Red famine

A realistic account of Stalin's brutal plan that still affects us today, and which cost the lives of millions. In 1929, Stalin announced the collectivization of agriculture - in its effects equivalent to a second Soviet revolution - which forced millions of peasants to give up their land and join collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, which claimed the most lives in European history. Between 1931 and 1933, at least five million people died in the Soviet Union. However, instead of providing aid, the Soviet state used the disaster to get rid of a political problem. Anne Applebaum claims in The Red Famine that more than three million of the victims were Ukrainians, who died there not as accidental victims of bad policy, but because the state deliberately doomed them to destruction. The author provides evidence for a long-held suspicion: after a series of uprisings rocked Soviet power in Ukraine, Stalin decided to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry. The state sealed the republic's borders and confiscated all available food. Famine quickly set in, and people ate anything: grass, bark, dogs, dead animals. Sometimes they killed each other to get food. Applebaum's work is a gripping read; it recalls one of the most serious crimes of the twentieth century and shows how it could once again pose a threat to the political order of the twenty-first century. The book describes with devastating force and precision the horrors experienced by people trying to survive this extraordinary evil.