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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
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. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. 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.
Applebaum proves what has long been suspected: after a series of rebellions unsettled the province, Stalin set out to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry. The state sealed the republic’s borders and seized all available food. Starvation set in rapidly, and people ate anything: grass, tree bark, dogs, corpses. In some cases, they killed one another for food. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil.
Today, Russia, the successor to the Soviet Union, has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more. Applebaum’s compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the twenty-first.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
October 10, 2017 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780525498193
- File size: 512042 KB
- Duration: 17:46:45
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Suzanne Toren gives a splendid display of her narration talents in this account of the famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine. The Ukrainians call this the "Holodomor," and for many Robert Conquest's HARVEST OF SORROW, published in 1986, was their introduction to this horrible event. Applebaum had access to sources and documents unavailable some 30 years ago, and this work will probably be seen as definitive on the historical horror. Toren has a clear and expressive voice, and her enunciation is sublime. She is engaging and does an excellent job reading Ukrainian words. Another narrator delivers longer excerpts in Ukrainian. This production is an excellent match of text and voice. M.T.F. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine -
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.
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