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

…Applebaum's new book, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, [is] a richly detailed history of the great famine, peaking in 1933, which killed an estimated five million or more Soviets, more than 3.9 million of them Ukrainian…Applebaum has painstakingly mined a vast array of sources, many of which were not available when the historian Robert Conquest wrote his pioneering history of the famine, The Harvest of Sorrow, 30 years ago: oral histories of survivors; national and local archives in Ukraine, including those of the secret police; and archives in Russia, which opened in the 1990s and then partly closed again, but not before various scholars published collections of documents from them.

09/25/2017
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. (Oct.)

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

"Applebaum's account will surely become the standard treatment of one of history’s great political atrocities. . . . She re-creates a pastoral world so we can view its destruction. And she rightly insists that the deliberate starvation of the Ukrainian peasants was part of a larger [Soviet] policy against the Ukrainian nation. . . . To be sure, Russia is not the Soviet Union, and Russians of today can decide whether they wish to accept a Stalinist version of the past. But to have that choice, they need a sense of the history. This is one more reason to be grateful for this remarkable book."
—Timothy Snyder, Washington Post

“Lucid, judicious and powerful. . . . The argument that Stalin singled out Ukraine for special punishment is well-made. . . . [An] excellent and important book.”
—Anna Reid, Wall Street Journal

“Applebaum chronicles in almost unbearably intimate detail the ruin wrought upon Ukraine by Josef Stalin and the Soviet state apparatus he had built on suspicion, paranoia, and fear. . . . Applebaum gives a chorus of contemporary voices to the tale, and her book is written in the light of later history, with the fate of Ukraine once again in the international spotlight and Ukrainians realizing with newly-relevant intensity that, as Red Famine reminds us, 'History offers hope as well as tragedy.'”
—Steve Donoghue, Christian Science Monitor

“A magisterial and heartbreaking history of Stalin’s Ukrainian famine.”
—Simon Sebag Montefiore, London Evening Standard
 
"Powerful. . . . War, as Carl von Clausewitz famously put it, is the continuation of politics by other means. The politics in this case was the Sovietisation of Ukraine; the means was starvation. Food supply was not mismanaged by Utopian dreamers. It was weaponised. . . . With searing clarity, Red Famine demonstrates the horrific consequences of a campaign to eradicate 'backwardness' when undertaken by a regime in a state of war with its own people."
—The Economist

“Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine—powerful, relentless, shocking, compelling—will cement her deserved reputation as the leading historian of Soviet crimes.”
—Daniel Finkelstein, The Times (London)

“Chilling, dramatic. . . . In her detailed, well-rendered narrative, Applebaum provides a ‘crucial backstory’ for understanding current relations between Russia and Ukraine. An authoritative history of national strife from a highly knowledgeable guide.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

10/01/2017
For decades, the extreme famine in 1930s Ukraine was portrayed as no worse than what resulted in Russia from Joseph Stalin's policy of agricultural collectivization. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Applebaum (Gulag: A History) places Ukraine in pre- and postrevolution historical context to show why Stalin was intent on destroying all vestiges of independent Ukrainian nationality. Government and closed police archives prove that Ukrainian peasants were especially targeted for starvation as requisitions of grain demanded by Moscow far outstripped supply. At the same time, educators, cultural, and religious leaders were murdered. The exact number of those who died as a result of famine and purges during this time will never be known, but a strong case is made that proportionally, Ukraine was devastated more than other areas of the Soviet Union. Oral histories and memoirs of victims suppressed under the Soviet regime show the human impact of starvation. This insightful book illustrates an area of eastern Europe fraught to this day with religious, nationalist, and urban vs. rural conflict yet still coveted for its fertile farmland. VERDICT This book will appeal to readers interested in Ukrainian history, Soviet policies, and the current Ukrainian-Russian conflict. [See Prepub Alert, 4/24/17.]—Laurie Unger Skinner, Coll. of Lake Cty., Waukegan, IL

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

★ 2017-07-25
A new history of Stalin's oppressive regime, which led to the death by starvation of nearly 4 million Ukrainians between 1931 and 1934.Drawing on considerable published scholarship and new archival sources, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Applebaum (Practice/London School of Economics; Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, 2012, etc.) offers a chilling, dramatic, and well-documented chronicle of a devastating famine. She argues persuasively that the lack of food resulted from a conflation of political, rather than natural, causes: enforced collectivization, confiscation of food, harsh blacklists imposed on farms and villages, trade restrictions, and a "vicious propaganda campaign designed to persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbours died of hunger." Ukraine was especially vulnerable to oppression: "disdain for the very idea of a Ukrainian state had been an integral part of Bolshevik thinking even before the revolution" of 1917; all Russian political parties, Applebaum writes, "shared this contempt" and feared any signs of a Ukrainian national movement. Famine was a scourge in the 1920s, as well; after the outbreak of World War I, a nationalized food distribution system created chaos and shortages. That situation worsened under Stalin's policy known as "War Communism": "take control of grain, at gunpoint, and then redistribute it to soldiers, factory workers, party members and others deemed ‘essential' by the state." Food was exported, as well, to fund purchases of arms and machinery. Collectivization, which required farmers to give up their land to the Communist state, "destroyed the ethical structure of the countryside as well as the economic order." When farmers resisted handing over their land and property, collectivization brigades "resorted to outright intimidation and torture." When farmers refused to hand over grain, they were punished like political dissidents. Stalin's draconian policies included the elimination of Ukraine's scholars, writers, and political leaders and the "systematic destruction of Ukrainian culture and memory." Famine was another form of repression. In her detailed, well-rendered narrative, Applebaum provides a "crucial backstory" for understanding current relations between Russia and Ukraine. An authoritative history of national strife from a highly knowledgeable guide.