Red Famine -- Anne Applebaum (Full Book Review) (CC)

What I learned about the 1932-1933 Holodomor (death by famine) in Ukraine from Anne Applebaum's historical nonfiction book "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine." It's a dense book, but an important one. Note: This is one of my more complicated reviews and even in this short summary, I delve quite a bit into the politics and sociology of Ukraine at the time.

0:00 -- Introduction
4:10 -- The years before
5:52 -- During the famine
9:19 -- The aftermath
12:25 -- The genocide question
15:07 -- Wrapping up

I highly recommend learning at least a bit about this historical event; it helped me to understand a critical part of Ukrainian history that reverberates today. Check out some of the other free resources below to learn a bit more, all of which I personally found helpful.

RESOURCES:

"Holodomor survivor tells his story" (4 mins)

"Stalin's secret genocide 2016 documentary short" (16 mins)

"How Ukraine's Holodomor Famine Was Secretly Photographed" (4 mins -- Warning, contains imagery of starving and dying victims.)

Wikipedia...

Holodomor

Debate over genocide classification

Anne Applebaum

[aydanjesson]

Really great review. Your summary gave me an idea of what is presented so that I could decide whether to hold off on this book

[k.u.]

No way it was a genocide for a number of reasons:

1. None of the correspondences among the leadership suggested they were expecting the high death rates. In fact they were completely panicked about it and lowered the grain requirements several times. Not by enough, and too late, but the goal wasn't to kill, and that's clear.

2. Ukrainians communists were the ones that enforced the grain policy within Ukraine.

3. Ukraine was not hardest hit by the famine, it hit the whole union and hurt the Kazaks the most. They lost 1/3 of their population since they were a nomadic society forced to abandon their way of life, shoved into collective farms.

4. The weather was legitimately terrible, and human error and corruption like local party officials overreporting grain production to the leadership to get promotions and rewards contributed hugely to the famine.

A genocide suggests intentionality, this was more like an enormous policy failure from unfeeling leaders who cared more about rapid industrialization than saving lives.