kristol. now timothy snyder history professor at yale university recounts the mass killings overseen by a lot of fer and joseph stalin from 1933 to 1945. mr. snyder examines the region between berlin and moscow that he dubbed the blood lands. 14 million people were killed over the 12 year period. timothy snyder discusses his book at the ukrainian institute of america in new york city. it's an hour and ten minutes. 64. it's a delight to be here. i appreciate you taking an hour of this bright and perfect afternoon in new york to spend it listening to an account of what may be the single darkest chapter in the history of the modern west. what i would like to talk to you about this afternoon is a catastrophe. a catastrophe in which 14 million people, chiefly children and women in the ages were killed over the space of just 12 years by two regimes, the nazi german regime and the stalinist regime in the soviet union. this total figure of 14 million is in itself i think astonishing it is too large to grasp and i will return to what that means and how we might try to grasp that but it's also a number that tells us something very special about the two regimes. we now know or have least have a pretty good certainty about the total number of people killed by their regimes. it was about 17 million. of those 17 million, about 14 million were killed in a place the line calling the blood lands. that is to say not so much russia, not so much germany that the land between for moscow. baltic states, ukraine and most of poland. so what this means is of all the killing that took place, organized by both hitler and stalin from the atlantic to the pacific the tremendous majority of this mass murder was concentrated in this relatively small territory. this is the event that caught my attention to the district's me that once we know these numbers and we can't localize these numbers in time when we can look at them in a place, what we see is an even which has few comparisons in the history of the world. the question then would be why is there no history of this event? why has someone to become the one seen it as an event? why wasn't it written before? i would like to start by saying a few words why i think it is. in the last 20 years, we have had a new opportunity to write such a history. the reason we had this opportunity is that the soviet union collapsed in 1991. eastern europe began to open in 1989. this is very important. obviously this is important in terms of understanding the history of the soviet union and soviet communist europe, however, it was also incredibly important to understand the history of nazi germany. why is that? the reason is this. it's very simple. the germans carried out almost all of their killing on territories which than immediately after the war fell behind the iron curtain. the line across which the germans killed is essentially the same line that marked off the soviet post for entire so if we wanted to have an idea what nazi germany policy was in the nazis turnpike year from 1959 to 1945, we have to have archives that concern the territories where the germans did most of the killings. so a surprise so to speak result of the end of communism is that now we have a much stronger basis on which to talk about not only the history of communism the history of nazi germany. why then hasn't spoken and written by someone else in the last 20 years because believe me this is not a book a particularly wanted to write have someone else written it i would have kept my cap and said very good and moved on to somewhat pleasant subject. i wrote this out as a sense of obligation once i realized it hadn't been written and had stronger more worrying feelings that perhaps it never would be. in any e tentative the reasons why this book hasn't been written doherty essentially three. they have to do with certain weaknesses in three otherwise very impressive schools of historical writing. the first of these to start with its east european history. although we learned a tremendous amount about eastern european history in the last 20 years, what has happened is that what we've learned in east european history, and here i mean the estonians and the creations, the ukrainians and the polls, the russians and the hungarian almost all of it has been framed within a familiar national context. so these enormous tragedies i'm discussing or will discuss can only be seen from a certain point of view. one can only catch part of it. probably the country to which this would apply the lease would be ukraine or about half of the killing happened. however even from a ukrainian point of view you can't see that what the of the killing certainly not beyond the famine. the second problem has been the history of the soviet union. i would emphasize russian ukrainian american and other historians working on the soviet union have discovered incredibly important things about the subject of my book but has not happened is these findings have not been integrated into a kind of geographical approach which is the approach and favoring. the consensus has shifted on what collectivization and for ukraine. with the predominant opinion now being this was a deliberate action designed to starve people coming and we know much more about the great terror, but both of these policies, collectivization and terror weigh heavily on people of the western border land of the soviet union. that is the same territory where a few years later the germans were going to kill in the largest numbers. this overlap is almost never noticed. one of the reasons for this is the soviet history tends to jump from 1941 to 1945 with the war treated as a separate subject but once we treat the territory as a framework, we can make this observation that the places where stalin killed or also the places where hitler killed. a the third reason has to do with but by far is the strongest body of historiography and that is the history of the holocaust. in the last 20 years since germany the historiography of the holocaust has been raised to very high levels indeed. manly by german historians also israeli historians, americans as well. there are new schools coming out of poland to a lesser extent. all of this has been tremendously important. however, there are some limitations