Red Famine

by Anne Applebaum

Allen Lane 512pp £25 The Week Bookshop £22 (incl. p&p) “In 1933, the rural population of Ukraine began to die,” said Daniel Finkelstein in The Times. “They fell down dead while sitting at school desks”, or while “scavenging in the fields”. The causes of the Holodomor (literally, “hunger-death”) are no mystery. When Ukraine’s farms, collectivised in the late 1920s, failed to meet their targets, Stalin instituted a policy of grain requisition. Peasants, he claimed, were hoarding food needed elsewhere in the Soviet Union; so party officials visited their homes and “confiscated any grain, bread or other food that they found”. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s borders were shut, ensuring the hungry couldn’t leave. Between 1932 and 1934, more than four million Ukrainians died from starvation. Those who survived ate their horses, cats and dogs, and even “the dead bodies of their family members”. Anne Applebaum’s “relentless, shocking” history of the tragedy will “cement her deserved reputation as the leading historian of Soviet crimes”.

Historians disagree as to whether the famine was an “intended consequence” of Soviet policy, but Applebaum is in “no doubt”, said Nick Rennison in The Sunday Times. Stalin harboured “a paranoid distrust of Ukraine”, and his suppression of Ukrainian nationalism “marched in parallel” with the policies that led to the famine. While peasants were dying, Ukraine’s intellectuals were being rounded up, said Owen Matthews in The Spectator. The aim was to “squash all hopes of an independent Ukrainian state”. Today, the Holodomor remains an “ideological touchstone”: most Ukrainians regard it as a genocide, whereas Putin’s “tame historians” still – “disgustingly” – maintain that it was merely a natural disaster. In her important and “meticulous” study, Applebaum has “drawn back the veil” on “one of the 20th century’s most egregious crimes”.