Timothy Snyder born on August 18, 1969 in the American state of Ohio in the family of a veterinarian. After graduating from school, he continued his education at prestigious universities in the country. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in History and Political Science from Brown University. Further a PhD in modern history in 1997 from the University of Oxford, where Timothy Snyder (Timothy Snyder) studied from 1991 to 1994. (thanks to the prestigious Marshall Scholarship, which allows gifted American students to study at prestigious universities in the UK). By the time he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree, Snyder's track record already included work in scientific centers in France and Austria. He also earned an academic scholarship to Harvard.

Since 2001, Snyder has been a professor at Yale University, and over the past twenty years he has been an emeritus teacher or had practice at a number of universities in Europe, in particular in Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and London. Timonati Snyder can speak and write fluently English , French, German , Polish And Ukrainian languages, as well as read in Czech, Slovak, Belarusian and Russian, which helped him in working with original sources and cooperation with researchers of European history. Timothy Snyder is a member of the editorial boards and committees of journals, institutes for Holocaust studies, and the largest Center for the Study of the Holocaust (USHMM). To date, Professor Timothy Snyder has written five full-length monographs, two co-authored books, and dozens of scientific papers.

Positive criticism of Bloodlands

Following the release of Timothy Snyder's book in 2010, received generally favorable criticism from both the professional press and scholars of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Bloodlands quickly topped the lists of a number of reputable publishers and print media. Based on the results of that year, the monograph « Bloodlands » was recognized as a bestseller by twelve authoritative lists in six countries, including such media mastodons as The New York Times, The Economist, and the Financial Times. "Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin" also became the winner of nine prestigious book awards in the New and Old Worlds, in particular the Prize for Understanding of Europe at the annual Leipzig Fair and also, in 2013, the award named after. Hannah Arendt in the field of political thought - Timothy Snyder more than once refers to the works of the writer, in particular on the topic of totalitarian regimes. As of 2017 « Bloodlands » have already been translated into 30 languages.

Negative criticism of the book Bloodlands

On the author's page Timothy Snyder and books « Bloodlands » The Wiki contains excerpts from a small amount of criticism - and even more can be found by searching in English. This is not surprising, as is the case with any known work on the Second World War. The more attention to the monograph and the more positive reviews, the more criticism in varying proportions - the most iconic authors of the subject have been subjected to it for decades, and Timothy Snyder « big » I'm still new to the literature on World War II. To be fair, the critics' arguments themselves seem unconvincing - on closer inspection they point to points that, according to them, the author missed, but this is not the case in the book. The cause-and-effect relationships between the Stalinist and Nazi regimes are also not presented so superficially. It was as if those criticizing had read another book or had not done it carefully enough and were deliberately biased.

In total, after finishing the main text of the book Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder gives 17 archives , the sources of which he used for writing and also an impressive list of, attention, 730 sources . While citing archives is common practice for books and documentaries about World War II, citing them does not provide insight into the depth of research, since the USHMM archives alone today contain hundreds of terabytes of digitized data and entire floors of original materials: books, letters, photographs, film, documents. The most common criticism leveled at Bloodlands concerns not so much the comparison between the regimes of Stalin and Hitler as Snyder's use of secondary rather than original sources.

Footnotes in the text of the book "Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin" quite frequent and refer both to original documents, such as memos, orders and instructions, to the testimony of defendants or witnesses in post-war trials on war crimes, and to numerous works of other researchers. It is on them that author Timothy Snyder mostly relies in his work, which makes Bloodlands not an original study, despite all the objective advantages of the book. When viewed objectively, the most questions are raised by the almost categorical figures given by Snyder, again, from third-party sources - which does not give the impression that the author independently worked with the original ones.

