Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

In the context of the broader, 1932–3 Soviet famine, these two decrees are unique, as are the events that followed them. There were, it is true, other regions that received special treatment. Suspicion of their loyalty probably contributed to higher death rates among peasants in the Volga provinces, where some of the policies used in Ukraine, including mass arrests of communist leaders, were also deployed, though not at the same level as in Ukraine.2 In Kazakhstan the regime blocked traditional nomadic routes and requisitioned livestock to feed the Russian cities, creating terrible suffering among the ethnic Kazakh nomads. More than a third of the entire population, 1.5 million people, perished during a famine that barely touched the Slavic population of Kazakhstan. This assault on the nomads, sometimes called “sedentarization,” was another form of Sovietization and a clear attack on a recalcitrant ethnic group.3 But nowhere else were agricultural failures linked so explicitly to questions of national language or culture as they were in both Ukraine and in the North Caucasus, with its large Ukrainian-speaking population.