to the history of the holocaust as well. the first of these is language. almost all of the holocaust history that is red is based upon german sources and german sources alone which can give you very far if what you're trying to do is understand german decision making. you can still go further to have language in eastern europe where you can understand the germans were facing. the german language sources don't help you very much with the victim's mother they are jewish victims one on jewish victims 97% or so of the jews killed in the holocaust did not know german so even if he were only concerned with the jewish victims, you'd find viewing tv could using german alone would limit you and of course the non-jewish victims were even less likely to speak german, the huge majority of russian and so on the left behind traces but they are not in the german language with a few exceptions. second limitation of the history of the holocaust and this is related and this is it tends to take the perspective of berlin. it begins with the german and berlin. most important history of the holocaust and again there are laudable exceptions but most important histories do not give a strong sense of what can a society ukraine or belarus or poland was, or even what sort of jews lived in those places. and to get a robust sense of the jews and their neighbors beyond germany on has to start with eastern europe. a particular test that i applied to holocaust is this: what does it say about the other german crimes of eastern europe? for example the germans killed more than 3 million soviet prisoners of war to read this the second-largest german war crème after the holocaust. in general on the literature of the holocaust this is mentioned to read briefly sometimes not at all. in my view it is important to understand the holocaust to understand what happened to soviet prisoners of war first. even if i'm wrong about that it strikes me if one were concerned about german war crimes one would want to bring all of them and just check to see if there is some kind of a relationship. the final difficulty has to do with comparison. but i have been edging towards is the argument that one has to understand eastern europe and the soviet union in order to understand the crime germany committed in eastern europe and the soviet union which i'm afraid isn't an obvious point. one of the things that has held us back from this understanding has been comparison. in two different ways. on the one hand, there is a very strong tradition of comparison beginning with hannah but says the regimes for both totalitarian. i have a lot to say about that and i will talk about it in question to something that interests you but here the problem to know is and the to tell the terrie in school were looking at soviet society and nazi germany society has to examples of a larger phenomenon here. you're looking at a situation which policies in the capitol fact german or soviet citizens. but you're not looking at is how the regime's interjected and since the central observation of my book is that people die where the two regimes interacted this is very important. utilitarianism, a kind of abstract terrorism can't explain what happened. then on the other hand, we have people who insist one cannot compare at all and this is a taboo that i will return at the end if i have a moment. for the time being i will make the simple observation that if the taboo on comparison means you can't bring the soviets and the germans into the same picture, so to speak, the very basic elements of what actually happened. so how do we get by this? what could we possibly do? i would like to begin by stressing that my major concern of writing this book was not to compare. my major concern writing this book was to describe and to explain. i want to describe who these people were, these 14 million who died, and explain how so many of them could have been killed in such a small place over such a short period of time. my thought about comparison personally was when the understand the killing policies, which i think most of us would agree are fundamental aspects of those regimes, with the understand all of the killing policies of both sides, then we will be in the position to compare. it was lying to you that we need to understand these things better before we left to any kind of conclusion comparative or otherwise. so limited in trying to describe and explain was as follows colin call a very straightforward conventional highly traditional, traditional to the point of boring historical method, which basically consisted in three parts. the first was to see that history happens in a time and place. the time and place is what i'm calling the blood of land between 1933 and 1945. this allows me to see the crime and from the perspective of the victims because this is where the victims' lives and where the victims die, but it also allows me i think hopefully in a fruitful way to bring the two regimes into the story without constantly comparing one to the letter. these are latrines for the power killed so when one focuses on these trains once he's the german and soviet power of the most dangerous. one sees the the did individually and also can check to see the places where they did or the did not interact. the historical part of my head is i distinguish between killing and looting by which is a difficult distinction moral philosophy and i'm not trying to say letting dhaka by the way is not significant. sent to the glory concentration camp is of course a horrible fate. being ethnically cleansed or deported is a horrible fate. those things lead to very many millions of deaths. however, i am not discussing those with and my 14 million. if i add those events in the gulag ethnic cleansing deportation that would add a few more million deaths. the interesting thing to observe though is that most of the people were killed in this region were deliberately killed. they were not killed because they were sent to camps, they weren't killed by ethnic cleansing or deportation, they were deliberately killed when their by starvation, shooting or by gassing. a deliberate killing on the territory is the most significant event in this region. it is one of the regions to focus on it. another reason to focus on