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Americans call the Second World War "the Good War." But before it
even began, America's ally Stalin had killed millions of his own
citizens-and kept killing them during and after the war. Before
Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as
many other Europeans. At war's end, German and Soviet killing sites
fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing
in darkness. ? Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly
definitive, Bloodlands is a new kind of European history,
presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist
regimes as two aspects of a single story. With a new afterword
addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary
decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone
seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its
meaning today.
**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** 'A sort of survival book, a sort of
symptom-diagnosis manual in terms of losing your democracy and what
tyranny and authoritarianism look like up close' Rachel Maddow
'These 128 pages are a brief primer in every important thing we
might have learned from the history of the last century, and all
that we appear to have forgotten' Observer History does not repeat,
but it does instruct. In the twentieth century, European
democracies collapsed into fascism, Nazism and communism. These
were movements in which a leader or a party claimed to give voice
to the people, promised to protect them from global existential
threats, and rejected reason in favour of myth. European history
shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can
collapse, and ordinary people can find themselves in unimaginable
circumstances. History can familiarise, and it can warn. Today, we
are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to
totalitarianism in the twentieth century. But when the political
order seems imperilled, our advantage is that we can learn from
their experience to resist the advance of tyranny. Now is a good
time to do so.
Remembering the lessons of Jan Karski, who risked his life to share
the truth with the world Richly illustrated with stills from the
black-and-white film adaptation of the acclaimed stage play,
Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski tells the story of World
War II hero, Holocaust witness, and Georgetown University professor
Jan Karski. A messenger of truth, Karski risked his life to carry
his harrowing reports of the Holocaust from war-torn Poland to the
Allied nations and, ultimately, the Oval Office, only to be ignored
and disbelieved. Despite the West's unwillingness to act, Karski
continued to tell others about the atrocities he saw, and, after a
period of silence, would do so for the remainder of his life. This
play carries forward his legacy of bearing witness so that future
generations might be inspired to follow his example and "shake the
conscience of the world." Accompanying the text of the stage play
in this volume are essays and conversations from leading diplomats,
thinkers, artists, and writers who reckon with Karski's legacy,
including Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Ambassador Stuart
Eizenstat, award-winning author Aminatta Forna, best-selling author
Azar Nafisi, President Emeritus of Georgetown Leo J. O'Donovan, SJ,
Ambassador Samantha Power, Ambassador Cynthia P. Schneider,
historian Timothy Snyder, Academy Award (TM) nominated actor David
Strathairn, and best-selling author Deborah Tannen.
The most complete English-language collection of the prose of
Tadeusz Borowski, the most challenging chronicler of Auschwitz,
with a foreword by Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny "Borowski's
sharp-edged descriptions of life in Nazi concentration camps
shatter the limits of even Kafka's most surreal
imaginings."-Benjamin Balint, Wall Street Journal "The most
important work of the most challenging chronicler of
Auschwitz."-Timothy Snyder, from the foreword In 1943, the
twenty-year-old Polish poet Tadeusz Borowski was arrested and
deported to Auschwitz as a political prisoner. What he experienced
in the camp left him convinced that no one who survived Auschwitz
was innocent. All were complicit; the camp regime depended on this.
Borowski's tales present the horrors of the camp as reflections of
basic human nature and impulse, stripped of the artificial
boundaries of culture and custom. Inside the camp, the strongest of
the prisoners form uneasy alliances with their captors and one
another, watching unflinchingly as the weak scrabble and struggle
against their inevitable fate. In the last analysis, suffering is
never ennobling and goodness is tantamount to suicide. Bringing
together for the first time in English Borowski's major writings
and many previously uncollected works, this is the most complete
collection of stories in a new, authoritative translation, with a
substantial foreword by Timothy Snyder that speaks to its enduring
relevance.
