Book Launch: Red Famine by Anne Applebaum

Pulitzer Prize–winning author Anne Applebaum launches her latest book 'Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine' with a talk chaired by Prof Andrew Wilson of UCL SSEES, followed by Q&A and a book signing. 

Applebaum’s searing new work begins in 1917, with the Ukrainian revolution and the Ukrainian national movement that challenged Bolshevik rule. It ends in the present, with a discussion of the ongoing politics of memory in Ukraine. Published at a moment when Russia is once again attempting to subvert and subdue Ukraine, Red Famine bears witness to a genocide that killed nearly four million people, destroyed the aspirations of Ukraine for two generations and has real echoes in the politics of the present.

Reflecting 25 years worth of scholarship on the Ukraine and several national campaigns to collect oral history and memoirs, this recent research has yielded thousands of new testimonies from all over the country. From these sources, Applebaum has sought updated answers to troublesome questions:

What happened in the autumn, winter and spring of 1932–3? What chain of events, and what mentality, led to the famine? Who was responsible? How does this terrible episode fit into the broader history of Ukraine and of the Ukrainian national movement? And what happened afterwards?

The Sovietization of Ukraine did not begin with the famine and did not end with it. Persisting to the end of the 20th century and beyond, it often took the form of Russification: the Ukrainian language was demoted, Ukrainian history was not taught. Above all, the history of the famine of 1932–3 was not taught. On the contrary, between 1933 and 1991 the USSR simply refused to acknowledge that any famine had ever taken place or to allow any documentation of the history of the famine and the accompanying repression. 

But in 1991 Stalin’s worst fear came to pass. Ukraine did declare independence and a new generation of Ukrainian historians, archivists, journalists and publishers emerged. Thanks to their efforts, the complete story of the artificial famine can now be told. 2018 will mark its 85th anniversary. 

Anne Applebaum’s previous books include 'Gulag: A History', which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction and the Duff Cooper Prize, as well as 'Iron Curtain', which in 2014 won the Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature and the Cundhill Prize in Historical Literature. She is Professor of Practice at the Institute for Global Affairs, LSE, and a columnist for the Washington Post. She divides her time between Britain and Poland.

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