Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

In retrospect, it is clear that 1932 and 1933 were really the beginning of the great wave of terror that peaked all across the USSR in 1937 and 1938. All of the elements of the “Great Terror”—the suspicion, the hysterical propaganda, the mass arrests made according to centrally planned schemes—were already on display in Ukraine on the eve of the famine. Indeed, Moscow’s paranoia about the counter-revolutionary potential of Ukraine continued after the Second World War, and into the 1970s and 1980s. It was taught to every successive generation of secret policemen, from the OGPU to the NKVD to the KGB, as well as every successive generation of party leaders. Perhaps it even helped mould the thinking of the post-Soviet elite, long after the USSR ceased to exist.