Geography of the Bloodlands

An interesting feature of the book "Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin" What sets it apart from most monographs on World War II is Timothy Snyder's methodological emphasis not so much on the chronology of years, but on the fate of specific territories in Eastern Europe. The author considers the territories of modern states in retrospect of the twentieth century as the area of Europe that suffered the largest number of civilian casualties - Snyder uses the figure of 14 million people. Over the course of reading 500 pages of a book "Bloodlands" this abstract figure acquires practical and human meaning. Author Timothy Snyder repeatedly emphasizes that one should not multiply a general person, the average Jew or a representative of other nationalities, by impressive numbers. 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust is not the average Jew multiplied by 6 million - but such a number of unique destinies and personalities. The 3 million victims of the Holodomor are not the average Ukrainian peasant, but 3 million individual destinies. The methodology and calculation of Professor Timothy Snyder can be roughly divided as follows:

3.3 million Holodomor victims on the territory of the then Ukrainian SSR. Timothy Snyder takes only this part of the USSR, which is part of the Bloodlands, but mentions the famine in other republics, in particular the 1 million dead in Kazakhstan.

300,000 victims of the Great Terror Stalin's repressions of 1937-1938 and ethnic cleansing in the Bloodlands of 680,000 throughout the entire Soviet Union.

200,000 Polish citizens , including Polish intelligentsia and prisoners of war exterminated by the Germans and Soviets after the occupation of Poland between 1939 and 1941.

4.2 million civilian casualties who died from a famine artificially created by the Germans in the territory of the occupied Soviet Republics. Among them are 3.1 million Soviet prisoners of war and 1 million residents of besieged Leningrad.

5.4 million Jews , victims of the Holocaust. The victims of the death camps in occupied Poland are considered, as well as more than a million Soviet Jews killed by punitive detachments east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line.

700,000 civilians , killed by the Germans during acts of retaliation in the fight against partisans in Belarus and Ukraine, and during the uprisings in Warsaw in 1943-1944.

As for geography itself "Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin", Timothy Snyder provides two general maps and, as the text progresses, other diagrams of the territorial changes of these lands. Its methodologists included the territories of the following modern states:

Poland

Ukraine

Lithuania

Latvia

Estonia

Belarus

Moldova

Western part of Russia

Some interesting passages from the book

Occupying German forces renamed the historic Market Square in Krakow Adolf Hitler Platz

In February 1940, the NKVD transported 140,000 Poles from the territory of Poland occupied by the Red Army to Kazakhstan. 5,000 of them died en route in cattle cars

In June 1940, 78,000 Poles, 84% of them Jews from the former Eastern Poland, were deported to Kazakhstan, especially for refusing to obtain a Soviet passport.

The Germans first tried euthanasia for the mentally ill in the territory of occupied Poland - in November 1939, Polish mentally ill people were gassed - 7,000 people died.

The 4,410 Polish officers executed by the Soviets in the Katyn Forest were just one of the actions taken at the same time. Another 6,314 unfortunates were killed near Tver and 3,739 near Kharkov.

In Germany, in 1943, a tourist guide to the so-called General Government in Poland was printed. and German travelers even visited the ghetto in Warsaw.

Most of the nearly 400,000 Jews that the Warsaw ghetto held at its peak were brought there from the suburbs and other occupied territories—it was among the newcomers, not the native Jews of Warsaw, that the death rate was highest.

In the autumn of 1941, Lenin's body was removed from the Mausoleum in anticipation of the Wehrmacht's rapid advance towards the capital.

On August 28, 1941, Staley signed a decree on the deportation of 438,700 Soviet Germans to Kazakhstan - an action that was carried out in early September.

Useful article? Tell about her!

By Timothy Snyder Tim Duggan Books. 128 pp.

Timothy Snyder wrote a book against Donald Trump, but it went against the entire American society, conservatives and liberals.

In the middle of the “dashing 90s” I had the opportunity to live and work in Moscow. In 1996, at the height of “shock therapy,” Yeltsin was being re-elected for a second term in Russia. These were the only elections in the history of the Russian Federation that took place in two rounds. The president's rating was about 3%, but enthusiasm reigned in the circles of the “creative class”. There they repeated in different ways the phrase of Yeltsin’s bodyguard Korzhakov: “We won’t give up power.” Armed with black PR and disregarding professional ethics, Russian journalists mobilized for a propaganda war.

