Timothy Snyder

To Resolve the Ukrainian Question Once and for All: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukrainians in Poland, 1943-1947

The complicated and violent interactions between Ukrainians and Poles during and after World War II have been the subject of competing Ukrainian and Polish historical interpretations. This article sifts through the historical evidence to determine why Ukrainian and Polish memories of that period are so much at odds. The fate of the contested territories of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia was decided ultimately by the Soviet Union, which imposed new borders on Poland. Once those borders had been established, the transfer of Poles from the newly enlarged Soviet Ukraine and the forced removal of Ukrainians from eastern Poland consolidated an ethnically cleansed post-war order.

The Polish‐Lithuanian commonwealth since 1989: National narratives in relations among Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine

Those who hold that national identity amounts to an organic historical tradition are likely to believe that it directly influences policy, while those who consider it recent and constructed are apt to contend that it is manipulated by political elites. A third position holds that nationally conscious people create narratives which, while constrained by brute historical facts, invariably prove their right to statehood. National conflicts, then, are best predicted not by the actual precedent of bloodshed, but by the interactions of the narratives of neighbouring nations which have recently attained sovereignty. This argument is tested by the case of contemporary relations among Belarus, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine.

The Ethical Significance of Eastern Europe, Twenty Years On:

Twenty years after the end of communism in Eastern Europe, the region seems to have lost its sheen of moral appeal. What has happened to the dissidents, the heroes, the ethical lessons? Yet the Eastern Europe of today has become, in new and surprising ways, the test case of three of the largest questions of political morality in the early twentieth century: free elections, energy independence, and the divisiveness of national memory.

Dan Stone. The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. 288 pp.

istration intervened with Cuban officials, which led to the admission of 5,000– 6,000 Jewish refugees to the island. Most importantly, though we know of the ultimate tragic fate of many of those who ended up in the western European countries that eventually would be overrun by the Nazis—two-thirds of them would be murdered in death camps—in 1939 the travelers themselves did not see themselves as doomed or damned. As Breitman and Lichtman put it, “In June 1939, the Holocaust had not yet begun. The St. Louis passengers, Jewish aid workers, and American officials all believed that the refugees had escaped Nazi persecution” (139). FDR and the Jews will not end the debates over the performance of the American government during the Shoah. Nor for that matter will it close discussion over the responses of American Jewry’s leadership during these desperate times, which is a collateral theme of this book. Predictably, these authors are not out in search of heroes and villains as they focus on the constraints, misperceptions, and rivalries that undermined Jewish communal efforts to save their people. Withal, FDR haters will certainly continue to dig up statements by the president during his long public career that they hope will undermine his reputation. And in their angriest poses, these critics will relate what they see as perfidy during World War II to postwar and even contemporary American administration attitudes towards Jews and the Jewish state. Meanwhile, historian friends of FDR will emphasize what they assert was his record of concern for Jews and the courageous battles that he waged against nefarious enemies within the United States while saving the world from totalitarianism. What is certain is the enduring truth of the statement that Breitman and Licthman make at the outset of this important work. There, they argue that the tragedy of the destruction of European Jewry goes far beyond the performance of one man in the White House. In the end, while the rescue of the Jews, even when possible, was for the president subordinate to winning the war, the murder of six million Jews, for the Third Reich, was at all times essential to its purposes, even rising above its goal of winning the war against the Allies.

L'Europe centrale prise entre deux terreurs

L’auteur de Terres de sang revient ici sur la methode de son livre. La volonte de partir d’un espace permet d’adopter une logique inclusive, en sortant des approches nationales ou strictement quantitatives, pour analyser les massacres de masse perpetres dans cette region par les nazis comme par les Sovietiques.

The Causes of the Holocaust

Not long ago I was discussing before a theatre audience in Philadelphia a performance of ‘Our Class’, Tadeusz Slobodzianskis remarkable theatrical reinterpretation of Jan Grosss pioneering book Neighbors. It helped so very much that the discussion took place after rather than before the performance! It is a great honour to find my book at the centre of this discussion by colleagues, but it would be great vanity on my part to expect that every reader of this exchange will have first read my book. And yet without some general sense of the argument and substance of Bloodlands , I can hardly explain why the four responses are so different each from the other, what underlying concerns unite them, and how they might be answered. The book is a study of all German and Soviet mass killing policies in the lands between the Black and Baltic Seas from south to north and from Smolensk to Poznan from east to west. It begins from the observation that fourteen million non-combatants were deliberately killed in this zone between 1933 and 1945, when both Stalin and Hitler were in power. The figure is very high in its own right, and represents the vast majority of Soviet and German killing. The territory can be defined in terms of the number of murdered, or as the place where the Holocaust was perpetrated, or as the zone touched by both German and Soviet power: all three definitions generate the same map of the bloodlands.

East European History: The “State of the Field” Report on the Stanford–Yale Workshop, September 17 and 18, 2010

What is east European about east European history, and what is historical about east European studies? Some twenty historians from the United States and Canada gathered at the History Department at Stanford to discuss the present, past, and, most importantly, the future of the east European field, broadly defined.

Ukrainians and Poles

In the middle of the seventeenth century, Orthodox clerics trained in the rhetoric and languages of the Polish Renaissance and Reformation settled in Moscow. Ukrainian clerics, for example, all but controlled the Russian Orthodox Church. The Cossacks profited from Pereiaslav to free themselves and much of Ukraine from Poland, but then under Hetman Doroshenko aimed for an alliance with the Ottomans. The Congress of Vienna created a Kingdom of Poland, usually known as the Congress Kingdom, which included Warsaw and some of central Poland. Romantic nationalism, as exemplified by Mickiewicz, also treated Russia rather as a political perversion than a national enemy, and emphasised not so much Polish national uniqueness as the Polish national mission. The partitions of Poland brought right-bank Ukraine, lands west of the Dnieper, into the Russian Empire. Ukrainian politics in Russia was forced towards the centre, but remained preoccupied with the peasant, who in Ukraine was or wished to be a farmer.

Balancing the Books

East Europeans know things about Nazi occupation that Westerners do not. Time for a new common narrative – Europes future depends on it

Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War II, and the International Politics of Restitution (review)

“Kosher food is big business” writes Timothy D. Lytton in Kosher: Private Regulation in the Age of Industrial Food (p. 7). The kosher food market generates about