Red Famine
Stalin began his agricultural collectivization strategy in 1929, thereby launching a second Russian revolution by forcing millions of peasants off their property and onto collective farms. The outcome was a devastating famine, one of the deadliest in European history. Between 1931 and 1933, at least five million people died in the Soviet Union. Instead of delivering aid, the Soviet Union took use of the disaster to solve a political problem. Anne Applebaum contends in Red Famine that more than three million of those killed were Ukrainians, who died not as unintended victims of faulty policy, but because the state sought out to kill them. Red Famine is a devastating and comprehensive portrayal of regular people striving to survive exceptional wickedness.
Today, Russia, the successor to the Soviet Union, has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more. Applebaum’s compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the twenty-first.
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