Review of 'Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine'

Abstract

During the horrific famine of 1932-3, did Ukrainian peasants die because they were Ukrainians or because they were peasants? This blunt question is at the heart of scholarly debate on the famine: while some believe that the famine was a deliberate attempt to crush Ukrainian nationalism (and thus can be considered an act of genocide), others see it as a product of Soviet agricultural mismanagement and Bolshevik indifference to the peasants' fate. Terry Martin suggests a compromise he calls the 'national interpretation of the famine'. He argues that the famine originated in the sphere of Soviet agricultural policies. However, Moscow interpreted Soviet Ukraine's failure to meet its (impossible) grain quotas as an act of national defiance. The Bolsheviks introduced harsher measures targeting the Ukrainian Soviet Republic that transformed the widespread starvation of 1932 into the horrendous famine of 1933.(1) Anne Applebaum's new book addresses this question. As a journalist, she is a long-time commentator on Central and Eastern Europe and, as the member and founder of various thinktanks, an actor aspiring to shape it. Therefore, unusually for a historical work on Ukraine, her monograph has received wider attention, including numerous reviews in the press. Red Famine is a work of three parts. The first places the Ukrainian nation at the centre of the story. This is unsurprising, as Applebaum is well-known for her contention that nationalism is the source of the citizen's civic engagement without which democracy is impossible.(2) This carries with it the ontological assumption that nations must be, if not perennial, then at least very old, a fundamental and enduring part of what it is to be human. Accordingly, in her opening chapter on 'The Ukrainian question', Applebaum ignores the great body of scholarship that sees nations as modern creations, instead claiming that by the late Middle Ages Ukrainians had their own distinct language, food, customs and traditions. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the period in which most scholars see nations emerging, a sense of Ukrainian identity merely 'sharpened'. The leitmotif of this history she finds summed up in Voltaire's claim that 'Ukraine has always aspired to be free' (p. 5). This narrative loses all the fascinating complexity of Ukrainian nation-building. In the 19th century, intellectuals in the area we now call Ukraine did not agree on their identity. In Eastern Galicia, then ruled by the Habsburgs, they debated whether they were Ruthenians (members a nation confined to the borders of the

Talking population geographies and a ‘love letter’ to the journal

“…In lecture PG2, L7 Chris explores how eugenicist discourses frame certain population cohorts as ones that should not be allowed to breed, perhaps even to be more-or-less deliberately 'left to die', alighting specifically on the case of 'the deaf' inspired in part by a paper in the journal (Mathews, 2011;also Mathews, 2006also Mathews, , 2010) that itself briefly speaks of 'Foucauldian geographies'. In lecture PG2, L8 Chris explores the terrors of genocide where 'letting die' slips so horribly into 'making die', including the Stanlinist starvation of 1930s Urkaine (Applebaum, 2017), the Nazi Holocaust (connecting to work on Holocaust and Hitler's geographies: e.g., Giacarria & Minca, 2016), and the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (Tyner, 2009a; also e.g., Tyner, 2009bTyner, , 2012Tyner & Rice, 2016). Tyner (2009a, p. 42) provides an overall statement of some moment here: "population geographers [should] be better positioned to intervene in the struggle against spatial and moral exclusionary practices that serve to categorise, discriminate, oppress, and ultimately murder those who are perceived to be Others" (Tyner, 2009a, p. 42).…”

Socioeconomic impacts of Russian invasion of Ukraine: A multiregional assessment for Europe

“…To reinforce a colonial-like dependency to Moscow has been the norm throughout history (Raeff, 1984). The underlaying rationale for Stalin's "great famine" in the Ukraine in the early 1930s was the same as today: to make Ukraine dependent on Moscow again (Applebaum, 2017). The collapse of the Soviet Union cut the political ties to Moscow for many of the East European post-Soviet countries, but the economic ties remained.…”

Introduction to the Handbook of Food Security and Society

“…The voices of women were, and continue to be, under-represented in the official narratives of food and food policy except as the subjects of research (Kinealy, King, Reilly, 2016). A contemporary example comes to mind with the war in Ukraine and the memories of past famines in the 1930s under Stalin (Applebaum, 2017). Despite these folk memories, policymakers seem to suffer policy amnesia when it comes to addressing a crisis (de Waal, 2021).…”