german war crimes that they would just check to see if there was a boy relationship. the final difficulty pass to do with comparison. what i have been edging toward is the argument to understand the soviet union to understand the crime that was committed that is an obvious point* that i am afraid it is not. but the thing is comparison. in two different ways.

>> so how do we get by this? what could we probably do? i'd like to begin by stressing that my major concern in writing this book was not to compare.

my major concern in writing this book was to describe and to explain. i wanted to describe who these people were, these 14 million who died, and explain how so many of them could possibly have been killed in such a small place over such a short period of time. my thought about comparison personally was when we understand all of the killing policies, most of us would agree are fundamental aspect of both regimes, then we'll be in the position to compare. it was my view we needed to understand them better. so my method in trying to describe and explain was as follows. a very straightforward conventional, highly traditional, traditional to the point of boring historical method. which basically consistented in

three parts. the first was to say that history happens in a time and place. the time and place is what i'm calling in the bloodlands between 1933 and 1945. this allows me to see the crimes from the perspective of the victims. it's where the victims lived and died. it also allows me, i think, hopefully in a fruitful way to bring the regimes into a story without constantly comparing one to another. these were terrains where soviet and germans were killed. if one focuses on the terrain, ones sees it dangerous. one sees what they did and check to see the places where they did or didn't interact. second, i distinguish between killing and letting die. i'm not saying letting die isn't significant.

being sent to gulag or concentration is a horrible fate. they let to very many millions of deaths. however, i am not discussing those within my 14 million. if i add those events in, the gulag, ethnic cleansing, that would add a few more millions deaths. the interesting thing to observe though, that most of the people who were killed in this region were deliberately killed. they were killed because they were sent to camps, they weren't killed by ethnic cleansing, they were deliberately killed by starvation, shooting, or gassing. deliberate killing on the territory is the most significant event. that's one the reasons why i chose to focus on it. another reason was it seems to me it has the innate significance, deserving of it's own attention. a final basic bit of historical method was there. nothing is beyond history. everything that happened in the

past is hit. we should try to understand it by way of historical method. this may seem elementary. but you'll understand what i many. there are many who say or believe one cannot understand the famine or terror in the soviet union without thinking ahead to what happened in the second world war. these things were somehow necessary because they prepared the soviet union to win the war. now i think factually, that's not true. but you have a deeper point. one has to understand as distinct events. rather than thinking if you look ahead you can re-evaluate them. they are historical term worthy of understanding in the time and place. you'll know there are people that believed that the holocaust is so special, one should only discuss it in metaphysical, and taints it to be discussed in historical terms. i think if we do not treat the

holocaust as a central historical event, subject to normal kind of historical understanding, that's when it,s uprooted and open to question. when one situates in history, that's when it's solid and indisputable. all of these methods are simple. i combined with the use of all of the languages of the territory that i was talking about that i knew. i know most of these languages. i wish i knew lithuanian, i don't. most of the rest of them i know. i mention that not to boast, but to point out in general, it's almost never the case that people who write about the soviet union use german, or people who write about germany, use russian. not to speech of polish or ukrainian, or yetish for that matter. i used historical method, very

elementary historical method has a way to stay grounded and stay close to the victims and follow the policies that brought their lives to an end. what were these policies? essentially the policies can be divided into three fazes. there's a period from 1933 to 1938 when it's the soviet union doing almost all of the killing. the germans are killing in the hundreds or maybe the thousands, but the soviets are already killing in the millions. then there's the second period between 1941 and 1945 when nazi and soviet are allies. the germans catch up. they kill at about the same pace and also killing about the same kinds of people. then there's the third period, the bloodiest of them all between 1941 and 1945, after the germans detray their soviet ally, invade the union, and kill millions of people east of the 1939 borders, jewish and

nonjewish. these periods break down into the following policies. before i talk about the policies, let me say a word about the introduction. the introduction is important, because the introduction recalls the first world war. the first world war was this strange and destructive episode which opened up a whole need of political possibilities. most of the options have been forgettable. in soviet union after 1917. these two options were among dozens of revolutionary possibilities after the first world war. the point is the first world war was is situation in which things which would have been improbable, become much more likely. there's something in particular about the first world war. that is this. the germans didn't lose the

