Red Famine

Anne Applebaum argues that the famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933, now widely called the Holodomor, cannot be explained away as an unintended side effect of clumsy Soviet economic planning. Using archives that only became accessible after the Soviet collapse, she traces how Stalin's regime responded to peasant resistance and Ukrainian national assertion by escalating grain quotas past any level that could be met, sealing Ukraine's borders to trap starving people inside, and continuing to export grain abroad even as villages emptied of the living. She pairs this with a simultaneous assault on Ukrainian language, culture, and political leadership, arguing the famine and the purges of Ukrainian intellectuals and officials were two fronts of one coordinated campaign against a people the regime had decided posed a nationalist threat.

The book matters both as history and as a warning still relevant today. It recovers a catastrophe that Soviet authorities spent decades denying and that Western observers were slow to believe, partly because some journalists in Moscow chose not to report what they knew. Applebaum also frames the famine as part of a longer pattern of Russian state power treating Ukrainian independence as an existential threat to be suppressed by force, a pattern she explicitly connects to Russia's renewed aggression toward Ukraine in the years leading up to the book's publication.

Who should read it

Readers interested in twentieth-century authoritarian violence, Soviet history, or the roots of the current Russia-Ukraine conflict will find this essential; it also serves general readers who want a rigorously sourced account of a famine that remains far less known internationally than comparable atrocities.

About the author

Anne Applebaum is an American-Polish journalist and historian who has written extensively on Soviet and Eastern European history; she won the Pulitzer Prize for her earlier book Gulag: A History.