Five years ago, Timothy Snyder published Bloodlands, a book situating the Holocaust in the context of the waves of mass killings that swept Central and Eastern Europe between the beginning of the 1930s and the end of World War II.

This violence took place in what Snyder terms “the Bloodlands” — a vast space spanning from Odessa to Leningrad and including Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic countries, Eastern Prussia, and the western areas of Russia.

According to Snyder’s estimates, at least fourteen million civilians were killed in these territories between 1930 and 1945, almost half of whom died because of the famine provoked first by Stalin’s and then by Hitler’s policies. All kinds of horrors, from cannibalism to the gas chambers, took place there.