In Bloodlands, his groundbreaking history of mass killing in Eastern Europe from 1933 to 1945, Timothy Snyder reserved exactly three pages for Auschwitz. This was deliberate. Auschwitz is commonly misunderstood as the place where the most Jews were killed, even though by the time the camp was established, more than three-quarters of the Jews who would perish during the war were already dead, shot by the mobile killing units of the Einsatzgruppen or asphyxiated in the death camps of Treblinka, Bełzec, and Sobibór. Auschwitz’s symbolic power had also bewitched a generation of philosophers like Theodore Adorno and Hannah Arendt whose interpretation of the Holocaust largely became our own. They saw in the concentration and death camp an example of an all-powerful state that had taken bureaucracy to its terrifying conclusion, using it as a tool to catalogue, repress and then exterminate an entire class of its own citizens.

Looking further east, Snyder saw a different kind of killing with different implications. The dehumanizing tattoos of Auschwitz, the orderly gas chambers and crematoria were not what characterized the massacres there. What happened in the territory he dubbed the Bloodlands—in western Belarus and Ukraine, in the Baltic states, and in what was independent Poland—was chaos, improvisation, and sudden death for the vast majority of Jews in lands in which all social and political order had broken down. The only reason we know so much about Auschwitz, Snyder wrote, was because there were some who survived it. For most of those killed in the Holocaust the story was different, but they did not live to tell it.

The book’s aim was to offer a corrective. Snyder aimed to explain what made killing on such a scale possible, tracing how both Hitler and Stalin played out their fantasies of empire and conquest on the same territory, destroying polities and the people they believed were in their way, whether Ukrainian, Polish or Jewish. This new narrative framed the Holocaust as part of a wider phenomenon of mass murder, making Jews one set of victims among the 14 million who were killed. Certainly Jews were unique in this story for their status as nonbeings in Nazi cosmology; but he saw what happened to them from a broader perspective, as the result of a unique and deadly politics that emerged in the Bloodlands.

Yet Snyder did not move from narrative to overarching theory, offering a new way of understanding the killing to counter the codified Auschwitz-inspired one that has stuck in the popular imagination. Instead, he tended to zoom in on human detail, telling the individual stories of starving Ukrainians forced to cannibalism or the Soviet POWS on whom the Nazis first tested poison gas. As the historian Samuel Moyn wrote in a 2010 review, Snyder’s fine-grained work “lays the foundation for some grand new explanation rather than providing one itself.”

This brings us to Black Earth, Snyder’s new book, which is, most definitely, an attempt to provide a “grand new explanation” specifically of the Holocaust—a departure for a historian who seemed wary of such things. It tries to offer lessons, moving Snyder from the historian’s mode to the prophet’s, something that seems to come naturally to him tonally, a self-assured narrator of history as dark prelude.