Red Famine, by Anne Applebaum

This book about the Holodomor, the tragic (and almost completely avoidable, in fact promoted by the Soviet regime) Ukraine famine of 1932-33, took me forever to get through on audiobook — it is long, dense with detail, and on a very difficult and painful subject — but it is very relevant background to have in the light of the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia. It’s helpful to understand the pre-Communist relationship between the two countries (not that Ukraine was officially a “country” for much of that time, but Applebaum shows how Ukrainian identity and nationalism was always a powerful force and always put down by Russia). As well as learning about the famine itself, I was interested in how controversial even talking about or naming the famine (the Soviets referred to it as “food difficulties” and similar euphemisms) was for a long time, well up through the Cold War era, when sympathy with Ukrainian nationalists was often seen as a right-wing, anti-Communist position in the West (this, as well as WW2 obviously, goes a long way to explaining Putin’s current slander of all Ukrainian nationalists as “Nazis”).

Anne Applebaum clearly has little sympathy for even the most lofty ideals of the Russian Communist movement, in the light of the suffering Stalin’s regime caused in Ukraine, and viewed through the lens of these events, that perspective is entirely understandable. Even when I had finished, I felt like there was a lot of nuance I still didn’t fully grasp in this book, but I certainly learned a lot more than I knew before, all of it helpful in understanding the context of the current Russia/Ukraine situation.