For most people in poor countries, he thinks, mobile phones are fast becoming the main communications tool, schoolbook, vaccination record, family album and many other things.
For those who are wedded to the simplistic schoolbook notions that the Hitlerites were the mass murderers and the Soviets the liberators, or that the killing started in 1939 and ended in 1945, Mr Snyder's theses will be thought-provoking or shocking.