it is because it seems to me it has a kind of in the significance deserving of its own attention to be a final very basic bit of myth is this, that nothing is beyond history. everything that happened in the past is history, and we should try to understand why we of historical method. this may seem elementary. i fear it does but you will understand what i mean. there are many people who say or believe one cannot understand the famine or the terror in the soviet union without thinking ahead what happened in the second world war. that these were somehow necessary because the compared the soviet union to win the war. i think that is actually not true, but i have a deep point which is i believe one has to try to understand the famine and the terror as distinct historical events rather than thinking if you look ahead you can somehow then reevaluate them. that is i think they are historical term evin is worthy of understanding in their own time and place. he will also know there are people who believe that the holocaust is so special one should only discuss it in a metaphysical terms, that it is somehow discussed in historical terms under the opposite view for a number of reasons to be like if we do not to the holocaust as a central historical event subject to a normal kind of historical understanding that's when it becomes a uprooted and open to question. when one situation in history it is at its most solid and most indisputable. so, all these methods are extraordinarily simple. i combine them with, and again this is going to seem even more i'm afraid symbol, i combine them 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 lithuanians. i don't. but most of the rest of them i know and i mention that not to boast but just point out that in general it's almost never the case people the right of the soviet union east german or people the right but germany and use russian not to speak of polish or ukrainian or yiddish for that matter. so what i am trying to say is i used historical methods as a very elementary as a way to stay grounded as a way to stay close to the time and place and the victims and to try and this week to follow the policies that brought their lives to an end. so were these policies? essentially the policies can be divided into three phases. there is a program in the 1930's from about 1933 to 1938 when the soviet union which is doing almost all the killing. the germans are coming in the hundreds or maybe the thousands of the soviets are already telling in the millions. then there's a second period between 1939 and 1941 when nazi germany and the soviet union our military allies and during this period so to speak the germans catch up. the germans and soviets killed about the same pace and also are telling about the same kinds of people. and then there is a third period, the bloodiest of the mall between 1941 and 1945 after the germans petrie the soviet allies, invade the soviet union and kill millions of people east of the 1939 borders, jewish and non-jewish. in the period break down to the following policies. before i talk up the policy 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 the strange destructive episode which opened up a whole theater of political possibilities. most of the bismarck options emerge from the first world war have been forgotten because they were never implemented but two of them actually did come to pass national socialism after 1933 and bolshevism in the soviet union after 1917. these options were among dozens of revolutionary possibilities after the first world war. the point is the first world war is the situation in which otherwise would have been very and probable cause to be taken much more likely that there is something more particularly worth noting especially the sitting of ukraine and that its the germans didn't lose the first world are on the eastern front. the one the first world war on the eastern front. they were never defeated. they were defeated on the western front which meant for many germans including most of the nazi leadership eastern europe and especially ukraine was a kind of mystical land of opportunity, a breadbasket where future in player could be one and this is crucial because the place of eastern europe in this very important imaginative geography that the nazis have. it puts in particular ukraine in between hitler and stalin in a way to describe to become commercially important. the first record is about the famine, the famine in soviet ukraine of 1932 to 1933. what's striking here is that as hitler was coming to power in germany, he's making a to the collector will speeches about the famine in ukraine. he's saying the famine in ukraine shows that marxism can lead to come and course by marxism he means communist plus social democrats and basically everyone who disagrees with them putting them all into one bag it's not exactly a fair argument. the interesting thing is the famine is going on in the background and it's none of that is hit or comes to power. in the soviet union, the famine is of course a reality to be in the fall of 1932, having already departed or killed the people regarded, having already forced collectivization and taking away land from millions of ukraine and other peasants throughout the soviet union stalin takes a series of particular decisions which we cannot document rather carefully, which leads and i think quite deliberately to the starvation of about 3 million more people in the soviet ukraine than had to die. the second chapter concerns a great terror, the second it third chapter is of great terror. when we thought of the great terror in the past we generally had in mind the spectacle intellectuals wearing contact lenses, the political leaders, the bolsheviks at best the military officers who some of the snow were killed. the great terror was a mass killing action directed at normal soviet citizens. the largest group of people to die for the so-called coo locks like a peasant that had somehow survived other forms of soviet repression and might therefore oppose the regime. the second largest group of victims in the great terror or members of small national minorities and this is the subject of chapter 3. the bloodiest national action is the polish section that took place in soviet