Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine Hardcover – October 10, 2017

I beg you to read this long, beautifully written but very difficult book.Why is it difficult? Because reading so much evidence about how terrible people can be to one another is not to everyone's taste.This is the story of how Joseph Stalin deliberately caused the deaths of 3.9 million Ukranians in 1932-33 and how thousands of ordinary Russians and Ukranians helped him do it. As Ukraine failed to meet Stalin's impossible targets for grain production, to feed Russian citizens and for export, Stalin sent thousands of young Russians to search farms (though some couldn't tell a colt from a calf) and to find food—not huge caches of hidden grain, but bits of bread, meet and eggs that were keeping families alive.And so they starved—men, women and children. Western diplomats in Russia looked away, and western reporters, with two astounding exceptions (Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge) knew what was happening but denied there was a famine. Since western aid might have saved some of the dying, this was surely the greatest journalistic crime of the 20th century.The great Robert Conquest first told this story 30 years ago. And now, Anne Applebaum, accessing sources not available to Conquest, tells the story again in another great book. To know how great this work is, just look at the footnotes—the sources in English, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, French. The patient accumulation of small details that paint the whole ghastly picture.Read this above all to know another chapter in the annals of large-scale human misbehavior. Read it to learn about brave people who were calm or generous in the face of death and others who were inhuman to them. And read it to appreciate the work of one of the greatest and hardest-working historians of our time.

Applebaum does an extraordinary job of unearthing a history that has been purposefully obfuscated and buried in a most deliberate manner. Her style is to look at archives, but also rely quite a bit on oral history. The oral histories are woven throughout the chapters of the book.It is a constantly repeating litany. The Holodomor was not a onetime thing. It was a culmination of a series of famines induced by Soviet policy, starting from the very beginning of the Soviet Union. One learns a great many things from this book.The first thing one observes is the traditional Russian disdain for the Ukrainians. Although they were part of the Empire, even under the tsars, their language was depreciated, not respected, treated as a mere dialect of Russian. As a guy who speaks Russian but hasn't managed Ukrainian even after ten years, I can testify that this is absolutely not true. The people were regarded as uncouth peasants. It is true that Ukrainian was the language of the peasants because the Russians had been more successful in forcing Russian as a language in this upon the cities and the eastern countryside.The disdain for which, in which the Russians held Ukrainians is echoed in today's media. The people in America who would support Putin, such as Paul Craig Roberts, Ron Paul, the Unz review, the Saker and others, go out of their way to disparage Ukrainians. They called the leadership in modern Ukraine fascists, corrupt oligarchs, and so on. The habit of putting down Ukrainians seems to be deeply ingrained and of very long-standing, going back more than a century.Ukraine's geography features few natural geographical boundaries. The most formidable, the Carpathian Mountains in the Southwest are not very tall or rugged. Otherwise there is nothing but forest and steppe. Ukraine has been invaded from all sides since time immemorial.Applebaum correctly says that the relationship of the Ukrainian language to Polish and Russian is rather similar to that of Italian to Spanish and French. I the reviewer note that just as Italian a somewhat closer to Spanish, Ukrainian is somewhat closer to Polish. It is distinct enough from Russian that I, a Russian speaker, cannot get by Ukrainian. A good many Ukrainian words, such as onion, tomato and color, are cognates of Polish and Western European languages, not Russian.Ukrainians always maintained a unique identity, even under the Poles and the Russians. Their language was recognized as different, at least a strong dialect. Their music, food, and way of life were different.Voltaire noted that the Ukrainians long to be free, their own masters, even when they were under the yoke of Poland and Russia. Nevertheless, they acquired some of the features of their overlords. Russian orthodoxy held sway in the East; the Catholic Church in the West.Ukrainian was the language of the countryside; Polish, Russian and Yiddish were the languages of the city. The Ukrainians resented them all. They shared the anti-Semitism of Poles and Russians.When Alexander II manumitted the serfs in 1861 it had a disproportionate effect on Ukrainian speakers, who made up a large share of the Russian Empire's peasant class. This sparked the sense of Ukrainian identity. Ukraine produced its first native language poet, Taras Shevchenko.Recognizing the threat that the Ukrainian language posed, successive tsars refused to recognize its legitimacy, even as they allowed