I was a member of NTV (then still Gusinsky), ORT (then Berezovsky) and other communities where Russian public opinion was created. I tried to explain to my colleagues that they were cutting the branch they were sitting on. He said that their propaganda leads to the hollowing out of civic values, to the loss of independence and freedom of the press. He said that the authorities would inevitably evaluate their betrayal of their profession and suppress freedom of speech. In response, they assured me that I didn’t understand anything, and sometimes I myself felt like a character in a joke from the genre “a foreigner came to Russia.”

In fact, it was then that the foundations of the current odious “Kiselevsky television” were laid. Then, under the friendly and massive propaganda of the liberal media, the rudiments of that same middle class, which alone could become the basis for the true democratization of Russia, were being uprooted. Therefore, when the same people who mobilized for Yeltsin in 1996 came to Bolotnaya in 2011, there was no longer a society in Russia capable of providing them with mass support. The authorities appreciated the importance of the media and simply took them for themselves.

Liberals in America, who also mobilized for Hillary Clinton, have not yet realized that they live “without feeling the country beneath them.” But conservative ideologists have already realized that after the election of Donald Trump, “their” electorate turned away from them. Neoconservative Robert Kagan, who had recently proclaimed the triumph of globalism, now burst out in the Washington Post with an article “How Fascism Came to America.”

He is echoed by former Bush speechwriter and author of the “axis of evil” David Frum, who in The Atlantic describes in broad strokes the picture of the end of liberal America. Voting is increasingly difficult, self-censorship is rampant, Congress is subjugated, political power is used for personal enrichment, the truth becomes more and more obscure. Freedom is gradually being replaced “not by dictate and violence, but by a slow, demoralizing process of corruption and deceit,” he writes. And a group of more than 200 scholars of the Holocaust and Jewish history published an “open letter” lamenting the fragility of democracy and condemning “agitators who are promoting their toxic views on the back of Trump’s neck”: “We call on all honest Americans to unequivocally condemn hate speech, discrimination and threats."

Timothy Snyder is also a Holocaust scholar, albeit a controversial one. His thesis that it is impossible to understand the Holocaust by taking it out of the overall context of the history of violence in Eastern Europe from the 1910s to the 1940s has attracted much criticism. (the historical establishment saw this as an attack on the concept of Holocaust exceptionalism). His new book “On Tyranny. 20 Lessons from the 20th Century” does not offer any alternative to the pessimism and despondency that now dominates the American intellectual elite. In it, Snyder tries to apply his historical insight to what is happening in America today, and the Washington Post critic calls this slim, pocket-sized book "the most remarkable work of the new resistance."

“Today’s Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who watched democracy give way to fascism, Nazism, and communism in the twentieth century,” Snyder writes. “Our advantage is that we can learn from their experience.”

Snyder is distinguished by the absence of the notorious sense of national superiority, or even God's chosenness, inherent in most American political writers and publicists.

The author tries to learn lessons from “everyday politics.” Long before Hitler invaded Austria, ordinary Austrians were ready to take part in the Anschluss, and local Nazis compiled lists of Jews ahead of time in order to seize their property. “The willingness to obey is a political tragedy,” writes Snyder. However, it is the willingness to obey that is fostered in Americans by family, school, and “corporate culture.” What can a society count on, whose basis is bureaucratic corporations, the most totalitarian institution of Western civilization?

Snyder hopes for greater responsibility among professional elites—doctors, lawyers, businessmen. After all, even the most democratic institutions are not able to protect themselves. “It is difficult to undermine the rule of law without lawyers or to hold show trials without judges,” he writes. “Authoritarianism needs obedient civil servants, and concentration camp commanders are looking for businessmen interested in cheap labor.” This is precisely about the corporate political-bureaucratic elites of venture capitalism, who without hesitation practice outsourcing and downgriding, and consider people as a resource or fuel. This is how it is officially pronounced – “human resource”.

