Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER – AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

“Applebaum’s account will surely become the standard treatment of one of history’s great political atrocities. . . . She re-creates a pastoral world so we can view its destruction. And she rightly insists that the deliberate starvation of the Ukrainian peasants was part of a larger [Soviet] policy against the Ukrainian nation. . . . To be sure, Russia is not the Soviet Union, and Russians of today can decide whether they wish to accept a Stalinist version of the past. But to have that choice, they need a sense of the history. This is one more reason to be grateful for this remarkable book.”
–Timothy Snyder, Washington Post

“Lucid, judicious and powerful. . . . The argument that Stalin singled out Ukraine for special punishment is well-made. . . . [An] excellent and important book.”
–Anna Reid, Wall Street Journal

“Applebaum chronicles in almost unbearably intimate detail the ruin wrought upon Ukraine by Josef Stalin and the Soviet state apparatus he had built on suspicion, paranoia, and fear. . . . Applebaum gives a chorus of contemporary voices to the tale, and her book is written in the light of later history, with the fate of Ukraine once again in the international spotlight and Ukrainians realizing with newly-relevant intensity that, as Red Famine reminds us, ‘History offers hope as well as tragedy.'”
–Steve Donoghue, Christian Science Monitor

“A magisterial and heartbreaking history of Stalin’s Ukrainian famine.”
–Simon Sebag Montefiore, London Evening Standard

“Powerful. . . . War, as Carl von Clausewitz famously put it, is the continuation of politics by other means. The politics in this case was the Sovietisation of Ukraine; the means was starvation. Food supply was not mismanaged by Utopian dreamers. It was weaponised. . . . 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 Economist

“Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine–powerful, relentless, shocking, compelling–will cement her deserved reputation as the leading historian of Soviet crimes.”
–Daniel Finkelstein, The Times (London)

“Chilling, dramatic. . . . In her detailed, well-rendered narrative, Applebaum provides a ‘crucial backstory’ for understanding current relations between Russia and Ukraine. An authoritative history of national strife from a highly knowledgeable guide.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)