Apart from his main position at Yale, he is a visiting professor at the College d’Europe’s Warsaw branch at Natolin, an EU institution. After Sir Martin Gilbert and other leading Holocaust scholars resigned in protest from the Lithuanian government’s historical commission in protest against Lithuania’s outrageous actions in pursuing the head of Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust commemoration centre, as a possible war criminal, Snyder was one of those who agreed to join. Following controversial diplomatic activity, Yad Vashem itself agreed to rejoin the commission. Snyder accepted a place on the commission after the Lithuanian government sponsored and passed a resolution of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe — the Vilnius Declaration of 2009 — “equating,” as reported by the BBC, “the roles of the USSR and Nazi Germany in starting World War II”.

Snyder has repeatedly excoriated Russia for aggression against Ukraine, contrasting German virtue with Russian vice. Urging CDU/CSU Bundestag deputies on June 10 to take a more robust line in support of Ukraine, he assured them that Germany’s actions to take responsibility after the Holocaust have been “exemplary” and that Germany is “better than everyone else in carrying out historical discussions”. On June 20, he attended the high-level annual Global Security Conference in Slovakia where he urged an enlargement of the EU to include Ukraine. Reverting to his concern in Black Earth about land, and chillingly oblivious of the throwback to Hitler’s quest for Lebensraum, he suggested that Ukraine has a lot to offer the EU because “it has quality agricultural land which the EU doesn’t have so much of”.

The strength of Snyder’s praise for present-day Germany and his harsh criticism of Russia must add to the suspicion that an objective of Bloodlands, Black Earth and of Snyder’s essays in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere is to shift some Holocaust blame from Hitler to Stalin. In his review of Bloodlands, Evans wrote that Snyder’s account constituted “a narrative that homogenises the history of mass murder by equating Hitler’s policies with those of Stalin”.

Speaking in 2012 at the US Embassy in Lithuania, Snyder insisted that those who suggested he had made such an equivalence either had not read his book or were “animated by bad faith”. His account of the struggles in Poland and the Baltic states between the Nazi and Communist superpowers focused on the interaction between them and the effects of such interaction on local attitudes to their Jewish populations. This, he argued, was different from a comparison between the relative evils of the two regimes. Moreover, though he had not set out to make a comparison, the findings of his book showed that Hitler was worse than Stalin both in the numbers he murdered and in his genocidal intent.

Whatever conclusion is drawn about the purpose and impact of Snyder’s work, it is impossible to ignore the background of his controversial activities in the field of public diplomacy in Central and Eastern Europe.