A powerful and revelatory history book about the bloodlands - the
lands that lie between Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany - where
14 million people were killed during the years 1933 - 1944. In the
middle of Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi
and Soviet regimes murdered fourteen million people in the
bloodlands between Berlin and Moscow. In a twelve-year-period, in
these killing fields - today's Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Western
Russia and the eastern Baltic coast - an average of more than one
million citizens were slaughtered every year, as a result of
deliberate policies unrelated to combat. In this book Timothy
Snyder offers a ground-breaking investigation into the motives and
methods of Stalin and Hitler and, using scholarly literature and
primary sources, pays special attention to the testimony of the
victims, including the letters home, the notes flung from trains,
the diaries on corpses. The result is a brilliantly researched,
profoundly humane, authoritative and original book that forces us
to re-examine one of the greatest tragedies in European history and
re-think our past.
Essays by a founder of the Borderland Foundation in East-Central
Europe explore the meanings of community in a fractured world. How
do we build civil society? How does a society repair itself after
violence? How do we live in a world with others different from
ourselves? These questions lie at the heart of Krzysztof
Czyzewski's writing and his work with Fundacja Pogranicze, the
Borderland Foundation, at the border of Lithuania, Poland, and
Belarus. Writing from the heartland of Europe's violence and
creativity, Czyzewski seeks to explain how we can relate better to
each other and to our diverse communities. Building on examples of
places and people in East-Central Europe, Czyzewski's essays offer
readers concepts such as the invisible bridge, the nejmar (the
bridge-builder), and the xenopolis (the city of others), which
create community throughout the world. The three sections of the
book-concepts, places, and practices-show how this cultural work
bridges the divide between concepts and practices and offers a new
map of Europe. Ultimately, Czyzewski hopes we can all move toward
xenopolis, toward the understanding that others are, in fact,
ourselves. This book offers an introduction to Czyzewski's work,
with framing essays by specialists in Central and East European
history.
Ukrainian dissident Myroslav Marynovych recounts his involvement in
the Brezhnev-era human rights movement in the Soviet Union and his
resulting years as a political prisoner in Siberia and in internal
exile. This memoir by a prominent Ukrainian dissident, now in
English translation, offers a unique account that spans the entire
postwar period, from the author's childhood in newly Soviet western
Ukraine and coming of age within the Communist system to the
collapse of the Soviet Union, concluding with his reflections on
culpability and justice in the post-Soviet context. Marynovych's
description of the varied landscape of Ukrainian dissent in the
1960s and 1970s focuses on the emerging human rights movement,
especially the creation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, of which
he was a founding member. He vividly recounts his encounters with
the Soviet repressive apparatus, including his arrest and trial,
and offers a rich picture of daily life in a Siberian prison camp
and his internal exile in Kazakhstan. Imbued with the author's deep
Christian convictions, this memoir sheds light on the key role
faith played for some participants in the Soviet human rights
movement, a movement that has most often been seen as having a
secular inflection. It also provides a fresh look at the complex
place of Ukrainian dissidents within the broader Soviet human
rights movement, as well as the interplay between human rights
advocates and other dissident groups in Soviet Ukraine.
Under the Soviet regime, millions of zeks (prisoners) were
incarcerated in the forced labor camps, the Gulag. There many died
of starvation, disease, and exhaustion, and some were killed by
criminals and camp guards. In 1939, as the Nazis and Soviets
invaded Poland, many Polish citizens found themselves swept up by
the Soviet occupation and sent into the Gulag. One such victim was
Julius Margolin, a Pinsk-born Jewish philosopher and writer living
in Palestine who was in Poland on family matters. Margolin's
Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back offers a powerful,
first-person account of one of the most shocking chapters of the
violent twentieth century. Opening with the outbreak of World War
II in Poland, Margolin relates its devastating impact on the Jews
and his arrest and imprisonment in the Gulag system. During his
incarceration from 1940 to 1945, he nearly died from starvation and
overwork but was able to return to Western Europe and rejoin his
family in Palestine. With a philosopher's astute analysis of man
and society, as well as with humor, his memoir of flight,
entrapment, and survival details the choices and dilemmas faced by
an individual under extreme duress. Margolin's moving account
illuminates universal issues of human rights under a totalitarian
regime and ultimately the triumph of human dignity and decency.
