BOOKS & ARTS
The hunger
Owen Matthews
Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine
by Anne Applebaum
Allen Lane, £25, pp. 496In 1933 my aunt Lenina Bibikova was eight
years old. She lived in Kharkov, Ukraine.
Every morning a polished black Packard
automobile would draw up to the door of
the handsome pre-revolutionary mansion
her family shared with other senior Party
cadres to take her father to his job as Party
boss at the Kharkov Tractor Factory. When
he returned in the evening her father would
be carrying bulging packets of sausages and
meat from the factory canteen. Lenina did
not remember wanting for anything.
Yet in reality Kharkov, like all Ukraine’s
cities in that terrible year, was an island
of plenty in a sea of starvation. All over
Ukraine millions of peasants were dying
of hunger in a massive, man-made famine
deliberately unleashed by the Soviet state.
As Anne Applebaum chronicles in her
wrenching, vivid and brilliant account of the
Holodomor — literally, the ‘hunger-death’
— famine had become the main weapon
of a war unleashed by Stalin on both the
reactionary peasant class and on Ukrainian
national identity itself.
During the famine years those peasants
who managed to crawl to Ukraine’s cities,
bellies bloated from hunger, were rounded
up by special trucks that patrolled at night
on secret orders from the municipal author-
ities to pick up the living and the dead. By
morning there was no trace, for those who
chose not to see, of the horror which was
unfolding all around.
That wilful blindness has continued ever
since. For Ukrainian nationalists, the Hol-
odomor was a genocide unleashed against
their people that is today commemorated
in a day of national mourning akin to Holo-
caust memorial day in Israel. For the Soviet
authorities — and now, disgustingly, Putin’s
tame historians — the great famines of the
early 1930s were nothing more than a natu-
ral disaster.
As Applebaum shows, drawing on a
wealth of witness accounts and Soviet archi-val sources, there was little natural about it.
From the earliest days of the Revolution, she
writes, ‘the link between food and power was
something that the Bolsheviks also under-
stood very well... constant shortages made
food supplies a hugely significant political
tool. Whoever had bread had followers, sol-
diers, loyal friends.’ As early as 1921 Maksim
Litvinov — later Soviet foreign minister —
told a group of visiting American aid work-
ers coming to help the starving of the Volga,
in his precise but accented English, ‘Yes, but
food is a veppon...’
It took Stalin’s ruthless genius to fully
weaponise hunger as a tool of total war
against the enemies — real or imagined
— of the Soviet regime. The first Five Year
Plan of 1928 called for peasants’ private
land to be confiscated and all herds and
grain to be turned over to the new collec-
tive farms. All over the Soviet Union, peas-
ants slaughtered their livestock and gorged
themselves rather than give them up to the
Soviet state. Eyewitnesses from the Red
Cross reported seeing peasants ‘drunk on
food’, their eyes stupefied by their mad,self-destructive gluttony, and the knowl-
edge of its consequences. Harvests from the
new collective farms fell disastrously. By the
summer of 1932, it was clear that Ukraine
— for centuries the grain-basket of the Rus-
sian empire thanks to its fertile black earth
and twice-yearly harvests of winter barley
and summer wheat — had catastrophical-
ly failed to meet the production quotas set
by the Kremlin. Stalin reverted to what he
knew best from his days as a bank-robber
in Tbilisi — violence, and theft. Requisition
gangs were sent to seize grain reserves, seed
reserves, animal fodder and, ominously,
daily food supplies.
The unfulfilled portion of the Plan had to
be ‘fulfilled unconditionally, completely, not
lowering it by an ounce’, Stalin’s lieutenant
Vyacheslav Molotov told the Ukrainian
authorities in October 1932. Already, the
secret police had rounded up wealthy peas-
ants who had resisted collectivisation and
shipped them to newly built gulags in their
tens of thousands — the guards dubbed the
trainloads of humanity ‘white coal’. Now,
the Soviet authorities unleashed something
very close to a war on their own Ukrainian
citizens. ‘During the Revolution I saw things
that I would not want even my enemies to
see,’ wrote the Politburo member Nikolai
Bukharin. ‘Yet in 1919 we were fighting for
our lives... but in 1930–33 we were con-
ducting a mass annihilation of completely
defenceless men together with their wives
and children.’
On 1 January 1933 Stalin demanded thatHarsh, but entertaining
Patrick Skene Catling
Dunbar
by Edward St Aubyn
Hogarth, £16.99, pp. 211
When millionaires become billionaires they
become even greedier and more ruthless.
At the highest level, Trumpian economics
can be lethal. Edward St Aubyn, in his pow-
erful new novel Dunbar, applies the oxya-
cetylene brilliance and cauterisation of his
prose to bear on the tragic endgame of a
family’s internecine struggle for control of
a global fortune. St Aubyn is a connoisseur
of depravity, yet also shows he cherishes the
possibility of redemption.
Henry Dunbar is an 80-year-old Cana-
dian mogul who founded and developed
the world’s second-most influential media
conglomerate. His older daughters, Abigail
and Megan, want the wealth and power; his
youngest daughter, Florence, wants only his
love. The rivalry is freakishly intense, but
one can endure the horrors and enjoy the
author’s stylish craftsmanship.
At first the old man’s situation seems
terminally dire. The diabolically acquisitive
daughters have bribed his personal physi-
cian to commit him to a supposedly secure
psychiatric hospital in the Lake District.
Demented and further confused by drugs,
Dunbar has been incapacitated so that he
should be unable to resist the final quashing
of his authority by a hostile takeover at an
imminent board meeting in New York. Sur-
prisingly, however, Dunbar’s hospital room-
mate, Peter Walker, an alcoholic comedian
with a multifaceted personality disorder
and voices to match, proves to be providen-
tially sympathetic and resourceful.
‘I really did have an empire, you know,’
said Dunbar. ‘Have I ever told you the story
of how it was stolen from me?’
‘Many times, old man, many times,’ said
Peter dreamily, who is moved not to achieve
justice in big business but to contrive their
escape to the nearest bar. Dunbar, as
instructed, spits out his medication and fol-
lows Walker out through the kitchen’s back
door. They find a vehicle suitable for rugged
terrain, with the ignition key conveniently
in place. Dunbar’s captors have confiscat-
ed all his credit cards, except one he man-
aged to hide, a card for a Swiss account
with unlimited credit. The alcoholic, having
served his narrative function, is recaptured
and kills himself. Dunbar is then free for a
lonely, dangerous escape in the snow, pur-
sued by hospital guards.
Dunbar is saved from frostbite and col-
lapse by a tramp, a defrocked vicar who was
ruined by Dunbar’s newspapers. ‘When he
had been running a global empire, his cru-
elty and his vindictiveness and his lies and
his tantrums were disguised as the neces-
sary actions of a decisive commander-in-
chief, but in his current naked condition the
naked character of these actions screamed
at him, like ex-prisoners recognising their
torturer in the street.’ An Aubynesque sim-
ile can brighten a grey passage: ‘A gaudy
sunset, like a drunken farewell scrawled in
lipstick on a mirror.’
But the overall focus, satisfactorily, is on
contemporary social pathology and Dun-
bar’s moral transcendence. Most of the
novel is harsh; all of it is entertaining.It took St alin’s ruthl ess geniu s to fully
weaponise hunger as a tool of war
against enemies real or imagined