Michael: Most of us think of famine as a tragedy of nature—a drought, a blight, a failed harvest. But what if the deadliest famine in European history wasn't an accident at all? What if it was a meticulously engineered political weapon? Kevin: That’s a terrifying thought. The idea that hunger could be deliberately manufactured and aimed at a specific group of people… it sounds like something out of a dystopian novel, not a history book. Michael: It’s the terrifying question at the heart of Anne Applebaum's book, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine. Kevin: And Applebaum is no lightweight. She's a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, known for her deep dives into Soviet archives. She’s not someone who makes claims like that lightly. Michael: Exactly. And for this book, she gained access to newly opened Ukrainian and Russian archives, allowing her to piece together this story with a level of detail that was previously impossible. It's a work that has been widely acclaimed as the definitive history of the Holodomor, the Ukrainian terror-famine. Kevin: So she’s not just retelling a known story; she’s uncovering new evidence. Michael: Precisely. And her argument starts long before the starvation, with Stalin's growing fear of an independent Ukrainian identity.

Kevin: That’s what I find so fascinating. The book makes it clear this wasn't just about a bad harvest. It was political from the very beginning. Michael: It was. In the 1920s, the Bolsheviks actually pursued a policy called 'Ukrainization.' They promoted the Ukrainian language and culture to try and win over the population. But it worked a little too well. A strong Ukrainian national identity began to flourish, with its own writers, academics, and political leaders. Kevin: Wait, so you're saying they were actually encouraging Ukrainian culture before trying to destroy it? That seems like a massive contradiction. Michael: It was a calculated risk that, in Stalin’s eyes, backfired spectacularly. By the late 1920s, he was facing two crises: his disastrous policy of forced collectivization was failing, and peasants, especially in Ukraine, were resisting. At the same time, he was becoming increasingly paranoid. There was an incident called the Ryutin affair, where a memo circulated within the party calling for his removal. Stalin saw enemies everywhere. Kevin: And he connected this peasant resistance in Ukraine with a nationalist threat? Michael: He fused them into one. He saw the Ukrainian peasant as the backbone of Ukrainian nationalism. In his mind, to break one, you had to break the other. And that’s when a food crisis transforms into a weapon. Applebaum documents a series of chillingly specific decisions that were applied almost exclusively to Ukraine. Kevin: Okay, so what were these decisions? What takes this from a tragedy to a deliberate act? Michael: First, they set impossible grain quotas. We're not talking about high taxes; we're talking about quotas that sometimes demanded 100% of a farm's harvest. It was a mathematical certainty that villages would be left with nothing. But it gets worse. Kevin: How can it get worse than taking all the food? Michael: By instituting a policy of 'blacklisting.' When a village failed to meet its impossible quota, it was put on a blacklist. This wasn't just a mark of shame. It was a death sentence. Kevin: Hold on, 'blacklisting' sounds like a corporate term. What did that mean for a village in 1932? Michael: It meant a total economic blockade. All state stores were closed. No goods—no kerosene, no matches, no salt—were allowed in. All credit was cut off. And most cruelly, all the village's remaining grain and food were confiscated as a penalty. Applebaum tells the story of the village of Horodyshche. It was blacklisted, and when the authorities felt the punishment wasn't working fast enough, they sent in a special brigade. They seized the village's seed grain, confiscated the miners' private garden plots, and arrested the entire collective farm leadership. They left them with nothing. Kevin: My god. So it’s not just that the state isn’t helping; it’s actively preventing any possibility of survival. Michael: And then came the final, most damning decision. As starving peasants began to flee Ukraine, trying to get to Russia or Belarus where there was food, Stalin made a choice. In January 1933, he and Molotov issued a secret directive. They sealed the borders of Ukraine. Kevin: They trapped them inside. Michael: They trapped them. The OGPU, the secret police, set up checkpoints on the railways and roads. Millions of people were caught in a vast, open-air prison, with no food and no escape. Kevin: That's chilling. Sealing the borders... it's like turning the entire republic into a prison camp. This directly counters the argument that this was just a widespread Soviet problem, right? This was specific to Ukraine. Michael: That's Applebaum's central point. There was famine in other parts of the USSR, but only in Ukraine was it combined with a direct assault on its political and intellectual class and a physical blockade. This was, as she calls it, a "famine within a famine."

