Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

A central theme in Bloodlands is the systematic dehumanization at the heart of both Nazi and Soviet regimes. Snyder details how both Hitler’s and Stalin’s policies reduced individuals to mere numbers or obstacles to ideological goals. This theme is essential for understanding the mechanisms that made the mass killings possible. Through propaganda, legal discrimination, and pseudoscientific racial theories, the Nazis categorized people into hierarchies of worth, marking Jews, Slavs, and others as subhuman. Similarly, Stalin’s regime labeled groups as enemies of the people—kulaks, Ukrainians, or Poles—thus stripping them of their humanity and justifying their extermination or starvation.

This dehumanization went beyond rhetoric; it was embedded in the operation of the concentration camps, the execution of the Great Terror, and the starvation policies. The book’s description of the Hunger Plan and the Holodomor shows how dehumanization facilitated the unthinkable: the systematic starvation of millions. Snyder’s narrative forces readers to confront how the abstraction of human beings into categories or numbers enables atrocities. The theme underscores a critical takeaway: the peril of ideologies that prioritize abstract goals over individual human lives.

The book outlines numerous examples of the twisted thinking that went on in both regimes to justify the genocides: “Stalin shifted to a position of pure malice, where the Ukrainian peasant was somehow the aggressor and he, Stalin, the victim.