Timothy Snyder

Timothy Snyder

Timothy Synder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University. The American historian specialises in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust.

His most recommended book is Bloodlands. “This book is about not just World War II but it is also about the Stalinist repression of the areas known as the borderlands, which Snyder has termed the ‘bloodlands.’ Snyder is looking at the deliberate mass murder of civilians in a particular zone of Europe between about 1930, at the start of the second Ukraine famine, and 1945. The zone is the territory that lies between central Poland and, roughly, the Russian border, covering eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic republics.” Antony Beevor included Bloodlands in his best books on World War II.

Books by Timothy Snyder

Tim Snyder wrote a wonderful book, which could easily be on this list, called The Reconstruction of Nations. It’s about how from the population of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, destroyed in 1795, there arose several modern nations: the Lithuanian national movement, based on the Lithuanian language; the Belarussian national movement; and, interestingly, the Polish national movement. [Józef] Pilsudski, Marshal of Poland and one of the biggest figures of Polish history in the 20th century, said he wasn’t a Pole. He came from Vilna – that is, Lithuania.

The best books on Europe’s Vanished States recommended by Norman Davies

Interviews where books by Timothy Snyder were recommended

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