What Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR had in common. Excerpt from Timothy Snyder's new book

At the end of August, the collaboration of Choven and Local History publishing houses will publish a bestselling book in Ukrainian by American historian Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands. Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, a deconstruction of the nature of two related totalitarian regimes: Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR, which was transformed into modern Russia.

In the heart of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered around 14 million people. The bloody lands, the place where all the victims died, span from central Poland to western Russia: Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states. During the rise 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 violence descended on this region on an unprecedented scale in history. The victims were mainly Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, Belarusians, and the peoples of the Baltic states.

Timothy Snyder's study summarizes the most tragic pages in the history of Eastern Europe in the twentieth century.