Four million peasants died of starvation in Ukraine – one in eight people – the atrocity today known as the Holodomor (‘Death by Hunger’) that was, writes Serhii Plokhy, ‘a man-made phenomenon, caused by official policy’, resulting from ‘policies with a clear ethnonational coloration’. Simultaneously, it was part of a wider Soviet famine – 1.2 to 1.4 million Kazakhs starved to death: ‘This,’ writes Stephen Kotkin, ‘was the highest death ratio in the Soviet Union.’ Stalin’s self-made calamity could have destroyed the USSR, but instead the cruel gamble paid off: the USSR emerged with
...more
