Response Paper: Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder

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I have chosen to write my response paper on our course’s monograph Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy D. Snyder published by Basic Books in 2010. This text is considered revisionist history and has been very well received, even earning the 2013 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. Snyder’s was considerably unconstrained in his research. He has a reading knowledge of eleven European languages allowing him utilize a wide range of primary and secondary sources. These widespread sources allowed him compile a book containing many groundbreaking perspectives and conclusions.
The main argument (thesis) of the text is that the “bloodlands” was the region where the regimes of Stalin and Hitler, regardless of their contradictory objectives and ideologies, interacted to intensify the tragedy and bloodshed that was worse than any seen in western history. The bloodlands are defined as the region that includes modern-day Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States, Poland and a portion of western Russia. The storyline examined in the text was over events that occurred in the bloodlands from the early 1930s to the 1950s, and the actions of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes that resulted in the murder of over fourteen million people. These
Fisher 2 events were: the political famine directed at Soviet Ukraine (1932-1933), Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937-1938, the combined German and Soviet effort to destroy the Polish educated class (1939-1941), Siege of Leningrad, Holocaust in German occupied Poland, Baltic States and Soviet Union, additionally the Soviets and Germans provoked one another to commit greater crimes. I believe Snyder wrote this text in order to view these events in an interconnected, broader perspective. He states,...

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...of one without mentioning the other.) I believe our instructor chose this specific text because it not only contains the main themes of the course but also discusses them with an original assessment. The text also attempts to teach the reader about the society and cultural that produced it. Bloodlands interweaves personal anecdotes and accounts and from the region moving beyond merely recording what happened and offering human
Fisher 4 dimensions. The Soviet and Nazi regimes “turned people into numbers” the author attempts to avoid the reader from doing the same (408). Snyder not only describes how the Soviet and Nazi regimes operated similarly, and details how they (before imperialism caused them to turn on each other in 1941) assisted each other. Both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany attempted to achieve their vision of utopia implemented through mass killings.

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