ukraine and belarus and which more than 100,000 people were individually shot on the charges of being spies for poland. that concludes the first period the soviets are killing and the germans are killing on a much smaller scale. the second period is between 39 and 1941 when the germans and the soviets trying to get there as military allies. the germans used the cover of this alliance to invade the countries and franz as well as scandinavia and begin the battle of britain. the soviets invaded finland, they occupy some of armenia, the occupied the baltic states and along with germany to join the occupied poland. the main subject of this chapter is the joint german soviet occupation of poland in which hundreds of thousands of people were deported and about 200,000 are killed. the striking thing about this period was that this is the time when the germans catch up to the soviets. this is the moment when they are going to gain a infamy leader ronnie and began to kill people in large numbers. the people they began to kill our polls. this is also the time interesting when the germans and soviets are in the closest agreement about what sorts of people should be killed. the demographic profile is such that very often the germans in that killing one sibling and the soviets and killing another sibling. and the reason this is so is that those troops are after the intelligence to get which is a word by way which is used in russian and german and polish it comes out of the 19th century and of course it has a significance of the ukrainians as well a significance of the group which is supposed to embody national culture and politics and interesting the germans and the soviets agree the way to destroy the polish nation from the german view or to master it from the soviet view was to destroy the intelligence and both of them tried to do this. the third period is when they betrayed a soviet ally and invade the soviet union in june of 1941 and our region barbara rouson. i began this kirker with a long discussion of political economy. now, that might not seem the most dramatically to proceed. it's much more dramatic to describe 1 million men in arms crashing across the border to discuss this rise of stalin and all of this of course true, and i get to that, but here in the middle of the book wanted to emphasize just how important political economy was. what we mean by political economy? i mean the imagine division of how colonization could take place. i try to remind readers of with the soviet mission was astelin salles things without the possibility for territorial enlargement the soviet union itself to be internally, mike. collectivization had to be used to create capitals so the soviet union could itself modernize. then there's a german vision which in many ways is the contrary to the soviet mission although in some ways it borrows from it. in the nazi idea the soviet union is going to be modernized. it's cities are going to be destroyed. its industry for the most part is going to be removed. 30 million people are going to starve to death in the first winter after the war and after the war several tens of millions of what people are going to be deported, assimilated, killed, or in sleeved. and all of this, it's also planned that all of the jews are going to disappear, it hasn't been decided before the war. so the germans going to the soviet union with these explicit plans now knows as the hon group plan. they don't achieve these things but 1i think has to understand this vision of political economy to see what the moral premise of the german invasion and occupation work and it's in this chapter that i deal with the german policies which most closely resemble these plans manly the starvation of prisoners of war, some 2.6 million soviet prisoners of war maxtor to death and another half a million were shot. this is a huge figure often overlooked. there are striking things to notice, so for a simple, as late as december of 1941, the largest group of victims of german occupation or not use or poles or anyone else but soviet prisoners of war. in occupied poland alone, where the germans struck the soviet prisoners of war the largest victim group in december, 1941 was not choose or polls but actually soviet prisoners of war, the crime on a huge scale which the polish resistance by the we observed and reported upon. polls around the camp tried to help them and they were killed for doing so but 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 to applying the policy were some 1 million people starved to death. because the germans explicitly planned to kill the population, destroy the city, and hand over can be seen as continent with the earlier planning. then in the closing of the book in three long chapters i deal with the event which i think defines the blood land more than any other. the death of these policies more stark. i divide into three different chapters overlaps. the first concerns ukraine, it presents the initial policy of killing jewish men, how that escalated to the murder of women and children and then whole communities. in ukraine we can see this escalation in the transition from a policy of the murder of some jews quickly in my opinion by december 1941 although opinions vary. in a second chapter on belarus i recall the relationship between the holocaust in belarus and german antipartisan actions in belarus. the center of soviet partisan activities. it was here more than anywhere else the germans killed civilians and reprisals. reprisal has to be in quotation marks for partisan activities because some of the so-called reprisals' involved in things like taking hold communities come putting them in bonds and burning the bonds, taking whole communities, putting them over ditches and shooting them or by the end of the war tecum the women and children and killing the women and children and then taking the man as slave laborers to germany. obviously that isn't a reprisal of any traditional sense of the word and hundreds of thousands of people in belarus by denizli. more than 300,000 jews and non-choose of belarus were shot by the german civilians during the war. if you put into that the russian p.o.w. and soviet citizens who died in other german policies, the los becomes the territory in the world