Red Famine : Stalin's War on Ukraine

AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR From the creator of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the Nationwide Ebook Award finalist Iron Curtain, a revelatory historical past of one in every of Stalin’s best crimes–the implications of which nonetheless resonate right this moment In 1929 Stalin launched his coverage of agricultural collectivization–in impact a second Russian revolution–which compelled hundreds of thousands of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The end result was a catastrophic famine, essentially the most deadly in European historical past. No less than 5 million folks died between 1931 and 1933 in the us. However as a substitute of sending aid the Soviet state made use of the disaster to rid itself of a political drawback. In Purple Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that greater than three million of these lifeless had been Ukrainians who perished not as a result of they had been unintentional victims of a foul coverage however as a result of the state intentionally got down to kill them. Applebaum proves what has lengthy been suspected: after a sequence of rebellions unsettled the province, Stalin got down to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry. The state sealed the republic’s borders and seized all accessible meals. Hunger set in quickly, and folks ate something: grass, tree bark, canine, corpses. In some circumstances, they killed each other for meals. Devastating and definitive, Purple Famine captures the horror of extraordinary folks struggling to outlive extraordinary evil. Right this moment, Russia, the successor to the Soviet Union, has positioned Ukrainian independence in its sights as soon as extra. Applebaum’s compulsively readable narrative recollects one of many worst crimes of the 20th century, and reveals the way it could foreshadow a brand new risk to the political order within the twenty-first.