national languages and other parts of the Empire.The period prior to World War I saw nationalist sentiment rise almost everywhere. Ukraine was no exception. The tsars had to backpedal and grant Ukrainians a fair amount of civil liberty, including significantly the right to use the Ukrainian language in public.The collapse of the two bordering empires, Habsburg and Russia, at the end of World War I gave Ukraine its moment of opportunity. It declared independence. The Poles quickly put that to an end in the West, annexing Galicia and Volyn at a cost of 10,000 Polish lives, 15,000 for the Ukrainian defenders. The situation in the East was more complex.The series of famines started during the period of Ukrainian independence in the wars between the declaration of the Soviet Union in 1917 and the final conquest of Ukraine in 1921-22. The battles were fought back and forth.The Ukrainians and the Soviets were up in arms against the rich landowners. Class warfare, socialism, had been a hot theme for the prior 50 years of tsarist rule.Virulent ideology turned out to be a problem. Anarchy cannot manage an Army. The various factions of peasant rebels were unable to effectively fight a war. Although the Bolsheviks were fairly universally feared and despised in Ukraine, the Ukrainians were never able to pull themselves together to decisively repel them. In particular, their anti-bourgeois attitudes made it difficult for them to form alliances with the White army, which was an aristocratic affair, and bias against Russians excluded Russian peasants who were also fighting the Bolsheviks. It was general chaos. The revolutionary theory of redistribution of all wealth was something that left no people with education and ability in charge, and alienated people who were who could not be counted among the poor peasants.There are a couple of useful maps in the beginning of the book. The most telling is the one showing where the deaths occurred throughout Ukraine. Overall Applebaum estimates that 13% of the population died, and most of the provinces averaged 10 to 15% mortality. This was other sources would lead you to believe that the deaths were concentrated in the steppe region. No – the Kyiv oblast, which is in the north, suffered 20% mortality. Actually, the Donbass came off better than the others. It was already more industrial, especially on dedicated to coal production, and the Soviets could not afford to kill their industrialization. Moldova, then the province of Ukraine, suffered. The westernmost provinces of Podolia and Volyn, not extending as far as today's Lviv, then in Poland, suffered just as much as the rest.Applebaum assigns the blame more to Stalin than anybody else. Stalin conceived the plan of collectivization and was single-minded about its implementation. Despite wave after wave of protests from people, including our people in the party hierarchy, he refused to waiver on his commitments to collectivization. Collectivization deprived the individual farmers of their own private property. Everything, houses, car cows, fields and such went into the collective. The individual owns nothing. It was very dispiriting, and they simply refused to work in large measure. There was also a great deal of theft. What belongs to everybody belongs to nobody. Writing now in 2017, I would either reviewer often hears anecdotes from the Soviet times about just such theft. Our people they had no compunction about stealing from the state.Applebaum claims that Stalin knew of the effects of his policy. The observation is that the Ukrainians were unreliable and had to be decisively broken. They had been obdurate, rebellious, in tsarist times, during the first years of the USSR, and even in the 1920s. Applebaum quotes a historian, a certain Lemkin, as saying that genocide involves doing away with not just the genome but the culture, history, literature, language – everything associated with a people. Stalin took strong measures in every direction. The intelligencia, especially Ukrainians, suffered the most. Jews, having no agricultural land, and Germans and Poles, having external connections, suffered somewhat less.The Soviet methods even of 1917 echoed the Russian methods of today. They set up local committees, ostensibly autonomous, but in fact puppets of the Russians, to stage a phony revolution or mount a phony protest, after which the benevolent Soviet government (today, Russian) hastens to recognize this "legitimate" manifestation of the will of the people and to provide it armed support. The Soviets also were experts at dividing, setting people against people. Applebaum goes on at length about how the poor and middle class peasants were set against the Kulaks, the richer peasants. In the end, however, there was no hard line, there could not be. More and more of the middle and even the poor peasants became categorized as Kulaks. If they did anything against the regime, they were automatically classed as Kulaks.The measures used confiscate grain already in use in the time of the Ukrainian wars of 1918 -21 were quite severe. Roving bands of armed "war communists" would confiscate what they could from the peasants. She described it getting worse and worse, finally, in the last chapter, the Holodomor itself, they use long metal rods to poke and