Writing is punctuated solitude; the pleasure of finishing a book is acknowledging those who helped it take form.

Krzysztof Michalski and Klaus Nellen of the Inst.i.tut fur die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna forced me to specify the original thought. Thanks to the work-shops organized by the Inst.i.tute within the project "United Europe/Divided Memory," I enjoyed the company of several dozen outstanding historians in meetings in Vienna and at Yale University. I drafted the ma.n.u.script at Yale, my scholarly home, in the company of colleagues who set very high standards; and then rewrote the book during a stay at the IWM, made productive by the efforts of its staff, especially Susanne Froeschl, Mary Nicklas, and Marie-Therese Porzer. I am appreciative of my sabbatical year from Yale, and especially of the consideration shown by Laura Engelstein as chair of the Department of History. Ian Shapiro and the Macmillan Center at Yale supported my research. The competence and cheer of Marcy Kaufman and Marianne Lyden allowed me to balance administrative duties at Yale with research and teaching.

During the conception and drafting of this book, I had the good fortune to be surrounded by generous and talented graduate students at Yale. Some of them took part in demanding seminars on the subjects of the book, and all of them read draft chapters or discussed the book with me. I appreciate their work, their frankness, their good humor, and their intellectual company. Particular thanks go to Jadwiga Biskupska, Sarah Cameron, Yedida Kanfer, Kathleen Minahan, Claire Morelon, and David Petrucelli. The students and I could not have held our seminars, and I could not have researched this book, without the marvelous collections of the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale and the a.s.sistance of Tatjana Lorkovic and William Larsh of its Slavic Reading Room. Two outstanding Yale then-undergraduates, Beth Reisfeld and Andrew Koss, also helped me with aspects of the research. I cannot imagine Yale, let alone taking up a project of this sort in New Haven, without Daniel Markovits, Sarah Bilston, Stefanie Markovits, and Ben Polak.

A number of friends and colleagues put down their own work in order to read chapters of mine, to my great benefit. They include Bradley Abrams, Pertti Ahonen, Pavel Bara, Tina Bennett, David Brandenberger, Archie Brown, Christopher Browning, Jeff Dolven, Ben Frommer, Olivia Judson, Alex Kay, Ben Kiernan, Hiroaki Kuromiya, Mark Mazower, Wolfgang Mueller, Stuart Rachels, Thomas W. Simons, Jr., Will Sulkin, Adam Tooze, Jeffrey Veidlinger, Lynne Viola, and Iryna Vushko. Dieter Pohl and Wendy Lower read considerable portions of the ma.n.u.script. Nancy Wingfield kindly read and commented upon an entire draft. So did Marci Sh.o.r.e, who sets an example of humane scholarship that I wish I could match. It goes without saying that readers did not always agree with my interpretations. Critique helped the ma.n.u.script enormously; the responsibility for its flaws is mine.

From the beginning of the project to the end, Ray Brandon regularly contributed his superior bibliographic knowledge and vigorous critical spirit. Timothy Garton Ash helped me, at important points, to clarify my purposes. As I was drafting this book, I was speaking weekly with Tony Judt, in connection with another one. This altered my thinking on subjects such as the Popular Front and the Spanish Civil War. A decade of agreeing and disagreeing with Omer Bartov, Jan Gross, and Norman Naimark in various settings has sharpened my thinking on a host of questions. I have learned much over the years from conversations with Piotr Wandycz, my predecessor at Yale. Teaching a course in east European history at Yale with Ivo Banac broadened my knowledge. I found myself returning to basic problems of Marxism that I first perceived while studying under Mary Gluck (and Chris Mauriello) at Brown and then pursued at Oxford with the late Leszek Koakowski. I did not continue the study of economics as John Williamson long ago counseled me to do, but I do owe a good deal of whatever economic intuition and knowledge remain to his support. My grand-mother Marianna Snyder talked to me about the Great Depression, and my parents Estel Eugene Snyder and Christine Hadley Snyder helped me to think about agricultural economics. My brothers Philip Snyder and Michael Snyder helped me to frame the introduction.