“Totalitarianism doesn’t come out of nowhere and suddenly become all-powerful,” Snyder said in a radio interview. - This doesn’t happen. Totalitarianism begins when the line between your public and private life becomes blurred.

If we cannot share information with our friends, family or loved ones without fear of it being made public, then we have no privacy. And if we don’t have privacy, then we’re not really free people.” We were talking about the leak and subsequent publication of correspondence between Hillary Clinton and Democratic Party functionaries, but the same applies to the monstrous system of total surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden, sanctioned by Presidents Bush and Obama.

“We must understand history, because fascism began with a detachment from reality,” Snyder reminds. – Fascism argued that facts are irrelevant. All that matters are impressions, emotions and myths.”

However, the most effective American marketer in the world has been cultivating feelings and emotions for half a century, and with him all kinds of left and right, liberal and conservative, racial, gender, national and religious politicians. American students at elite liberal universities, seeking the dismissal of professors and all kinds of restrictions on freedom of speech, are not much different from religious conservatives fighting against “insulting the feelings of believers.”

“When descending from the world of facts into the world of emotions, the first thing is to create an alternative reality that does not correspond to reality,” Snyder said at a meeting with readers. – Regardless of whether you are the Russian media or Breitbart (a right-wing radical online publication that supported Trump. – MD). Then they tell us that we are all smeared with the same world. This is a special kind of cynicism that claims that you can’t trust anyone, because everyone is pursuing selfish interests, everyone has their own share in the game. And then, as this belief spreads throughout society, we suddenly find ourselves in a world that is ripe for totalitarianism.

Snyder warns against the dangers of using patriotic slogans and meaningless repetition of political constructs. “When we repeat words and phrases broadcast by the media, we allow a narrowing of vocabulary and thoughts, which only benefits the “strong leader.”

“Come up with your own way of speaking!“, he advises the reader. And absolutely revolutionary for America, obsessively in love with electronic gadgets, is Snyder’s call: “Throw away your screens and surround yourself with books... The characters of Orwell and Bradbury did not have this opportunity, but you and I are still capable of this.”

The book contains advice that is new to Americans, but well known to Europeans and Russians. They all already passed in the 20th century, and they are going through it again now. “Beware of symbols of loyalty - be it a sticker or a bandage, or even a cap, no matter how harmless they may seem... When everyone follows the same logic and a society is covered in symbols of loyalty, then resistance becomes impossible.” “Hitler's language rejected the legitimacy of the opposition. The words “people” and “people” did not mean all of them, but only some. Disputes and clashes of opinions have always been portrayed as war. Any attempt by free people to understand the world in their own way was considered defamation and slander of the leader.”

Like the Soviet people who believed in social progress, Americans, especially young people, were also raised in faith. They believe that the free market pushes history in the right direction. Trump’s victory shocked many, not only rational thinkers, but also those who believe in emotions and rely on the omnipotence of reflection of “offended feelings.” Snyder suggests that from the usual “everything will be fine,” American society may swing in the other direction, deciding for itself that now everything will be “very bad.”

“After the Cold War, we were fascinated by the “politics of inevitability,” the idea that history had already ended with the victory of liberal democracy. We have let our guard down and are now moving towards a “politics of eternity” in which our past appears as a vast, foggy courtyard filled with obscure monuments to national sacrifice. Inevitability was like a coma, eternity was like hypnosis... The path of least resistance leads from inevitability to eternity.” “The danger we now face is the transition from a naive and amoral democratic republic to a confused and cynical fascist oligarchy,” Snyder concludes.

History is made up of what each of us does in our place. Today's twenty-year-olds have a chance to become the generation that changes history. Among the other pieces of advice Snyder gives, however, is one ominously succinct one: “Make sure you and your family have foreign passports.”

For the first time on March 24, 2017 in the publication Orthodoxy.ru #Territory of Life