Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

The difficulty of classifying the Holodomor as a genocide in international law has not stopped a series of Ukrainian governments from trying to do so. The first attempt followed the Orange Revolution of 2004—a series of street protests in Kyiv against a stolen election, corruption and perceived Russian influence in Ukrainian politics. Those protests led to the election of Viktor Yushchenko, the first president of Ukraine without a Communist Party pedigree. Yushchenko had an unusually strong mandate from the Ukrainian national movement and he used it to promote the study of the famine. He made references to the Holodomor in his inaugural speech and created a National Memory Institute with Holodomor research at its heart. He also lobbied for the United Nations, the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe and other international institutions to recognize the Holodomor as a genocide. Under Yushchenko’s government, funding for research into the famine expanded dramatically.