first world war on the eastern front. they won the first world war on the eastern front. they were never defeated on the eastern front. they were defeated on the western front. which that for many germans, including nazi leadership, eastern europe and ukraine was a mystical land of opportunity, bread basket, place where a future empire could be won. this is crucial. it places eastern europe in the very important and imaginative geographies. it put ukraine in hitler and stalin in a way that's going to be important. the first chapter is about the famine in 1932 to 1933. what's making, as hitler was coming to power in germany, he's making speeches about the family in ukraine. he's saying the famine in crane is what marxism can mean to, my

means communist and social democrats and people that disagree with them. all in one bag. it's not a fair argument. the famine is going on and known about in germany. in the soviet union, the famine is, of course, a reality. in the fall of 1932, having already killed people forced as kulak, stalin takes the series of particular decisions which we can now document rather carefully which lead, and i think quite deliberately need to the starvation of about 3 million more people in soviet ukraine than had to die. the second chapter concerned the great terror. the second and third. when we have thought about the great terror in the past, we've had in mind the intellectuals,

i'm wearing contact lenses. the political leaders, the old leaders, at best the military officers who some of us know were killed. in fact, the great terror was a pass killing. it was directed at normal soviet citizens. the largest group of people to die was the so called kulak. it was meant a pheasant who had somehow survived forms of soviet repression and might therefore oppose the regime. the second largest group of victims in the great terror were members of small national minorities. this is the subject of chapter 3. the bloodiest national action was the polish action which took place largely in soviet ukraine and soviet belarus, in which more than 100,000 people were shot on the charges of being spies for poland. that concludes the first period in which the soviets are killing and the germans killing on a

many, many smaller scale. the second period is the period between 1939 and 1941 when the germans and soviets joined together as military allies. the germans used the cover of this alliance to invade the low countries in france as well as some of scandinavia as well as the battle of britain in the air. they occupy baltic states and along with germany, poland. the main subject is joint occupation of poland in which hundreds of thousands of people are deported and 200,000 people are killed. the striking thing about this period, this is the time when the germans catch up to the soviets. this is the moment, when for example, the people are killed in masses. this is also the time when the germans and soviets are in the closest agreement about what sorts of people should be

killed. the demographic profiling is such that were often, the germans end up killing one sibling, and the soviets another sibling. the reason is that both groups are after the intelligentsia. it was a word that was used in russian, german, and polish. it comes out of the 19th century. for pohls, it has the significance, ukrainians as well, the significance of the group which is supposed to embody both national culture and national politics. interestingly, the germans and soviets agree the way to destroy from the german view or master it from the soviet view was to destroy the intelligentsia, both of them tried to do this. the third period is the period when the germans betray soviet ally in operation of belarus. i begin with the long political economy. that might not seem the most dramatic way to proceed.

it is much more proceed to describe blitzcreed, to describe the subprize of -- surprise of stalin. i get to that. here in the middle of the book, i wanted to emphasize how important political economy was. what do i mean by political economy? i mean the imagined vision of how colonization could take place. i try to remind readers of what the soviet vision was. as stalin saw things without the possibility for territorial enlargement, the soviet union itself had to be internally colonized. collectivization had to be used to create capital so that the soviet union itself could modernize. then there's the german vision which some ways contradicts, and borrows from soviet union. it is going to be demodernized. if the city is going to be

destroyed, industry is going to be removed. 30 million people are going to starve together in the first winter after the war. after the war, several millions of more people are going to be deported, assimilated, or enslaved. in all of this, it's also planned that all of the jews east of germany are going to disappear. how that's going to happen hasn't been decided before the war. so the germans go into the soviet union with these plans. these plans are now known as the hunger plan. they don't achieve these gin -- these things. they have to see the moral premise of the german occupation. i deal with the german policy that most closely resemble, mainly the starvation of prisoners of war. 6.2 million were starved to death, another half a million were shot. this is a huge figure. it's often overlooked.

