In the middle of Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered fourteen million people in the bloodlands between Berlin and Moscow. In a twelve-year-period, in these killing fields — today's Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Western Russia and the eastern Baltic coast — an average of more than one million citizens were slaughtered every year, as a result of deliberate policies unrelated to combat. In his revelatory book, Timothy Snyder offers a ground-breaking investigation into the motives and methods of Stalin and Hitler and, using scholarly literature and primary sources, pays special attention to the testimony of the victims, including the letters home, the notes flung from trains, the diaries on corpses. The result is a brilliantly researched, profoundly humane, authoritative and original book that forces us to re-examine the greatest tragedy in European history and re-think our past.

Wilhelm von Habsburg wore the uniform of an Austrian officer, the court regalia of a Habsburg archduke, the simple suit of a Parisian exile, the decorations of the Order of the Golden Fleece and, every so often, a dress. He spoke the Italian of his archduke mother, the German of his archduke father, the English of his British royal friends, the Polish of the country his father wished to rule and the Ukrainian of the land Wilhelm wished to rule himself. Timothy Snyder's masterful biography is not only a reconstruction of the life of this extraordinary man — a man who remained loyal to his Ukrainian dreams even after the country's dissolution in 1921 — but also charts the final collapse of the ancient regime in Europe and the rise of a new world order.