Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

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 crimesâ€”the consequences of which still resonate today

In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivizationâ€”in effect a second Russian revolutionâ€”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 republicâ€™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. Applebaumâ€™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.
Country USA
Brand Doubleday
Manufacturer Doubleday
Binding Hardcover
ItemPartNumber 0385538855
ReleaseDate 2017-10-10
UnitCount 1
EANs 9780385538855

Country	USA
Brand	Doubleday
Manufacturer	Doubleday
Binding	Hardcover
ItemPartNumber	0385538855
ReleaseDate	2017-10-10
UnitCount	1
EANs	9780385538855

Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

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