there's striking things to notice. as late as december 1941, the largest group of victims of the german occupation were not jews or pohls or anyone else in ethnic terms, but soviet prisoners of war. in occupied poland alone where the germans starved, they brought them to camps and occupied poland and starved them, the largest victim group was not jews or pohls, but soviet prisoners of war. this was a crime on a huge scale. which the polish resistance, by the way, observed and reported on. they tried to help them. for the most part, it goes completely overlooked. for that reason among others, i pay attention to it. the other place where the germans come close is in the starvation seizure of leningrad. 100,000 people were starved to death. because they planned to kill the population of leningrad, destroy the city, and hand over the

ruins to finland, it can be seen as constant with the earlier planning. i then close in three long chapters which deal with the events that defined the bloodlands more than any other. the depths of the policies more starkly than the other. that's the holocaust. i divide it up into three different chapters. although there were overlaps. the first of these concerns ukraine, it prevents the german initial policy of killing jewish men, that rapidly escalated to women and children and whole communities. in ukraine we see it from a transition of policy to murder of some jews to what very quickly by december 1941, although opinions vary, policy of destroying all jews. in the second chapter on belarus, i concentrate on the relationship between the holocaust, the jews in belarus, in german anti-partisan actions. belarus was the center of soviet

partisan activities. it was here more than anywhere elsewhere the germans killed civilians in reprisals. it has to be in quotation marks. some of the reprisals involved taking whole community, putting them in barns, burning. putting them over ditches and shooting them. or by the end of the war, taking and killing all of the women and children, and taking all of the men back to slave laborers. that was not a reprisal in any traditional sense. hundreds of thousands of people in belarus died in this way. more than 300,000 nonjews in belarus were shot by the germans, civilians i'm talking about, during the war. if you put into the soviet p.o.w.s and the belarus russian soviet citizens who died in other german policies, it was the territory that was most touched by the second world war.

in the final chapter, i deal with the death facilities in occupied poland, starting with belzets. it was the person that executed the final solution in poland. it was also the person that was in charge of planning concrete planning in the soviet union. one can see how the germans fell back from the nor ambitious of kills tens of millions and became much more precise and escalated against a specific group, namingly jews by focusing in 1942. i described what happened at betzec and then auschwitz where jews were gassed. we take the number of jews shots

and gassed, the total number is 5.4 million. another 300,000 were killed by the romanians. the final chapter deals with the warsaw uprising. during the uprising, actions unrelated to combat. they killed at least 120 civilians in the early days of august 1944, they were shooting several thousands civilians a day which were unrelated to combat. i can close the book with two chapters that were not about killing in my sense, but were necessary to bring us to the second world war to today. the second in 1942 to 1948, carried out first in the caucuses and in crimean, then among ukrainians, pohls, and jews, as well as balks, and poland itself.

this is the largest total action. what becomes the federal public of german and german democratic republic. these are tremendous movements that involve huge numbers of death as well as rape. i try to describe them very carefully. in my view, these events as horrible as they are, are a transition from the age of mass killing to the age of cold war. i try to show the holocaust in the eastern europe and east of the soviet union was difficult to handle. stalin towards the end of his life developed a new kind of anti-semitism, which has made it harder for the holocaust. is there an explanation for all of this? let me try to do so very, very briefly. we see two ideas, two ideologies

of global transformation? one focused on a race, one focused on a class. for different reasons, both of these ideas have a territorial focus. that territorial focus is the lands between berlin and moscow. what i mean by this, in this world, shared by nazis and defined in some sense of the first world war and great depression, in which the only possibility for expansion seemed to be onland, ukraine, and poland for different reasons economic and political were at the focus of both regimes. now this is not just abstract matter. first the soviet, then the germans try to control the terrain.

