Red Famine

Starred review from August 15, 2017
A new history of Stalin's oppressive regime, which led to the death by starvation of nearly 4 million Ukrainians between 1931 and 1934.Drawing on considerable published scholarship and new archival sources, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Applebaum (Practice/London School of Economics; Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, 2012, etc.) offers a chilling, dramatic, and well-documented chronicle of a devastating famine. She argues persuasively that the lack of food resulted from a conflation of political, rather than natural, causes: enforced collectivization, confiscation of food, harsh blacklists imposed on farms and villages, trade restrictions, and a "vicious propaganda campaign designed to persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbours died of hunger." Ukraine was especially vulnerable to oppression: "disdain for the very idea of a Ukrainian state had been an integral part of Bolshevik thinking even before the revolution" of 1917; all Russian political parties, Applebaum writes, "shared this contempt" and feared any signs of a Ukrainian national movement. Famine was a scourge in the 1920s, as well; after the outbreak of World War I, a nationalized food distribution system created chaos and shortages. That situation worsened under Stalin's policy known as "War Communism": "take control of grain, at gunpoint, and then redistribute it to soldiers, factory workers, party members and others deemed 'essential' by the state." Food was exported, as well, to fund purchases of arms and machinery. Collectivization, which required farmers to give up their land to the Communist state, "destroyed the ethical structure of the countryside as well as the economic order." When farmers resisted handing over their land and property, collectivization brigades "resorted to outright intimidation and torture." When farmers refused to hand over grain, they were punished like political dissidents. Stalin's draconian policies included the elimination of Ukraine's scholars, writers, and political leaders and the "systematic destruction of Ukrainian culture and memory." Famine was another form of repression. 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.

COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 25, 2017
In this monograph, which is sure to be controversial, Applebaum (Iron Curtain), a professor of practice at the London School of Economics who lives in Poland, argues that Stalin’s 1929 plan for agricultural collectivization was more sinister than socialist and that he sought to systematically rid the burgeoning Soviet Union of Ukrainian peasants. Her eyebrow-raising thesis is that Stalin ruthlessly used famine as a weapon to kill off Ukrainian peasants, intending to replace them with more compliant Russians to secure both a bread basket and a military front. Applebaum attempts to show how collectivization resulted in genocide and outlines Stalin’s prolonged death plan for Ukraine, beginning with the Ukrainian peasant uprising of 1919 and including both its bureaucratic underpinnings and horrifying consequences. Reframing the history of this sad period in terms of hatred and nationalism, Applebaum states that in 1932, amid drought and crop failure, “the Kremlin could have offered food aid to Ukraine,” but Stalin instead stepped up the famine campaign. It is an inflammatory accusation based on circumstantial evidence, and even Applebaum admits that “no written instructions governing the behavior of activists have ever been found.” The Nazis also had a “Hunger Plan” for Ukraine, which according to her was Stalin’s “multiplied many times,” but they never implemented it. Applebaum’s revisionist historiography may serve her concluding claims against Vladimir Putin’s aggressions today, but it doesn’t stand up to deep scrutiny. Maps & illus.

Starred review from October 15, 2017
Pulitzer Prizewinning Applebaum's (Iron Curtain, 2012) richly researched account of the Ukrainian famine of 193233 pulls no punches, either in its harrowing descriptions of starvation or its assertive analysis of the cynical Stalinist political calculus that caused it. Although there were food shortages in many parts of the USSR then, the situation in Ukraine, traditionally the breadbasket of Eastern Europe, was made particularly dire by Soviet policy decisions designed to squeeze value from the region and punish it for past disloyalty. Collectivization of farms forced peasants to give up their land, depriving them of sustenance, while the authorities confiscated all available grain for the military, Soviet officials, and political loyalists. As the population began to starve, Stalin's secret police purged the region of intellectuals and Ukrainian nationalists, and fomented violence that turned the poorest peasants against their slightly wealthier neighbors. The result, captured in survivors' accounts and further revealed in recently opened archives, was hell on earth: scoured landscapes, distended bodies and destroyed minds, corpses in the street, and horrific choices. Applebaum deftly parses decades of politicized reportage and deliberate obfuscation to show how seemingly distinct aspects of Stalinism were deployed to suppress an independent Ukraine. Applebaum adds important context and compelling insights to WWII history and more recent regional conflicts. Highly recommended.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

October 1, 2017

For decades, the extreme famine in 1930s Ukraine was portrayed as no worse than what resulted in Russia from Joseph Stalin's policy of agricultural collectivization. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Applebaum (Gulag: A History) places Ukraine in pre- and postrevolution historical context to show why Stalin was intent on destroying all vestiges of independent Ukrainian nationality. Government and closed police archives prove that Ukrainian peasants were especially targeted for starvation as requisitions of grain demanded by Moscow far outstripped supply. At the same time, educators, cultural, and religious leaders were murdered. The exact number of those who died as a result of famine and purges during this time will never be known, but a strong case is made that proportionally, Ukraine was devastated more than other areas of the Soviet Union. Oral histories and memoirs of victims suppressed under the Soviet regime show the human impact of starvation. This insightful book illustrates an area of eastern Europe fraught to this day with religious, nationalist, and urban vs. rural conflict yet still coveted for its fertile farmland. VERDICT This book will appeal to readers interested in Ukrainian history, Soviet policies, and the current Ukrainian-Russian conflict. [See Prepub Alert, 4/24/17.]--Laurie Unger Skinner, Coll. of Lake Cty., Waukegan, IL

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2017

Author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the National Book Award finalist Iron Curtain, Applebaum provides evidence that the terrible famine following Stalin's 1929 agricultural collectivization was not the result of cruelly misguided policy but deliberately engineered to punish rebellious Ukrainian peasants.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.