Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

Snyder chronicles the fourteen million civilians killed between Berlin and Moscow between 1933 and 1945 by both German and Soviet power — a geography of killing the Cold War's binary memory had obscured. The Bloodlands were Ukrainian, Belarusian, Polish, Baltic. The killing was industrial on both sides. Snyder insists each of the fourteen million be counted as an individual. The effort is moral and it exhausts you.