 The twentieth century poses one additional challenge for the historian because it falls within the human memories of the living generation of historians grappling with its intricacies. When Tony Judt writes (2006) about the fall of Ceaușescu in Romania in 1989, or Timothy Snyder (2010) writes about the murderous actions of German order police in Ukraine in 1940, or Marc Bloch (1949) writes about the “strange defeat” of France in 1940, they are writing about events for which they themselves, or their parents, or Poles and Ukrainian Jews with whom they can interact, have direct lived experiences and memories. Timothy Snyder’s style of historical writing suggests that the nearness in time of the killings in the bloodlands both supports and warrants an especially personal and individual approach; thus Snyder’s use of many individual stories of victims of the killings of peasants, Jews, and other human victims of the killing machines of Hitler and Stalin suggests that he believes it is important for the historian to make an effort to convey the individual meanings of these events affecting millions of people. How does this accessibility of the recent past affect the problems facing the historian? Does it influence the ways in which historians select events, causes, and actions as “crucial”? Does this experiential access through living memory provide a more secure form of historical evidence than other sources available to the historian? Does it give rise to an experiential content and detail to historical writing that solve an interpretive problem for the reader – for example, how to put oneself in the position of a Ukrainian peasant slowly starving to death? Did the stories told in the Judt household in London in 1942 about beloved cousins then facing deadly threats in Brussels shape the historical consciousness of the adult historian (Judt and Snyder 2012)? Did Marc Bloch’s own experience as a French army officer in defeat at Dunkirk influence the way that he understood war and violence? Access to individuals who lived through the Holodomor or the Spanish Civil War is of course valuable historical evidence. Here too, however, Marc Bloch has important insights, for Bloch specifically challenges the idea that participants have an inherently more reliable or complete form of knowledge than more temporally distant historians (1953: chapter II). Memories and personal accounts are valuable for the historian, but equally, historians have access to other forms of historical evidence (archaeological, archival, government records, …) which may be comparably important and epistemically secure in attempting to piece together the complex history of Stalin’s war on the Ukrainian peasantry.