AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the
National Book Award finalist Iron Curtain a revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest
crimes-the consequences of which still resonate today In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of
agricultural collectivization-in effect a second Russian revolution-which forced millions of
peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine the
most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the
USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself
of a political problem. In Red Famine Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of
those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad
policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them. Devastating and definitive Red
Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil. Today
Russia the successor to the Soviet Union has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once
more. Applebaum's compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the
twentieth century and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the
twenty-first.
