TERRIBLE FATE: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe

By Benjamin Lieberman

In Terrible Fate, Lieberman describes the violent transformations that occurred in hundreds of towns and cities as historic empires collapsed. Drawing upon a variety of sources, Lieberman’s story sweeps across the continent, taking the reader from ethnic cleansing’s earliest beginnings in Bulgaria, Greece, and Russia in the nineteenth century, through the rise of nationalism, both world wars, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the rise and fall of the Soviet empire, up to the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Along the way he examines the decisive roles of political leaders—not only monarchs and dictators but also those who were democratically elected—as well as ordinary people who often required little encouragement to rob and brutalize their neighbors, or who were simply caught up in the tide of history.

Ivan R. Dee (2006)