which is most touched by the second world war. in the final chapter on holocaust i deal with the facilities in occupied poland, starting with [inaudible] very important because this is where the germans were initially going to be carrying out elements of the person who executed the final solution in poland was also the person in charge of planning concrete planning in the soviet union. one can see how the germans fell back from the more and russia's plans of tens of millions and became precise and escalated the policy against the more specific group namely the jews by focusing on 1940, 41, 42, which is what i do. i describe what happened at finally auschwitz where some 2.8 million jews were gassed. if we take you for the members of the jews who were shot and aghast, the total murdered by the germans are something like 5.4 million, another 300,000 were killed by armenians. the final chapter of the book deals with the warsaw uprising. during the warsaw uprising actions unrelated to the combat germans killed at least 120,000 civilians in the early days of august 1944 they were shooting several thousand civilians a day of actions that were as i say totally unrelated to combat. inclusive the two chapters of the deliberate killing in my sense that which i think are necessary to bring us from the second world war ii today the first concern ethnic cleansing from 1943 to about 1948 carried out first in the caucasus and then among ukrainians, poles and jews from the soviet union as well as the poland itself against ukrainians. this and of course the largest total action and then the deportation of germans from eastern europe to the federal public of germany and the german democratic republic. these are tremendous population movements that involves huge numbers of deaths as well as great. i try to describe them very carefully. in my view, these events, as portable as they are or a kind of transition from the age of mass killing to the age of the cold war which i discussed in a final chapter under the title of the anti-semitism and which i try to show how the holocaust as an event of eastern europe and of the soviet union was very difficult for the soviet ideology to handle and how towards the end his life stalin had developed a new kind of anti-semitism, which i argue has made it harder for us to understand the holocaust and eastern geography. saddam is there an explanation for all of this? is there any way to bring all of these events together? let me try to do so to recovery briefly. we see to ideas, to ideologies of global transformation. one focus on race, one focused on class. for different reasons both of these ideas have a territorial focus. the territorial focus is the land between berlin and moscow. what i mean by this is that in this world shared by the nazis and of bolsheviks defined in some sense by the first world war also defined by the great depression in which the only possibility for expansion and development seem to be on land, seem to invite controlling fertile soil ukraine, belarus and poland for different -- for different reasons, economic and political, ret the focus of those regimes. first the soviets and then the germans strive to control these trains and then in a jointly describe the independent political unit, poland which is a barrier to both of them and then the germans moved forward. it's important to see the time factor here. this is one of the ways it's important not to just compare the germans to the two germans. the bolshevik revolution had run its course and the soviet union under stalin was in a series of retreats to the variety of modernizing and the soviet union without going further with the kind of retreat collectivization and punishing people for its failure was a kind of retreat. the great terror was a kind of retreat. then the germans are red dancing as the soviets are retreating. they have their own very ambitious idea of a eurasian revolution that is going to be for the benefit of their own race. when that failed, they come too, a retreat. but they carried out is what a horrible, but the policy that the actually carry out, the holocaust, it does not exhaust all of the planning they went into on the eastern front with. they retreat to a particular policy that defines one enemy that actually can be destroyed, 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 of all of this is different. so, in the book i try to stress that ideas matter a great deal of the cannot be separated from economics. it is -- it makes no sense to try to understand the stalinist ideas of development simply in terms of an ideology without the notion of how the soviet union is going to become a moderate. the same holds for nazi germany. the destruction of the soviet union is a vision of colonization. racial colonization therefore it is highly ideological but it is also a vision of colonization, a new kind of frontier in pipe and odierno the ken network without the audiology. likewise, i try to emphasize ideology cannot be understood without politics. the politics one can only study by seeing this advanced retreat i'm talking about, the politics that include the various kinds of encounters between nazi germany and the soviet union, the politics that is evident when groups resist the germans or the soviets and the hitler and stalin have to decide what to do all of that is politics and the most tender and sensitive kind of politics, the most controversial to use a word i don't like kind of politics is the politics of the interaction between the soviet union and nazi germany. this interaction could involve competition, it could involve military alliance, or it could involve war, but i would stress even when it involves war, the two regimes make each other worse. for an example why do so many soviet prisoners of war dhaka in the german starvation cans? because stalin wouldn't allow the generals to retreat. why is some of the of the russian civilians die from german shootings in 1943 and 1944? soviet partisans provoke those reprisals' among other things. in the gulag in 1941 to 1942, 1943 we have the worst record of death of any every year in the soviet union about 500,000 people are registered as having died in those years. those people die because they were sentenced to the gulag