The story of famine in Ukraine is presented in this book in the context of historical events that took place during 1917-1930th. Applebaum's compulsive narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the 20th century and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the 21st.Ī thorough view into Stalin's regime in UkraineĪnne 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.

Today, Russia, the successor to the Soviet Union, has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil. In some cases they killed one another for food. Starvation set in rapidly, and people ate anything: grass, tree bark, dogs, corpses. The state sealed the republic's borders and seized all available food. 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.Īpplebaum proves what has long been suspected: After a series of rebellions unsettled the province, Stalin set out to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry. But instead of sending relief, the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. At least five million people died between 19 in the USSR. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. 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.

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.

Red Famine by Anne Applebaum