Where others have summarized this marvellous book detailing the genocide perpetrated on Ukraine by Stalin and his henchmen, I will take a sidebar into things as they stand today.

The Soviet Union is no more. Its apologists are no more, we think.

But an equally diabolical regime in China has decided that millions of Muslims within its borders require “reeducation” and this same regime has:

1) Among the most sophisticated systems of electronic surveillance imaginable;

2) Access to personal information unimaginable even a few years ago such that it is poised to leapfrog other industrialized nations in a race to develop machine learning and artificial intelligence.

3) Scientists who are apparently applying gene editing to humans without agreement on the moral limits to applying this technology.

We live on a hungry planet. The race for resources will accelerate as the poorest among us become richer, as our population goes apace, and as we have no consensus to reverse the devastation of pollution or to deal with the hundred or so million climate refugees likely to result.

China may soon have the power to put us out of business. And China is not transparent, or the least bit concerned with the future of its neighbours or, for that matters, with us.

What is to stop China from redirecting the resources of the planet toward its aggrandizement and away from the welfare of the five or so other billion people on the planet.

Its belt and road program is one step in that direction. It may not even need the cadres that Stalin used to terrorize the Soviet Union’s neighbours.

Information and the incompetence of its regime stopped the Soviet clown show in its tracks. But once the machines have been programmed, who will stop them? ( )

A fascinating and unsettling book on a period in history that has been much more widely discussed in recent months since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: the Holodomor, the famine which ravaged Ukraine in the early 1930s and which killed millions. Anne Applebaum traces its origins back to the 1910s and argues that the famine was the result of a deliberate Soviet policy aimed at resource extraction from Ukraine while suppressing Ukrainian national sentiment and cultural identity as much as possible. She draws extensively on memoirs and contemporary records to show the devastating impact that the famine had on the Ukrainian peasantry, and this is not a book to read if you have a weak stomach. Applebaum’s political sympathies are clearly centre-right, but I found myself broadly in agreement with her that Stalin’s attitude towards Ukrainians—a mix of indifference, malice, and paranoia—coupled with institutional incompetence were the determinative factors behind what happened.

The Holodomor is an important topic in its own right, but even though Red Famine was published about five years ago, its contemporary resonances are painfully obvious, with Putin clearly drawing freely from Stalin’s playbook. ( )

Red Famine has been named by many sources (The Guardian, New York Times), as the #1 book to understand the relationship between Ukraine and Russia. Highly recommended.

I knew about the famine in Ukraine that caused the death of several million people, but I always thought that it was caused by the resistance of the kulaks to the collectivization of farms under Stalin’s regime in the 1930’s.

Applebaum’s book reveals that it was not so simple. In fact, it was a a planned genocide by the Soviet government. Masterminded by Stalin’s suspicious mind, Ukrainian peasant were not forced onto collective farms. Instead, those who resisted collectivization were systematically starved, first through blacklists that deprived them access of modern farm implements, seeds & fertilizer, and then by squads of enforcers who searched their homes and property for any kind of food (or items to cook like grains) and confiscated it. The government then instituted a news blackout on what was happening in an attempt to hide their actions from the world.

At the same time the Soviets attempted to stamp out the Ukrainian language and culture under the guise that Ukraine was part of Russia and not a separate entity unto itself. The echoes of what happened 90 years ago is now playing out again today in the war that Russia began against Ukraine in March 2022.

This is a must read book to understand what is happening in Eastern Europe today. ( )

Because of events in Ukraine, my book club decided to read a book that would help us understand current relations between Russia and Ukraine. This is the book most recommended for background information. The author’s thesis is that the 1932-33 famine, that was worst in Ukraine than in other Soviet grain-growing regions, was a product not so much of poor weather conditions but of government policies.

Applebaum begins in 1917 with the Ukrainian revolution which she argues influenced Soviet views of Ukraine. Lenin, and later Stalin, needed Ukraine’s grain to feed his people or they would question the Soviet system and demand change, so Ukrainian national movements which could lead to the loss of Ukraine were seen as a threat to Soviet power. The book suggests that leaders were always focused on getting Ukrainian grain and undermining any expressions of Ukrainian nationalism.