by the soviet union. but they also died because in those years of nazi germany had invaded the soviet union and disrupted food supply. are the victims of hitler or victims of stalin? like many of the people, the blame is shared. this brings me to the last point i want to make and it has to do with precisely the comparison. as i said, i did not write this book because i wanted to compare a nazi germany and the soviet union. it was my view and is still is my view going into the look at these comparisons are too abstract, too theoretical and little round in what we now know about history. that said i think the comparison is something that ought to be done and i put to the end of the book and i am going to give you a glimpse of what i think about it to be the first is this. logically i don't think any taboo on comparison is that all sustainable. so, i would say to you cannot compare the soviet union and nazi germany. the only logical content of that is i have already made the comparison, and i would very much like for you not to do so. it has no other meaning. the word incomparable is a comparative judgment. you cannot say to things are incomparable unless you already looked at them and made some kind of comparison. so 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 disband the differences between the soviet union and nazi germany, and i think the differences are very, very significant, by the way, but if one wants to defend the differences, one has to make the comparison first. if you want to say nazi germany as special as i believe it was, you have to actually make the comparison and if you do make the comparison on the basis, for civil skilling policies, which is what i do in my book, you find some interesting things. you find, flexible, although like everybody the holocaust believe the soviets killed more civilians and germans that's not true. the germans killed more civilians than the soviet state. a lot of the things we just think are true because we've been told or repeating them for decades actually don't stand up to an actual comparison. the third thing i think about comparison is setting the taboo on a comparison is a luxury of the present day. given that the germans killed on the same territory that the soviets killed, people who live there, and we are talking about tens affect hundreds of calls since people were condemned. a comparison was a part of their life experience. if i give you some examples this will hopefully become clear. the peasants and soviet ukraine of 1933 many of them hope for a foreign invasion to rescue them from their misery. in 1941 a foreign invasion came and then they compared to eight people survived in 1933 who were then starved in german hands of 1941. naturally, the compared. once you see this, the list just goes on and on and on. whether we are talking about jews in 1939 who were trying to decide when both the soviet union invaded poland which way they should fleet, whether we're talking about the russians in 1943 where they had to decide what they are going to join the partisans or the german police and often there was no choice, whether we are talking about the polls in 1944 trying to decide if they should begin an uprising of soviet power with a about to replace german call these people were condemned to compare. so if we place comparisons somehow be on their own historical investigation, we cannot be fair to the people who actually lived in these times and displeases and we are doing our own analysis, our own historical live a very important element. so many people were killed, and this is my final word, so many people were killed that it's really hard to grasp. once we get carried out the comparison, once we have analyzed the policy, once again tried to understand the individual ways in which these people russians and others were killed we are left with this overwhelming figure, which is 14 million. now, i think the figures matter. i feel that numbers matter. it's very important to try to get members right. but i also think that even as we try to get numbers right we should be careful with them among other reasons because the difference between the zero and one is so great. the difference between zero and one is an affinity. the difference between life and death is itself an insanity, and then each increment is another infinity. the difference between zero and one we can remember if we think of the last person we care about is so enormous commit the difference between zero and one is the same difference as the difference between say 720,031 or 7,020 to do this we have to be important with numbers and we have to do this partly for the reason that i said but also for a very important historical reason which is that history is not about death. history is about life and that is why an account such as this one brings us to the border of what history can actually do that because history is about life, i try to portray some of the individuals who died while they were alive. very often when writing about the famine or the holocaust or any of these tragedies people appear at the moment when they die. i try to introduce in this book people such as bill little boy in ukraine who is also when there was no food and died in the famine and the rest of his family either died in the famine or the terror or the polish officer who just before he was shot was keeping a diary left of his wedding ring, or the woman in the synagogue who knew she was about to be shot and scratched to her mother in the synagogue. we have these kind of materials and without reference to them to recreate these people and we don't have history, but we don't have the kind history that can rescue these events from the people who perpetrated them from it for and stalin which is why i and the book with an attempt having seen how hitler and stalin turned this part of the world that we all care about and to members trying to turn these numbers back into human beings because it seems to me that if we cannot do that in the end of the half one. thank you very much. [applause] >> there's a kind is adamant logic to the way use truck through the book and i'm not going to quarrel with it but you also chose not to discuss certain issues one of them is the collateral war and i am just wondering