Red famine - Anne Applebaum

Winner of the Duff Cooper and Lionel Gelber prizes

In 1932-33, nearly four million Ukrainians died of starvation, having
been deliberately deprived of food. It is one of the most devastating
episodes in the history of the twentieth century. With unprecedented
authority and detail, Red Famine investigates how this happened,
who was responsible, and what the consequences were. It is the fullest
account yet published of these terrible events.

The book draws on
a mass of archival material and first-hand testimony only available
since the end of the Soviet Union, as well as the work of Ukrainian
scholars all over the world. It includes accounts of the famine by those
who survived it, describing what human beings can do when driven mad by
hunger. It shows how the Soviet state ruthlessly used propaganda to
turn neighbours against each other in order to expunge supposedly
'anti-revolutionary' elements. It also records the actions of
extraordinary individuals who did all they could to relieve the
suffering.

The famine was rapidly followed by an attack on
Ukraine's cultural and political leadership - and then by a denial that
it had ever happened at all. Census reports were falsified and memory
suppressed. Some western journalists shamelessly swallowed the Soviet
line; others bravely rejected it, and were undermined and harassed. The
Soviet authorities were determined not only that Ukraine should abandon
its national aspirations, but that the country's true history should be
buried along with its millions of victims. Red Famine, a triumph
of scholarship and human sympathy, is a milestone in the recovery of
those memories and that history. At a moment of crisis between Russia
and Ukraine, it also shows how far the present is shaped by the past.