Kevin: And that decision to trap them leads directly to the next horrifying layer: how this was enforced on the ground. It wasn't just a policy on paper; it was carried out by people, in people's homes. Michael: Exactly. The state unleashed what were known as 'activist brigades' or 'search brigades' on the countryside. Their job was to find and confiscate any and all hidden food. Kevin: This is the part I'm almost afraid to ask about. Who were these 'searchers'? Were they all Russian soldiers sent in to terrorize the population? Michael: That's the most disturbing part. Some were outsiders—party loyalists or Komsomol youth sent from the cities. But many were locals. They were poor peasants turned against their slightly better-off neighbors, people who were promised a share of the confiscated food, or simply people who were terrified of what would happen to them if they refused. Kevin: So the state created a system that turned neighbors into monsters. Michael: It weaponized hunger and envy. The book includes the personal account of Lev Kopelev, a young activist at the time. He described how he and his comrades would enter a home and take everything, justifying it to themselves with revolutionary fervor. He wrote, "I mustn't give in to debilitating pity. We were realizing historical necessity. We were performing our revolutionary duty." Kevin: That's a terrifying justification. It's one thing to follow orders, but to believe you're on the right side of history while taking the last crumbs from a starving family… What did these searches actually look like? Michael: They were systematic and brutal. The brigades carried long metal rods, which they used to poke into walls, floors, and the ground outside, searching for buried caches of grain. They looked everywhere. Applebaum includes dozens of survivor testimonies. One woman recalled a brigade confiscating the pot of buckwheat soup her family was cooking right off the stove. They took the soup and the pot. Kevin: The cooked meal itself? Not just stores of grain? Michael: Anything. Another survivor remembered activists breaking the family's hand-cranked millstones, not to take them, but just to ensure the family couldn't grind any grain they might find later. A woman hid a small bag of flour under her sleeping baby in a cradle. The searchers found it and took it, ignoring her screams that the baby would die. Kevin: So they weren't just taking grain. They were taking away the very means of survival, even prepared food. It feels less like requisition and more like pure, sadistic destruction. Michael: It was a complete breakdown of humanity. The psychological pressure was immense. Brigades would sometimes surround a house and demand to know, "How is it possible that no one in this family has yet died?" Survival itself became a crime, proof that you must be hiding food. Kevin: That’s an impossible situation. You’re condemned if you starve, and you’re condemned if you don’t. It’s a perfect machine for generating terror and despair. Michael: And it worked. Society collapsed. People stole from each other. Families disintegrated. The book details horrific accounts of cannibalism, of parents abandoning children, of a complete loss of empathy. The goal wasn't just to collect grain; it was to shatter the social fabric of the Ukrainian village.

Kevin: It’s hard to even comprehend that level of suffering. But the story doesn't end in 1933. The physical destruction was followed by something else, wasn't it? Michael: Yes. And that destruction didn't stop when the famine subsided. Stalin then launched what Applebaum calls a 'war on memory'. Kevin: How do you even cover up the deaths of millions of people? The bodies are real. The empty villages are real. Michael: You do it systematically. First, you control the language. The word 'famine' (holod) was banned. Doctors were forced to write anything but 'starvation' on death certificates—'malnutrition,' 'typhus,' 'pneumonia.' The truth was erased at the most basic level. Kevin: So they created a paper trail of lies. Michael: A massive one. And then came the most audacious act of all: the 1937 Soviet Census. The state needed to count its population, but the preliminary numbers revealed a demographic catastrophe. They were expecting a population of around 170 million. The real number came back at 162 million. Kevin: Eight million people were 'missing'. Michael: Exactly. Stalin's reaction was swift and brutal. He declared the census a "wrecker's census," a conspiracy by enemies of the people. The officials who organized it were arrested and executed. The results were locked away in secret archives, and the census was simply erased from history. Kevin: That is unbelievable. You can't get the numbers you want, so you shoot the mathematicians. What about the outside world? Did anyone know this was happening? Michael: This is one of the most shameful parts of the story. Some did. A young Welsh journalist named Gareth Jones defied the authorities, snuck into Ukraine, and witnessed the famine firsthand. He held a press conference in Berlin and exposed it. But he was immediately attacked and discredited, most famously by Walter Duranty, the Moscow correspondent for The New York Times. Kevin: The New York Times? Michael: Yes. Duranty, who was deeply compromised by the Soviet regime, wrote a now-infamous article titled "Russians Hungry, But Not Starving." He dismissed reports of famine as "exaggeration or malignant propaganda." He even won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Moscow, a prize that, to this day, has not been revoked despite numerous campaigns. Kevin: Wow. So the 'paper of record' was actively helping conceal a genocide. That's a powerful and disturbing lesson about media and power. How did the memory survive at all? Michael: It went underground. It survived in whispers, in family stories passed down through generations. It survived in the Ukrainian diaspora, among those who had escaped. For fifty years, it was a forbidden topic inside the Soviet Union. But after Ukraine gained its independence in 1991, the archives were opened, the stories came out, and the Holodomor became a foundational element of modern Ukrainian national identity.

Kevin: It’s just staggering to put all those pieces together. The political decision, the brutal enforcement, and then the decades-long, meticulous cover-up. Michael: Ultimately, Red Famine shows that the Holodomor was a dual-pronged attack: first, on the physical body of the Ukrainian people, and second, on their national memory. Stalin didn't just want to break the peasants; he wanted to erase the very idea of a separate Ukrainian nation. Kevin: And that's why this isn't just history. The denial of that history, the insistence that Ukraine is not a 'real' nation, is an echo we hear in Russian rhetoric to this very day. It's a ghost that has never been laid to rest. Michael: The Kremlin today still pushes the narrative that the famine was a general Soviet tragedy, not one specifically aimed at Ukrainians. They downplay the numbers, deny the intent, and accuse Ukraine of politicizing history. It's the same pattern of denial that began in 1933. Kevin: It’s a war over the past that is directly fueling a war in the present. Michael: It forces us to ask a really profound question: How does a nation recover when its deepest trauma is actively denied by its powerful neighbor? The struggle over the memory of the Holodomor is, in many ways, the struggle for Ukraine itself. Kevin: This is a heavy but incredibly important topic. It feels essential for understanding the world right now. We'd love to hear your thoughts. What part of this story resonated most with you? Find us on our social channels and let's continue the conversation. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.