Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

If the study of the famine helps explain contemporary Ukraine, it also offers a guide to some of the attitudes of contemporary Russia, many of which form part of older patterns. From the time of the revolution, the Bolsheviks knew that they were a minority in Ukraine. To subjugate the majority, they used not only extreme violence, but also virulent and angry forms of propaganda. The Holodomor was preceded by a decade of what we would now call polarizing ‘hate speech’, language designating some people as ‘loyal’ Soviet citizens and others as ‘enemy’ kulaks, a privileged class that would have to be destroyed to make way for the people’s revolution. That ideological language justified the behaviour of the men and women who facilitated the famine, the people who confiscated food from starving families, the policemen who arrested and killed their fellow citizens. It also provided them with a sense of moral and political justification. Very few of those who organized the famine felt guilty about having done so: they had been persuaded that the dying peasants were ‘enemies of the people’, dangerous criminals who had to be eliminated in the name of progress.