Looking Into the Abyss Daniel Chirot Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. ByTimothy Snyder. New York: Basic Books, 2010. 544p. $29.95. I n order to understand the forces that brought Hitler and Stalin to power and permitted them to commit almost unbelievable horrors, we must first appreciate how desperate times bring about entirely unpredictable political reactions. As stabilizing traditional institutions no longer seem to work, people become frightened and disoriented. They look for simple answers and turn to ideologies and leaders that might have seemed danger- ously extreme in normal times. Wild ideas and extremist political entrepreneurs come to the fore precisely because they offer salvation. There are many such situations today. For example in troubled Arab countries that have turned away from cor- rupt, failed regimes, there seems to be a tendency to turn toward reactionary forms of Islam, some of which prom- ise only extreme repression and brutality. This is what happened in Yugoslavia when Serbs accepted the murder- ous regime of Slobodan Milos ˇevic ´, whose promise of national revival seduced enough followers to produce Europe’s bloodiest war since World War II. Likewise, it is what happened in Cambodia in the 1970s, and in Rwanda in the early 1990s. Revolutionary situations that turn soci- eties upside down do not always result in such horrors, but many do. Most of the worst political violence, past and present, has been produced by this deadly combina- tion of failed institutions, desperation, and leaders willing to go to extremes in order to satisfy an unrealistic ideolog- ical urge to fix their world. We have yet to see whether such violence will reoccur if our current economic crisis spreads and plunges us back into a time like the years after World War I, and the Depression of the 1930s. As social scientists, we have not analyzed such situa- tions well. In suggesting that successful revolutions are necessarily progressive events in which a new and better class takes power from an old and obsolete one, several generations of politically leftist historians have blinded themselves to the negative outcomes of the French Revo- lution, and even more, to the horrors perpetrated by Len- inism, Maoism, and their offshoots. 1 By insisting that revolutions must lean in a certain direction to meet the approval of Marxist theory, a good many social scientists and historians have refused to believe that fascism, partic- ularly as practiced in Nazi Germany, was truly revolution- ary; yet, Hitler aimed to create a very original kind of political and economic system, and was willing to engage in limitless brutality in order to achieve his goals. In fact, it has been mostly historians, rather than those in the disciplines that claim to be more “scientific,” who have led the way toward a better understanding of how a simplified and utopian ideology that comes to power risks producing a nightmare result. There are exceptions, of course, notably Benjamin Valentino (2004) in political science and a few others. But mostly, those in the social sciences who have tried to understand the evils resulting from strong ideologies have been too politically biased. An example is Michael Mann (2005), who blames democ- racy for genocides and leaves questions surrounding Hit- ler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot unanswered. Rather, it has been historians like François Furet (1999), Gérard Pru- nier (1995, 2009), Eric Weitz (2003), Ben Kiernan (1996, 2007), and Frank Dikötter (2010) who have led the way; great journalists such as Philip Gourevitch (1998) have also contributed greatly. If we as social scientists want to better analyze the mon- strous evils perpetrated by various kinds of ideological extremism, we need to better incorporate into our models the knowledge provided by major historians. We have to accept the reality that currently fashionable theories seem- ing to explain how various class and individual prefer- ences operate in routine, bloodless politics fail badly when the extraordinary happens. And we have to remember that just because the politics of revolutionary and ideological extremism rarely succeed, when they do the consequences may be both cataclysmic and long lasting because they leave an institutional legacy of their own that may only be overcome through more violence. This makes the widely and very well reviewed book by Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, one we should all read. Hitler and Stalin were Daniel Chirot is Job and Gertrud Tamaki Professor of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. Review Essay: Undisciplined doi:10.1017/S1537592712000734 June 2012 | Vol. 10/No. 2 397