I’ve had a look at the book that comes with some recent promotion - Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum. Copyrighted five years ago, the message it carries applies to today’s war in that country. A few of her statements hit hard.
Ukrainians’ farm and garden produce along with their animals had been taken from them and a killing famine called Holodomor resulted in 1931-’33. Up to five million of them died. Applebaum states some wrote directly to the Kremlin, asking for an explanation. One of them said “Honourable Comrade Stalin, is there a Soviet government law stating that villagers should go hungry? Because we, collective farm workers, have not had a slice of bread in our farm since January…”
And in another letter, “Every day, ten to twenty families die from famine in the villages, children run off and railway stations are overflowing with fleeing villagers. There are no horses or livestock left in the countryside…”
One more, “The famine and its legacy play an enormous role in contemporary Russian and Ukrainian arguments about their identity, their relationship and their shared Soviet experience.”
Applebaum comes with credentials and experience to produce a relevant book such as this. Among others things, she is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian.
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