Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum (PDF)

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A revelatory history of one of Stalin’s greatest crimes, the consequences of which still resonate today, as Russia has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more—from the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the National Book Award finalist Iron Curtain.”With searing clarity, Red Famine demonstrates the horrific consequences of a campaign to eradicate ‘backwardness’ when undertaken by a regime in a state of war with its own people.” —The EconomistIn 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 five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil. Applebaum’s compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the twenty-first.

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⭐Applebaum does an extraordinary job of unearthing a history that has been purposefully obfuscated and buried in a most deliberate manner. Her style is to look at archives, but also rely quite a bit on oral history. The oral histories are woven throughout the chapters of the book.It is a constantly repeating litany. The Holodomor was not a onetime thing. It was a culmination of a series of famines induced by Soviet policy, starting from the very beginning of the Soviet Union. One learns a great many things from this book.The first thing one observes is the traditional Russian disdain for the Ukrainians. Although they were part of the Empire, even under the tsars, their language was depreciated, not respected, treated as a mere dialect of Russian. As a guy who speaks Russian but hasn’t managed Ukrainian even after ten years, I can testify that this is absolutely not true. The people were regarded as uncouth peasants. It is true that Ukrainian was the language of the peasants because the Russians had been more successful in forcing Russian as a language in this upon the cities and the eastern countryside.The disdain for which, in which the Russians held Ukrainians is echoed in today’s media. The people in America who would support Putin, such as Paul Craig Roberts, Ron Paul, the Unz review, the Saker and others, go out of their way to disparage Ukrainians. They called the leadership in modern Ukraine fascists, corrupt oligarchs, and so on. The habit of putting down Ukrainians seems to be deeply ingrained and of very long-standing, going back more than a century.Ukraine’s geography features few natural geographical boundaries. The most formidable, the Carpathian Mountains in the Southwest are not very tall or rugged. Otherwise there is nothing but forest and steppe. Ukraine has been invaded from all sides since time immemorial.Applebaum correctly says that the relationship of the Ukrainian language to Polish and Russian is rather similar to that of Italian to Spanish and French. I the reviewer note that just as Italian a somewhat closer to Spanish, Ukrainian is somewhat closer to Polish. It is distinct enough from Russian that I, a Russian speaker, cannot get by Ukrainian. A good many Ukrainian words, such as onion, tomato and color, are cognates of Polish and Western European languages, not Russian.Ukrainians always maintained a unique identity, even under the Poles and the Russians. Their language was recognized as different, at least a strong dialect. Their music, food, and way of life were different.Voltaire noted that the Ukrainians long to be free, their own masters, even when they were under the yoke of Poland and Russia. Nevertheless, they acquired some of the features of their overlords. Russian orthodoxy held sway in the East; the Catholic Church in the West.Ukrainian was the language of the countryside; Polish, Russian and Yiddish were the languages of the city. The Ukrainians resented them all. They shared the anti-Semitism of Poles and Russians.When Alexander II manumitted the serfs in 1861 it had a disproportionate effect on Ukrainian speakers, who made up a large share of the Russian Empire’s peasant class. This sparked the sense of Ukrainian identity. Ukraine produced its first native language poet, Taras Shevchenko.Recognizing the threat that the Ukrainian language posed, successive tsars refused to recognize its legitimacy, even as they allowed national languages and other parts of the Empire.The period prior to World War I saw nationalist sentiment rise almost everywhere. Ukraine was no exception. The tsars had to backpedal and grant Ukrainians a fair amount of civil liberty, including significantly the right to use the Ukrainian language in public.The collapse of the two bordering empires, Habsburg and Russia, at the end of World War I gave Ukraine its moment of opportunity. It declared independence. The Poles quickly put that to an end in the West, annexing Galicia and Volyn at a cost of 10,000 Polish lives, 15,000 for the Ukrainian defenders. The situation in the East was more complex.The series of famines started during the period of Ukrainian independence in the wars between the declaration of the Soviet Union in 1917 and the final conquest of Ukraine in 1921-22. The battles were fought back and forth.The Ukrainians and the Soviets were up in arms against the rich landowners. Class