Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

But in the official, Soviet world the Ukrainian famine, like the broader Soviet famine, did not exist. It did not exist in the newspapers, it did not exist in public speeches. Neither national leaders nor local leaders mentioned it—and they never would. Whereas the response to the 1921 famine was a prominent and widely heeded call for international aid, the response to the 1933 famine was total denial, both inside the Soviet Union and abroad, of any serious food shortage. The aim was to make the famine disappear, as if it had never happened. In an era before television and the internet, before open borders and travel, this was easier to achieve than it would have been in the twenty-first century. But even in 1933 the cover-up required an extraordinary effort on the part of numerous people over many years.