In the middle of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes killed fourteen million people in certain borderlands between Berlin and Moscow. In these bloodlands, today's Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and the eastern Baltic coast, an average of more than a million civilians were killed annually by the Nazi and Soviet regimes during twelve years that both Hitler and Stalin were in power, from 1933 to 1944. ogether Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union ruled most of the Eurasian landmass, but they killed chiefly, indeed almost entirely, in the bloodlands. Beyond the bloodlands, the regimes of Hitler and Stalin together, in their vast domains from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, deliberately killed no more than three million civilians in these years. If the compact area of the bloodlands is included, the figure rises to seventeen million souls. he center of gravity of modern European history is here, in the frontier zones and lands between states advocating European ideologies, who assaulted European peoples, and eradicated an established European order.The center of gravity of modern European history is a black hole. oday Stalin's crimes are associated