“The Loneliness of the Dying”: General and Particular Victimization in Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

Abstract

Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands is part of a shift to the east in study of the Holocaust since the 1990s. Snyder depicts the mutually reinforcing, destructive impact of Hitler and Stalin in the territories from central Poland to western Russia, from 1933 to the 1950s. This review highlights Snyder's contributions but raises questions about the particularity of the “bloodlands” and the emphasis on mass killing as the work of outsiders to the region. It recognizes the value of a regional approach but notes that the global dimension of the Holocaust gets lost as do the specificities of groups of victims, whose suffering bound them together yet kept them apart.