Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine

In 1932 and 1933, Stalin engineered a famine that killed between three and a half and five million Ukrainians — a famine that was not incidental but deliberate, designed to break Ukrainian nationalism and collective resistance to Soviet collectivisation. Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine is the definitive account of how it happened, drawing on newly available Ukrainian archives, regional records, and survivor testimonies to reconstruct the full history of an event that the Soviet Union worked for decades to deny.

Applebaum brings to this material the same combination of historical rigour and narrative intelligence that won her the Pulitzer Prize for Gulag. She traces the policy decisions, the implementation, the specific mechanisms of grain requisition and village enforcement that turned collective starvation into state strategy — and she gives names and faces to the people who starved and to those who enforced the famine.

A devastating and essential book — more urgent than ever in the light of subsequent events. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Ukraine’s history and the nature of totalitarian power. Published by Penguin.