The book outlines Stalin’s decision to create collective farms as a response to grain shortages. Collectivization would, he believed, increase the food supply, and state-controlled agriculture would also eliminate the kulaks, prosperous land-owning peasants, who were a threat to socialism. Because collectivization was Stalin’s signature policy, it could not be seen as failing. Any failures (activism against the policy) were attributed to class enemies and foreign influences so Stalin’s paranoia about the counter-revolutionary potential of Ukraine grew.

A lack of rainfall contributed to the famine of 1932-33 but Applebaum argues that policy decisions were responsible for starvation and deaths. Grain collection quotas were unrealistic and when they weren’t met, all grain was confiscated, even that reserved for consumption and seeding. Farms and entire villages were blacklisted and severely sanctioned so eventually even kerosene, salt and matches needed for cooking food could not be purchased. Borders were closed to prevent peasants from leaving to find food in cities or other countries. Violent searches were conducted to confiscate food. And, of course, there were always propaganda campaigns.

Stalin’s agricultural policy could not be blamed for food shortages, so Ukrainization (development of Ukrainian language and culture) was blamed: nationalist elements had infiltrated the state apparatus and sabotaged grain collection. So the Ukrainian Communist Party was purged, the Russian language made primary in public life, educators systematically fired, Ukrainian schools and institutions closed, churches shut, writers banned, and even monuments destroyed; in essence, the intellectual class was eliminated. There was a systemic assault on the very idea of Ukraine.

The chapters describing the effects of the famine are heart-wrenching to read. Both the physical and psychological effects of starvation are detailed. Witness stories about personality changes, family abandonment, and the loss of trust and empathy are included. I was horrified to read about widespread cannibalism and necrophagy.

Because about 3.9 million Ukrainians died, there was a labour shortage after conditions improved so a mass resettlement programme was started; Russians and Ukrainians from problematic border regions were moved into empty villages. In a decade, over 1 million Russians migrated so Russification occurred.

A section I found most interesting was the chapter describing the lengths to which the Soviet government went to cover up the famine. Public speech was curtailed, village death registries were destroyed, the 1937 census was abolished because it showed such a drastic population decrease, and foreign visitors and foreign press were controlled and manipulated.

The last section of the book focuses on explaining how word of the famine eventually reached the outside world. After World War II, the Ukrainian diaspora spread the oral stories which contradicted official denials, and Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost allowed discussion. The author concludes by arguing that the Sovietization of Ukraine and the Holodomor meet the general, if not legal, definition of genocide.

The book suggests that techniques used in the Soviet past have not been abandoned by Russians. In 1919, Lenin had his forces enter Ukraine in disguise and called them a liberation movement; in Russia’s invasion of Crimea, masked soldiers in unmarked army uniforms were used. Propaganda and disinformation campaigns have always been common; for instance, the invasion of Crimea was described as a defense against the cultural genocide of Russian speakers by Ukrainian Nazis. Stalin’s secret police fabricated criminal charges against those who didn’t support policies, and that tactic continues to be used against Putin’s opponents. Dissenters were ordered killed by Stalin, and a number of Putin’s critics have died in violent or mysterious circumstances. Information about the Holdomor was strictly controlled so citizens were ignorant of events in Ukraine; Putin has cracked down on media outlets and individuals, imposing prison sentences of up to 15 years for those spreading information that goes against the Russian government’s narrative on the war.

I had wondered why Putin and others in his government have labeled the Ukrainian government and its leaders as “Nazis.” This book offers one explanation. During their occupation of Ukraine, the Nazis used the famine to promote hatred of Moscow, especially amongst rural Ukrainians whose efforts were needed to feed the Wehrmacht and Germany. Since the Russian state argues that the Holodomor never happened, they claim only “Nazis” would speak of it. “The memory of the Nazi occupation, and the collaboration of some Ukrainians with the Nazis, also meant that even decades later it was easy to call any advocate of independent Ukraine ‘fascist’.” And any criticism of the Soviet government was “an anti-Soviet, Nazi propaganda drive that also had links to Western intelligence.”

“Much later this same set of links – Ukraine, fascism, the CIA – would be used in the Russian information campaign against the Ukrainian independence and anti-corruption movement of 2014.” (Now the Kremlin has alleged that the United States and Ukraine are conducting chemical and biological weapons activities in Ukraine.) Of course, calling Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his government Nazis is an attempt to delegitimize Ukraine in the eyes of the Russian public, which considers its war against Nazi Germany its greatest moment.

