* In the middle of Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered fourteen million people in a zone of death between Berlin and Moscow.

* These were the bloodlands - today's Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, western Russia and the eastern Baltic coast. In a twelve-year period - 1933 to 1945 - as a result of deliberate polices unrelated to combat, an average of more than a million civilians were murdered annually. At the end of the Second World War the bloodlands fell behind the iron curtain, leaving their history in darkness.

* In this revelatory book Timothy Snyder offers a groundbreaking investigation of Europe's killing fields and a sustained explanation of the motives and methods of both Hitler and Stalin. He anchors the history of Hitler's Holocaust and Stalin's Terror in their time and place and provides a fresh account of the relationship between the two regimes. Using scholarly literature and primary sources in all relevant languages, Snyder pays special attention to the testimony of the victims: the letters home, the notes flung from trains, the diaries found on corpses.

* Brilliantly researched, profoundly humane, authoritative and original, Bloodlands re-examines the greatest tragedy in European history and forces us to rethink our past.