Stalin’s famine, a war on Ukraine
A new book details how the Soviet regime buried evidence and even stopped people from fleeing famine-stricken areas in 1932-33
Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. By Anne Applebaum. Doubleday; 496 pages; $35. Allen Lane; £25.
OF THE estimated 70m deaths due to famines in the 20th century, at least 40m occurred under communist regimes in China, the Soviet Union, North Korea and Cambodia. The precise number of deaths remains uncertain, as do the causes, owing to the difficulty of disentangling the effects of war, revolution and disease, as well as those regimes’ isolation and secrecy. Even low estimates, however, are damning: what clearer illustration could there be of socialism’s impracticality than its repeated failure to feed its own people?
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "The making of a mass murder"
From the September 30th 2017 edition
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