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From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the National Book Award finalist Iron Curtain, a revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest crimes - the consequences of which still resonate todayIn 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.Applebaum proves what has long been suspected: after a series of rebellions unsettled the province, Stalin set out to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry. The state sealed the republic's borders and seized all available food. Starvation set in rapidly, and people ate anything: grass, tree bark, dogs, corpses. In some cases, they killed one another for food. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil.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.
About the Author
Anne Applebaum is a historian and journalist. She is a staff writer for the Atlantic as well as a Senior Fellow at the Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of several history books, including GULAG which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction; IRON CURTAIN, on the Sovietization of Eastern Europe after the war, which won the 2013 Cundill Prize for Historical Literature; and RED FAMINE, which begins with the Ukrainian revolution of 1917, ends with the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 and provides the background to today's Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Her newest book, TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY, examines the attraction of autocratic forms of government, especially to intellectuals, all across the Western world. Anne has been writing about Eastern Europe and Russia since 1989, when she covered the collapse of communism in Poland for the Economist magazine. She has also covered US, UK and European politics for a wide range of American and British publications. She is a former Washington Post columnist, a former member of the Washington Post editorial board, and a former deputy editor of the Spectator magazine. She is married to Radoslaw Sikorski, a Polish politician and writer, and lives in Poland and Britain.
