Bloodlands

“Bloodlands”

With the end of World War I, Europe fractured, populations dispersed and emperors gave way to elected leaders. Eastern Europe, or the bloodlands, became a buffer between Germany and the Soviet Union. The territory stretched from the Baltics south through Belarus, Poland and the Ukraine. Here in the brackish currents of ethnicity, race and tribe, Stalin and Hitler pressed their ideologies and their dreams for empire – dreams that cost the lives of 14 million people.

In 1932, Soviet collectivization and bad weather undermined food production. To meet government quotas, farmers had to surrender their seed grain, leaving them with nothing to sow for the next year. By that summer, in Kazakhstan alone, more than a million people had starved to death. Stalin saw “the starvation of Ukrainian peasants as a betrayal by members of the Ukrainian communist party.” He ordered his loyal, forceful administrators to fix the problem, but the bad times returned. In the “Soviet famines of 1933,” more than five million people starved to death, mostly in the Ukraine. Instead of benefiting from the revolution, peasants were recast as enemies of the state and divided into classes...