Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

Although these facts neither diminished the tragedy of 1932–3 nor altered its causes, the “Nazi” and “nationalist” associations were intended, simply, to smear anyone who wrote about the famine at all. To some extent the strategy worked: this Soviet campaign against the Ukrainian memory of the famine, and against the historians of the famine, left a taint of uncertainty. Even Hitchens had felt obligated to mention Ukrainian Nazi collaborators in his discussion of Harvest of Despair, and part of the scholarly community would always approach Conquest’s book with caution.61 Without access to archives it was still impossible, in the 1980s, to describe the series of deliberate decisions that had led to the famine in the spring of 1933. It was also impossible to describe the aftermath, the cover-up, or the suppressed census of 1937 in detail.