Once again, as in the past, Ukraine is being perceived as a rightful part of Russia. Putin wants to build a Russian empire which must include Ukraine which he thinks of as an illegitimate country that exists on rightfully Russian territory populated by rightfully Russian people. In a speech, Putin stated, “Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space. Since time immemorial, the people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians.”

Once again, forces in Ukraine are perceived as a threat. As the book points out, since 1917, Soviet citizens were taught to distrust Ukrainians. A sovereign, stable Ukraine successfully integrated with the West could have Russians asking for similar changes. Putin fears a Maidan Uprising against his own government. Bringing Ukraine to heel — demonstrating that a pro-Western protest movement in Russia’s historical heartland cannot succeed — is vital to protecting his own government.

This book examines some of the historical reasons for bad feelings on the part of Ukrainians toward Russia. Ukrainians have been warned that “’Only an independent Ukraine can guarantee that such a tragedy [the Holodonor] will never be repeated.’” Could that be one reason why Ukrainians are fighting so valiantly and with such determination against the Russian invasion?

Note: Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski). ( )

Anne Applebaum delves deep into the historical record to present evidence for her theories. In the case of this book, the theory is that the Famine was purposely constructed to punish Ukraine for its resistance and rebellion against Sovietization and collectivization. The famine was not just an impersonal fact of life. It was a method designed to bring Ukraine into submission.
She makes a compelling case.

The chapters on collectivizing Ukraine and why and how it failed were the best section of this book, and important for any student of the early Soviet period or today’s headlines. ( )

The story of the Holodomor, the great Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, was somewhat familiar to me; it had been covered in my Russian history courses at university in the mid-to-late 1980s. This was before the final collapse of the USSR, which unleashed a fresh supply of information from opened archives, and that's what makes this book intriguing (and a bit frightening). We now know a great deal more about what happened, and what drove the famine. Applebaum's recital of events going back ten to fifteen years before the famine makes it clear that there was a heavy dose of payback on the part of Josef Stalin and his cronies, which makes the events all the more frightening. It's in stark contrast to the fumbling of the great Irish famine of the 1840s or the great Indian famine a century after that. Highly recommended. ( )

Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum is the history of Russian-Ukranian relations from 1917- 1934 centering on Russian atrocities. Applebaum is an American journalist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author who has written extensively about communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. She is a visiting Professor of Practice at the London School of Economics, where she runs Arena, a project on propaganda and disinformation. She has also been an editor at The Economist and The Spectator, and a member of the editorial board of The Washington Post.

The Ukraine is the birth place of the earliest Russian settlements. Kiev is called the mother of Russian Cities or a cradle of the Rus'. The historic flux of borders and conquered lands and peoples had created friction between the various nationalities that became apparent with the fall of the Romanov dynasty. Ukraine saw it was time to break from Moscow's rule or rather St. Petersburg's rule.

Instead, Ukraine found itself in the middle of a battle ground. The Bolsheviks wanted the territory. The White Russian Russian army defended but without much care for the Ukrainians. The people were pummelled by both sides. With the defeat of the White armies, The Bolsheviks systematically slaughtered tens of thousands of Cossacks. The Bolsheviks saw Ukraine as their bread basket. Quotas on wheat and forced collectivization created chaos and mass death. Peasants fought against losing their land, live stock, and possessions. Although there was resistance, it was far from organized and effective. Later, Stalin's paranoid mind saw any resistance real or imagined as a threat to the USSR. Many were executed for a variety of "crimes." Many simply just disappeared.

The wheat taken from the Ukrainian farms was not just taken and sold back to the farmers as bread or even used to feed Russia. It was exported for hard currency. The five-year plans and quotas existed independently of reality. When yields were lower than required Moscow took actions like limiting communal tractors forcing more manual and (disappearing) animal labor. Instead of finding solutions more restrictions were added. By the time of the 1933 famine, there was not enough healthy or living people to plant and harvest. There was no carrot and stick only the stick. The Springtime brought with it not the smell of flowers or new life but the decay of rotting bodies.