probe everything, probing behind walls in cemeteries in attics behind icons in every conceivable place where there might be food hidden. They would investigate fresh dirt. Apparently there were lots of people involved in the searches, and as the searchers themselves were often quite hungry, they were highly motivated to search. She talks some of her interviews with the survivors among these activists show that they had to psychologically dehumanize the Kulaks in order to force themselves to perform these unpleasant tasks.In addition to being starved, a great many were forced forcibly moved. Many went to the Soviet Far East. This includes my father-in-law's family, who spent a couple of generations on Sakhalin Island on the East Coast of Russia. Others who stayed died; my wife's great-grandfather among them. Her grandmother still speaks bitterly of the experience.One of the amazing things is the brotherhood of nations, Druzhbi Narodi theme that the Russians have played throughout the history of the Soviet Union. In Kyiv there are there remain a memorial arch to the friendship of nations and a large street named for it. So strong was the Soviet propaganda that a couple of generations had more or less forgotten the horrors of the Holodomor. However, the current war with Russia has revived the memories.Speaking of memories, one of the things that Applebaum makes clear is that the Soviets did their best to extirpate all memory. During the 1920s they had allowed a revival of Ukrainian literature and the development of Ukrainian language dictionary, orthography, and philology. All of that was ruthlessly repressed in the 1930s. It remained so until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Many of those books did not survive. Certainly, the scholars did not – and great many of them met bitter ends. My son is attempting to learn Ukrainian folk music. There is not that although there are books of folklore and folk songs, a vast amount was lost. Among the things that were lost was the tradition of village singing, of village of strolling minstrels and so on. There are two touching movie documentary movies called Bozhichi and Bekandor showing what is left of it. It is heartrending that some of the traditional songs that they sing glorify Stalin. That is how thoroughly their history was cleansed.Applebaum's describes the people who are the activists the 25,000 whom sent by the Soviet Union to enforce collectivization and to confiscate grain in Ukraine, as consisting of local activists, Russians, and Jews. She doesn't play down the Jewish involvement very much. She assigns Lazar Kaganovich a less important role than other historians. Kaganovich was Stalin's right hand man in Ukraine for quite a period. She credits him with having protested to Stalin that the collectivization and the green levees were too severe.The imposition of internal passports came late in the game, in the winter of 1933. This forced peasants to remain on the land. Whereas they had previously been fleeing in large numbers to the cities, across the border to Russia where things were better, and escaping the country, the system of internal passports meant that if they were discovered anywhere other than where they were supposed to be, they could be imprisoned, shot, or sent back. Basically they were condemned to remain on the land until they starved.Soviet propaganda, supported by a reluctance of outside governments to confront the Soviet Union and later Russia itself, kept the truth about the Holodomor from being discussed for most of the 58 years leading up to the end of the Soviet Union. In her last chapter Applebaum describes various attempts, in history and fiction, to portray what happened. It is, however, only in the quarter century of Ukraine's independence that the story can be fully investigated. She gives credit to prior authors, but there was a lot of new material for her to work.Her outline tells the story of the buildup, the Holodomor itself, and the aftermath in chronological order.1     The Ukrainian Revolution, 19172     Rebellion, 19193     Famine and Truce, the 1920s4     The Double Crisis, 1927– 95     Collectivization: Revolution in the Countryside, 19306     Rebellion, 19307     Collectivization Fails, 1931– 28     Famine Decisions, 1932: Requisitions, Blacklists and Borders9     Famine Decisions, 1932: The End of Ukrainization10   Famine Decisions, 1932: The Searches and the Searchers11   Starvation: Spring and Summer, 193312   Survival: Spring and Summer, 193313   Aftermath14   The Cover-Up15   The Holodomor in History and MemoryEpilogue: The Ukrainian Question Reconsidered

