Book Review: "Red Famine - Stalin's War on Ukraine," by Anne Applebaum

So, it seems I've found the new focus of my reading for 2022, and it's eerily reminiscent of the focus of my reading in 2021.

Дежавю?

During the early chapters of this book, I found myself repeatedly struck by the sense that I had read this book before. Not literally of course, but the events sounded eerily familiar. Here's the premise. As a corrupt and outdated empire falls, a long-oppressed vassal state on is southwestern frontier (which has, in recent centuries, sought to reassert its long-buried national identity against the will of its erstwhile colonizer) rises. Their independence is short-lived, as they are soon conquered by the fledgling Communist dictatorship that has replaced their former imperial overlord. The result is engineered famine, mass deportation, and genocide, after which the Imperial/Communist occupier denies that the conquered ever even had a national identity in the first place.
If you read my reviews often, you're probably thinking "oh, this is Tibetan Nation by Warren J, Smith." It's actually Red Famine by Anne Applebaum, a book that outlines the history of the famine deliberately engineered by officials in Moscow in the 1930's to subdue and eradicate the population of Ukraine.

Unambiguous Blame

The famine of the 1930's, during which 10% of Ukraine's population died, is a subject the Russian government likes to forget. Much like the Great Famine of the 1950's in China, the subject is buried under mountains of "creative history" that seeks to pretend it was natural. Applebaum's book cuts through this like putty. This was no accident, as she proves, nor was it merely a side-effect of some "Glorious Social Engineering Project for the Greater Good." It was genocide by a country too poor to afford enough bullets for the job. As to the guilty party, Applebaum takes up the mantle of prosecutor in the court of history, and lays out a solid, well-evidenced case against Josef Vissarionovich Stalin and 110,098,000 accomplices (the population of Soviet Russia at the time) for not only engineering the famine but also seeking to cover it up.

Lebdenko went further. 'The Bolsheviks have never robbed Ukraine as thoroughly and as cynically as they do now. Without question, there will be famine." -p. 112

Thus did Stalinist policy remove the most effective and the most defiant farmers from the Soviet countryside. -p. 134

Collectivization, Stalin disingenuously reminded the cadres, was intended to be voluntary, [but] some excesses had occurred.
Of course, neither Stalin nor anyone else back in Moscow took responsibility for these 'excesses'... Instead, Stalin shifted the blame for any mistakes squarely onto the shoulders of local party members, the men and women on the lowest rung of the hierarchy... they were far away, they were nameless, and they were powerless. -p. 148

[It] is now difficult to classify the Ukrainian famine, or any other Soviet crime, as genocide in international law. This is hardly surprising, given that the Soviet Union itself helped shape the language precisely in order to prevent Soviet crimes, including the Holodomor, from being classified as 'genocide.' -p. 357

Meticulously Sourced

The book itself takes up 366 pages. The footnotes and citations take up another 69, and the bibliography alone fills another 16. More impressive still, is the fact that nearly half the sources she cites are government archives. Not the Ukrainian government, mind you (which Russian apologists might try and label as 'biased'), but interrogation records from Soviet Secret Police accessed directly from archives in Moscow, along with volume after volume of interviews with Ukrainians who lived at the time.
As evidence that the population of the Russian Soviet State were fully aware of (and fully supported) the policy of starving Ukraine to feed Russia, the author routinely cites interviews with Russian factory workers and members of commune committees. As evidence that the entire state apparatus (as opposed to merely Stalin himself) was aware that the goal was to eliminate the Ukrainian population (and that the Soviet hierarchy labelled the entire demographic of ethnic Ukrainians as "dangerous counter-revolutionaries" whose "nationalistic tendencies" were a threat to the failed experiment that was the USSR), the author cites reports by members of the OGPU (precursor to the KGB).
The sourcing here is phenomenal. To clarify, the author speaks both Russian and Ukrainian and her sources (except where otherwise noted) are original documents, not translations. This, while making her work more credible and authentic, also makes her sources more difficult to check, since she did not include translations but simply referenced the original documents. However, there is no denying that this (coupled with the fact that footnotes appear at a frequency of about 15 per page) makes it undeniable that this book is the result of much research and very little idle speculation. I've rarely ever read anything that leaned on so many first-hand sources and so little ex-posto-facto scholarly research. Again, Smith's Tibetan Nation is the only thing that rivals it.
Of course, considering how rarely this topic has been covered, it's likely that this means Applebaum's book will be among the first of the "scholarly texts" leaned on by later authors.

Slow Starter

I have frequently compared this to Smith's work on Tibet. If the author's goal had been the same as Smith's goal (that is, to shine light on the formation of a border-state's national identity against the backdrop of Communist Imperialism), then the book would have few flaws. However, the book bills itself as a book about the Holodomor, with the development of Ukrainian nationalism as merely a precursor.
If that was the author's intention, then she does take a while getting to what she says is her point. The chronologically ordered book does not reach the point of the first hints of the 1930's famine until nearly a third of the way through, and does not actually arrive in the Year of Our Lord 1932 until almost the halfway mark. Perhaps this is less a flaw in the book than in the title and marketing (which leads the reader to believe the main focus is the Holodomor, when in fact the book's central theme seems to be the rise of a strong Ukrainian national identity and the Holodomor is simply one of the examples of Moscow's brutality against Ukraine that led to this).

So Who Should read It?

Well the most obvious audience right now (as I type the review in early April of 2022) is anyone who is concerned about Ukraine in the wake of Russia's assault. This book shows that Russia's history of using any pretext available to brutalize Ukraine is nothing new. Though as for that, another audience who would benefit from it is anyone who still, somehow, supports Russia at this point.
For anyone still trying to swallow Russia's narrative about "protecting itself" from Ukrainian "ultranationalist" aggression, this book shines a bright white light on the fact that the government in Moscow used similar pretexts for the slaughter of Ukrainian civilians on an almost once-per-decade basis throughout the entire 20th century and Putin's litany of excuses for the current war is nothing new. Reading how the Czars, then Lenin, and then Stalin, all used similar speeches to excuse their murderous romps through Ukraine might help such people wake up and see how the current Russian onslaught against Ukraine is no different.
But for almost anyone with even half an iota of world-wisdom or political awareness, this book screams to be read NOW, while its subject matter is relevant.