warfare, socialism, had been a hot theme for the prior 50 years of tsarist rule.Virulent ideology turned out to be a problem. Anarchy cannot manage an Army. The various factions of peasant rebels were unable to effectively fight a war. Although the Bolsheviks were fairly universally feared and despised in Ukraine, the Ukrainians were never able to pull themselves together to decisively repel them. In particular, their anti-bourgeois attitudes made it difficult for them to form alliances with the White army, which was an aristocratic affair, and bias against Russians excluded Russian peasants who were also fighting the Bolsheviks. It was general chaos. The revolutionary theory of redistribution of all wealth was something that left no people with education and ability in charge, and alienated people who were who could not be counted among the poor peasants.There are a couple of useful maps in the beginning of the book. The most telling is the one showing where the deaths occurred throughout Ukraine. Overall Applebaum estimates that 13% of the population died, and most of the provinces averaged 10 to 15% mortality. This was other sources would lead you to believe that the deaths were concentrated in the steppe region. No – the Kyiv oblast, which is in the north, suffered 20% mortality. Actually, the Donbass came off better than the others. It was already more industrial, especially on dedicated to coal production, and the Soviets could not afford to kill their industrialization. Moldova, then the province of Ukraine, suffered. The westernmost provinces of Podolia and Volyn, not extending as far as today’s Lviv, then in Poland, suffered just as much as the rest.Applebaum assigns the blame more to Stalin than anybody else. Stalin conceived the plan of collectivization and was single-minded about its implementation. Despite wave after wave of protests from people, including our people in the party hierarchy, he refused to waiver on his commitments to collectivization. Collectivization deprived the individual farmers of their own private property. Everything, houses, car cows, fields and such went into the collective. The individual owns nothing. It was very dispiriting, and they simply refused to work in large measure. There was also a great deal of theft. What belongs to everybody belongs to nobody. Writing now in 2017, I would either reviewer often hears anecdotes from the Soviet times about just such theft. Our people they had no compunction about stealing from the state.Applebaum claims that Stalin knew of the effects of his policy. The observation is that the Ukrainians were unreliable and had to be decisively broken. They had been obdurate, rebellious, in tsarist times, during the first years of the USSR, and even in the 1920s. Applebaum quotes a historian, a certain Lemkin, as saying that genocide involves doing away with not just the genome but the culture, history, literature, language – everything associated with a people. Stalin took strong measures in every direction. The intelligencia, especially Ukrainians, suffered the most. Jews, having no agricultural land, and Germans and Poles, having external connections, suffered somewhat less.The Soviet methods even of 1917 echoed the Russian methods of today. They set up local committees, ostensibly autonomous, but in fact puppets of the Russians, to stage a phony revolution or mount a phony protest, after which the benevolent Soviet government (today, Russian) hastens to recognize this “legitimate” manifestation of the will of the people and to provide it armed support. The Soviets also were experts at dividing, setting people against people. Applebaum goes on at length about how the poor and middle class peasants were set against the Kulaks, the richer peasants. In the end, however, there was no hard line, there could not be. More and more of the middle and even the poor peasants became categorized as Kulaks. If they did anything against the regime, they were automatically classed as Kulaks.The measures used confiscate grain already in use in the time of the Ukrainian wars of 1918 -21 were quite severe. Roving bands of armed “war communists” would confiscate what they could from the peasants. She described it getting worse and worse, finally, in the last chapter, the Holodomor itself, they use long metal rods to poke and probe everything, probing behind walls in cemeteries in attics behind icons in every conceivable place where there might be food hidden. They would investigate fresh dirt. Apparently there were lots of people involved in the searches, and as the searchers themselves were often quite hungry, they were highly motivated to search. She talks some of her interviews with the survivors among these activists show that they had to psychologically dehumanize the Kulaks in order to force themselves to perform these unpleasant tasks.In addition to being starved, a great many were forced forcibly moved. Many went to the Soviet Far East. This includes my father-in-law’s family, who spent a couple of generations on Sakhalin Island on the East Coast of Russia. Others who stayed died; my wife’s great-grandfather among them. Her grandmother still speaks bitterly of the experience.One of the amazing things is