This is a serious, very fully-researched history of Ukrainian aspects of the early 1930s famine in the Soviet Union.Anne Applebaum looks back to the 1917 revolution; the protracted civil war that followed; Stalin’s infamous role in Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad/Volgograd) in the procurement of grain to feed Moscow and other northern cities; a serious famine of 1921 (for which international relief was requested and received); and the New Economic Policy of 1922-28, all of which are relevant.The farm collectivization program that began in 1928 and the simultaneous ‘liquidation’ of the kulaks (peasants sufficiently prosperous to employ labor) are generally credited with having led to the famine. Applebaum thoroughly reviews the background to both of those – and absolutely correctly adds the consideration of grain and other farm products having been requisitioned not only to feed the fast-growing cities, but for export to earn hard currency. Those exports continued throughout the famine years.The famine itself is of course well covered. So, to the book’s great credit, is the famine’s aftermath – right through to the present. Applebaum’s suggestion that the famine’s impact on demography and political thinking remains of significance today in both Russia and Ukraine is likely to be regarded as among the more controversial aspects of the book, but her case is well made.Unlike the 1921 famine, the 1930s famine – it peaked in 1932-33 – was consistently denied by the Soviet Union on the international stage. At most, there was ‘acute food shortage’, ‘food stringency’, ‘food deficit’ and ‘diseases due to malnutrition’. The fact of the famine is now widely accepted, and the numbers who died mostly subject to only minor quibbles (Applebaum presents an estimate of around 5 million Soviet citizens, of whom rather more than 3.9 million were Ukrainians), but whether or not the famine was specifically targeted at the Ukrainian nationality and culture or, alternatively, at peasants as a socio-economic group, remains controversial, and will perhaps never be resolved.One reason for the controversy is that if either the Ukrainian or the peasant group were specifically targeted, the charge of genocide can be laid at Stalin’s door. The evidence is contradictory, however. Ukraine was far from being the only Soviet republic subjected to farm collectivization and it was not the only one to suffer severe shortage of food, or even a catastrophic death rate.On the other hand, the late 1932 ‘blacklisting’ of farms, villages and whole districts, shutting down all trade, such that the inhabitants could not grow, prepare or purchase anything at all to eat, was applied earlier, more widely and most rigorously in Ukraine. In January 1933 the republic’s borders were closed, preventing movement of the starving out of Ukraine; and in February an unconditional ban on the issue of any travel document, so that no peasants could leave their village, was implemented in Ukraine alone.Applebaum makes no riddle of where her sympathies lie with respect to what she sees as a continuum of imperialist aggression by Russia towards Ukraine, but she nevertheless does a competent and essentially even-handed job of setting out her story. Readers not already familiar with at least the bare facts of the famine years are likely to be deeply shocked. We can argue about genocide – as defined by a United Nations resolution – and at which group, if any, the famine was targeted, but there can be no question about there having been a succession of crimes against humanity and that the ultimate responsibility was Stalin’s.

Applebaum’s analysis of Ukrainian history is that a combination of the ‘Holodomor’ (hunger extermination) of 1933-1934 as well as the suppression of the intellectual and political class in 1934 had permanently neutered the country’s ability to challenge the Soviet Republic, and although it broke away from the Soviet bloc in 1991, the Russian shadow over it has not gone away. This book traces the reason why even today Russian leaders are keenly aware of this history; a history in which Stalin had expressed what his ‘greatest fear’ was – losing Ukraine. Applebaum sketches not only a history of the changing map of Ukraine, but a portrait of the Ukrainian people, both the peasant class that is deeply anti-Soviet, and the intellectual and political class that was voicing nationalistic pride and ideals. Applebaum begins with three important periods, the Ukrainian revolution of 1917, the peasants’ revolt in 1919, and first famine in 1920. Through it all, she attempts to show what happened between the years 1917 and 1934, focusing on the events from the autumn of 1932 to the spring of 1933. The question was, who was responsible? And although the Sovietization of the Ukraine did not begin with the famine, Applebaum contends, it ‘did not end with it’. The chapter catastrophe and suffering are vividly depicted in the chapter, ‘Starvation: Spring and Summer, 1933’, including vignettes like the account of a starving 15-year-old girl who was berated for begging for food. The storekeeper who berated her, hit her and she fell. He then kicked her as she lay, stretched and grasping a crumb of bread, and shouted to her to go home and get work. She died there and then. Applebaum tells us, ‘As during the Holocaust, the witnesses of intense suffering did not always feel – perhaps they could not feel – pity. This book is important because of the silence that ensued; that in the years following the famine, ‘Ukrainians were forbidden to speak about what happened. They were afraid to mourn publicly.’ The accounts in this book include the remembrance, the private memories of survivors. These included the story of Volodymyr Chepur, who was five years old at the time. His parents were starving and suffering, but they told him that they would give everything to ensure he lives even if they perish, so that he can bear witness.

