The Soviet Union was the largest state in the twentieth-century world, but its repressive power and terrible ambition were most clearly on display in Europe. Under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union transformed itself and then all of the European countries with which it came into contact. This book considers each aspect of the encounter of Stalin with Europe: the attempt to create a kind of European state by accelerating the European model of industrial development; mass murder in anticipation of a war against European powers; the actual contact with Europe's greatest power, Nazi Germany, during four years of war fought chiefly on Soviet territory and bringing untold millions of deaths, including much of the Holocaust; and finally the reestablishment of the Soviet system, not just in the reestablished Soviet system, but in the Baltic States, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and East Germany. The contributors take up not just high politics but also the experiences of the populations that were affected by them. Divided into four parts, the book deals with Soviet politics and actions mainly in the 1930s; the Soviet invasion and occupation of Poland; German aggression against the Soviet Union as well as plans for occupation and their improvised implementation; and Soviet wartime plans for the postwar period. This volume brings together the best work from a multi-year project sponsored by the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, including scholars who have worked with archival materials in numerous countries and whose research is often published in other languages.

Timothy Snyder opens a new path in the understanding of modern nationalism and twentieth-century socialism by presenting the often overlooked life of Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz, an important Polish thinker at the beginning of the twentieth century. During his brief life in Poland, Paris, and Vienna, Kelles-Krauz influenced or infuriated most of the leaders of the various socialist movements of Central Europe and France. His central ideas ultimately were not accepted by the socialist mainstream at the time of his death. However, a century later, we see that they anticipated late twentieth-century understanding on the importance of nationalism as a social force and the parameters of socialism in political theory and praxis. Kelles-Krauz was one of the only theoreticians of his age to advocate Jewish national rights as being equivalent to, for example, Polish national rights, and he correctly saw the struggle for national sovereignty as being central to future events in Europe. This was the first major monograph in English devoted to Kelles-Krauz, and it includes maps and personal photographs of Kelles-Krauz, his colleagues, and his family.

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.

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.

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.

**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.

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.

Even as economic and military walls have come down in the post-Cold War era, states have rapidly built new barriers to prevent a perceived invasion of 'undesirables.' Nowhere is this more dramatically evident than along the geographic fault lines dividing rich from poor countries: especially the southern border of the United States, and the southern and eastern borders of the European Union. This volume examines the practice, politics, and consequences of building these new walls in North America and Europe. At the same time, it challenges dominant accounts of globalization, in which state borders will be irrelevant to the human experience. In short, the volume brings borders back in to the study of international politics.

Even as economic and military walls have come down in the post-Cold War era, states have rapidly built new barriers to prevent a perceived invasion of 'undesirables.' Nowhere is this more dramatically evident than along the geographic fault lines dividing rich from poor countries: especially the southern border of the United States, and the southern and eastern borders of the European Union. This volume examines the practice, politics, and consequences of building these new walls in North America and Europe. At the same time, it challenges dominant accounts of globalization, in which state borders will be irrelevant to the human experience. In short, the volume brings borders back in to the study of international politics.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

Two explorers set out on a journey from which only one of them will return. Their unknown land is that often fearsome continent we call the 20th Century. Their route is through their own minds and memories. Both travellers are professional historians still tormented by their own unanswered questions. They needed to talk to one another, and the time was short. This is a book about the past, but it is also an argument for the kind of future we should strive for. Thinking the Twentieth Century is about the life of the mind - and the mindful life.