Red Famine

Stalin's War on Ukraine

By: Anne Applebaum

Narrated by: Suzanne Toren

AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the National Book Award finalist Iron Curtain, a revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest crimes—the consequences of which still resonate today

In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization—in effect a second Russian revolution—which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them.

Applebaum proves what has long been suspected: after a series of rebellions unsettled the province, Stalin set out to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry. The state sealed the republic’s borders and seized all available food. Starvation set in rapidly, and people ate anything: grass, tree bark, dogs, corpses. In some cases, they killed one another for food. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil.

Today, Russia, the successor to the Soviet Union, has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more. Applebaum’s compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the twenty-first.

Critic reviews

"Applebaum's account will surely become the standard treatment of one of history’s great political atrocities . . . She re-creates a pastoral world so we can view its destruction. And she rightly insists that the deliberate starvation of the Ukrainian peasants was part of a larger [Soviet] policy against the Ukrainian nation . . . To be sure, Russia is not the Soviet Union, and Russians of today can decide whether they wish to accept a Stalinist version of the past. But to have that choice, they need a sense of the history. This is one more reason to be grateful for this remarkable book."
—Timothy Snyder, Washington Post

“Lucid, judicious and powerful . . . The argument that Stalin singled out Ukraine for special punishment is well-made . . . [An] excellent and important book.”
—Anna Reid, Wall Street Journal

“Applebaum chronicles in almost unbearably intimate detail the ruin wrought upon Ukraine by Josef Stalin and the Soviet state apparatus he had built on suspicion, paranoia, and fear . . . Applebaum gives a chorus of contemporary voices to the tale, and her book is written in the light of later history, with the fate of Ukraine once again in the international spotlight and Ukrainians realizing with newly-relevant intensity that, as Red Famine reminds us, 'History offers hope as well as tragedy.'”
—Steve Donoghue, Christian Science Monitor

“A magisterial and heartbreaking history of Stalin’s Ukrainian famine.”
—Simon Sebag Montefiore, London Evening Standard

"Powerful . . . War, as Carl von Clausewitz famously put it, is the continuation of politics by other means. The politics in this case was the Sovietisation of Ukraine; the means was starvation. Food supply was not mismanaged by Utopian dreamers. It was weaponised . . . With searing clarity, Red Famine demonstrates the horrific consequences of a campaign to eradicate 'backwardness' when undertaken by a regime in a state of war with its own people."
—The Economist

“Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine—powerful, relentless, shocking, compelling—will cement her deserved reputation as the leading historian of Soviet crimes.”
—Daniel Finkelstein, The Times (London)

“Chilling, dramatic . . . In her detailed, well-rendered narrative, Applebaum provides a ‘crucial backstory’ for understanding current relations between Russia and Ukraine. An authoritative history of national strife from a highly knowledgeable guide.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

A thorough view into Stalin's regime in Ukraine

Anne Applebaum’s book Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine gives a thorough view into a very tragic moment in the history of Ukraine and its people. The story of famine in Ukraine is presented in this book in the context of historical events that took place during 1917-1930th. Without understanding of what was happening in Ukraine in the post-revolutionary and during the civil war years in the beginning of the 20 century, the whole account of the man-made famine, deliberately aiming to destroy one nation or one class of a nation (the peasants), would be hard to believe. Applebaum made this story to speak for itself by bringing to the light archive materials, personal stories and pictures that undeniably prove the existence of the state-created and successfully executed by the communist regime famine in Ukraine that still hunts the country down in present time.
Destruction of the national political elite (arrests and killing of the national leaders), removal of the active peasants (“dekulakization" and massive deportations of Ukrainians from their land) created the political vacuum in towns and subdued the rather stubborn national movement in the countryside. Banning the Ukrainian language, literature, music, cultural and spiritual rites and customs (churches, holidays, social structure in villages, council of the elderly) effectively depressed the national identity of Ukrainians. Destruction of the established free market system, collectivization and following confiscation of the land, machinery and livestock, removal of grain (prodrazverstka) and the ultimate removal of all grain and food (preserved as a seed or for the personal consumption) led to the catastrophic events in 1932-1933. All of that can be associated with the humanitarian crisis deliberately created in order to subdue the once proud and free willing people into slavery and obedience to the regime. As a result, people started to distrust the state and the fellow villagers, became indifferent and mostly hostile to the collective farms that in turn caused the diminishing production of grain and other farm products. The deepest human vices were unleashed: impunity of the members of the ruling party started to flourish, killing fellow villagers in order to obtain their possessions or even some food, became new norm. In the once rich and prosperous land, diseases and starvation spread rapidly leading to death of both the weak and strong.
As a child of the soviet time, I was raised on the beliefs about the internal and external enemies of the Soviet motherland that we had to uncover and fight by any means. Total propaganda... My grandparents, who survived to see me grow, were reluctant to tell me anything about that time. But I always sensed some distrust and even fear to the state or to strangers. Either during family gatherings or while listening people talk at a store on a countryside or in a farm (kolkhoz), one would never speak openly about any complains or injustice in the society.
The Red Famine book, though in a highly emotional tone, helped me to place that tragic period of time deep in my heart. It helped me to understand what circumstances shaped the people who were born in the early 20th and late 30th of the 20th century. Now I deeply regret I haven't asked enough questions to the survivors of the holodomor. Once you’ve read about the Stalin created famine in Ukraine, this part of the human history could not be forgotten or ignored.
I hope this book is translated to both Ukrainian and Russian language. It would be a great addition to the already existed score of this events.

A political anecdote from the 1980s:
A grain collection officer: the people of Ukraine are crying that there is no more food left.
Stalin: if they cry, they still have some left to part with. Proceed as I said until they start to laugh.

a must listen/read for everything

if you want to know more about current events all you have to do is learn about the past. this was very eye opening.

Great

A great book that provides much needed context for evaluating what is happening in Europe today.

The Holodomor was Awful

If you have never heard of word Holodomor, stop reading this review right now and browse a couple of articles. It is the worst genocide that most people didn't know happened, for reasons outlined in the book. This book is not a fun read, in fact some of it will probably give me actual nightmares, but it is necessary to understanding the true evil that was the Soviet Union. Pair this with the Gulag Archipelago and you will see why the citchey teens wearing the sickle and hammer are every bit as awful as those who wear swastikas.

The best book I have read all year

I highly recommend this title if you want to learn more about this chapter in Ukraine's history. I really enjoyed the narration and the content of the book. I learned a lot I had not before, and I feel that the writer of this book has links to Canada, so the Canadian content aspect was also of interest. I simply loved learning what I learned and feel that everyone should know more about the genocide and famine of 1932-1933.