Red Famine

At the city archives, there are two identical maps of the grain-growing region, printed in the same year by the same office. One is a topographical survey, a sterile document of elevations, riverbeds, and rail lines. It shows a land of immense potential, a breadbasket. The other map was never meant for public view. It is covered in handwritten annotations, not of geography, but of human inventory. Red circles mark villages that have met their grain quotas. Blue squares mark those that have not. But there is a third marking, a simple black 'X' drawn with heavy ink, that denotes something else entirely. These are the villages placed on the 'blacklist.' For them, the roads are blockaded. The stores are emptied. All food is seized, down to the last crumbs on the table. The topographical map shows a place; the annotated map shows a weapon.

This act of turning food into a tool of total destruction is a political decision. Anne Applebaum, a historian whose work has long focused on the brutal mechanics of totalitarianism, encountered the ghosts of this decision everywhere while living and reporting in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She heard the faint, persistent whispers of a catastrophe that had been systematically denied, a famine that was a mass murder. For her, the story of the Holodomor was a living wound in the present, a historical crime whose methods, she realized, were being refined for future use. "Red Famine" is the result of that realization—her effort to give the crime its proper name and trace the long, dark shadow it casts over the 21st century.

Module 1: The Seeds of Conflict

Before the famine, there was a revolution. And before that, centuries of tension. Understanding the Holodomor requires rewinding the clock to see how Ukraine’s identity was forged in opposition to powerful neighbors.

Ukraine’s geography left it vulnerable. It sits on the vast East European Plain with no natural borders. This made it a crossroads for empires, particularly Poland and Russia. For centuries, these powers vied for control over its famously fertile "black earth." Despite this constant pressure, a distinct Ukrainian culture flourished. It had its own language, its own traditions, and its own heroes, like the Cossack leaders who symbolized rebellion. This identity was deeply rooted in the peasantry.

This brings us to the first crucial point. Imperial powers actively worked to suppress Ukrainian national identity. Russian tsars, for example, banned Ukrainian-language books and declared Ukrainian a mere dialect of Russian. They feared that a strong Ukrainian identity would threaten the unity of their empire. Polish nobles often viewed the land as "wild fields" they were destined to civilize, justifying their economic exploitation. This long history of cultural and political subordination created deep resentment.

So, when the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917, Ukrainians seized the moment. The 1917 Ukrainian national movement was a popular, intellectual-led effort to build a sovereign state. Mass demonstrations filled the streets of Kyiv. A new government, the Central Rada, was formed, led by historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky. It declared independence and sought international recognition. For a brief, exhilarating period, an independent Ukraine seemed possible.

But here’s the problem. The new Ukrainian government lacked the institutional power to enforce its authority. It had popular support and brilliant ideas, like radical land reform for the peasants. What it didn't have was a functioning army or a stable bureaucracy. The country descended into chaos. Multiple armies—nationalist, anarchist, Bolshevik, and anti-Bolshevik "White" forces—fought for control. Kyiv changed hands over a dozen times in 1919 alone.

And here's the thing. The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, were fundamentally hostile to Ukrainian sovereignty. The Bolsheviks' primary objective in Ukraine was the extraction of grain to fuel their revolution in Russia. Facing starvation in their own cities, they saw Ukraine as a breadbasket to be plundered. Lenin sent desperate telegrams demanding "grain, grain and more grain!!" This was about survival, and they were willing to use any means necessary.

To achieve this, the Bolsheviks deliberately fomented class war in the Ukrainian countryside. They couldn't just take the grain; the peasants resisted fiercely. So they created collaborators. They organized "committees of poor peasants," empowering them to seize grain from their wealthier neighbors, who were labeled "kulaks" or class enemies. This tactic turned village against village. It was a brutal strategy designed to break peasant unity and facilitate the confiscation of food. This period of civil war and forced requisitioning set a dark precedent. It taught the Soviet state that Ukraine was both essential for its survival and a hotbed of dangerous resistance.

Module 2: The Famine Machine

The civil war ended, but the conflict between the Soviet state and the Ukrainian peasantry did not. The 1920s saw a temporary retreat with the New Economic Policy, which allowed some private trade. This period also saw a policy of "Ukrainization," where the Ukrainian language and culture were promoted. But this was a strategic move, not a change of heart. Beneath the surface, the mechanisms of control were being perfected.

By the late 1920s, Stalin had consolidated power. He was determined to fund rapid industrialization. His solution was forced collectivization. He declared that small peasant farms were inefficient and had to be merged into large, state-controlled collective farms. This leads to a critical insight: Stalin chose forced collectivization as an ideological tool to consolidate power and fund industrialization. He argued that the state needed to extract a "tribute" from the peasantry. This policy was about breaking the back of the independent farmer, the heart of Ukrainian identity.

The implementation was a disaster from the start. Collectivization was a violent, top-down revolution imposed by outsiders. Thousands of urban activists, known as the "Twenty-Five Thousanders," were sent to the countryside. They were ideologically zealous but utterly ignorant of agriculture. They arrived with lists, ready to "liquidate the kulaks as a class."

But who was a kulak? The definition was dangerously vague. "Dekulakization" became a campaign of terror based on arbitrary criteria. Originally meaning a wealthy peasant, the label was soon applied to anyone who resisted collectivization. If you owned two horses, you could be a kulak. If you spoke out at a village meeting, you could be a kulak. This ambiguity gave local enforcers immense power. They expropriated property, evicted families into the winter cold, and deported hundreds of thousands to the Gulag.

The result was predictable. Collectivization destroyed peasant incentives and shattered agricultural productivity. Peasants who once worked their own land were now state laborers, paid little and with no control over their harvest. Why work hard if the state takes everything? Many slaughtered their livestock rather than hand them over to the collective farm. Between 1928 and 1933, the Soviet Union lost nearly half its cattle and horses. The agricultural system was in ruins.

This widespread chaos and resistance terrified the Soviet leadership. Stalin and the secret police interpreted peasant resistance as a nationalist political threat. They saw a counter-revolution. They believed Ukrainian intellectuals in the cities were conspiring with peasant "saboteurs" in the villages, backed by foreign powers like Poland. This paranoia fused economic failure with national security. It created the justification for the extreme measures that would follow. The stage was set for the famine.