This translation by Stefani Hoffman is the first English-language
edition of this classic work, originally written in Russian in 1947
and published in an abridged French version in 1949. Circulated in
a Russian samizdat version in the USSR, it exerted considerable
influence on the formation of the genre of Gulag memoirs and was
eagerly read by Soviet dissidents. Timothy Snyder's foreword and
Katherine Jolluck's introduction contextualize the creation of this
remarkable account of a Jewish world ravaged in the Stalinist
empire—and the life of the man who was determined to reveal the
horrors of the gulag camps and the plight of the zeks to the world.
From the author of international bestseller On Tyranny, this
prescient analysis of Russia's ongoing interference in the West is
now more relevant than ever. 'One of the best...brisk, conceptually
convincing account of democracy's retreat in the early years of
21st century' Guardian The past is another country, the old saying
goes. The same might be said of the future. But which country? For
Europeans and Americans today, the answer is Russia. In this
visionary work of contemporary history, Timothy Snyder shows how
Russia works within the West to destroy the West; by supporting the
far right in Europe, invading Ukraine in 2014, and waging a
cyberwar during the 2016 presidential campaign and the EU
referendum. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the creation of
Donald Trump, an American failure deployed as a Russian weapon. But
this threat presents an opportunity to better understand the
pillars of our freedoms and face the choices that will determine
the future: equality or oligarchy, individualism or
totalitarianism, truth or lies. 'A brilliant and disturbing
analysis, which should be read by anyone wishing to understand the
political crisis currently engulfing the world' Yuval Noah Harari,
bestselling author of Sapiens
Ukrainian dissident Myroslav Marynovych recounts his involvement in
the Brezhnev-era human rights movement in the Soviet Union and his
resulting years as a political prisoner in Siberia and in internal
exile. This memoir by a prominent Ukrainian dissident, now in
English translation, offers a unique account that spans the entire
postwar period, from the author's childhood in newly Soviet western
Ukraine and coming of age within the Communist system to the
collapse of the Soviet Union, concluding with his reflections on
culpability and justice in the post-Soviet context. Marynovych's
description of the varied landscape of Ukrainian dissent in the
1960s and 1970s focuses on the emerging human rights movement,
especially the creation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, of which
he was a founding member. He vividly recounts his encounters with
the Soviet repressive apparatus, including his arrest and trial,
and offers a rich picture of daily life in a Siberian prison camp
and his internal exile in Kazakhstan. Imbued with the author's deep
Christian convictions, this memoir sheds light on the key role
faith played for some participants in the Soviet human rights
movement, a movement that has most often been seen as having a
secular inflection. It also provides a fresh look at the complex
place of Ukrainian dissidents within the broader Soviet human
rights movement, as well as the interplay between human rights
advocates and other dissident groups in Soviet Ukraine.
Vaclav Havel's remarkable and rousing essay on the tyranny of
apathy, with a new introduction by Timothy Snyder Cowed by life
under Communist Party rule, a greengrocer hangs a placard in their
shop window: Workers of the world, unite! Is it a sign of the
grocer's unerring ideology? Or a symbol of the lies we perform to
protect ourselves? Written in 1978, Vaclav Havel's meditation on
political dissent - the rituals of its suppression, and the sparks
that re-ignite it - would prove the guiding manifesto for uniting
Solidarity movements across the Soviet Union. A portrait of
activism in the face of falsehood and intimidation, The Power of
the Powerless remains a rousing call against the allure of apathy.
'Havel's diagnosis of political pathologies has a special resonance
in the age of Trump' Pankaj Mishra
Jan Karski's Story of a Secret State stands as one of the most
poignant and inspiring memoirs of World War II and the Holocaust.
With elements of a spy thriller, documenting his experiences in the
Polish Underground, and as one of the first accounts of the
systematic slaughter of the Jews by the German Nazis, this volume
is a remarkable testimony of one man's courage and a nation's
struggle for resistance against overwhelming oppression. Karski was
a brilliant young diplomat when war broke out in 1939 with Hitler's
invasion of Poland. Taken prisoner by the Soviet Red Army, which
had simultaneously invaded from the East, Karski narrowly escaped
the subsequent Katyn Forest Massacre. He became a member of the
Polish Underground, the most significant resistance movement in
occupied Europe, acting as a liaison and courier between the
Underground and the Polish government-in-exile. He was twice
smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto, and entered the Nazi's Izbica
transit camp disguised as a guard, witnessing first-hand the
horrors of the Holocaust. Karski's courage and testimony, conveyed
in a breathtaking manner in Story of a Secret State, offer the
narrative of one of the world's greatest eyewitnesses and an
inspiration for all of humanity, emboldening each of us to rise to
the challenge of standing up against evil and for human rights.