the brotherhood of nations, Druzhbi Narodi theme that the Russians have played throughout the history of the Soviet Union. In Kyiv there are there remain a memorial arch to the friendship of nations and a large street named for it. So strong was the Soviet propaganda that a couple of generations had more or less forgotten the horrors of the Holodomor. However, the current war with Russia has revived the memories.Speaking of memories, one of the things that Applebaum makes clear is that the Soviets did their best to extirpate all memory. During the 1920s they had allowed a revival of Ukrainian literature and the development of Ukrainian language dictionary, orthography, and philology. All of that was ruthlessly repressed in the 1930s. It remained so until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Many of those books did not survive. Certainly, the scholars did not – and great many of them met bitter ends. My son is attempting to learn Ukrainian folk music. There is not that although there are books of folklore and folk songs, a vast amount was lost. Among the things that were lost was the tradition of village singing, of village of strolling minstrels and so on. There are two touching movie documentary movies called Bozhichi and Bekandor showing what is left of it. It is heartrending that some of the traditional songs that they sing glorify Stalin. That is how thoroughly their history was cleansed.Applebaum’s describes the people who are the activists the 25,000 whom sent by the Soviet Union to enforce collectivization and to confiscate grain in Ukraine, as consisting of local activists, Russians, and Jews. She doesn’t play down the Jewish involvement very much. She assigns Lazar Kaganovich a less important role than other historians. Kaganovich was Stalin’s right hand man in Ukraine for quite a period. She credits him with having protested to Stalin that the collectivization and the green levees were too severe.The imposition of internal passports came late in the game, in the winter of 1933. This forced peasants to remain on the land. Whereas they had previously been fleeing in large numbers to the cities, across the border to Russia where things were better, and escaping the country, the system of internal passports meant that if they were discovered anywhere other than where they were supposed to be, they could be imprisoned, shot, or sent back. Basically they were condemned to remain on the land until they starved.Soviet propaganda, supported by a reluctance of outside governments to confront the Soviet Union and later Russia itself, kept the truth about the Holodomor from being discussed for most of the 58 years leading up to the end of the Soviet Union. In her last chapter Applebaum describes various attempts, in history and fiction, to portray what happened. It is, however, only in the quarter century of Ukraine’s independence that the story can be fully investigated. She gives credit to prior authors, but there was a lot of new material for her to work.Her outline tells the story of the buildup, the Holodomor itself, and the aftermath in chronological order.1 The Ukrainian Revolution, 19172 Rebellion, 19193 Famine and Truce, the 1920s4 The Double Crisis, 1927– 95 Collectivization: Revolution in the Countryside, 19306 Rebellion, 19307 Collectivization Fails, 1931– 28 Famine Decisions, 1932: Requisitions, Blacklists and Borders9 Famine Decisions, 1932: The End of Ukrainization10 Famine Decisions, 1932: The Searches and the Searchers11 Starvation: Spring and Summer, 193312 Survival: Spring and Summer, 193313 Aftermath14 The Cover-Up15 The Holodomor in History and MemoryEpilogue: The Ukrainian Question Reconsidered

⭐While it may be long-winded, it is a valued contribution to understanding the current (2022) events in Ukraine perpetrated by the Russian aggressor.I read this while the western world leaders were visiting Zelensky and I could not help noticing the same entry promises of support. In 1933, the world looked away when Stalin inflicted his fabricated famine on Ukraine, and today, the world just wants to apply sanctions when Zelensky is calling for arms to enable his fast diminishing brave soldiers to face the evils of Putin. The West is becoming fatigued while the Ukrainians are dying. The USA is scared spitless that Putin will use his Nukes, and become only the second country to have ever done that, the Americans did that first and then twice. The British are offering just about all they have but the USA is only willing to drip feed a few weapons to ease their conscience while Poland wants to offer all their MiGs but the USA said NO.As Zelensky has said, “We will eventually win” but what will the West be saying years from now. Will Anne Applebaum need to write another book to document this Ukrainian recovery while the world casts doubt on whether it really happened, or are the International news footage just fabrications in digital studios. Please read this book, even if the details are too much, because 4.5 million Ukrainians died at the hand of Stalin, and currently many Ukrainians and let’s not forget those unwilling Russians, all who are dying because of a man man’s desire to recolonize the old USSR, and destroy democracy.