This book draws from research carried out in a number of archives over the course of many years. A good deal of the thinking also took place in archives. The archivists of the inst.i.tutions mentioned in the bibliography are owed my thanks. The talk of archives in eastern Europe is often of what is closed; historians know that very much is open, and that we owe our productive work to those who keep it so. This study involved reading in German, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Yiddish, Czech, Slovak, and French as well as English. It required cognizance of debates within the major historiographies, above all the German. I am sure that it would have benefited from literatures that I could not read. The friends who helped me with the languages I do read know who they are, and what I owe them. Special thanks are due to two excellent language teachers, Volodymyr Dibrova and Kurt Krottendorfer. Early on, Mark Garrison and the late Charles William Maynes impressed upon me the importance of learning languages and taking risks. In eastern Europe, Milada Anna Vachudova taught me about some of the overlaps. Stephen Peter Rosen and the late Samuel Huntington encouraged me to keep learning languages and deepening connections with eastern Europe, and provided the necessary support. It was at Harvard that I became a historian of this region, as opposed to a historian of some of its countries; this book is a pendant to the one that I wrote there.

Sources and inspiration for this book came from many other directions. Karel Berkhoff, Robert Chandler, Martin Dean, and Grzegorz Motyka graciously allowed me to read unpublished work, Dariusz Gawin directed me to forgotten works on the Warsaw Uprising, and Gerald Krieghofer found important press articles. Rafa Wnuk very kindly discussed with me the history of his family. The late Jerzy Giedroyc, Ola Hnatiuk, Jerzy Jedlicki, Kasia Jesie, Ivan Krastev, the late Tomasz Merta, Andrzej Paczkowski, Oxana Shevel, Roman Szporluk, and Andrzej Wakiewicz helped me to ask some of the right questions. It was very instructive, as always, to think through the maps with Jonathan Wyss and Kelly Sandefer of Beehive Mapping. Steve Wa.s.ser-man of Kneerim and Williams helped me with the t.i.tle and the book project, and offered me an opportunity in a book review to consider some of the issues. I appreciated the work of Chris Arden, Ross Curley, Adam Eaglin, Alex Littlefield, Kay Mariea, Ca.s.sie Nelson, and Brandon Proia of Perseus Books. I learned much that was necessary to conceive and write this book from Lara Heimert of Basic Books.

Carl Henrik Fredriksson invited me to give a lecture at the Eurozine conference in Vilnius on the imbalance between the memory and the history of ma.s.s killing. Robert Silvers helped me to temper the argument of that lecture in an essay that arose from that lecture, which states the problem that this book attempts to resolve. He and his colleagues at the New York Review of Books New York Review of Books also published, in 1995, an essay by Norman Davies that drew my attention to some of the shortcomings of previous approaches to the problems treated in this book. also published, in 1995, an essay by Norman Davies that drew my attention to some of the shortcomings of previous approaches to the problems treated in this book.

Lectures and seminars at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, the Stiftung Gens.h.a.gen, the Universidade Catolica Portuguesa in Lisbon, the Central European Forum in Bratislava, the Deutsches Historisches Inst.i.tut in Warsaw, the Instytut Batorego in Warsaw, the Einstein Forum in Berlin, the Forum for Levande Historia in Stockholm, the Kreisky Forum in Vienna, Harvard University, Columbia University, Princeton University, Birkbeck College London, and the University of Cambridge were welcome opportunities to test conclusions. Presentations generate exchanges: I think in particular of Eric Weitz's remark about implicit and explicit comparisons, or Nicholas Stargardt's notion of the economics of catastrophe, or Eric Hobsbawm's willingness to counsel comparison in London and Berlin.

I recall all of these and many other moments of contact with grat.i.tude.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

ARCHIVES (AND ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES).

AAN.

Archiwum Akt Nowych

Archive of New Files, Warsaw AMP.

Archiwum Muzeum Polskiego

Archive of the Polish Museum, London AVPRF.

Arkhiv Vneshnei Politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii

Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation, Moscow AW.

Archiwum Wschodnie, Orodek Karta

Eastern Archive, Karta Inst.i.tute, Warsaw BA-MA.

Bundesarchiv-Militararchiv

Bundesarchiv, Military Archive, Freiburg, Germany CAW.

Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe

Central Military Archive, Rembertow, Poland DAR.

Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Rivnens'koi Oblasti

State Archive of Rivne Oblast, Ukraine FVA.

Fortunoff Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies

Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut GARF.

Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii

State Archive of the Russian Federation, Moscow HI.

Hoover Inst.i.tution Archive, Stanford University, California IfZ(M) Inst.i.tut fur Zeitgeschichte, Munchen

Inst.i.tute for Contemporary History, Munich IPN.

Instytut Pamici Narodowej

Inst.i.tute of National Remembrance, Warsaw OKAW.

