“Holodomor” is a less well-known word than “Holocaust”, but Anne Applebaum’s indignant history of the famine that Stalin and his followers deliberately inflicted on Ukraine in 1932-33 leaves little doubt that it should be remembered alongside Hitler’s slaughter of Europe’s Jews.
At least 4 million Ukrainians died, victims not of a natural catastrophe but a carefully calculated crime. Ukraine had resisted Bolshevism in the civil war of 1918-1920, and when Stalin collectivised Soviet agriculture, that vast land, the bread basket of the USSR, became his target.
Applebaum describes how death squads fanned out across the steppes to seize grain from peasant farmers, reducing them to cannibalising their own children. It is grim but essential reading, and does much to explain the legacy of burning resentment in Ukraine, which led to the country’s clash with Vladimir Putin, a strongman seen by many as from the same mould as Stalin.
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