then they destroy poland. which is a barrier to both of them. then they move forward. it's important not just to compare the soviets and germans abstractly. it was in a series of retreats. the very idea of modernizing within the soviet union, rather than going further was a kind of retreat. collectivization and punishing people was a kind of retreat. the germans are advancing, they have their own very ambitious idea of a euroasia revolution which is going to be for the benefit of his race. what they carry out is absolutely horrible. but the policy they carry out, the holocaust did the exhaust sadly all of the planning they went into the war on the eastern front with. they retreat to the particular policy which defines one enemy,

an enemy which can be destroyed sadly the jews as the main enemy of the war. that's not a full explanation of the holocaust, of course, but it gives a sense of how the timing in all of this is different. in the book, i try to stress that ideas matter. ideas cannot be separated from economics. it makes no sense to try to understand stalinist ideas of development simply in terms of ideology without a notion of how the soviet union is going to become modern. the same holds for nazi germany. the vision of destruction was a vision of colonization, racial colonization, therefore, it's highly ideological, and also a vision of colonization, new kind of empire. the ideology could not have worked out the economics, and economics could not have worked without the ideology. likewise, i try to emphasize that ideology cannot be understood would politics. the politics that one can only

study by seeing the advance in retreat that i'm talking about. the politics between the encounters, and which is evident when groups resists germans and soviets, and hitly and -- hitler and stalin have to decide what to do. all of that is politics. the tender and controversial, to use a word i don't like, kind of politics is the politics of the interaction between the soviet union and nazi german. this would involve competition and military alliance, or it could involve war. but i would stress that even when it involved war, the two regimes made each other worse. so, for example, why did so many prisoners of war die in the camps. because stalin wouldn't allow his generals to retreat. why did so many belarus-russian

soldiers die? because soviet partisans intentionally provoked among other things. in the gulag in 1941, 1942, and 1943, we have the worse deaths. about 500,000 people are registered as having died. they died because they were sentenced to the gulag. they also died because nazi germany had invaded and disinstructed. are they victims of hitler or stalin? like many other people, the blame is shared. this brings me to the last point that i want to make. it has to do with precisely the comparison. as i said, i did not write this book because i wanted to compare nazi germany and the soviet union. it was my view and still is my view going into the book that we -- these comparisons are too abstract and too theoretical about history. that have said, comparison is something that ought to be done.

i put it at the end of the book. logically, i don't think comparison is sustainable. if i were to stand here and say to you, you cannot compare the soviet union and nazi germany, the only logical content is i have already made the comparison. i would very much like for you not to do so. it has no other meaning. the word incomparable is a judgment. you cannot say both are incomparable unless you've looked at both of them and made the comparison. the comparison taboo is essentially a power play. it just means i have the microphone. it does not have any stronger meaning than that. the second thing about comparison is that if we really

want to know -- if we want to defend the differences between the soviet union, and nazi germany, i think the differences are very, very significant. if one wants to defend the differences, one has to make the comparison. if you want to say that nat -- nazi germany was special, which is what i do in comparing in my book, you find interesting things. almost everybody, including historicals of the holocaust believes that the soviets killed more civilians than the germans. in fact, that's not true. the germans killed more civilians than the societies did. a lot of things that we just think are true because we've been told or retreating them, don't stand up to an actual comparison. the third thing that i think about comparison is this. setting the taboo on comparison is the luxury of the present

day. given that the germans killed on the same territories that the soviets killed, people who lived there. we're talking about tens and hundreds of millions of people. in 1941, a foreign invasion came. then they compared. there were people who had survived hunger in 1933 who were then starved in german camps in 1941. naturally, they compared. once you see this, the list goes on and on and on. whether we're talking about jews in 1939 who were trying to decide when both the soviet union and nazi germany invadeed which way to free, and

belarus-russians when they had to decide to join the partisans and german police, whether we are talking about pohls in 1944, who are trying to decide whether we should begin the uprising as soviet power was about to replace german. all of these people were condemned to compare. if we place comparison somehow beyond our own historical investigations, we are not being fair to the people that lived in the times and places, and our own analysis of a very important element. it's hard to grasp. once we have carried out the comparison, analyzed the poll sis, once we have tried to understand the individual ways in which all of the people, jews, pohls, russians, and others were killed, we're left with the overwhelming figure,

