Extraordinary times
Anne Applebaum is one of the leading popular historians of the Communist era. A professor at the London School of Economics, where she is helping to lead a project examining disinformation and modern propaganda, she is also a journalist, a former editor a
Q Why did you decide to write a book about the Ukrainian famine right now?
A The original reason to start work on it was that I was aware of how much was now available in Soviet archives and how much work has been done by Ukrainian historians, (so) it was possible to write that story in a different way. As Ukraine tried to establish itself as an independent country, it explains that the famine (also known as the Holodomor, a state-inflicted food shortage that killed millions between 1932 and 1933) attempted to eliminate that possibility forever. That attempt to establish an independent Ukraine didn’t go away after the famine and after Stalin murdered the Ukrainian elite; it just went underground. It emerged again in 1991 and we see it again in the battle for Ukrainian independence that continues today. That was a story that I felt hadn’t been written before using the new material, and then it also is a story that helps explain (current) hard politics as well.
Q How does this change the official narrative of the famine in Ukraine?
A I don’t know if it changes the official narrative, but my book establishes it in a broader context. It begins in 1917, with the first Ukrainian revolution and explains why it was that Stalin’s policy toward Ukraine became genocidal, why it was that Stalin felt the need to eliminate a major part of the peasantry as well as the intellectual elite. He saw peasants as the troops of the national movement, and feared a peasant rebellion — as there had been a peasant rebellion in 1918 when they threw the Bolsheviks out of Ukraine. Stalin saw the peasants as a kind of living threat, an anti-Soviet force.
Q It sounds like this wasn’t an entirely paranoid or delusional fear, from his perspective.
A No, but he caricatured those positions to the point of hysteria. The Soviet press was full of rantings about the countless revolutionary hordes, Western intervention, imaginary alliances with the U.K. (or) between the peasants and the Poles. An attempt was made to work up both the Russian and Ukrainian urban dwellers to a state of hysteria about the danger poised by the peasantry.
Q How does this history play out today?
A After (the famine) happened, it was very thoroughly repressed. Nobody was allowed to mention it for many decades, but the effect of that is that it developed in a kind of counternarrative. In Ukrainian society, it was told to children and grandchildren until it became part of Ukraine’s hidden history. That’s why it was so important to the diaspora, but also why, since, 1990, it played such a role in the Ukrainian narrative about re-establishing the real history and telling people what really happened. That motivated the independence movement.
Q As a journalist and historian of this era, what has stood out for you over the past year?
A We have an extraordinary situation now in the U. S.-Russian relationship where we have an American president, for reasons that aren’t clear, afraid or unwilling to say anything critical of Russia. He’s willing to attack China, he’s willing to attack America’s allies. He’s attacked the British prime minister, but he has been very wary about saying anything negative about (Russian President) Vladimir Putin. There could be many reasons for this; one could be the financial relationship he has with Russia. He could be afraid about something Russia knows about him, or it could reflect his profound admiration for the oligarchic, autocratic society Putin oversees in Russia. I don’t know.
Q We seem to have had a bizarre turnaround in which American conservatives seem aligned with Russia.
A The conservative movement had to reorient itself to cope with the president and has had to take completely different positions on a lot of things. That’s led to big divisions, of course, in the Republican Party.
Q Have you been surprised by the level of resistance — or lack of resistance — to Donald Trump?
A Republicans in Congress have continued to think their agenda is a bigger priority than impeaching the president, and conservatives in the country — I don’t know. We’ll see what happens in the next couple of elections. There is no question that the Republican Party is different now than it was two years ago. There are different values, different structures and different people running it.
Q As a historian, does what is happening right now concern you?
A The U.S. is a very, very big place. Not only are there checks and balances but it is also very decentralized. Trump has very little say about what happens in California, for example. This is not a small European country where it’s really dangerous when an anti-pluralist or aggressively dishonest politician takes power. I don’t think he is going to do permanent damage to America. I am less worried by him than I am worried by the politics in other countries. There is an anti-pluralist and anti-democratic mood around. People are impatient with the institutions in democracies and they are more and more interested in trying to get things done quickly, without consensus, without creating coalitions. There are a lot of reasons for that, but I think part of it is be- cause they are accustomed with the speed by which things are now done on social media; they can find the democratic process frustrating. But, also, it’s more easy to create anti-democratic movements than it used to be, also thanks to social media.
Q Meanwhile, the investigation into whether or not there was collusion between President Trump’s team and Russia during the election is ongoing.
A The investigation is a big deal and there is a lot more to come. There have been hints of the scale of this; (law enforcement) has been very strict about not leaking anything so I don’t have any special insights. I do expect it to bring us more information. What’s been produced so far is already well beyond what anybody thought possible a year ago — Michael Flynn (who briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser) has been indicted and there have been revelations about Trump’s sons having multiple meetings with Russia.
Q It’s true that these were surprising, but they had less impact than expected.
A People have become more tribal than they used to be and they don’t necessarily hear those stories. We increasingly live in echo chambers and they don’t even see them, or they have decided their tribal loyalty is more important than worrying whether or not the president is a traitor.