Ukraine's identity as a contested 'borderland' set the stage for tragedy

Applebaum opens by tracing how Ukraine's very name, derived from a word meaning borderland in both Polish and Russian, reflects centuries in which outside powers treated the territory as a periphery to be absorbed rather than a nation with its own claim to sovereignty. Under the Tsarist empire and later the early Soviet state, Ukrainian language and culture were alternately tolerated, suppressed, and cautiously promoted depending on the regime's political needs of the moment.

This history matters to her larger argument because it establishes why Bolshevik leaders, including Stalin, remained deeply suspicious of Ukrainian nationalism even while nominally supporting Ukrainian cultural autonomy through much of the 1920s. A people whose distinct identity had long been denied or minimized by neighboring powers were, in Applebaum's account, unusually likely to be viewed by Moscow as a latent threat once that identity began asserting itself more confidently.

Takeaway: the famine's roots reach back through a much longer history of Ukraine's sovereignty being treated as negotiable by more powerful neighbors.