Anne Applebaum's "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine"

c gibbons: Difficult to get into it

United Kingdom on Sep 30, 2023

Orso: Molto bello nella sua tragicità. Per me dovrebbe essere obbligatorio lo studio nelle scuole.

Italy on Aug 03, 2023

traditional: Though the author upholds the typical present-day belief in certain peoples fulfilling the roles as good guys/bad guys, the book gives an overall historical picture of the horrors that truly took place in Ukraine in the 1920s-1930s which ended up killing an estimated 6-8 million people by starvation--all the while the West totally ignored the few who dared to report the truth of what went on. A must read to learn what degree of evil man is capable of reaching in the treatment of his neighbor!

United States on Jul 21, 2023

Regine van sweringen: The media could not be loaded.  Anne applebaum’s THE RED FAMINE is tedious at times, overwhelming the reader with too many details, but generally speaking this book clearly underlines the disrespect and discrimination of the Russian’s , their ruling leaders and particularly Stalin of the Ukrainian people, culture, language etc. Famine, starvation in the cruelest wide scale sense was used mechanically to subjugate any independent sense of an Ukrainian identity . By starving/ killing the kulaks ( farmers with land) Stalin mercilessly wiped out a class of people he despised. Applebaum describes in great detail the horrors of this time. This book helps to understand not only this period but the present war. A must read for anyone interested in the Russian- Ukrainian conflict.

Germany on May 19, 2023

/recon: "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine" is a powerful and well-researched book that sheds light on one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century. Anne Applebaum does an excellent job of outlining the events that led to the famine, as well as the impact that it had on the people of Ukraine.

The book is well-written and engaging, and Applebaum's research is extensive. The descriptions of the events leading up to the famine, as well as the famine itself, are detailed and harrowing. The book is a powerful reminder of the human toll of political ideology and the dangers of government overreach.

However, the book is somewhat one-sided in its portrayal of the events leading up to the famine. While Applebaum is critical of Stalin and the Soviet government, she places much of the blame for the famine on their policies, and less on the broader historical and economic context that contributed to the crisis. This can lead to a somewhat simplistic view of the events and the causes behind them.

Overall, "Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine" is a powerful and important book that sheds light on a little-known chapter of history. While it is somewhat one-sided in its...

United States on Feb 20, 2023

Bghd: 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...

United Kingdom on Aug 28, 2021

Andreas Oberender: Im Frühjahr und Sommer 1933 lag über den Dörfern der Ukraine eine gespenstische Stille. Pferde und Rinder, Schweine und Hühner, Hunde und Katzen waren spurlos verschwunden. In den Häusern dämmerten ausgemergelte Gestalten dahin, denen die Kraft für die Feldarbeit fehlte. Das Ackerland blieb auch deshalb unbestellt, weil die Bauern kein Saatgut besaßen. Seit Monaten herrschte Hunger in der Ukraine, einem Land, das seit alters her für die Fruchtbarkeit und reichen Erträge seiner Böden bekannt war. Der menschliche Verstand sträubt sich gegen die Vorstellung, dass Millionen ukrainischer Bauern verhungerten. Wie konnte es dazu kommen? Anne Applebaum hat diese Frage in den Mittelpunkt ihres Buches gestellt. Wie schon in ihrem Buch über das Gulag-System führt Applebaum ihren Lesern die Schrecken der Stalin-Zeit vor Augen. Die Große Hungersnot von 1932/33 war die schlimmste humanitäre Katastrophe, die die Sowjetunion zu Friedenszeiten erlebte. Nicht nur die Ukraine war von dieser Katastrophe betroffen, sondern auch andere Regionen, der Nordkaukasus, das Wolga-Gebiet und Kasachstan. Die Zahl der Opfer kann auch nach den intensiven Forschungen der jüngeren Zeit nur...

Germany on Oct 19, 2017

Graham H. Seibert: 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...

United States on Sep 12, 2017