The Red Hunger

Devastating and definitive, The Red Famine captures the horror of men and women turning to animalism to survive an unprecedented evil.

In 1929, Stalin launched a policy of agricultural collectivization—effectively a second Russian Revolution—that drove millions of peasants from their lands and into collective farms. The result was a deadly famine, the deadliest in European history. At least 5 million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the Soviet Union. However, instead of sending aid, the Soviet state used this barbarity to solve a political problem: more than 3 million of the dead were Ukrainians, who perished not because they were accidental victims of a catastrophic policy, but because the state deliberately worked to exterminate them.

In this disturbing book, Anne Applebaum proves what has long been suspected: after a series of rebellions in the provinces, Stalin actively sought to eliminate the Ukrainian peasantry. The state closed the Republic's borders and confiscated all available food. Famine spread rapidly, and people resigned themselves to eating anything: grass, tree bark, dogs, corpses.

But the famine was only half the story. While peasants were dying in the countryside, the Soviet secret police simultaneously launched an attack on Ukraine's intellectual and political elites. As the famine spread, a campaign of slander and repression was unleashed against Ukraine's intellectuals, teachers, museum curators, writers, artists, clergy, theologians, civil servants, and bureaucrats.

These two developments—the Holodomor in the winter and spring of 1933, and the persecutions of the Ukrainian political and intellectual classes in the months that followed—resulted in the Sovietization of Ukraine, the destruction of the idea of Ukrainian nationality, and the neutralization of any Ukrainian challenge to Soviet unity.

As Russia, the successor to the Soviet Union, once again puts Ukraine's independence in its crosshairs, Red Famine chronicles in detail one of Stalin's greatest crimes and its consequences to this day—a work that illuminates the historical understanding of the impetus that underlies the threats to the political order of the 21st century.