This definitive edition-which includes a foreword by Madeleine
Albright, a biographical essay by Yale historian Timothy Snyder, an
afterword by Zbigniew Brzezinski, previously unpublished photos,
notes, further reading, and a glossary-is an apt legacy for this
hero of conscience during the most fraught and fragile moment in
modern history.
Timothy Snyder traces the emergence of four rival modern
nationalist ideologies from common medieval notions of citizenship.
He presents the ideological innovations and ethnic cleansings that
abetted the spread of modern nationalism but also examines recent
statesmanship that has allowed national interests to be channeled
toward peace.
""A work of profound scholarship and considerable
importance."--Timothy Garton Ash, St. Antony's College, University
of Oxford
""Timothy Snyder's style is a welcome reminder that history writing
can be--indeed, ought to be--a literary pursuit."--Charles King,
"Times Literary Supplement"
""A brilliant and fascinating analysis of the subtleties,
complexities, and paradoxes of the evolution of nations in Eastern
Europe. It has major implications for all of us who want to
understand the processes of state collapse and nation-building in
the world."--Samuel P. Huntington, Harvard Academy for
International and Area Studies
""Snyder's ultimate query in this fresh and stimulating look at the
path to nationhood is how the bitter experiences along the way,
including the bitterest--ethnic cleansing--are to be
overcome."--Robert Legvold, "Foreign Affairs"
A captivating graphic edition of Timothy Snyder's bestselling book
of lessons for surviving and resisting the arc toward
authoritarianism. Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny is one of the
essential books of recent years, using the darkest moments in
twentieth-century history to teach twenty lessons on resisting
modern-day authoritarianism. These include a warning to be aware of
how symbols used today could affect tomorrow, an urgent reminder to
research everything for yourself and to the fullest extent, and an
encouragement to use personalised and individualised speech rather
than cliched phrases when arguing a point In this graphic edition,
Nora Krug draws from her highly inventive style in Heimat - at once
a graphic memoir, collage-style scrapbook, historical narrative and
trove of memories - to breathe new life, colour and power into
Snyder's modern classic, turning a quick-read pocket guide of
lessons into a visually striking rumination and call for action.
'On Tyranny is a must read, a clear-eyed guidebook' Ken Burns
History does not repeat, but it does instruct. In a time of great
uncertainty and instability, this edition of On Tyranny emphasises
the importance of being active, conscious, and deliberate
participants in resistance.
A virus is not human, but the reaction to it is a measure of humanity.
America has not measured up well. Tens of thousands are dead for no reason. America is supposed to be about freedom, yet illness and fear make its citizens less free. After all, freedom is meaningless if we are too ill to think about our right to happiness or too weak to pursue it. So, if a government is making its people unhealthy it is also making them unfree.
On December 29, 2019, Timothy Snyder fell gravely ill. As he clung to life he found himself reflecting on the fragility of health, not recognized in America as a human right, but without which all rights and freedoms have no meaning. And that was before the pandemic. We have since watched understaffed and undersupplied hospitals buckling under waves of coronavirus patients. The federal government made matters worse through wilful ignorance, misinformation, and profiteering.
This passionate intervention outlines the lessons we must all learn, wherever we are, and finds glimmers of hope in dark times. Only by enshrining healthcare as a human right, elevating the authority of doctors and truth, and planning for our children's future, can everyone be properly free.
Freedom belongs to individuals. But to be free we need our health, and for our health we need one another.