Famine is perhaps not the most accurate word for the human catastrophe in Ukraine. There was food but it was for the consumption others outside the Ukraine and even Russia. People were dying in front of rows of grain. Stalin feared Ukrainian nationalism as a threat to Soviet power. Lenin recruited Ukrainians under the guise of Soviet unity rather than Russian unity. Stalin, however, simply wanted to crush any resistance from organized threats to women and children stealing a handful of wheat. It is estimated that three million Ukrainians died, mostly of starvation, in 1933. Applebaum also describes the process of starvation on the body and the mind. Using declassified records and documents along with first-hand hand experiences she captures the systematic terror and suffering that is one of the worlds mostly forgotten tragedies. When the world was not looking, Stalin waged war on people in his own country killing millions with systematic starvation. Red Famine details the atrocities, failures, and indifference that allowed the senseless slaughter of millions. ( )

Srark account of one of Stalin's worst crimes - the callously engineered extermination of up to 4 million Ukrainian in 1932-33 by forced starvation. As the author indicates, the Ukraine was a hotbed of rebellion to the Soviet cause after WWI, and a contunual source of concern to the Bolsheviks because it was the breadbasket of the USSR. Soviet suppression of so-called "Petliurites" was savage and brutal, and was followed by a campaign of forced collectivization and "de-kulakization" (eradication of wealthier peasants whom the Soviets identified as a class enemy). Desperate to maintain grain exports to the West both toe gain much-needed hard currency and prove that the Soviet system was working, Stalin ordered the forced collection of grain even though it left the peasants at risk of starvation. This developed into a systematic policy of eliminating "unnecessary" population by blocakding off large portions of the Ukraine so no food could be brought in. The suffering was horrendous, unflinchingly detailed by Applebaum throughy oral accounts and long-suppressed records, at least 4 million men, women and children simply starved to death. Stalin vigorously suppressed the existence of the famine, aided by lickspittle reporters in the West, who actively scorned the reports passed on by those who directly observed the famine. It took literally decades for the truth to come out, in fact not until glasnost under Gorbachev was the full horror acknowledged by the Soviet Union. Applebaum concludes by showing how the Holodomor, as it became known, still affects Ukraine's tense relationship with an increasingly nationalistic Russia. Not a pleasant book to read by any means, but a fascinating account of the evil perpetrated by unyielding political ideology. ( )

Tough read - Worse than reading about battles - Well written book about the early Stalin years in the Ukraine - Babies and whole families being sacrificed supposedly for the good of the country, but you don't tell them why. Should be required reading for high school students who thing life is so tough. ( )

The first revolution in St. Petersburg, Russia in February 1917 was caused by food riots while the second in October 1917, was caused by a link between intellectuals (the Bolsheviks) and the workers. A provisional government cobbled together by Alexander Kerensky, Romanov family members, army officials, and other members of the Duma. Factionalism, food shortages, in the presence of thousands of discontented army deserters, combined with agitation-propaganda by the Bolsheviks among the factory workers led to a Bolshevik coup.
On 26 Jan 1918, Ukraine declared itself to be a sovereign republic, and the Ukrainian Republic was recognized by Soviet Russia, Great Britain, France, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey. However, that all changed when Lenin (a paranoid, conspiratorial and fundamentally undemocratic man) realized Ukraine was the breadbasket for Soviet workers so could never be independent, and ordered two Red Army invasions of Ukraine in 1919. The famines of 1920-22 were acknowledged by Moscow and aide was accepted from the American Relief Association set up by Herbert Hoover. By the autumn of 1922, Russia was selling food on foreign markets to “secure machinery and materials for the economic improvement of the survivors.” A few months afterwards the ARA left Russia for this reason. Ukrainian intellectuals and politicians believe this famine was used to put down a Ukrainian peasant revolt. Alexander Shlikhter, People’s Commissar of Food Collection in Ukraine in 1918 invented the word “kulaks” to describe wealthier peasants in Ukraine.
In 1927, Stalin ordered the collecting of grain from Ukrainians peasant through the use of political violence and suppression. He believed the national movement in Ukraine was linked with the peasant movement and to crush the latter would get rid of the former. Collectivization and kulakization combined with a weather induced famine forced millions of peasants to leave the land for the cities. Mass deportations in 1930-32 sent two million Ukrainian peasants to Russia. The ethical and economic structures in Ukraine were destroyed. A secret memorandum from the Central Committee in 1930 stated, “If we had not immediately taken measures against violations of the party line, we would have had a wide wave of insurrectionary peasant uprisings; a good part of our lower officials would have been slaughtered by the peasants.”
In 1932-3 the Ukrainian Communist Party became a tool of Moscow, with no autonomy or any ability to take decisions on its own. The purge of intellectuals in Ukraine began starting with those who opposed collectivization, grain collection, teachers, professors, journalists, and Ukrainian nationalists.
Anne Applebaum summarizes with “… Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, had led the countryside to the brink of starvation …. causing at least 5 million people to perish of hunger between 1931 and 1934 all across the Soviet Union and among them 3.9 million Ukrainians.” Stalin had proclaimed the 1937 census would show an increase in population to 170 million caused by the wonders of collectivization but instead, the census numbers showed a drop to 162 million. Stalin was enraged so he suppressed the results, and ordered the deaths of statisticians Ivan Kraval (head of the census bureau), Avdiienko (editor of Soviet Statistics, and Askatin (head of the economics department at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences).
Knowledge of Holodomor, the Stalin created famine genocide became too dangerous to speak of in the Soviet Union. Russians and the West forgot but Ukrainians and descendants of the Ukraine diaspora did not. Upon independence in 1991, the memories of the famine genocide took on new life, and on 25 Nov 2006, the first Holodomor Memorial Day was held in Ukraine.
Applebaum’s research is meticulous, with thousands of documents listed in the bibliography, all of which serve to bring this appalling betrayal of Ukraine back into the historical spotlight where it belongs. ( )