which is 14 million. i think that figures matter. i think that numbers matter. i think it's very important to try to get numbers right. but i also think that as we try to get numbers right, we should be careful with them, among other reasons, because the difference between zero and one is so great. the difference between zero and one is an infinity. the difference between life and death is itself an infinity. and each increment is another infinity. the difference between zero and one as we can all remember as we think of the last person that we cared about is so enormous. the difference between zero and one is the same difference between the difference between 720,031, and 720,032. the end number matters. we have to do this partly for the human reason, but also for

the historical reason. history is not about death. history is about life. and that's why an account such as this one brings us to the borders of what history can actually do. but because history is about life, i tried to portray some of the individuals who died while they were alive. hard though that was. very often when writing about the famine or holocaust or any of these tragedies, people appear at the moment when they die essentially. i tried to introduce in this book to people such as the little boy in ukraine who saw food when there was no food, and died in the famine, and the rest of the family that died in the famine or terror. the polish officer were he was shot, he was keeping a diary and left about his wedding ring which they were trying to take from him. or the young woman in the synagogue that knew she was

about to be shot and scratched a note to her mother on the wall. we have these kinds of terribles. without these kinds of materials and without reference, in the end we don't have history. we don't have the kind of history that can rescue the events from people who perpetrated them. from hitler and stalin. which is why i end the book with an attempt, having seen how hitler and stalin turned the world, trying to turn the numbers back into human beings. it seems to me, if we can't do that in the end, they have won. thank you very much. >> there's a kind of logic to

the way you structured the book. i'm not going to quarrel with it. you chose also not to discuss certain issues. one of them is the collateral civilian deaths of the war. i'm just wondering is that because the statistics are unreliable? it seems to me -- you also chose not to discuss the implications of this massive wave of killings for these societies. it just seems to me that in the contemporary development of these countries, the legacies of these poorly discussed events, particularly in ukraine and belarus are a haunting legacy and a political problem. is this something that you hope to turn to? or why -- was it simply you couldn't discuss everything in the order of the book? it just seems to me that, you know, if you take the civilian collateral casualties, in addition to the deliberate death and the -- military casualties have sort of ranked in file

soldiers, there's the vast destruction of the societies. what does it do to their view of the outside world? it creates, i think, a certain kind of hostility, a more harsh and fierce people that's separate and distinct from the soviet experience. so i wanted to sort of put those on the agenda. and again to ask why you didn't specifically talk about the additional numbers. i don't know what those numbers are. they are in the, you know, they are probably another 10 million soldiers that fought in that war and also civilian casualties apart from those that you have circumscribed that died in that period in the same space. >> yeah. >> every book as a certain form. and form allows us to do the things that we do. form also prevents us from doing other things. i think the thing that i like

the most about your question is the way that it takes the form of my book to be self-evident. you call it adamanting, very strong indeed. and one works very hard to make these things self-evident. no one had remotely done before what i did. no one had made the observation that the killing was concentrated in the region and tried to explain it. that was my goal. if i've done that much, then i'm happy. if i've made it seem like a self-evident approach, then i've succeeded, i've got to say beyond my wildest dreams. to answer the question in more specific terms, the -- it's not that i don't discuss, that's a little too strong. i do discuss civilian deaths. i mention them, i also discuss the war. the war is going on from 1939 to 1945. there are many places in the book where i talk about how many soldiers fell in such and such a battle. i don't include them in my definition of the number of people who died by policies of deliberate murder in the

bloodlands. for two reasons. the first is that i want to try to understand policies of deliberate killing. and it's so easy for those things to bleed analytically into ethnic cleansing and deportation and battlefield action. i realize there's a natural reason for that, these are related. i had a sense that not only had we not concentrated on the time and place, we hadn't quite expracticed this sort of hard, terribly hard kernel of reality from the other darkness surrounding it. i wanted to make sure we had a good record of the deliberate killing. the question about collateral, so-called collateral damage and war deaths has to do with your question about memory. there, of course, you are right. at the end of the book we make sure the reader knows how many people died in the second world war title. i mentioned it in the introduction as well. the losses are catastrophe.

