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A review by bookly_reads
Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, 1921-1933 by Anne Applebaum
5.0
This is not a review. I'm taking notes so that I can remember later. Stalin forced much of the Soviet Union, and Ukraine in particular, into a state of unprecedented famine and despair.* This was caused partly by forcing independent peasant farmers onto inefficient collective farms and then sending agents in to requisite the wheat they grew. Over time this expanded to forbidding the peasants from growing their own personal gardens, possessing livestock, or engaging in trade. They were forbidden from purchasing salt or matches, and so did not have the means to cook any food they might be able to find. Those who "stole" food were executed. People who survived did so by eating rats, grass, ants, tree bark, fish from rivers if they were lucky, and human flesh.
While much of the food collected from the peasants was sent to industrial centers, a lot of it was also deliberately spoiled upon collection, simply for the sake of depriving peasants of any food at all. Borders were closed to prevent Ukrainians from escaping—one of the policies that made the famine particularly harsh in Ukraine. 3.9 million people died in Ukraine in 1932-33.
This was followed by a brief but hellish Nazi occupation, then further Soviet repression for many decades, during which time the gap between public and private memory widened disorientingly. In 1987, Douglas Tottle, a Canadian labor activist, published a book of fraudulent history arguing that the Holodomor had happened but had not been caused deliberately by the state, and that any beliefs to the contrary could be held only by Nazis. This set the framework of accusing Ukrainian people of being Nazis when they assert their independence, which we have seen Russia do while acting on its imperial impulses in the 2000s.
Stalin himself never denied that a mass famine caused by the State occurred; his defense was always, during and after, that the Ukrainians had it coming for not being suitably communist and for clinging to their national identity. The man who coined the word "genocide," Raphael Lemkin, spoke of the Holodomor as a classic example of genocide. That it has not been recognized as such by international courts is "hardly surprising, given that the Soviet Union itself helped shape the [legalistic] language [of genocide] precisely in order to prevent Soviet crimes, including the Holodomor, from being classified as 'genocide.'"
The historian Tim Snyder writes that, until we deliberately pivot away from the paradigms of history built by Nazis and Communists themselves, "we will find that Hitler and Stalin continue to define their own works for us." He's completely right. I never learned about the Holodomor in school. As a student in 21st century America I was taught to conceive of Eastern Europe in bizarrely Soviet terms: There is Russia, and then a bunch of countries that don't matter, places with inconsequential histories. Stalin would be thrilled that this conceptualization has lingered in the West for so long. (I also didn't know he'd had a wife and that she'd committed suicide; another thing he covered up during his lifetime, and would probably be pleased to know is still kept on the down low.)
Historians have done the work to reset these narratives—and are still doing that work. Yet it hasn't entered public thought or school curricula in the U.S. There's an enormous amount of catching up to do.
*I don't like the phrasing that Stalin's "economic policies" caused the famine. Sending agents to break into homes and shoot children who are in possession of meager ears of wheat is not an economic policy, it's a crime against humanity.
While much of the food collected from the peasants was sent to industrial centers, a lot of it was also deliberately spoiled upon collection, simply for the sake of depriving peasants of any food at all. Borders were closed to prevent Ukrainians from escaping—one of the policies that made the famine particularly harsh in Ukraine. 3.9 million people died in Ukraine in 1932-33.
This was followed by a brief but hellish Nazi occupation, then further Soviet repression for many decades, during which time the gap between public and private memory widened disorientingly. In 1987, Douglas Tottle, a Canadian labor activist, published a book of fraudulent history arguing that the Holodomor had happened but had not been caused deliberately by the state, and that any beliefs to the contrary could be held only by Nazis. This set the framework of accusing Ukrainian people of being Nazis when they assert their independence, which we have seen Russia do while acting on its imperial impulses in the 2000s.
Stalin himself never denied that a mass famine caused by the State occurred; his defense was always, during and after, that the Ukrainians had it coming for not being suitably communist and for clinging to their national identity. The man who coined the word "genocide," Raphael Lemkin, spoke of the Holodomor as a classic example of genocide. That it has not been recognized as such by international courts is "hardly surprising, given that the Soviet Union itself helped shape the [legalistic] language [of genocide] precisely in order to prevent Soviet crimes, including the Holodomor, from being classified as 'genocide.'"
The historian Tim Snyder writes that, until we deliberately pivot away from the paradigms of history built by Nazis and Communists themselves, "we will find that Hitler and Stalin continue to define their own works for us." He's completely right. I never learned about the Holodomor in school. As a student in 21st century America I was taught to conceive of Eastern Europe in bizarrely Soviet terms: There is Russia, and then a bunch of countries that don't matter, places with inconsequential histories. Stalin would be thrilled that this conceptualization has lingered in the West for so long. (I also didn't know he'd had a wife and that she'd committed suicide; another thing he covered up during his lifetime, and would probably be pleased to know is still kept on the down low.)
Historians have done the work to reset these narratives—and are still doing that work. Yet it hasn't entered public thought or school curricula in the U.S. There's an enormous amount of catching up to do.
*I don't like the phrasing that Stalin's "economic policies" caused the famine. Sending agents to break into homes and shoot children who are in possession of meager ears of wheat is not an economic policy, it's a crime against humanity.