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Book Review;Mass murder 书评;大屠杀 History and its woes;How Stalin and Hitler enabledeach other s crimes; 历史及其悲哀之处;斯大林和希特勒如何纵容彼此犯下大罪; Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. ByTimothy Snyder. 血染之地：希特勒和斯大林之间的欧洲，作者TimothySnyder。 In the middle of the 20th century Europe s two totalitarian empires, Nazi Germany andStalin s Soviet Union, killed 14m non-combatants, in peacetime and in war. The who, why,when, where and how of these mass murders is the subject of a gripping andcomprehensive new book by Timothy Snyder of Yale University. 在20世纪中期，欧洲大陆的两大集权帝国，纳粹德国和斯大林治下的苏联，在和平时期和战争时期杀死了1400万非战斗人员。这些大屠杀所涉及的人，屠杀的原因、时间、地点以及过程就是耶鲁大学的TimothySnyder的这本引人而内容全面的新书的主题。 The term coined in the book s title encapsulates the thesis. The bloodlands are the stretchof territory from the Baltic to the Black Sea where Europe s most murderous regimes didtheir most murderous work. The bloodlands were caught between two fiendish projects:Adolf Hitler s ideas of racial supremacy and eastern expansion, and the Soviet Union sdesire to remake society according to the communist template. That meant shooting,starving and gassing those who didn t fit in. Just as Stalin blamed the peasants for the failureof collectivisation, Hitler blamed the Jews for his military failures in the east. As Mr Snyderargues, Hitler and Stalin thus shared a certain politics of tyranny: they brought aboutcatastrophes, blamed the enemy of their choice, and then used the death of millions to makethe case that their policies were necessary or desirable. Each of them had a transformativeUtopia, a group to be blamed when its realisation proved impossible, and then a policy ofmass murder that could be proclaimed as a kind of ersatz victory. | 