our grasp of them is poorer than the grasp civilian death. especiallyien -- especially on the civilian side. we don't know how much of the demography is covering. there was a period when the numbers were too low, and then there was a period in the '70s when the numbers were too high. the people that have worked on this found that the recordkeeping was incredibly uneven. in general, i didn't include it because of the phenomenon. you are right, if you put the military into this as well, by my calculation, which is rough, about half of the deaths in the entire second world war, including the pacific theater, happened in the bloodlands as well. we're looking at a catastrophe loss of life. why don't i talk about memory? i don't talk about member because i thought for a couple of reasons. i thought it would dilute the

project. if i made my own reasons known, people would read the history in what i have to say about memory. which is the last thing that i wanted. because i care about the memory discussions. i thought my greatest contribution to the memory discussions would be to try to write a history which was as unbiased and professional and grounded and objective as possible. i'm not saying i succeeded in all of those things. in different kinds, this maybe pie in the sky. different kinds of pohls and jews and russians and so on, not to mention americans, and others, could see this book as a kind of starting point, they would have a starting point which we really don't have. the one thing that i say about memory at the end has to do with numbers. i have a general concern that we be cautious with numbers and not inflate them. i think it's -- i think for all cases it's a bad thing when we release the thirty spirits of

people who never lived. the real discussions are bad enough. >> professor snyder, in your " the bloodlands" you mention that 300 million people died in '32, and '33. can you give clarity as to how you derived that number. it's conquest and others who have written on this topic. >> first of all, i want to say that robert conquest was an incredibly important -- is an incredibly important historian. the book about the famine and terror. provided interpretations which very often turned out to be right. some of the ways that he argued

with the terror and famine whicher highly controversial and generally rejected at the time are now part of the scholarly consensus. one the elements is the numbers. and that's the very simple reason that when conquest was writing those books, we just didn't have any idea. and the figures that he was relying on for both famine and terror were sort of second hand from people inside the soviet union. or at best, they were demographic projections of a kind which we could probably now reject. since conquest's incredibly important book, the "harvest of sorrow" two important things has happened, soviet union came to the end, historians started working on the issue. some of them train demographerred. in general, they have found that something on the range between the low end 2.4 million, or maybe it's 2.5, at the high end

maybe as many as 4 million ukrainians died. there is a controversy among historians within that range. but whether you are looking at australians or americans or ukrainians in ukraine working on this, you will not find people who are actually looking at the numbers in a serious way that go beyond that way in either direction. you won't find people that die in the event. that it killed millions of people. you won't find people that go above 4 million, if they do just by a little bit. how i came to that number. i'm not a demographer. i relied on the demographic studies that have been done, and the very long demographer of steven wheatcroft. i looked at ukrainian

historiography on the subject. don't by ukrainians in ukraine, that believed they were done by a distinct event. that's what ukrainians and ukraine are arguing for. now in my best estimates that was 3.3. now the difference between the famine and other events like the terror or even important elements like the holocaust, we don't have kill records. we don't have quotas and the kinds of figures which are ever going to resoft the dispute. when i say 3.3, that's an estimate in the sense that numbers for parts of the holocaust or terror are not estimates. those are calculations on other local and reliable and important sources. 3.3 million is always going to be an estimate. it's within a range of a few hundred thousand of being right. i would be very surprise first-degree -- surprised if

that turned out not to be the case. it's entirely controversial on the people that look at the subjects, whatever their commitments might be. >> i was wondering why you didn't not use the term holodomr which seems to be more accurate, rather than famine, thought as natural event. second, do you, in fact, believe the holodomor was a genocide against the ukrainian people? >> at the book, at the end, there are so many -- is there so many terminological questions. i allowed myself to write at the end of the book why i use some words and not others. i make a distinction in the book, i'm getting to your question. it doesn't sound like it, but i am. between the final solution and

