BLOOD LANDS

In the middle of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes killed fourteen million people in certain borderlands between Berlin and Moscow. In these bloodlands, today's Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and the eastern Baltic coast, an average of more than a million civilians were killed annually by the Nazi and Soviet regimes during twelve years that both Hitler and Stalin were in power, from 1933 to 1944. Together Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union ruled most of the Eurasian landmass, but they killed chiefly, indeed almost entirely, in the bloodlands. Beyond the bloodlands, the regimes of Hitler and Stalin together, in their vast domains from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, deliberately killed no more than three million civilians in these years. If the compact area of the bloodlands is included, the figure rises to seventeen million souls.The centre of gravity of modern European history is here, in the frontier zones and lands between states advocating European ideologies, who assaulted European peoples, and eradicated an established European order.The center of gravity of modern European history is a black hole.Today Stalin's crimes are associated with Russia, and Hitler's with Germany: these countries were not the main sites of mass killing. People were killed in the lands between, where most of Europe's Jews lived, where Hitler and Stalin's plans overlapped, and where the Wehrmacht and the Red Army fought, and where the Soviet NKVD and the German SS concentrated their forces.