A brilliant, haunting, and profoundly original portrait of the defining tragedy of our time. In this epic history of extermination and survival, Timothy Snyder presents a new explanation of the great atrocity of the twentieth century, and reveals the risks that we face in the twenty-first. Based on new sources from eastern Europe and forgotten testimonies from Jewish survivors, Black Earth recounts the mass murder of the Jews as an event that is still close to us, more comprehensible than we would like to think, and thus all the more terrifying. The Holocaust began in a dark but accessible place, in Hitler's mind, with the thought that the elimination of Jews would restore balance to the planet and allow Germans to win the resources they desperately needed. Such a worldview could be realized only if Germany destroyed other states, so Hitler's aim was a colonial war in Europe itself. In the zones of statelessness, almost all Jews died. A few people, the righteous few, aided them, without support from institutions. Much of the new research in this book is devoted to understanding these extraordinary individuals. The almost insurmountable difficulties they faced only confirm the dangers of state destruction and ecological panic. These men and women should be emulated, but in similar circumstances few of us would do so. By overlooking the lessons of the Holocaust, Snyder concludes, we have misunderstood modernity and endangered the future. The early twenty-first century is coming to resemble the early twentieth, as growing preoccupations with food and water accompany ideological challenges to global order. Our world is closer to Hitler's than we like to admit, and saving it requires us to see the Holocaust as it was --and ourselves as we are. Groundbreaking, authoritative, and utterly absorbing, Black Earth reveals a Holocaust that is not only history but warning.

An in-depth exploration of Ukraine through encounters with the many different people who live there. “Will someone pay for the spilled blood? No. Nobody.” Mikhail Bulgakov composed this ominous and prophetic phrase in Kiev amid the turmoil of the Russian civil war. Since then, Ukrainian borders have shifted constantly, and its people have suffered numerous military foreign interventions. Ukraine has only existed as an independent state since 1991, and what exactly it was before then is controversial among its people as well as its European neighbors. In Black Earth: A Journey through the Ukraine, journalist and celebrated travel writer Jens Mühling takes readers across the country amid the ousting of former president Viktor Yanukovych and the Russian annexation of Crimea. Mühling delves deep into daily life in Ukraine, narrating his encounters with Ukrainian nationalists and old communists, Crimean Tatars and Cossacks, smugglers, and soldiers. Black Earth connects all these stories to convey an unconventional and unfiltered view of Ukraine, a country at the crossroads of Europe and Asia and the center of countless conflicts. In this paperback edition, a new preface is included that takes into account recent developments up to the 2022 war between Russia and Ukraine.

R. Craig Nation provides the first post-Cold War history of the Soviets' seventy-five-year struggle to maintain an effective national security policy in a hostile world without altogether abandoning the commitment to their original internationalist ideals.

Introduction: setting the table -- Governance, or, How to solve the grain problem? -- Production -- Consumption, or, The Perestroika of the quotidian -- Nature -- Conclusion: vulnerabilities.

Bloodlands + Black Earth: Red Flags as History and Warning. Stalin, Mao, & Hitler - their blood red flags and black hearts caused the deaths of millions. There was a conspiracy shared by all three of them and by many others worldwide. They were aided by ideological comrades in the USA. Their comrades continue to cover up their deadly dogma today. Top historical discoveries of the century are revealed in this book, including: (1) Congress and the Flag Code confirm that the military salute was the origin of the Nazi salute. (2) The USA's Pledge of Allegiance inspired Nazi rituals. (3) Public schools spread Nazi behavior. (4) Swastikas represented crossed "S" letter shapes for "socialist" under Hitler. The above scholarly achievements are from astounding academic work by the historian Dr. Rex Curry. Verified! The U.S. Congress confirms that the remarkable research is correct. Learn how flag laws are written to hide America's scary past, present, and future. Fact checked! The startling news exposes the origins of the police state and how to fight it. Save yourself from the cult of the omnipotent state! The de-programming guide is right here. This blockbuster debunks parts of Timothy Snyder's books "Bloodlands" and "Black Earth." EXPOSED: what the "+" symbol means on the front cover in the title "Bloodlands + Black Earth"! Author Ian Tinny relied on research by Dr. Curry, including these astonishing discoveries: (1) that the "Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag" was the origin of the Nazi salute and Nazi behavior; (2) that the military salute was the origin of the Nazi salute (via the military salute's use in the original Pledge of Allegiance) and; (3) Swastikas represented crossed "S" letter shapes for "socialist" under Hitler. Research for Dr. Curry's distinguished accomplishments was painstaking and difficult, but fortunately grad students are plentiful and cheap. The government calls America's beloved VexilLOLogist (Dr. Curry) "the man who knows too much." Anyone who doubts that Hitler used the swastika to represent "S" letter shapes for "Socialism" is someone who believes Hitler was blind and that Hitler remained blind throughout the decades that Hitler used the symbol for his National Socialist Party. Eventually, Dr. Curry's discovery about the swastika will become so well-known and so obvious that no one will believe that Dr. Curry "made the discovery that Hitler used the swastika to represent 'S' letter shapes for 'socialism'" because no one will believe that there ever was a time when people could not see that Dr. Curry's assertion was self-evident. People will not believe that there ever was a time when the world did not see the glaring truth. People of the future will not believe that people of today were so blind and ignorant. It will be Dr. Curry's revolutionary paradigm shift. The same path of doubt, dissemination, and eventual widespread acceptance and paradigm shift will occur regarding Dr. Curry's discovery that the Pledge of Allegiance was the origin of the Nazi salute and Nazi behavior. "There is rumor of a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the Pledge of Allegiance as the origin of Nazi salutes and Nazi behavior; and the swastika as alphabetical 'S' letter shaped symbolism for 'socialist.' Hooray!" - R. Yates Bloodsworth "The professor's work left us speechless!" - Tampa Tribune Newspaper "This book will make you wonder if anything you know is true." - Dead Writers Club The Dead Writers Club also fights media incompetency and dishonesty; toward that goal it joined with the Pointer Institute to shut down the Tampa Tribune Newspaper in 2016. The author Ian Tinny's work (with the assistance of the Pointer Institute) led to the arrest, trial, conviction, and imprisonment of America's Dumbest Criminals (and the foreclosure of their homes, along with victim restitution liens, and criminal forfeiture judgments, in amounts totaling millions of dollars).

