Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

took three years to compile its report, a collection of oral and written testimony from survivors in the diaspora, which remains one of the largest ever published in English. When the commission presented its work in 1988, the conclusion was in direct contradiction to the Soviet line: “There is no doubt,” the commission concluded, that “large numbers of inhabitants of the Ukraine SSR and the North Caucasus Territory starved to death in a man-made famine in 1932–33, caused by the seizure of the 1932 crop by the Soviet authorities.” In addition, the commission found that “Official Soviet allegations of ‘kulak sabotage,’ upon which all difficulties were blamed during the Famine, are false”; that the “Famine was not, as alleged, related to drought”; and that “attempts were made to prevent the starving from traveling to areas where food was more available.” The commission concluded that “the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33 was caused by the extraction of agricultural produce from the rural population” and not, in other words, by “bad weather” or “kulak sabotage.”