What is Reddit's opinion of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin?

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This book is pretty riveting stuff. Kind of a side by side comparison of Nazis and Communists during those years and makes it clear how much more efficient the Soviets were in contrast to the stereotype of German efficiency.

Like in Poland, where Nazis had a hard time actually killing the people they needed to kill and pretty much just grabbed anybody they could, especially the jews. Soviets collected information first and quietly executed soldiers, officers, intellectuals, and local leaders instead. They learned how to do it from years of experience doing the same domestically. They killed quite a few jews and non-Russians because, despite their ideology of bringing the world together, they were very nationalistic/paranoid when it came to key jobs and power.

The deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainians by Soviet authorities in the early 1930s. You should read Bloodlands, about the various episodes of mass death in Eastern Europe between 1930 and 1950.

You still have to recognize that collectivization and poor economic policy led to sober estimates of 4 - 7 million people dead. This may not be as high as some American books will tell you, but if this is what collectivization is capable of, I think allowing markets is a much safer alternative.

>But who do you say were more deserving of death, counter revolutionaries, German spies and rapists, or Jews blacks and gays?

I think the term counter revolutionaries is kind of ridiculous. Especially somehow trying to justify they should just be shot and left. Also the fact that Stalin's government was notorious for torture until signing guilty it was like a constant witch hunt finding "counter revolutionaries". As for rapists being bad I could never disagree, but most of the raping was done by those protecting "collectivism"

>...law came into force that stipulated that all food was state property and that mere possession of food was evidence of a crime... Under the pretext of grain confiscation, the brigades routinely raped women living alone.

>Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

I don't see that happening in many free markets...

Broadly speaking, before the war the plans were something like this: Conquer lands in the east (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Western USSR), de-populate them and colonise them with Germans. This eventually coalesced into the Hunger Plan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan), which was a set of more specific proposals on how to do this, including forced removal of food to Germany, leading to death by starvation of somewhere in the region of fifty million people. http://www.amazon.com/Bloodlands-Europe-Between-Hitler-Stalin/dp/0465002390/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1342617922&sr=8-1&keywords=bloodlands+europe+between+hitler+and+stalin+by+timothy+snyder

The war took unexpected turns for the Germans, so only small portions of the plan were ever implemented.