Patriot or traitor? More than one-half century after his execution, General Andrei Vlasov remains one of World War II’s most controversial figures. A brilliant Soviet commander, Vlasov was captured by the German Wehrmacht in July, 1942, and soon became central to the campaign by junior German officers to launch a Russian Liberation Army (usually referred to as the ROA) against Stalin’s regime. These plans ran up against Nazi dogmas of Lebensraum and Slavic inferiority, however, and Vlasov spent much of the war under house arrest. Only in the last months of the war did the Germans consent to sponsor a truncated version of his Liberation Army, with predictably futile results. Yet Vlasov’s vision – of a Russia freed of Stalin’s yoke, with guaranteed freedoms for its peoples – survived his battlefield defeats; that he sought to attain his goals through German Nazi sponsorship underlines the tragedy of his – and Soviet Russia’s – predicament.

Some Americans call the Second World War “The Good War.” But before it even began, America’s wartime ally Josef Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was finally defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, both the German and the Soviet killing sites fell behind the iron curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single history, in the time and place where they occurred: between Germany and Russia, when Hitler and Stalin both held power.

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