⭐Applebaum does good job of describing the Stalinist famine but does not give a complete history of Ukraine. During the Middle Ages there was no Russia and Ukraine but only one country now called Kievan Rus (aka Kyivan Rus) but then only known as Rus. This kingdom was essentially an expanded Ukraine which stretched from today’s eastern Poland through Ukraine to western Russia. Kiev was the capital and Moscow was a remote outpost on the eastern edge. This kingdom lasted from about 900 AD to 1240 AD when it was destroyed by a Mongol invasion.The resulting history is extremely complicated with constantly changing borders but the short summary is that Poland absorbed western Ukraine while Moscow absorbed eastern Ukraine. It was in 1480 AD that the Grand Duchy of Moscow overthrew Mongol rule and slowly expanded westward taking Ukrainian areas from Poland. By the time of the Soviet famine in 1932-1933 Russia controlled central and eastern Ukraine. By this time Russia and Ukraine had developed into similar but separate nationalities like Austria and Germany. Their languages were different but similar like Spain and Portugal. In 1939 Russia finally absorbed western Ukraine under the Hitler-Stalin pact.The short story of the famine is that around 1930 Stalin decided to complete the Sovietization of the USSR by enforcing collectivization of the peasantry. When the Ukrainian peasantry resisted he sent armed teams to the countryside which confiscated the peasants’ food supplies and left them to starve. The choice was collectivization or starvation. The famine peaked in 1933 after about four million peasants had died and Stalin decided it was enough to teach them a lesson.The details of the Soviet famine are increasingly well known with books such as this one but what is not emphasized is that many of the themes used to justify the famine are being repeated by the left right here in America today. One of the first themes was that the poor farmers (poor producers) were Soviet heroes while the rich farmers (better producers) were class enemies. Today we constantly hear about the poor as being victims and the producers as being exploiters.The Soviet famine was above all a war on peasants who as a group were the most resistant to Communism. Today we have a war on the middle class which resists the open borders and free trade which support Globalism. Any criticism of Soviet policy meant imprisonment, deportation, or execution. Today any criticism of open borders is labeled as racism and people can lose their jobs for this.One of the first things the Soviets did was ban Christmas which the peasants always celebrated. Today corporate America has basically banned Christmas and court decisions constantly restrict Christian practices. The Soviets encouraged students to denounce their parents who could then be arrested or executed. Today schools encourage students to harangue their parents about global warming and now the Green New Deal.The Soviets engaged in hysterical propaganda which accused the peasants of being class enemies by sabotaging grain production to resist collectivization. Claiming that the inefficiencies of collectivization caused the decline in production would mean the Gulag or worse. Today any attempt to enforce immigration laws is met with similar hysteria.Since the Ukrainian peasants were nationalistic the Soviets attempted to wipe out all vestiges of nationalism. The Ukrainian language was banned. Thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals were executed. Today we see a war on nationalism all over the West as an impediment to Globalism. Meanwhile China is becoming more powerful as it asserts its nationality.While the artificial famine raged on word leaked out to the West. It should come as no surprise that the New York Times led the way in the denial and cover up of the famine. Today the New York Times has been one of the major players in the coup against an elected president who supports nationalism.The Soviets tried to create a new Soviet Man and killed millions of people who resisted the creation of this artificially created type. Today the Globalists are trying to create a new American by bringing in as many people as possible through open borders and thus globalize America as a fait accompli.Above all the famine was the culmination of an attempt to use government power to completely remake society. Today we hear about the Green New Deal as necessary to remake society. Communism was justified as being the result of scientific socialism. Today the Green New Deal is similarly said to be based on science. Not much has changed except for the genocidal measures taken by the Soviets.

