Shore has become a member of a powerful group of public intellectuals associated with a set of interlocking, mainly European institutions. The book needs to be seen in this context. She and her husband Timothy Snyder (another Yale history professor and author of the bestselling Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin) move in the circle of the New York Review of Books and bodies associated with George Soros such as the Vienna-based and Austrian government-funded Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen. Shore has held appointments there, her husband is a permanent fellow and their first child was born in Vienna. Snyder took his doctorate at St Antony's College, Oxford, and later co-authored a work with the dying anti-Zionist writer Tony Judt. Former Polish Communists who rebelled in 1968 against the Party — disciples of Leszek Kolakowski such as Aleksander Smolar — are active members of the group (Garton Ash, Smolar and Soros are all board members of the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen as well as members of the Council of the pro-EU and Soros-funded European Council on Foreign Relations.)  

Two of the core doctrines of the circle are anti-Communism and belief in a federal Europe as the basis of a liberal and open society. Anti-Zionism is a further feature of some of their writings and activities. Grounded mainly in the left-wing revolt against Communism, the network's public intellectuals tend to pay less attention to the Nazi era. When the Holocaust is covered at all, there is a tendency implicitly to balance the evils of Hitler with those of Stalin. It may be no coincidence that Shore's book is subtitled The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. As the Oxford scholar Zbygniew Pelczynski (my revered undergraduate tutor) has long argued, "totalitarianism" is an unhelpful term. It ignores the gradual, albeit partial changes within the Soviet satellites after Stalin's death in 1953. It also implies a morally and historically bogus Hitler/Stalin equivalence. As the Vilnius-based US academic Dovid Katz argues on his website, recent European Union initiatives have given official patronage to the idea of a Nazi-Communist parallel. Together with prevailing anti-Zionism (and, arguably, underlying anti-Semitic tendencies) so fashionable in Europe, these developments have consequences for the study and understanding of the Holocaust and of recent European history which are a cause for considerable concern.