In 1932-33 nearly four million Ukrainians died of starvation having been deliberately
deprived of food. It is one of the most devastating episodes in the history of the twentieth
century. With unprecedented authority and detail Red Famine investigates how this happened
who was responsible and what the consequences were. It is the fullest account yet published of
these terrible events. The book draws on a mass of archival material and first-hand testimony
only available since the end of the Soviet Union as well as the work of Ukrainian scholars all
over the world. It includes accounts of the famine by those who survived it describing what
human beings can do when driven mad by hunger. It shows how the Soviet state ruthlessly used
propaganda to turn neighbours against each other in order to expunge supposedly
'anti-revolutionary' elements. It also records the actions of extraordinary individuals who did
all they could to relieve the suffering. The famine was rapidly followed by an attack on
Ukraine's cultural and political leadership - and then by a denial that it had ever happened at
all. Census reports were falsified and memory suppressed. Some western journalists shamelessly
swallowed the Soviet line others bravely rejected it and were undermined and harassed. The
Soviet authorities were determined not only that Ukraine should abandon its national
aspirations but that the country's true history should be buried along with its millions of
victims. Red Famine a triumph of scholarship and human sympathy is a milestone in the
recovery of those memories and that history. At a moment of crisis between Russia and Ukraine
it also shows how far the present is shaped by the past.