⭐Applebaum’s analysis of Ukrainian history is that a combination of the ‘Holodomor’ (hunger extermination) of 1933-1934 as well as the suppression of the intellectual and political class in 1934 had permanently neutered the country’s ability to challenge the Soviet Republic, and although it broke away from the Soviet bloc in 1991, the Russian shadow over it has not gone away. This book traces the reason why even today Russian leaders are keenly aware of this history; a history in which Stalin had expressed what his ‘greatest fear’ was – losing Ukraine. Applebaum sketches not only a history of the changing map of Ukraine, but a portrait of the Ukrainian people, both the peasant class that is deeply anti-Soviet, and the intellectual and political class that was voicing nationalistic pride and ideals. Applebaum begins with three important periods, the Ukrainian revolution of 1917, the peasants’ revolt in 1919, and first famine in 1920. Through it all, she attempts to show what happened between the years 1917 and 1934, focusing on the events from the autumn of 1932 to the spring of 1933. The question was, who was responsible? And although the Sovietization of the Ukraine did not begin with the famine, Applebaum contends, it ‘did not end with it’. The chapter catastrophe and suffering are vividly depicted in the chapter, ‘Starvation: Spring and Summer, 1933’, including vignettes like the account of a starving 15-year-old girl who was berated for begging for food. The storekeeper who berated her, hit her and she fell. He then kicked her as she lay, stretched and grasping a crumb of bread, and shouted to her to go home and get work. She died there and then. Applebaum tells us, ‘As during the Holocaust, the witnesses of intense suffering did not always feel – perhaps they could not feel – pity. This book is important because of the silence that ensued; that in the years following the famine, ‘Ukrainians were forbidden to speak about what happened. They were afraid to mourn publicly.’ The accounts in this book include the remembrance, the private memories of survivors. These included the story of Volodymyr Chepur, who was five years old at the time. His parents were starving and suffering, but they told him that they would give everything to ensure he lives even if they perish, so that he can bear witness.

⭐While aware in a general way that ghastly things happened in Ukraine during the Stalin era (to the extent that Wehrmacht troops were greeted as liberators in 1941), my first encounter with the term “Holodomor” came in a quiet back road off Acton High Street in west London, when I encountered a memorial outside a church used by a Ukrainian congregation. Applebaum’s book sets out to tell the story of that long-overlooked episode of mass murder and trace its reverberations into the present day confrontation between Putin’s Russia and an independent Ukraine.This involves going wider than the narrow tale of dekulakisation, collectivisation and, ultimately, mass starvation in the Ukrainian countryside in the early 1930’s. The whole Soviet Union underwent the first two processes without (quite) tipping into massive starvation (though she concedes this needs more examination-recent scholarship suggests that Kazakhstan’s experience was as horrendous). Her argument is that, in effect, whatever screws were turned on the countryside elsewhere were given extra twists in Ukraine to break its national identity and that the destruction of the Ukrainian peasantry was paralleled by the destruction of the Ukrainian cultural elites- even ones who saw themselves as loyal Communists. Stalin and his closest associates, on this telling, were obsessed with a fear of “losing” Ukraine after their experiences in the post-Revolutionary civil war when the region collapsed into chaos and Reds, Whites, Nationalists of various kinds, peasant Anarchists led by Makhno and outside powers like Poland fought for power. If the New Economic Policy represented a fragile compromise with the peasantry, Soviet Ukrainianisation in the same period was a fragile and deceptive compromise with the carriers of national identity. Both were consciously destroyed by Stalin in an assertion of central, Moscow-based power- and grain delivery targets were deliberately set at completely unrealistic levels to justify stealing even seed corn from the peasantry. Although on one level the horrendous consequences (just under 4 million deaths from starvation on the most recent estimates) were an open secret in Soviet society, they were nevertheless covered up both domestically (by shooting those who had undertaken the 1937 census and discovered the massive population shortfall) and internationally (by a largely servile foreign press corps).Overall her account carries conviction. The understandable focus on Ukraine leads one to wonder whether there is a slight loss of perspective at times- was Ukraine really at the very top of Stalin’s agenda every day and its fate the driving factor in all Soviet policy, as is implied? Some aspects of the aftermath of the famine are somewhat under-examined. Ironically one of these is just what long term effects it had on agriculture in Ukraine; was collectivisation there an even worse disaster than elsewhere? How did survivors and perpetrators coexist in the Ukrainian countryside afterwards given that the gangs looting food from Ukrainian peasants were overwhelmingly composed of Ukrainian peasants- in many cases this was very much neighbours turning on each other? On the cultural side, how far did the undoubted achievements of the brief period of Ukrainianisation survive- for instance, is the spelling of modern literary Ukrainian derived from the attempt to create a standardised written language then? When dealing with the cover up for international consumption, the story is a bit centred on a limited number of mostly Anglophone figures (including, in fairness, the Welsh journalist who managed to report the truth and was largely disowned as a result). It’s revealing that the only authentic photographs of the famine came from an Austrian engineer with links to the Catholic church while some of the sharpest and best informed diplomatic reports were filed by consuls appointed by Mussolini’s Italy.Overall though the book does put the horrors of the Holodomor into a proper long term perspective.

