I chose to write my response article on our course 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 winning the 2013 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. Snyder was considerably free in his research. He has reading knowledge of eleven European languages ​​allowing him to use a wide range of primary and secondary sources. These widely available sources allowed him to write a book containing many groundbreaking insights and conclusions. The main argument (thesis) of the text is that the "lands of blood" were the region where the regimes of Stalin and Hitler, regardless of their conflicting goals and ideologies, interacted. to intensify the tragedy and bloodshed that was worse than anything seen in Western history. The Bloodlands are defined as the region that includes modern-day Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States, Poland, and part of Western Russia. The storyline examined in the text focused on events in the Bloodlands from the early 1930s to the 1950s, as well as 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) , the Siege of Leningrad, the Holocaust in The Germans occupied Poland, the Baltic States and the Soviet Union, and the Soviets and Germans provoked each other to commit greater crimes. I believe Snyder wrote this text in order to view these events from a broader, interconnected perspective. He states,...... middle of paper ...... of one without mentioning the other.) I believe our instructor chose this specific text because it contains not only the main themes of the course but also addresses them with an original assessment. The text also attempts to teach the reader about the society and culture that produced it. Bloodlands interweaves personal and local anecdotes and stories, going beyond simply recording what happened and giving HumanFisher 4 dimensions. The Soviet and Nazi regimes “turned people into numbers,” the author attempts to prevent the reader from doing the same (408). Snyder not only describes how the Soviet and Nazi regimes operated in similar ways, but also details how they (before imperialism forced them to turn on each other in 1941) helped each other. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany attempted to realize their vision of utopia through massacres..