holocaust. people use those in the same meanings. the final solution getting rid of the jews finally. in most of its versions and draft versions, it involves some kind of deportation. murderous, but not physical murder on site. it's the holocaust. the final version of the final solution. to understand, one has to make the distinction. with holodomor, i say something different. the reason that i don't use it, i think it would be distracting for english-based audiences. you could say it in this room, and it would be clear. i think 98 or 99% of my readership does not have ideas about the famine one way or the other. introducing them is not going to the best way to grasp. behind your question about language is a question about

deliberation. forgive me about saying this, from this i can tell you haven't read the book. i make a strong case in the chapter, it was a deliberate policy. after the policies and tens of thousands of killings, at a time when stalin knew that was a famine, that was his word in ukraine, he deliberately escalated policy in concrete ways. blacklist on individual communities if you didn't make requisition targets, you couldn't trade with the rest of the world. there were the meat quotas. if you didn't make the targets, you had to turn in the animals and livestock. for us doesn't sound like much. people that live in the countryside, they know the livestock is the last -- that's the last thing for starvation. you can get milk, slaughter it for meat. of course, in that world,

agrarian world, everyone knew. not letting pheasants to buy tickets to go to cities. sealing the border of ukraine. there was the requisition targets, guaranteed that millions of people were going to die when only hundreds of thousands of people were going to die. i make that clear. whether it's a genocide or not is another question. in that section at the end my book which i refer, i also explain why i don't use the word genocide in the whole book. the reason that i don't, i think precisely when you talk about these things, you end up in your discussions was it a genocide or not? i do think they are enlightening. one the reasons is that people mean different things by the word. it's beyond my power in one book or one lecture to change that. you have to recognize your

limits. people think when they say genocide, the december stings of whole people, or they mean the human convention definition in 1948 which is much broader and looser. it would include things like taking children and schooling them in a different language. the traditional definition, i agree with the word, i think it was a genocide. by the human definition, was it an attempt to physically murder the entire people. no, it wasn't. that's the popular definition of the word genocide. i avoid using the word. once you start, i'm afraid all you do is confuse people. >> despite your pledge, don't do what i do, don't compare. i would like you to elaborate on

two processes related to the killing policies. that is the decision making processes and communication of these policies as done by nazis and by the stalin regime. nazis seem to me, i'm not a historian, but the policies were clearly described communicated kill, kill, kill. i'm curious if you have an opportunity to look at the source materials in both native languages. is this the case and how that compare between these two regimes. >> okay. >> you are not violating my rule. i do compare. i just -- my sense is that we have just to try to be clear. my sense that we have too many comparison, and not enough basis for comparison. i would rather give people basis, knowing that naturally

people compare. naturally, all of you in the room compare and lots of other people and people of the time. my point rather that i see the book above all as an attempt to inventory and explain these killing policies. which then might help people make the larger comparisons. but at these particular levels, like the one you describe, i compare throughout the book. there are all kinds of comparison judgments. what you say is interesting. it reflects what the common view is, the germans were precise, they were prussian officials, where the soviets were sloppy. who knows it was all carelessness. it turns out to be not true. turns out not to be true. the germans had what the soviet didn't. they had explicit large-scale plans to kill millions of people. the two major ones are the hunger plan and [inaudible] we expect 30 million to die,

there's nothing like that on paper. the germans do not carry out the plans. they give you a sense of what they wanted to do, what they were willing to do, what ideology sanctioned. you can't say they followed the plans to the letter. they didn't. reality intervened. same is true with the holocaust. one the reasons why it's a difficult subject. people think there has to be -- you know, there has to be a plan with proper paragraphs and hitler's signature. there's no such thing. they talked about this themselves. there are thousands and thousands of indications about what they talked about and how holocaust happened. one is never going to say this is a plan. it doesn't exist. no one is ever going to find it. it doesn't mean the holocaust didn't happen. the germans had big ambitious plans and in practice and killing policies, there's a lot of communication back and forth, back and forth, where the center

