Narrator: In a Ukrainian village in the winter of 1932, a group of activists burst into a peasant home. They were searching for hidden grain, but they found a woman cooking a small pot of buckwheat soup for her starving family. Without a word, they took the soup. Then they took the pot. This act, repeated in countless homes, was not random cruelty. It was policy. It raises a terrifying question: what kind of government declares war on its own people’s food?

In her harrowing account, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, historian Anne Applebaum provides the definitive answer. She argues that the catastrophic famine that killed millions of Ukrainians was not a tragic consequence of bad weather or failed policy. It was a political weapon, deliberately engineered by Joseph Stalin to crush a nation’s aspirations and eliminate a people he saw as a threat to the Soviet project.

Narrator: Long before the famine, Ukraine posed a unique problem for Moscow. It was not just a borderland, as its name implies, but a nation with a distinct language, culture, and a deep, centuries-long aspiration for freedom. The collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917 ignited this dream. On April 1st, 1917, a massive crowd of over 100,000 people marched through Kyiv, waving blue and yellow flags and singing patriotic songs. They were led by intellectuals like Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who called on them to build a free, autonomous Ukraine.

But the Bolsheviks, who seized power in Russia, saw this national awakening as a mortal threat. Ideologically, they believed nationalism was a bourgeois distraction from the international socialist revolution. More practically, Ukraine was the breadbasket of the empire, rich with the grain, coal, and steel needed to fuel their new state. As one Bolshevik leader bluntly put it, their aim was to "exploit it to the utmost." From the very beginning, the Bolsheviks used deceptive tactics, what we might now call hybrid warfare, to undermine Ukrainian independence, cynically using nationalist rhetoric to install puppet governments loyal to Moscow. This set the stage for a brutal conflict, establishing a pattern of Russian domination and Ukrainian resistance that would have devastating consequences.

Narrator: By the late 1920s, Stalin faced a crisis. The New Economic Policy, which had allowed a degree of free enterprise, was failing to produce enough grain to feed the cities and fund his ambitious industrialization plans. He blamed the "kulaks"—a vaguely defined class of supposedly wealthy peasants—for hoarding grain and sabotaging the state. His solution was a radical revolution from above: forced collectivization. The plan was to eliminate private land ownership and force all peasants onto massive state-controlled farms.

The policy was implemented with breathtaking violence. Party activists, many of them urban workers who knew nothing of farming, descended on villages to enforce the new order. They were empowered to "liquidate the kulaks as a class." This impersonal phrase masked a campaign of terror. Peasants who had worked their whole lives to build a successful farm were branded enemies of the people. Their homes, tools, and livestock were confiscated. In a desperate act of protest, peasants across Ukraine began slaughtering their own animals rather than turn them over to the collective. Between 1928 and 1933, the number of cattle in the Soviet Union dropped by half. It was an economic catastrophe born of defiance, a clear signal that the peasantry would not submit quietly to this new form of serfdom.

Narrator: The chaos of collectivization and peasant resistance led to a disastrous harvest in 1932. A food crisis was looming across the Soviet Union. But what happened next in Ukraine was different. Applebaum meticulously documents how Stalin and the Politburo made a series of specific, lethal decisions that transformed a shortage into a targeted, man-made famine.

First, they set impossibly high grain quotas for Ukraine, demanding more grain than was physically available. Then, brigades of activists were sent to confiscate it all, leaving nothing for the peasants to eat or plant for the next season. Second, they introduced a system of blacklists. A village that failed to meet its quota, like the village of Horodyshche, was publicly shamed and effectively condemned to death. All goods were banned from its shops, all credit was cut off, and its entire seed stock was seized, ensuring total starvation.

Finally, and most cruelly, as starving peasants began to flee to other regions in search of bread, Stalin sealed Ukraine’s borders. In January 1933, he and Molotov issued a secret directive explicitly preventing Ukrainian peasants from leaving. They were trapped in a famine zone by their own government. These were not the actions of a state struggling with a crisis; they were the actions of a state using starvation as a tool of control.

Narrator: The war on Ukraine was fought on two fronts simultaneously. As the state starved the peasantry, it also launched a full-scale assault on the Ukrainian intellectual and political class—the very people who had championed the policy of "Ukrainization" in the 1920s. This policy had promoted Ukrainian language and culture, but by 1932, Stalin saw it as the root of the problem.

In December 1932, a secret decree explicitly blamed Ukrainian nationalism for the failures in grain collection. This unleashed a devastating purge. Ukrainian-language newspapers were shut down, and cultural institutions were gutted. The OGPU, the secret police, fabricated a massive conspiracy called the "Union for the Liberation of Ukraine" to justify the arrest of thousands of teachers, writers, priests, and academics. The attack culminated in the tragic fate of Mykola Skrypnyk, a veteran Ukrainian Bolshevik who had championed Ukrainization. Publicly humiliated and accused of being a nationalist traitor by Stalin's emissaries, he walked out of a Politburo meeting in July 1933 and shot himself. His suicide symbolized the death of the Ukrainian national revival. The famine was not just about grain; it was about destroying the idea of Ukraine itself.

Narrator: The Soviet regime went to extraordinary lengths to hide the famine from the world and erase it from history. Any public mention of the word "famine" was forbidden. A Red Army soldier who asked about it in a political instruction class was told he would be imprisoned for ten years if he ever spoke of it again. Doctors were forced to list causes of death as anything but starvation—typhus, dysentery, or simply "unknown." When the 1937 census revealed a catastrophic population deficit of some eight million people, Stalin had the results suppressed and the census-takers arrested and shot.

Internationally, the cover-up was aided by Western sympathizers and journalists. Walter Duranty of The New York Times famously wrote an article titled "Russians Hungry, But Not Starving," directly refuting the reports of a young Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, who had bravely traveled through Ukraine on foot and witnessed the horror firsthand. Duranty’s denials, which won him a Pulitzer Prize, became the accepted truth for many, effectively silencing the victims. The famine was buried under a mountain of lies, and for decades, it was a crime without a name.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Red Famine is that the Holodomor was an act of political genocide. It was the culmination of the Kremlin's belief that an independent-minded Ukraine was an existential threat to the Soviet Union. Stalin and his regime used the most primal weapon imaginable—hunger—to break the will of the Ukrainian peasantry and extinguish the nation's soul. They sought to create a new reality, one where Ukraine was not a nation, but merely a territory, its people silenced and subservient.

Understanding this history is not an academic exercise. It is essential for comprehending the world we live in today. The memory of the Holodomor, once suppressed, now lies at the very heart of modern Ukrainian identity, fueling a profound distrust of Moscow and an unyielding desire for sovereignty. It forces us to ask a difficult question: when a powerful state seeks to erase a nation's history and deny its very right to exist, what does it take for that nation to survive?