This remarkable book describes the extent to which Stalin used his man-made 1933 Holodomor against Ukrainian peasants in order to bring them into line. Moscow possessed an ingrained suspicion of Ukrainians, and Kulaks in particular. The Ukrainians weren’t helped by influence coming from Poland and Germany, as well as from polish, German and Jewish communities within Ukraine itself. The author doesn’t spare the gory details. There are horrific witness accounts of hunger and starvation, of people killing each other for food, as well as acts of cannibalism. Skin on a starvation victim apparently turns translucent. Stalin used Bolsheviks and the OGPU to force collectivization and the appropriation of property, and, to assist, carried out an assault on the church and religion in order to remove their influence. Anyone who deigned to stand above the crowd found themselves targetted. Millions died. Through their local diplomats other nations knew what was going on, but the timing was awkward - Stalin was needed as an ally against Hitler. The book is wonderfully written.

Anyone interested in acquiring a geopolitical overview of the Ukraine today will find p. 2 and 12 alone most informative: 'The Ukrainians failed until the late twentieth century to establish a sovereign Ukrainian state...the word means 'borderland' in both Russian and Polish...the lands that lay at the heart of the Kievan Rus...that Russians...claim as their ancestor.'Applebaum draws a parallel with Ireland as 'a colony that formed part of other European land empires', without referencing the consequences, of starvation accompanied by continuing exports of the food that the people produced. Those policies underlie current political relationships both for Russia, and for England facing the 'backstop' proposal.'Imperial armies battled over Ukraine...Polish Hussars fought Turkish Janissaries (Christian)...Hitler's armies fought Stalin's.' Yet typical of the Narrow Nationalism that afflicts Europe and is today being exploited in political populism, 'there is always an intellectual component as well'. Local academics whose incomes depend on it promote antiquated folk cultures boosting their 'language': the Ukrainian dialect of Russian; Ulster-Scots based on Old English ex Scotland. Both historically used by the rural peasants and needing to be adapted to modernity, as do their organised religions.The modern political battlelines in both countries were drawn c1917, when Stalin as a Georgian and outsider became the People's Commissar for Nationalities, 'responsible for negotiating with the non-Russian nations and peoples who belong to the Russian empire.' The author describes this activity as 'forcing them to submit', just at the time when the Nationalists were unilaterally laying out the NEW borders of a Ukrainian nation-state, that long continued to be expansionist. Stalin faced down the 'intellectuals' and the wealthier peasants/kulaks with increasing ruthlessness.The new Soviet state eventually took in the Black Sea coastline, previously rules by the Ancient Greeks, and Ottoman Turks who particularly dominated the Crimean peninsular (not shown in maps here as part of the Ukraine), until it was reallocated as an entity within the Soviet Union by (the Russian-village born son of the Donbas), Soviet President Kruschev, supposedly after a drunken night in 1956 among friends in Kiev.At the end (p364) Applebaum states that 'many Russians do not treat Ukraine as a separate nation, Ukrainians themselves have mixed and confused loyalties,' Just as the English have never really recognised the sovereignty of the Irish (or the Cypriots), and have recently had to come to terms with their new-found power and influence through the European Union.

For anyone who has the slightest interest in understanding why the Ukraine is of such interest to Russia, this book provides all the answers and more. I must warn readers that if you happen to be of a squeamish disposition you will need to steel yourselves. Both Russia and the Ukraine are in some ways prisoners of their own geography. The sad thing is that 6-7 million Ukrainians paid for Russia's paranoia with their lives between 1931 and 1937.

Numerous books and papers have been been written on this subject : this book stands the test with the best. It is an indictment of Stalin and his gang and their callous indifference for the value of human life. Do not believe the deniers who would pretend it was mainly caused by poor crop yields and climate. It was a man-made famine on an unimaginable scale.