I had never even heard of the Ukrainian famine until a professor mentioned it in a lecture I was watching online. I immediately looked it up and discovered that this book was being released about three days later, a nice coincidence.

I enjoyed the book a lot, but I can see how a lot of people would not like it: it's rather grim. It describes the events of the Russian Revolution and its relation to Ukraine's refusal to join the Soviet state. All this leading up to the 1932-33 man-made famine that killed around 4.5 million people, started by Stalin.

A very well-researched book, with excerpts from letters written by both high-ranking Soviet officials and Ukrainian peasants going through the famine. ( )

Despite reading a lot of history and biography, I knew very little about Russian history during the period between the world wars. While having seen reference to the Ukrainian famine, I was not familiar with the specifics of the tragedy, nor the details of dekulakization or the establishment of collective farms during Stalin’s early years in power.

This is a meticulously researched examination of the Ukrainian famine and the policies that led to and exacerbated it. While I cannot say that it is easy, or particularly enjoyable reading, I felt that it improved during the second half of the work. In that respect, it would perhaps be better classified as a scholarly work and more suitable for a student of the period or of political philosophy than as a work for the general public looking for an enjoyable and even educational read. ( )

Red Famine – Stalin’s War on Ukraine

As someone from a Polish family who before the Second World War lived in the Kresy (East Poland now in Ukraine) it has always surprised me how little of this war against Ukraine and her people is not widely known in the West. My Grandfather often used it as an example of how evil Stalin was in the way he allowed policy, to kill people and relieve him of a troublesome part of the country of its affluence.

As a child, he lived in Podwołoczyska, a border town on the river Zbruch, and when playing alongside the river he often heard the machine gun fire of the Soviet border guards killing Ukrainians trying to escape, in order to feed their families and themselves. He would often talk of his childhood and the knowledge that on the other side of the river Zbruch, evil things were happening to Ukrainians. After 17th September 1940, my family would also feel the wrath of Stalin.

Following rural unrest in 1932, the harvest in the Soviet Union dropped by 40%, and between 1928 – 1932 the livestock fell by 50%. One of the reasons being the peasants would rather feed themselves and their families instead of handing the cattle to the Communists.

All this from Stalin’s New Economic Plans which enforced collectivisation on the people, brought resistance, the liquidation of kulaks and a famine which would extend across the Soviet Union. Better known to Ukrainians and many East Europeans as the Holodomor, since independence has meant that this episode of cruelty and killing can become better known in the West.

Stalin knew what was going on in Ukraine, and what some readers might find hard to understand is that the Holodomor was completely man- made. It was his decisions, and that of his ministers that led to the famine, through the collectivisation of land and the eviction of kulaks, identified as enemies of the Revolution.

There are some historians who dispute the fact that the famine was man-made, I happen to agree with her assessment. Like Katyn, the Holodomor was the great unmentionable, Ukrainians could not talk about or acknowledge until 1991. Now is the time to tell the world and remind it what happened and not allow Stalin to be rehabilitated.