gives general ideas of what's going to happen. the people at the idea, report back. and the center gives an indication to go forward or stop. it's usually go forward. it's not the kind of careful memorandum that you would expect. on the soviet side, there's no master plan to kill millions of people. when there is the intentional to kill millions of people, it's extremely well documented. the soviets wrote things down, recorded them, they thought the revolution and history was on their side. they put things in the filing coo -- filing cabinets and then archived. when the file could come back, he'd right to be archived. we must export as much as possible after they talked about the conditions in ukraine.

stalin says yes, right, that's documented. for the terror, we have the numbers. we have the quotas that went down from the center, the local branches, and fulfill the quotas and we'd like the higher number. that is all recorded in excruciating detail, in many greater detail than we have on the german side. which i didn't expect either. but that's the way it actually looks. or with cateen, for example, it's clear, the documents from stalin signs give in precise detail what they are going to do. >> what did you think the terror and holocaust? in other words, did the stalinist policies that took place in the 1930s or starting

in the smaller famines in 1920s, do you feel those events aided and abetted the subsequent nazi policies as they moved across eastern europe? >> well, there are relationships. and i try to document them in the book. i wouldn't say there's a relationship which is a straightforward as that. it's surely the case that the famine was known about at the time; right? it was known about at the time in a way which it wasn't after the war and the cold war interestingly enough, there's research about this which makes it clear, it wasn't known about right when it was happening, but as early as spring of '33, when the diaspora, that's the wrong

word, they are writing letters to the president roosevelt at the time which is about to begin official relations with the soviet union. the famine is known about. i stress that. other places it's known about in germany. the fact of the famine happened is one the reasons. i would say it's the second tier, but it's one the reasons why european politics become polarized. famine is one more argument for being anti-communist. hitler uses it. but it's not a major argument. it's a second tier argument. it's in their somewhere in the mix. it's one the reasons why politics are polarized, not the main reason. the famine is one the reasons why west ukrainian nationalist are common. i think it hasn't been appreciated. it's one the reasons why romanians are anti-communist, because famine victims flee into poland and romanian. people in those countries have

experience with famine victims. it's a real pulpable event, which contributed to anti-communism. it's one the reasons why people are willing to believe that german rule might be better. there's lots of reasons. more of them going back to the first world war. in the book, i try to press more subtle and more far reaching claim. which is that especially ukraine office at the center of attention to both the soviets and the nazis. for both of them, it was a kind of key region for the transformation of the system. from the soviet point of view, you had to be able to master ukraine in order to export, get capital, industrialize the system. it was a bread basket for that reason. for the nazi point of view, i wished i talked about this more in the talk. nazi point of view, it's also in the bread basket. what the nazis mean to do to use the collective farm and keep it. use it to divert food into

germany and western europe and just let the russians and belarus-russians starve. that's their plan. the book and ukraine is at the center of things. ukraine is at the center of hitler's vision. yet he wants to master food in the second rate and second tier caucasian oil. in his view, soviet union is communist state. to control the terror and mast murder from the nazi point of view. in that sense, the two events, and that sort of underlying sense where both regimes see ukraine as a key to economic transformation which is going to cost many millions of lives. in that sense, the two events

are related. that's a kind of structural argument which i have to develop slowly chapter by chapter by chapter. >> thank you. >> my pleasure. >> for very interesting analysis. we look forward to the next book. >> thank you. [applause] [applause] >> timothy snyder is a history professor at yale university and the author of several books, including "the reinstruction of several nations," and "reprince." for more information visit perseusbooksgroup.com and search the author's name. >> we're here talking about the best seller game change. is there another book in the

works for the two of you. >> there is. we're working on a sequel. hbo is making a movie about this one, and at the same time, we're working on the book about the next presidential campaign. >> will there be any kind of paperback update? >> there is. we have a new one that takes into account over everything that's happened between the 22 months between the last election and this one. :