The 2013-2014 Euromaidan Revolution's call for justice, dignity,
and liberty brought Ukraine, which had 'disappeared ' behind the
Iron Curtain for decades after the horrors of World War II, into
the world's public consciousness. Yet, the country was soon almost
forgotten again. In early 2022, the rapid escalation of Putin's war
on Ukraine has put the country back into the spotlight. Without
knowing the country's past, one cannot understand its present. This
anthology tackles the complex history of terror and violence in
Ukraine - from the millionfold starvation of the Holodomor to the
changing occupation regimes, from the 'Shoah by Bullets' to the
Chornobyl disaster. Those ready to delve deeper into the checkered,
painful history of the country will better understand Ukraine's
current quest for independence, freedom, and democracy. The
volume's contributors are Serhii Plokhii, Timothy D. Snyder, Anna
Veronika Wendland, Anne Applebaum, Eduard Klein, Gelinada
Grinchenko, Gerhard Simon, Irina Scherbakowa, Jan Claas Behrends,
Karel C. Berkhoff, Kateryna Mishchenko, Klaus Wolschner, Nikolai
Klimeniouk, Nikolaus von Twickel, Oksana Grytsenko, Ottmar
Trașcă, Rebecca Harms, Sebastian Christ, Sébastien Gobert,
Viktoria Savchuk, Volodymyr Yermolenko, Wilfried Jilge, Christoph
Brumme, and Yevhen Hlibovytsky.
Wilhelm von Habsburg wore the uniform of an Austrian officer, the
court regalia of a Habsburg archduke, the simple suit of a Parisian
exile, the decorations of the Order of the Golden Fleece and, every
so often, a dress. He spoke the Italian of his archduke mother, the
German of his archduke father, the English of his British royal
friends, the Polish of the country his father wished to rule and
the Ukrainian of the land Wilhelm wished to rule himself. Timothy
Snyder's masterful biography is not only a reconstruction of the
life of this extraordinary man - a man who remained loyal to his
Ukrainian dreams even after the country's dissolution in 1921- but
also charts the final collapse of the ancien regime in Europe and
the rise of a new world order.
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE We have come to see
the Holocaust as a factory of death, organised by bureaucrats. Yet
by the time the gas chambers became operation more than a million
European Jews were already dead: shot at close range over pits and
ravines. They had been murdered in the lawless killing zones
created by the German colonial war in the East, many on the fertile
black earth that the Nazis believed would feed the German people.
It comforts us to believe that the Holocaust was a unique event.
But as Timothy Snyder shows, we have missed basic lessons of the
history of the Holocaust, and some of our beliefs are frighteningly
close to the ecological panic that Hitler expressed in the 1920s.
As ideological and environmental challenges to the world order
mount, our societies might be more vulnerable than we would like to
think. Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands was an acclaimed exploration of
what happened in eastern Europe between 1933 and 1945, when Nazi
and Soviet policy brought death to some 14 million people. Black
Earth is a deep exploration of the ideas and politics that enabled
the worst of these policies, the Nazi extermination of the Jews.
Its pioneering treatment of this unprecedented crime makes the
Holocaust intelligible, and thus all the more terrifying.
Focusing on state formation and the identity-geopolitics
relationship, makes the case that the Balkans were at the forefront
of European history in the century before World War I This
collection of essays places the Balkans at the center of European
developments, not as a conflict-ridden problem zone, but rather as
a full-fledged European region. Contrary to the commonly held
perception, contributors to the volume argue, the Balkans did not
lag behind the rest of European history, but rather anticipated
many (West) European developments in the decades before and after
1900. In the second half of the nineteenth century,the Balkan
states became fully independent nation-states. As they worked to
consolidate their sovereignty, these countries looked beyond
traditional state formation strategies to alternative visions
rooted in militarism or national political economy, and not only
succeeded on their own terms but changed Europe and the world
beginning in 1912-14. As the Ottoman Empire weakened and ever more
kinds of informal diplomacy were practiced on its territory by
morepowerful states, relationships between identity and geopolitics
were also transformed. The result, as the contributors demonstrate,
was a phenomenon that would come to pervade the whole of Europe by
the 1920s and 1930s: the creeping substitution of ideas of religion
and ethnicity for the idea of state belonging or subjecthood.
CONTRIBUTORS: Ulf Brunnbauer, Holly Case, Dessislava Lilova, John
Paul Newman, Roumiana Preshlenova, Dominique KirchnerReill, Timothy
Snyder Timothy Snyder is Richard C. Levin Professor of History at
Yale University. Katherine Younger is a research associate at the
Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, Austria.
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