is that because the statistics are unreliable? you also chose not to discuss the implications of the massive wave of killings for the society. it seems to me that in the contemporary development of these countries the legacy of the poorly discussed even particularly in u.k. and and other rooms are a haunting legacy and a political problem. is this something you hope to turn to or why was it simply you couldn't discuss everything in the order of the book? it seems to me that if you to the civilian casualty in addition to the deliberate and then the military casualties of rank-and-file soldiers there is a vast destruction of the society. what does it do to their view of the house side world? it creates a certain kind of hostility or harsh tears people think is separate and distinct from the soviet experience. i just wanted to sort of those on the agenda and again ask why you didn't specifically talk about the additional numbers. i don't know what those numbers are but they are probably another 10 million soldiers that fought in the war and also civilian casualties apart from those you have circumscribed that died in the same period. >> every book has a certain form and it allows us to do the things we do and it also prevents us from doing other things. i think the thing i like most about your question is the way that it takes the form of my good to be self-evident, you called it adamant which is strong in the and one who works hard to make these self-evident. no one has remotely done before what i did in this book. no one made the observation that the killing was concentrated in this region and then tried to explain it. it was my goal. if i've done that much and i'm happy with the results and make it seem like a self evident approach to these problems that i succeeded. i have to say beyond my wildest dreams to read to answer the question in more specific terms, the -- it's not that i don't discuss -- that is a little too strong -- i do discuss the civilian deaths and mention them. i also discussed the war going on from 1939 to 1945 and there are places the book i talk about how many soldiers fell in such and such battle. but i don't do is include them in my definition of the number of people who died by murder and what land. i do that for two reasons. first is i want to try to understand the policy of the deliberate killing. it's so easy for those things to bleed into the ethnic cleansing and deportation and just battlefield actions and i realize there's a natural reason for that which says that these things are often related, but i had a sense that not only had we not concentrate on the time and the place but we haven't quite extracted the sort of hard, terribly hard part of reality from the other dark umber surrounding. unwanted to make sure we had a good record of the deliberate killings but the heart of your question about collateral damage has to do with your question about memory and at the end of the book i do make sure the reader knows roughly how many people died in the second world war total. i mention this in the introduction as well and of course losses are catastrophic. we are grasped in the civilian death especially in the soviet side. the number of soldiers who die in the war is actually just not known. we don't know how much of the democracy was covered for the loss of the 1930's. there was a period stalin wanted the numbers to be too low and then there was a kirker when the 70's where the numbers were too by then the people work on these and found the record keeping was incredibly uneven but in general that is the only reason i didn't include it for different phenomenon but you're right if we put the military testing to this as well by my calculation which is rauf for the reason i mention half to death in the second world war including the theater happened in that land as well. so we're looking at a catastrophic loss of life. why don't they talk about memory? i don't talk about memory because i thought for a couple reasons. i thought it would dilute the overall project. i thought if i made my own views about memory at the end no and then people would read the history in terms of what i had to say about memory which is the last thing i wanted. among other reasons because i care about these memory discussions to which i thought my greatest contribution to these discussions would be to try to write a history which was as unbiased and professional and grounded and objective as possible. i am not saying i succeeded in these things but if different kinds -- and again maybe this is policy and this guy but different kind of poles and different kind of jews and russians and ukrainians and so on not to mention americans and others could see this book as a kind of starting point then they would have a starting point we don't have to be the one thing i do sing about memory at the end as in sure you know husted with numbers. i have a general concern that we be very cautious with numbers and not inflate them. i think for all cases it's a bad thing when we release the spirit for people who never lived in to the discussion. the real numbers are bad enough. >> in your blood land you you mentioned that approximately 3.3 million people died during the ukrainian famine of 32 to 33. can you please give some clarity how you drive that number? this contradicts the number that has been cited by conquest and others who have written on this topic. >> first of all i want to say that robert conquest was an incredibly important historian to read the book about the famine and about the terror. provided interpretations that turned out to be right and some of the ways he argued the terror and the famine that were highly controversial and rejected at the time are now a part of the census. one of the elements of both cases which is a not part of the senses with of the numbers and that is for the simple reason that when conquest was writing those books, we just didn't have any idea and the figures he was relying on for the famine and the terror were sort of second and from people inside the soviet union or at best they were demographic projections of a kind we would reject. since conquest incredibly important book was published a couple of important things happened. the soviet union came to an