Anne Applebaum: Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, Doubleday
Risvolto
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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