Includes bibliographical references and index.

Noting that concentration camps were not where most of the victims of Nazism and Stalinism died, Snyder (history, Yale U.) investigates the murder of 14 million people by Nazi and Soviet regimes at killing sites in the "bloodlands," the geographic region between Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, encompassing the Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, the Baltics, and western Russia between 1933 and 1945. These killings were part of political mass murder and Soviet and Nazi policy but were not casualties of the war between them, and many occurred before World War II began. These include killings Stalin directed at Soviet Ukraine and during the Great Terror; the shooting and gassing of Jews in the Soviet Union, Poland, and the Baltic States; and the mass starvation of Soviet prisoners of war and the inhabitants of Leningrad. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Incorporated, Portland, OR (booknews.com)