Experimental Blog # 228

Quotations from "Red Famine" - Stalin's War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum

"The absence of natural borders helps explain why Ukrainians failed, until the late twentieth century, to establish a sovereign Ukrainian state."

"On the eve of the Russian Revolution, Stalin was in his late thirties, with little to show for his life. He had "no money, no permanent residence, and no profession other than punditry," as a recent biographer has written."

"In just a few short months during the winter of 1929-30 the Soviet state carried out a second revolution in the countryside, for many more profound and more shocking than the original Bolshevik revolution itself. All across the USSR, local leaders, successful farmers, priests and village elders were deposed, expropriated, arrested or deported. Entire village populations were forced to give up their land, their livestock, and sometimes their homes in order to join collective farms. Churches were destroyed, icons smashed and bells broken."

"The Ukrainian famine reached its height in the spring of 1933. < > "Excess deaths" continued throughout the rest of 1933 and 1934". < > agreement is now coalescing around two numbers: 3.9 million excess deaths, < > and 0.6 million lost births < > These figures include all victims, wherever they died - by the roadside, in prison, in orphanages - and are based on the numbers of people in Ukraine before the famine and afterwards."

"In his momentous "secret speech" in 1956, Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, attacked the "cult of personality" that had surrounded the Soviet dictator and denounced Stalin for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people < > But Khrushchev, who had taken over the Ukrainian  Communist Party in 1939, kept silent about both the famine and collectivization."

"Although the chaos of collectivization helped create the conditions that led to famine, the high numbers of deaths in Ukraine between 1932 and 1934 < > were not caused by collectivization either. Starvation was the result, rather, of the forcible removal of food from people's homes; the roadblocks that prevented peasants from seeking work or food; the harsh rules of the blacklists imposed on farms and villages; the restrictions on barter and trade; and the vicious propaganda campaign designed to persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbors died of hunger."  

The author, Anne Applebaum, "lives in Poland with her husband, < > a Polish politician, and their two children" This is from the book jacket.