⭐Anyone interested in acquiring a geopolitical overview of the Ukraine today will find p. 2 and 12 alone most informative: ‘The Ukrainians failed until the late twentieth century to establish a sovereign Ukrainian state…the word means ‘borderland’ in both Russian and Polish…the lands that lay at the heart of the Kievan Rus…that Russians…claim as their ancestor.’Applebaum draws a parallel with Ireland as ‘a colony that formed part of other European land empires’, without referencing the consequences, of starvation accompanied by continuing exports of the food that the people produced. Those policies underlie current political relationships both for Russia, and for England facing the ‘backstop’ proposal.’Imperial armies battled over Ukraine…Polish Hussars fought Turkish Janissaries (Christian)…Hitler’s armies fought Stalin’s.’ Yet typical of the Narrow Nationalism that afflicts Europe and is today being exploited in political populism, ‘there is always an intellectual component as well’. Local academics whose incomes depend on it promote antiquated folk cultures boosting their ‘language’: the Ukrainian dialect of Russian; Ulster-Scots based on Old English ex Scotland. Both historically used by the rural peasants and needing to be adapted to modernity, as do their organised religions.The modern political battlelines in both countries were drawn c1917, when Stalin as a Georgian and outsider became the People’s Commissar for Nationalities, ‘responsible for negotiating with the non-Russian nations and peoples who belong to the Russian empire.’ The author describes this activity as ‘forcing them to submit’, just at the time when the Nationalists were unilaterally laying out the NEW borders of a Ukrainian nation-state, that long continued to be expansionist. Stalin faced down the ‘intellectuals’ and the wealthier peasants/kulaks with increasing ruthlessness.The new Soviet state eventually took in the Black Sea coastline, previously rules by the Ancient Greeks, and Ottoman Turks who particularly dominated the Crimean peninsular (not shown in maps here as part of the Ukraine), until it was reallocated as an entity within the Soviet Union by (the Russian-village born son of the Donbas), Soviet President Kruschev, supposedly after a drunken night in 1956 among friends in Kiev.At the end (p364) Applebaum states that ‘many Russians do not treat Ukraine as a separate nation, Ukrainians themselves have mixed and confused loyalties,’ Just as the English have never really recognised the sovereignty of the Irish (or the Cypriots), and have recently had to come to terms with their new-found power and influence through the European Union.

⭐This remarkable book describes the extent to which Stalin used his man-made 1933 Holodomor against Ukrainian peasants in order to bring them into line. Moscow possessed an ingrained suspicion of Ukrainians, and Kulaks in particular. The Ukrainians weren’t helped by influence coming from Poland and Germany, as well as from polish, German and Jewish communities within Ukraine itself. The author doesn’t spare the gory details. There are horrific witness accounts of hunger and starvation, of people killing each other for food, as well as acts of cannibalism. Skin on a starvation victim apparently turns translucent. Stalin used Bolsheviks and the OGPU to force collectivization and the appropriation of property, and, to assist, carried out an assault on the church and religion in order to remove their influence. Anyone who deigned to stand above the crowd found themselves targetted. Millions died. Through their local diplomats other nations knew what was going on, but the timing was awkward – Stalin was needed as an ally against Hitler. The book is wonderfully written.

⭐I’ve read other books by Applebaum and expected this one to be good. It’s tremendous.Exhaustive research of a very complicated period with so many actors, some creating untrue documents for their own ends.Applebaum creates a very readable detailed analysis.( This is not lightweight reading, but stick with it ! )It extends before, and after, the famine to the present day, to put that 1932 time in context.Dikotter’s great book on the Mao’s created famine covers a similar scenario. ‘Compare and contrast the Stalin and Mao famines’ – my intellect isn’t up to it !

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