Orodek Karta, Archiwum Wschodnie

Karta Inst.i.tute, Eastern Archive, Warsaw SPP.

Studium Polski Podziemnej

Polish Underground Movement Study Trust, London TsDAVO Tsentral'nyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Vyshchykh Orhaniv Vlady ta

Upravlinnia

Central State Archive of Higher Organs of Government and

Administration, Kiev USHMM.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.

IH.

ydowski Instytut Historyczny

Jewish Historical Inst.i.tute, Warsaw

PRESS ARTICLES (CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER).

Gareth Jones, "Will there be soup?" Western Mail Western Mail, 17 October 1932.

"France: Herriot a Mother," Time Time, 31 October 1932.

"The Five-Year Plan," New York Times New York Times, 1 January 1933.

"The Stalin Record," New York Times New York Times, 11 January 1933.

"Die Weltgefahr des Bolschewismus. Rede des Reichskanzlers Adolf Hitler im Berliner Sportpalast," Deutschosterreichische Tageszeitung Deutschosterreichische Tageszeitung, 3 March 1933, 2.

Gareth Jones, "Famine grips Russia," New York Evening Post New York Evening Post, 30 March 1933.

Walter Duranty, "Russians Hungry, but not Starving," New York Times New York Times, 31 March 1933, 13.

"Kardinal Innitzer ruft die Welt gegen den Hungertod auf," Reichspost Reichspost, 20 August 1933, 1.

"Foreign News: Karakhan Out?" Time Time, 11 September 1933.

"Die Hilfsaktion fur die Hungernden in Ruland," Reichspost Reichspost, 12 October 1933, 1.

"Helft den Christen in Sowjetruland," Die Neue Zeitung Die Neue Zeitung, 14 October 1933, 1.

"Russia: Starvation and Surplus," Time Time, 22 January 1934.

Mirosaw Czech, "Wielki G.o.d," Gazeta Wyborcza Gazeta Wyborcza, 22-23 March 2003, 22.

Michael Naumann, "Die Morder von Danzig," Die Zeit Die Zeit, 10 September 2009, 54-55.

"Vyrok ostatochnyi: vynni!" Dzerkalo Tyzhnia Dzerkalo Tyzhnia, 15-22 January 2010, 1.

BOOKS (INCLUDING DOc.u.mENT COLLECTIONS) AND ARTICLES.

Natal'ja Ablaej, "Die ROVS-Operation in der Westsibirischen Region," in Rolf Binner, Bernd Bonwetsch, and Marc Junge, eds., Stalinismus in der sowjetischen Provinz 1937-1938 Stalinismus in der sowjetischen Provinz 1937-1938, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010, 287-308.

Vladimir Abramov, The Murderers of Katyn The Murderers of Katyn, New York: Hippocrene Books, 1993.

Bradley Abrams, "The Second World War and the East European Revolution," East European Politics and Societies East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2003, 623-664.

Henry Abramson, A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, Cambridge, Ma.s.s.: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Ya'acov Adini, Dubno: sefer zikaron Dubno: sefer zikaron, Tel Aviv: Irgun yots'e Dubno be-Yisra'el, 1966.

Pertti Ahonen, After the Expulsion: West Germany and Eastern Europe, 1945-1990 After the Expulsion: West Germany and Eastern Europe, 1945-1990, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Pertti Ahonen, Gustavo Corni, Jerzy Kochanowski, Rainer Schulze, Tamas Stark, and Barbara Stelzl-Marx, People on the Move: Forced Population Movements in the Second World War and Its Aftermath People on the Move: Forced Population Movements in the Second World War and Its Aftermath, Oxford: Berg, 2008.

Gotz Aly and Susanne Heim, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Truman Anderson, "Incident at Baranivka: German Reprisals and the Soviet Partisan Movement in Ukraine, October-December 1941," Journal of Modern History Journal of Modern History, Vol. 71, No. 3, 1999, 585-623.

Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev KGB: The Inside Story of Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990.

Andrej Angrick, Besatzungspolitik und Ma.s.senmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der sudlichen Sowjetunion 1941-1943 Besatzungspolitik und Ma.s.senmord: Die Einsatzgruppe D in der sudlichen Sowjetunion 1941-1943, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003.

Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, The "Final Solution" in Riga: Exploitation and Annihilation, 1941-1944 The "Final Solution" in Riga: Exploitation and Annihilation, 1941-1944, New York: Berghahn Books, 2009.