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Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. By Timothy Snyder. New York: Basic Books, 2010. xix, 524 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Maps. $29.95, hard bound.

In 1846, a large-scale rebellion of the Polish nobility aimed at the restoration of independent Poland. In Galicia, the rebellion was suppressed less by the Austrian army than by self-armed peasants, whether Polish or Ruthene. This jacquerie for which, all Polish accusations to the contrary, the local Habsburg authorities were not responsible, seems to have been a case of genuine class struggle from which the government profited as did the idea of a unified Galicia. As opposed to this dramatic event, the murder of Viceroy Andrzej Potocki, in 1908, by a Ruthene student nationalist foreshadowed the Sarajevo murder. After all, Potocki and Franz Ferdinand both favored reconciliation among Slavs. In Wolff's words, the two "assassinations expressed the violent rejection of the politics of Habsburg rule . . . and both reflected national tensions that rendered Habsburg rule ultimately untenable" (332). By the late nineteenth century, the historian Mikhailo Hrusevsky used Galician history to articulate Galician Ruthene demands; others connected contemporary Galicia to medieval Halych and foresaw a Ruthene-dominated Galicia. The collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918 led to the temporary absorption of Galicia by Poland, whose soldiers at first engaged in cruel pogroms. This led to considerable and justified nostalgia for a Galicia ruled by a benevolent emperor, primarily among such Jewish writers as Joseph Roth, who wrote in German; Shmuel Yosef Agnon, who wrote mostly in Hebrew; and Bruno Schulz, who wrote his literary pieces in Polish. Yet with Schulz's death, in 1942, as a victim of the Holocaust, there disappeared the last illusion about a country called Galicia in which Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, Germans, and others lived, if not in harmony, at least with some respect for the rights and passions of the others. Perhaps it would have been better if in the late eighteenth century an enlightened despot would have understood that the only way to establish a rational government in the long run would be drastically to separate the ethnic groups in Galicia, as well as elsewhere. It might well have spared the inhabitants of Galicia the horrifying massacres and violent expulsions of the post-World War II period. But who in Joseph IPs age cared about the diverse Slavic dialects? Certainly, as Wolff so admirably demonstrates, Galicia proved infinitely more beneficial to its inhabitants than the successor states that claimed to be based on the self-determination of nationalities and that murdered each other's inhabitants with abandon, unless they combined forces to murder Jews.