Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

The problem worsened in the spring of 2014, when the Russian government produced a caricature “genocide” argument to justify its own behaviour. During the Russian invasions of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, Russian-backed separatists and Russian politicians both said that their illegal interventions were a “defence against genocide”—meaning the “cultural genocide” that “Ukrainian Nazis” were supposedly carrying out against Russian speakers in Ukraine. As the conflict between Russia and Ukraine intensified, attacks on the history and historiography also worsened. In August 2015, Russian-backed separatists deliberately destroyed a monument to the victims of the famine in the occupied eastern Ukrainian town of Snizhne—the same place from which separatists had launched the BUK missile a year earlier that brought down Malaysian Airlines flight 17, killing everyone on board.22 Also in August 2015, Sputnik News, a Russian government propaganda website, published an article in English entitled “Holodomor Hoax.” The article presented views reminiscent of the old era of denial, called the famine “one of the 20th century’s most famous myths and vitriolic pieces of anti-Soviet Propaganda” and even cited Douglas Tottle’s long-discredited book, Fraud, Famine and Fascism.23 The links that Tottle claimed between historians of the famine, alleged Ukrainian Nazis and alleged anti-Soviet forces in the West proved useful again to a Russia that once again sought to discredit Ukrainians as “Nazis.”24