Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

Anne Applebaum

Oct 2017 · Sold by Anchor

About this eBook

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest crimes, the consequences of which still resonate today, as Russia has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more—from the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the National Book Award finalist Iron Curtain.

"With searing clarity, Red Famine demonstrates the horrific consequences of a campaign to eradicate 'backwardness' when undertaken by a regime in a state of war with its own people." —The Economist

In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization—in effect a second Russian revolution—which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil. 

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.

Ratings and reviews

Anne Applebaum is a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy, which is a propaganda project developed by the CIA. It shows blatantly here where she outlines the same caricature of an insane tyrant hellbent on killing people that she uses on all sorts of other political figures ranging from Fidel Castro to Hugo Chavez to the illegally ousted Bolivian president Evo Morales. Of note, she offers unblinking praise for the notorious pogromist Symon Petlura, who massacred a large portion of Ukraine's jews.

Excellent, really exposes the hiporocy of the West in ignoring the story for so long because it did not suit. The NYT played a shocking role as a stooge of Stalin and the USSR

i like to read a lot information of what is happening around the world it helps me alot even though im busy on my work thanks.

About the author

ANNE APPLEBAUM is a columnist for The Washington Post, a Professor of Practice at the London School of Economics, and a contributor to The New York Review of Books. Her previous books include Iron Curtain, winner of the Cundill Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award, and Gulag, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction and a finalist for three other major prizes. She lives in Poland with her husband, Radek Sikorski, a Polish politician, and their two children.