the Party use a recent law on ‘theft of state
property’ to prosecute collective and indi-
vidual farmers in Ukraine who were alleg-
edly hiding grain. That telegram is probably
the closest thing we have to a direct com-
mand from the Kremlin ordering the Hol-
odomor. Stalin’s cable, writes Applebaum,
‘was a signal to begin mass searches and per-
secutions... in practice that telegram forced
Ukrainian peasants to make a fatal choice.
They could give up their grain reserves and
die of starvation, or they could keep some
grain reserves hidden and risk arrest, execu-
tion or the confiscation of the rest of their
food — after which they would also die of
starvation.’
The result was ‘such inhuman, unimagi-
nable misery, such a terrible disaster, that
it began to seem almost abstract, it would
not fit within the bounds of conscious-
ness’, wrote Boris Pasternak after a trip to
Ukraine. The young Hungarian communist
Arthur Koestler found the ‘enormous land
wrapped in silence’. The British socialist
Malcolm Muggeridge took a train to Kiev,
where he found the rural population starv-
ing. Embittered, the idealistic Muggeridge
left the Soviet Union, convinced he had wit-
nessed ‘one of the most monstrous crimes in
history, so terrible that people in the future
will scarcely be able to believe it ever hap-
pened’.
The enduring tragedy of the Holodo-
mor — which left at least five million dead,
including almost four million Ukrainians
— is that Muggeridge was right. Plenty
of modern Russians still don’t believe it
ever happened. Since Ukraine’s independ-
ence — and even more so since the Rus-
sian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the
ensuing Russian-backed separatist war in
Donbass — the Holodomor has become
an ideological touchstone, as vehemently
denied by the Kremlin as it is promoted by
nationalist Ukrainians.
Applebaum resists the passions of that
raging ideological battle and sticks to the
relentless, horrifying facts, unequivocal-
ly documented in the Soviet secret police
reports, eyewitness accounts and the cor-
respondence of senior Party leaders. She
squarely places the Holodomor in the
wider context of the Soviet regime’s battle
with Ukrainian identity itself (an imperial
crusade against separatism inherited fromthe Tsars). ‘Famine was only half the story,’
she writes. ‘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 slan-
der and repression was launched against
Ukrainian intellectuals, professors, muse-
um curators, writers, artists, priests, theolo-
gians, public officials and bureaucrats.’ The
archives show that Stalin’s aim was demon-
strably not just to exterminate the reaction-
ary peasantry but to squash all memory of
the independent Ukrainian state that had
flickered briefly in the aftermath of the first
world war.
Perhaps most controversial is the debate
over whether the Holodomor was, in fact,
a genocide. Some commentators have
accused Applebaum of shying away from
that loaded word — though in fact she is
perfectly clear that the debate is a purely
semantic one. Raphael Lemkin, the Pol-
ish-Jewish lawyer who invented the word
‘genocide’, spoke of the Holodomor as the
‘classic example’ of his concept: ‘It is a case
of genocide, of destruction, not of individu-
als only, but of a culture and a nation.’ The
controversy stems, as Applebaum explains
in a carefully written epilogue, from the
later, more legalistic definition of ‘geno-
cide’ as set down by the United Nations in- The Soviet delegation to the first UN
General Assembly had argued that politi-
cal persecution was ‘entirely out of place
in a scientific definition of genocide’, and
successfully lobbied that the official defi-
nition be restricted to the annihilation of
entire ethnic groups. ‘Genocide’ thereafter
became ‘organically bound up with fascism-
nazism and other similar race theories’,
Applebaum writes. ‘The Holodomor does
not meet that criterion. The Ukrainian fam-
ine was not an attempt to eliminate every
single living Ukrainian; it was also halted,
in the summer of 1933, well before it could
devastate the entire nation.’
Applebaum’s summary of the reality of
the genocide debate says more about Mos-
cow’s successful — and cynical — manipu-
lation of international discourse than it does
about the events of 1930–34 in Ukraine.
But it will also anger Ukrainian national-
ists who see the Holodomor — as they see
today’s conflict in Donbass — as a species
of epic blood feud between the two Slavic
nations. They are wrong. Both conflicts are
about the Kremlin’s imperial programme of
power and control rather than blind ethnic
hatred.
Today’s ideologically charged conflict
between Kiev and Moscow often reduces
history to the cannon fodder of propaganda.
That makes Applebaum’s meticulous study
— the first since Robert Conquest’s excel-
lent but inevitably poorly sourced The Har-
vest of Sorrow (1986) — so important. The
Soviet state successfully concealed the real-
Willow
Of all the trees, the willow is
The last to lose its yellow leaves
And yet among the first to try
Its newborn growth in early spring
When it can glisten gold and green
As trees come back to life again,
But when it rains it seems to cry,
To hang its head and tear its hair
As down the leaves the water seeps
And forms a droplet on each leaf
And, while the rain and wind are there
To wave its arms and shed a tear,
We think of it as him or her
Although in truth it does not care,
But we need company in grief
And that is why we like to hear
The willow is the one that weeps.— Duncan Forbes
Mykola Bokan’s photograph of his family, including a memorial to ‘Kostya, who died of
hunger’, July 1933. Bokan and his son were arrested for documenting the famine — both
died in the gulag