Anne Applebaum is not afraid to investigate and write about controversial parts of history, and the world is a better place for the light being shined into the dark corners. This is an excellently researched, well written book, this is not a dry history, this is a book that draws you in, and the writing keeps you captivated. I hope this book gets a wider audience, as it is compelling and tackle the ignorance that exists. ( )

> At least 5 million people perished of hunger between 1931 and 1934 all across the Soviet Union. Among them were more than 3.9 million Ukrainians. In acknowledgement of its scale, the famine of 1932–3 was described in émigré publications at the time and later as the Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger – holod – and extermination – mor.

> While peasants were dying in the countryside, the Soviet secret police simultaneously launched an attack on the Ukrainian intellectual and political elites. As the famine spread, a campaign of slander and repression was launched against Ukrainian intellectuals, professors, museum curators, writers, artists, priests, theologians, public officials and bureaucrats. Anyone connected to the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic, which had existed for a few months from June 1917, anyone who had promoted the Ukrainian language or Ukrainian history, anyone with an independent literary or artistic career, was liable to be publicly vilified, jailed, sent to a labour camp or executed

> The total population of the republic at that time was about 31 million people. The direct losses amounted to about 13 per cent of that number. The vast majority of casualties were in the countryside: of the 3.9 million excess deaths, 3.5 million were rural and 400,000 urban. More than 90 per cent of the deaths took place in 1933, and most of those in the first half of the year, with the highest numbers of casualties in May, June and July.

> Three years later the Ukrainian communist leadership became a particular target of the Great Terror, Stalin’s nationwide attack on the older members of the Soviet Communist Party. Khrushchev himself famously remembered in his memoir that in 1937–8 the Ukrainian Communist Party was ‘purged spotless’. He was certainly in a position to know, since he stage-managed the arrests. Khrushchev, born in a Russian village near the Ukrainian border, grew up in working-class Donbas. Like Kaganovich, he identified with proletarian, Russophone Ukraine, not with the Ukrainian-speaking peasantry. At Stalin’s request he returned to Kyiv in 1937, accompanied by a host of secret police troops. After a struggle – the Ukrainian Communist Party at first resisted – he oversaw the arrest of the entire leadership, including Kosior, Chubar and Postyshev. Within months they were all dead

> Between 1959 and 1970 over a million Russians migrated to Ukraine, drawn to the republic by the opportunities that a population depleted by war, famine and purges had created for energetic new residents. As the Soviet economy industrialized, a network of Russian-speaking industry bosses recruited colleagues from the north. Universities, hospitals and other institutions did the same. At the same time almost all the other minorities still living in Ukraine – the Jews who remained, the Germans, Belarusians, Bulgarians and Greeks – assimilated into the Russian-speaking majority.

> Those who were starving were not victims; they were perpetrators. They were not sufferers; they were responsible for their terrible fate. They had caused the famine, and therefore they deserved to die. From this assessment came the logical conclusion: the state was justified in refusing to help them stay alive. This was the argument that Stalin would advocate for the rest of his life

> Certainly the elimination of Ukraine’s elite in the 1930s – the nation’s best scholars, writers and political leaders as well as its most energetic farmers – continues to matter. Even three generations later, many of contemporary Ukraine’s political problems, including widespread distrust of the state, weak national institutions and a corrupt political class, can be traced directly back to the loss of that first, post-revolutionary, patriotic elite. In 1933 the men and women who could have led the country, the people whom they would have influenced and who would have influenced others in turn, were abruptly removed from the scene. Those who replaced them were frightened into silence and obedience, taught to be wary, careful, cowed. In subsequent years the state became a thing to be feared, not admired; politicians and bureaucrats were never again seen as benign public servants. The political passivity in Ukraine, the tolerance of corruption, and the general wariness of state institutions, even democratic ones – all of these contemporary Ukrainian political pathologies date back to 1933.

> The Russification that followed the famine has also left its mark. Thanks to the USSR’s systematic destruction of Ukrainian culture and memory, many Russians do not treat Ukraine as a separate nation with a separate history. Many Europeans are only dimly aware that Ukraine exists at all. Ukrainians themselves have mixed and confused loyalties. That ambiguity can translate into cynicism and apathy. Those who do not care much or know much about their nation are not likely to work to make it a better place. Those who do not feel any sense of civic responsibility are less interested in stopping corruption. ( )