Red Famine

INTRODUCTION

The Ukrainian Question

For centuries, the geography of Ukraine shaped the destiny of Ukraine. The Carpathian Mountains marked the border in the southwest, but the gentle forests and fields in the northwestern part of the country could not stop invading armies, and neither could the wide open steppe in the east. All of Ukraine s great cities Dnipropetrovsk and Odessa, Donetsk and Kharkiv, Poltava and Cherkasy and of course Kyiv, the ancient capital lie in the East European Plain, a flatland that stretches across most of the country. Nikolai Gogol, a Ukrainian who wrote in Russian, once observed that the Dnieper River flows through the centre of Ukraine and forms a basin. From there the rivers all branch out from the centre; not a single one of them flows along the border or serves as a natural border with neighbouring nations. This fact had political consequences: Had there been a natural border of mountains or sea on one side, the people who settled here would have carried on their political way of life and would have formed a separate nation.

The absence of natural borders helps explain why Ukrainians failed, until the late twentieth century, to establish a sovereign Ukrainian state. By the late Middle Ages, there was a distinct Ukrainian language, with Slavic roots, related to but distinct from both Polish and Russian, much as Italian is related to but distinct from Spanish or French. Ukrainians had their own food, their own customs and local traditions, their own villains, heroes and legends. Like other European nations, Ukraine s sense of identity sharpened during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But for most of its history the territory we now call Ukraine was, like Ireland or Slovakia, a colony that formed part of other European land empires.

Ukraine the word means borderland in both Russian and Polish belongedto the Russian empire between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Prior to that, the same lands belonged to

Anne Applebaum

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER  AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

"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