The author sets out to document systematic creation of famine and genocide in a country Stalin feared..Ukraine. there are no heroes here except those local peasants who fought back with fledgling ideas of democracy, thinking Stalin would not allow mad dedtruction opposed to what seemed to be Soviet socialist principles , the people write and sent messages of all kinds to him .. to no avail. . It was incomprehensible... The gathering of research data the author has found from. various sources is almost overwhelming and grim. In some ways knowing this not only helps to understand secret political societies' modus operandi but also background to attitudes Russians feel today toward Ukraine . Horrific overwhelming facts support her thesis that Stalin was targeting this entire country for destruction. They survived!

I had trouble diving into this book initially because the subject is so harrowing but once I found my momentum it was hard to put down. Incredibly well researched and thoughtfully laid out, Red Famine gives us a timeline of Soviet atrocities stretching right up to the present day. For me, the most chilling parallels are the political ones- the widening gap between the haves and have nots, propaganda, nationalism and resistance could all be examples taken from our headlines today.

Having read Riot Days immediately before this book the connection between Stalin’s era and now is unexpected. The terrible human toll of Stalin’s failed agriculture policy and his annihilation of his opponents are exposed here in a carefully researched and lively piece of writing. A necessary read to remind ourselves of what we must guard against.

A very readable and involving account of a very complex period of history.

A very intriguing book covering a period of history that is little known (for obvious reasons, the expurgations seemed to be particularly thorough!)

The suffering caused by a famine is almost too much to read, the fact that it was caused deliberately as part of a wholesale 'cleansing programme' makes the book doubly difficult to get through.

However, we must not shy away from out collective history, no matter how distasteful.

This book was a tough read but wortwhile, its not something to absorb at a poolside in the Balearics, this is something to digest during the autumn months behind a rain-streaked windowpane.

Is it possible to rate such a comprehensive account of an extraordinary event in world history anything less than 5 stars, surely not.

“Many reviewers expressed astonishment that they knew so little about such a deadly tragedy”

I put my hand up; I was one of those people. Stalin, USSR, communism….. These were all words I knew about, thought I understood to some extent, but wow, my eyes have been opened. Thank you.

I must admit that early on in the book I thought I had bitten off more than I can chew. Other than my last few books, it had been years since reading a non-fiction book and never have I read a historical non-fiction book. So when the build-up of events started I was not sure I would be able to make it through, but that feeling didn’t last too long, thankfully.

“Starvation was the result, rather, of the forcible removal of food from people’s homes; the roadblocks that prevented peasants from seeking work or food; the harsh rules of the blacklists imposed on farms and villages; the restrictions on barter and trade; and the vicious propaganda campaign designed the persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbours died of hunger”.

Wow was the world a cruel place back then, the magnitude of cruelty that human beings can impose on other human beings is sickening to say the least. Reading these events I actually can’t help but draw some parallels (in a much smaller quantities of course) of the mind set of some leaders in African countries. Thankfully the rest of the world won’t turn a blind eye, and thankfully the condemned have a lot more options. I just wish these so called leaders could learn something from History.

Thank you NetGalley and Penguin Books UK for a review copy.

I was totally intrigued by this book. It is a part of history that I knew nothing about. Parts of this book are harrowing. The authorities in Russia knowingly starved the Ukrainians. This book has obviously been very well researched and it is very well written. If you are into history this book is definitely worth reading. It is a very dark chapter in history that should be remembered.

Thank you to Netgalley for the opportunity to read this book as an arc.
This is an excellent historical journey charting the relationship between communist Russia and Ukraine between WW1 and the mid 1930s. Stalin's treatment of the people of Ukraine is absolutely horrifying, he enforces starvation and death on the people due to his policies. This is a period in history that wasn't even acknowledged until recently and it is an extremely interesting and informative read. It also goes a long way to explain the current relationship between the countries.

Sorry, I could not get into this book. A bit too historical for me.

Red Famine
This is, without doubt, one of the most disturbing books I've ever read. In part harrowing, the real tragedy is that it's a true account of a largely unknown act of genocide. I believed Stalin was a monstrous dictator, but had no idea that he set about ensuring the death of multiple millions of his own people.

I found the history of area fascinating. The author explores the origins and cultural influences of the Ukraine region with conviction and the first section allows the lay reader to understand the significant differences between the Ukraine and other areas. This is interesting in terms of understanding some current tensions in the area.

What follows is almost beyond belief; there are graphic accounts of the effects of famine on individuals, families and villages. It's beyond imagination and and some aspects are haunting. The research is meticulous. This is a compelling indictment of a regime which was a Western ally. Hitler's persecution of Jews and others was overt by comparison to Stalin's starvation tactic which killed millions. New source material is examined and Anne Appelbaum makes a compelling case that Stalin acted with planned deliberation.

I'm no academic, but this work must surely influence future interpretation of events in relatively recent history. The Holodomor was effectively wholesale slaughter of people in 1932/33 and virtually unrecognised in the West. Not an easy read emotionally, but very well written and accessible for anyone with interest in social history and human rights.

My thanks to the publisher for a review copy via Netgalley

Well-researched account full of primary sources. A much needed antidote to prevailing myths.

This is a well laid out book that covers a very large and important piece of Russian and Ukranian history .  It is very compelling reading and I think would be an invaluable book for those who want to know more regarding this area.

I know very little about the Ukraine and the atrocities that were committed upon it and it's people.  I have vague memories from very generalised history lessons at school as a teenager. But now, after reading this account of events, I am aware of the depths people have gone to, to achieve power.