This book deals with the sustainability of agriculture on the Black Earth by drawing on data from long-term field experiments. It emphasises the opportunities for greater food and water security at local and regional levels. The Black Earth, Chernozem in Russian, is the best arable soil in the world and the breadbasket of Europe and North America. It was the focus of scientific study at the very beginnings of soil science in the late 19th century—as a world in itself, created by the roots of the steppe grasses building a water-stable granular structure that holds plentiful water, allows rapid infiltration of rain and snow melt, and free drainage of any surplus. Under the onslaught of industrial farming, Chernozem have undergone profound but largely unnoticed changes with far-reaching consequences—to the point that agriculture on Chernozem is no longer sustainable. The effects of agricultural practices on global warming, the diversion of rainfall away from replenishment of water resources to destructive runoff, and the pollution of streams and groundwater are all pressing issues. Sustainability absolutely requires that these consequences be arrested.

Set in a fictional world based on feudal Japan Red Moon over Black Earth is a tale of a young man of a noble family, Akihiko, and those closest to him. With a changing world around him Akihiko’s sheltered life in a small village is interrupted with a visit by an unexpected guest. When Akihiko is called off to war his loved ones are left to take care of each other and cope without him. The world and the places with in it are just as entertaining to read about as the overall story. Red Moon does not fail to deliver action, light whimsical comedy, fantasy, and romance.

Mystery drama is a contemporary manifestation of a movement first expressed in early Greek drama. Rudolf Steiner renewed this form and viewed his mystery plays as an extension of the European theater tradition of realism, encompassing also the realism of experiences beyon the sensory world. After working with Rudolf Steiner's mystery dramas for some years, Christopher Marcus and his performance group felt the need to stage a contemporary work. The result is Black Earth, a bold and powerful drama of soul and spirit, based around themes of technology, art, destiny, and metamorphosis. First presented in 1999 by Circle-X Arts-an international group of artists, directors, writers, and producers-and performed around Europe to much acclaim, Black Earth is published here for the first time.

Russia’s foremost modernist master in a major new translation Osip Mandelstam has become an almost mythical figure of modern Russian poetry, his work treasured all over the world for its lyrical beauty and innovative, revolutionary engagement with the dark times of the Stalinist era. While he was exiled in the city of Voronezh, the black earth region of Russia, his work, as Joseph Brodsky wrote, developed into “a poetry of high velocity and exposed nerves, becoming more a song than ever before, not a bardlike but a birdlike song … something like a goldfinch tremolo.” Peter France—who has been brilliantly translating Mandelstam’s work for decades—draws heavily from Mandelstam’s later poetry written in Voronezh, while also including poems across the whole arc of the poet’s tragically short life, from his early, symbolist work to the haunting elegies of old Petersburg to his defiant “Stalin poem.” A selection of Mandelstam’s prose irradiates the poetry with warmth and insight as he thinks back on his Petersburg childhood and contemplates his Jewish heritage, the sunlit qualities of Hellenism, Dante’s Tuscany, and the centrality of poetry in society.

"That Black Earth is an extraordinary work is, for anyone who has known Russia, beyond question."—George Kennan "A compassionate glimpse into the extremes where the new Russia meets the old," writes Robert Legvold (Foreign Affairs) about Andrew Meier's enthralling new work. Journeying across a resurgent and reputedly free land, Meier has produced a virtuosic mix of nuanced history, lyric travelogue, and unflinching reportage. Throughout, Meier captures the country's present limbo—a land rich in potential but on the brink of staggering back into tyranny—in an account that is by turns heartrending and celebratory, comic and terrifying. A 2003 New York Public Library Book to Remember. "Black Earth is the best investigation of post-Soviet Russia since David Remnick's Resurrection. Andrew Meier is a truly penetrating eyewitness."—Robert Conquest, author of The Great Terror; "If President Bush were to read only the chapters regarding Chechnya in Meier's Black Earth, he would gain a priceless education about Putin's Russia."—Zbigniew Brzezinski "Even after the fall of Communism, most American reporting on Russia often goes no further than who's in and who's out in the Kremlin and the business oligarchy. Andrew Meier's Russia reaches far beyond . . . this Russia is one where, as Meier says, history has a hard time hiding. Readers could not easily find a livelier or more insightful guide."—Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost and The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin "From the pointless war in Chechnya to the wild, exhilarating, and dispiriting East and the rise of Vladimir Putin, the former KGB officer—it's all here in great detail, written in the layers the story deserves, with insight, passion, and genuine affection."—Michael Specter, staff writer, The New Yorker; co-chief, The New York Times Moscow Bureau, 1995-98. "[Meier's] knowledge of the country and his abiding love for its people stands out on every page of this book....But it is his linguistic fluency, in particular, which enables Mr. Meier to dig so deeply into Russia's black earth."—The Economist "A wonderful travelogue that depicts the Russian people yet again trying to build a new life without really changing their old one."—William Taubman, The New York Times Book Review.