victory. the only way for this to end is for them not to win that victory. you wrote a remarkable book called blood lands, about precisely this part of europe. ukraine and the area sort of sandwiched in particularly in world war ii between hitler and stalin, and the atrocities committed there. what is your reaction, as a historian of this area, when you see and read the accounts of what has transpired in places like bucha and borodyanka and other places outside kyiv? well, number one, it is very obvious, but i can t help but point out that the russians seem to have forgotten that when they won the second world war, the ukrainians were on the side. that has strategic and moral implications. this russian business of calling the ukrainians nazis and fascists, as the russian army is perpetrating exactly the kind of atrocities we
remember the nazis for, it is not just perverse. it s like a second version of the crime itself. by the thing i would like to add is that blood lands is essentially the history of how ukraine was colonized by late european colonial projects. a soviet project that led to starvation and pham in, a nazi project which led to millions of deaths and it was one of the contributors the holocaust. you said earlier that russians withdrew, which is true. but i think what is special about 2022, amidst all the war, is that the ukrainians have won the battle for kyiv. they have inserted themselves, as existing, as a nation state that does things that others do not expect, and in that way we are in a new war and we are out of the team i epoch described in bloodlands. so, you think something is happening here. again, being determined by the outcomes on the battlefield. and you are right. there is a sort of discomfort
you wrote a remarkable book called blood lands, about precisely this part of europe. ukraine and the area sort of sandwiched in particularly in world war ii between hitler and stalin, and the atrocities committed there. what is your reaction, as a historian of this area, when you see and read the accounts of what has transpired in places like bucha and borodyanka and other places outside kyiv? well, number one, it is very obvious, but i can t help but point out that the russians seem to have forgotten that when they won the second world war, the ukrainians were on their side. that has strategic and moral implications. this russian business of calling the ukrainians nazis and fascists, as the russian army is perpetrating exactly the kind of atrocities we remember the nazis for, it is not just perverse. it s like a second version of
the crime itself. by the thing i would like to add is that blood lands is essentially the history of how ukraine was colonized by late european colonial projects. a soviet project that led to starvation and pham in, a nazi project which led to millions of deaths and it was one of the contributors to the holocaust. you said earlier that russians withdrew, which is true. but i think what is special about 2022, amidst all the war, is that the ukrainians have won the battle for kyiv. they have inserted themselves, as existing, as a nation state that does things that others do not expect, and in that way we are in a new war and we are out of the team i epoch described in bloodlands. so, you think something is happening here. again, being determined by the outcomes on the battlefield. and you are right. there is a sort of discomfort coming down to who is better at killing who, essentially.
because probably too many big words and i know in that part of tennessee the reading level only 30% of the students in the schools are at reading level. but i would recommend on tyranny by timothy snyder which connects the dots admirably, a historian who wrote blood lands. it is a matter of trying to not only know what happens, but connect it to somehow what is happening to us now. you were talking about maybe this is a harbinger of what s to come and you mentioned, you know, when you were in school, maybe there wasn t much taught about the holocaust. i think there really was more of a reckoning in the 60s and 70s about the importance of talking about it more honestly and it seemed for decades now that was