For me, this book seems to be a very comprehensive account of the Ukraine between the years of 1917-1934.  It discusses how the rich, fertile soil made for the ideal conditions of growing grain, it then follows through the history to tell how Ukraine wanted to become autonomous of the Imperial Russian Empire, this is something that Russia did not want to happen, due to it's reliance on Ukraine being a valuable food provider.  It is quite disturbing how the peasants from Ukraine are seen by Russia, they are viewed as worthless , their culture and language to be ignored under the overpowering Russian rule and how they were persecuted beyond belief.  This book goes through the chronology of events that include a huge and and vast amount of bloodshed and atrocities. 

As I said this is comprehensive, there is a huge amount of information and it also includes sources.  It discusses the politics, revolts and fighting for the power to rule a country, and what methods were employed to maintain the power for as long as possible during a time of huge unrest.

This is a book I have found quite hard to review due to the vast amount of detail.  There is so much detail I could include, but I have decided to limit myself.  What I really want to say is "Just go and buy this book, you will not be disappointed" 

I would highly recommend this book to Historical and Factual readers, and especially for those with an interest in Europe, Russia and Ukraine.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Penguin UK for allowing me a copy of this book.  My opinion is honest, unbiased and is my own.

I'd be lying if I said some of this wasn't a little over my head; my knowledge of this period isn't as great as many others. But you know what, now it just might be! If there was ever anything you could possibly want answered about this tragic part of history, or any theories you might have bashing around in your head like I did - this book will certainly touch upon all of it, and then some.

The famine, or Holodomor, of 1932 to 1933 is largely where this book stems from, but actually the topics touched upon run much deeper than this. The sovietisation of Ukraine and the repression of it's infrastructures and agriculture are just the tip of the ice berg when it comes to exploring how Ukraine lost so much and so many; in-fact the author doesn't scrimp on a single detail relative to how the events of 1932-33 may have actually came about and how its people suffered. If you want a book to make you think about history, but also question what you think you might already know then this is the one you need.

What's most interesting is that this book looks at a period in history responsible for so many deaths at the hands of the Soviet Union, and what's remarkable is very few of us would actually call upon this period as much as we might do the Holocaust when we think of the extermination of a race. An interesting concept this book delivers well.

The most difficult and emotional part of reading this book was the horrifying descriptions of the famine itself; you might imagine such a book to be quite hard going. History isn't known for being the most gripping of topics, particularly where non-fiction is concerned, but because this author introduces so much information (much of which was new to me) I found myself soaring through it. Certainly one of the most emotive non-fiction reads I've ever come across anyway!

I may not have known enough before reading this book, but the more I read the more I realised how little is actually told and how much more attention deserves to be paid to this era. This is the kind of book which should be introduced as a teaching text - an accessible, informative and genuinely thought-provoking educational text about a group of people completely up against it, receiving little to no empathy or interest from witnesses when they most needed it, but with the absolute resolve to survive anyway. Amazing.

In Shaun Walker’s excellent forthcoming ‘The Long Hangover’, about the abuse of the past in the former Soviet Union, he writes that Viktor Yushchenko, as President of Ukraine, sought to secure his west Ukrainian power base by publicising the Holodomor (literally murder by hunger): the man-made famine of 1932-32.

It is obviously very important that the facts of that crime are known, not least because its existence was still denied at the time of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization and although its scale was admitted in Russia as a consequence of glasnost, many Russians persisted in refusing to acknowledge it as an act of genocide. The other side are not completely blameless either for, as Walker makes clear, some Ukrainians have tastelessly sought to brand the Holodomor as worse than the Holocaust and even exaggerated the number of victims to support their claims. However, as Anne Applebaum’s ‘Red Famine’ makes abundantly clear, there is no need to inflate the suffering of the famine victims, as the awful facts of the famine, in which many resorted to cannibalism, speak for themselves.

Applebaum puts the number of Ukrainian famine victims at 3.9 million but these aren’t the only victims she examines, as she also details the contemporaneous liquidation of Ukraine’s political and cultural elites. This is because she places the genocide within the context of Russian-Ukrainian relations, 1917-34, seeing the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 - although part of a wider Soviet famine - as being motivated as much, or more, by the desire to eradicate Ukrainian national and cultural autonomy, as to crush supposed class enemies of the Soviet system.

Whilst acknowledging that Conquest’s 1986 ‘Harvest of Sorrow’ remains a landmark study, Applebaum makes an excellent case for the timeliness of her own book, building as it does upon the opening of archives, the gathering of oral testimony and a spate of scholarship, post-1991, the latter originating not only in Ukraine but at Toronto’s Holodomor Research and Education Consortium and the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard.

Applebaum is, of course, aware of the ways in which the famine has continued to be politicized but whilst noting that fact (notably in her book’s last chapter), she rightly sees her role as an historian as limited to establishing what actually happened, so far as that is possible (although today’s Russian government will doubtless feel that she nevertheless oversteps that line).

It should be noted that I have used the term ‘genocide’ above in the everyday sense of the term, under which the Ukrainian famine was clearly an act of genocide perpetrated by Stalin. In the narrow legal sense of the term, however, it could not be classified as such, for reasons which Applebaum clearly explains in her epilogue. Use of the term in Russian and Ukrainian circles remains problematic but Applebaum has performed a great service to academic discourse by her examination of the term’s multiple meanings. Indeed, her book as a whole represents a most valuable contribution to this controversial topic.

“The history of the famine is a tragedy with no happy ending” Applebaum writes, to which one might reasonably respond that no tragedy does. However, in ‘Red Famine’ she has succeeded in producing a judicious synthesis of all the available material, which is consistently engaging and, insofar as it represents the defeat of efforts to distort or deny the past, ultimately uplifting.