"Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine" is a 2017 book 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

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 5 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 3 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. 

ANNE APPLEBAUM  is a historian and journalist. She is a regular columnist for the Washington Post and a Professor of Practice at the London School of Economics, where she runs Arena, a program dedicated to disinformation and 21st century propaganda. She is the author of several books, including GULAG:A HISTORY which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction and IRON CURTAIN which won the 2013 Cundill Prize for Historical Literature, both of which were nominated for the National Book Award. She is also the author of BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, a travelogue published in 1993 and recently reprinted, as well as the co-author of a Polish cookbook. 

REVIEWS

"Applebaum's account will surely become the standard treatment of one of history’s great political atrocities . . . She re-creates a pastoral world so we can view its destruction. And she rightly insists that the deliberate starvation of the Ukrainian peasants was part of a larger [Soviet] policy against the Ukrainian nation . . .  To be sure, Russia is not the Soviet Union, and Russians of today can decide whether they wish to accept a Stalinist version of the past. But to have that choice, they need a sense of the history. This is one more reason to be grateful for this remarkable book."