end and hundreds of researchers started working on this issue. some of them were trained demographers and in general, what they have found is something on the range between at the low end to .4 million, the 2.5 that the high end media as many as 4 million ukrainians died. there is a controversy among historians within that range. but whether you are looking at australia or america or ukrainians in ukraine working on this, you will not find people actually looking at the numbers in a serious way who go beyond that range in either direction. that is you will find people who deny the character he event that killed 90 people, but you also will find people who go foothill her that the above 4 million if it is it is just by a little bit pulitzer how i came to that number i am not a demographer. i rely upon the studies that have been done. i also rely upon the monograph in by stephen who is a demographer that comes to the figure of roughly 3.5. i look at all the recent, and i emphasize this, ukrainian historiography on the subject and by ukrainians and ukraine who believe the famine with the distinct event which in general gives a range of three to 3.5, that is what they are arguing for. in my estimate based on that was about 3.3. the difference between the salmon and other events like the terror and the holocaust is we don't have killing records, we don't have quotas or the kind of figures that are going to resolve this dispute so when i see 3.3 that is an estimate in the sense that my numbers for parts of the holocaust or the terror are not estimates. those are calculations based upon perpetrator's records and others who or other local and reliable and importance forces. 3.3 million laws ps2 net. i will say it is within a range of a few hundred thousand of being right. i would be surprised if that turned out not to be the case. what i am saying by the bay is entirely not controversial among people who look at the subject whenever the rubber commitments might be. >> i'm wondering why you did not use that term whole dimond which seems to be more accurate representation rather than famine generally thought of as a natural event. second, do you in fact believe that it was a deliberate genocide against the ukrainian people? >> in the book at the very end i have -- there are so many terminal logical questions i allowed myself to write the book a kind of guide where i use certain words and don't use other words. but simple, i make the distinction in the book that is generally -- and getting to your question, it doesn't sound like and but i am -- between final solution and holocaust. people use the buds in the same meaning that the final solution is the idea of getting rid of the issues finally. but in most of the versions and it is a draft version so to speak it involves a deportation but not physical murder on the site. that physical murder on site is the holocaust, the final version of the final solution but to understand one has to make a distinction between final distinction and holocaust. i would say something different which is the reason i don't use it is it would be distracting for the english-language audiences and that is basically at. in this room one could say it and would be clear what one is talking about. i don't use it for the reason i don't think 93% or 99% of my leadership doesn't have ideas about the famine one way or another and introducing new words to them in a foreign language is not going to be the best way for them to grasp what's going on. so behind your question about languages is the question about the liberation. from this i can tell and forgive me for saying this, i can tell you how to write the book because one of the -- i make a very strong case in the first chapter that this was a deliberate policy. that after the tens of thousands of killings and deportations, after the collectivization in the time when stalin knew that there was famine, there was his word and ukraine he deliberately escalated policy and concrete ways the this the blacklist on individual communities so if you didn't make requisitions targets you couldn't trade with the rest of the world the was a death sentence. there were the meet quotas like you didn't make requisitions target's you had to turn in whatever animals, but never livestock used to have for us doesn't sound like much but for people who live in the countryside they know that livestock is the last thing you have before starvation. you can get milk from it and slaughter it for me when you get livestock that is the last thing to do you live and in that agrarian world everyone with the requisition of livestock meant. not letting peasants by going to cities that is a policy about that, the borders of soviet ukraine there was a policy about that. but above all, the simple and for some of the requisitions targets in december 32, guaranteed that millions of people were going to die when only hundreds of thousands probably what otherwise so i see it as a deliberate act of policy and i need every clear in the chapter. whether it is a genocide or not, it is another question. in that section at the end of my book that i refer and i also explain why don't use the word genocide for any event and the reason i don't use the word genocide for in the event is when you talk about these things you end up in the discussion was a genocide was it not a genocide which i do not think a particular enlightening and one of the reasons i don't think they are enlightening is people mean different things by the word and it's about my lecture to change that and recognize limits. people think the basic genocide de their meen adelbert extension of all people or the mean the u.n. convention definition 48 which is much broader and loose and would include things like taking children schooling them in a different language. it takes a tremendous range. by the legal definition of genocide yes i agree who made up the word i think the ukrainian famine of 33 was genocide by yet the u.n. definition. was it an attempt to physically murder an entire people? the licht wasn't and that is the population to the popular definition of the word. i avoid using the word because all you do is i'm afraid all you do is confuse people.

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