Timothy Snyder, whose widely-acclaimed book Bloodlands offers a synthetic history of Nazi and Soviet mass killings before and during World War II, will examine their legacy in a free, public lecture hosted by the Cambridge Ukrainian Studies programme this week.

The talk, entitled “Mass Killing and Commemoration: Some European Disharmonies”, will take place on Thursday, 10 February at 5pm in the Gillespie Centre at Clare College.

The theme of Snyder’s lecture follows in the wake of Bloodlands, which was published last year and named in more than ten Book-of-the-Year lists for its unprecedented reconstruction of the violent deaths that took place under both the Nazis and Soviets in Eastern Europe from about 1930 to 1945.

Timothy Snyder is Professor of History at Yale, where he specialises in modern East European political history. His other works include Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine and The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke.

“Timothy Snyder is a historian who challenges us to question our conventional understanding of the darkest moments in European history,” said Dr Rory Finnin, Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies and a member of the Memory at War project. “His work sparks much-needed discussion and debate and opens up new avenues for research.”