Anne Applebaum

From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and Iron Curtain, a finalist for the National Book Award, a revelatory history of Stalin's greatest crime In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization in effect a second Russian revolution which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least 5 million people perished between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. In the Red Famine, Anne Applebaum reveals for the first time that 3 million of them died not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them. Applebaum proves what has long been suspected: that Stalin set out to exterminate a vast swath of the Ukrainian population and replace them with more cooperative Russian-speaking peasants. A peaceful Ukraine would provide the Soviets with a safe buffer between itself and Europe and would be a bread-basket region to feed Soviet cities and factory workers. When the province rebelled against collectivization, Stalin sealed the borders and began systematic food seizures. Starving, people ate anything: grass, tree bark, dogs, corpses. In some cases they killed one another for food. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil."

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