Overview

A powerful history of one the most devastating episodes in the twentieth century, by 'the leading historian of Soviet crimes' (Sunday Times) In 1932-33, nearly four million Ukrainians died of starvation, having been deliberately deprived of food. Red Famine shows how this happened, who was responsible, and what the consequences were. The book draws on a mass of archival material and first-hand testimony. It includes accounts by survivors describing what human beings can do when driven mad by hunger. It shows how the Soviet state used propaganda to turn neighbours against each other in order to expunge supposedly 'anti-revolutionary' elements. It also records the actions of extraordinary individuals who did all they could to relieve the suffering. The famine was rapidly followed by an attack on Ukraine's cultural and political leadership - and then by a denial that it had ever happened. The Soviet authorities were determined not only that Ukraine should abandon its national aspirations, but that the country's true history should be buried along with its millions of victims. Red Famine, a triumph of scholarship and human sympathy, is a milestone in the recovery of those memories and that history.

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9780141978284

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Reviews

An exhaustive, authoritative and eloquent book. She deals with questions that have hitherto lacked unequivocal answers -- Donald Rayfield * Literary Review * Her account will surely become the standard treatment of one of history's great political atrocities -- Timothy Snyder * Washington Post * Compelling in its detail and in its empathy -- Nick Rennison * The Sunday Times * Magisterial and heartbreaking -- Simon Sebag Montefiore * Evening Standard * Meticulously researched, blisteringly written -- Dominic Sandbrook * The Sunday Times (Books of the Year) *

Anne Applebaum's Red Famine - powerful, relentless, shocking, compelling - will cement her deserved reputation as the leading historian of Soviet crimes. -- Daniel Finkelstein * The Times * Magisterial and heartbreaking -- Simon Sebag Montefiore * Evening Standard * It remains a tragedy too little known. Applebaum's book, compelling in its detail and in its empathy with those who suffered, will do much to remedy that ignorance and to place the current crises and confrontations in Ukraine into a longer historical context -- Nick Rennison * The Sunday Times * A vivid and informative account of the Ukrainian famine -- Sheila Fitzpatrick * Guardian * Anne Applebaum has written an exhaustive, authoritative and eloquent book. She deals with questions that have hitherto lacked unequivocal answers -- Donald Rayfield * Literary Review *

Author Information

Anne Applebaum is the author of several books, including Gulag- A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize, and Iron Curtain, which in 2013 won the Duke of Westminster's Medal for Military Literature and the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature.

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