Red Famine

Between 1932 and 1933 close to four million Ukrainians starved to death while their grain was seized and exported. Anne Applebaum’s history shows the famine was not a natural disaster but a policy, engineered by Stalin’s regime to break Ukrainian resistance to collectivization and crush its national identity. Drawing on archives opened after the Soviet collapse and testimony from survivors, she reconstructs how the Holodomor happened and how it was denied for decades. The book won the Lionel Gelber Prize and reads with grim relevance today.