RED FAMINE

Stalin’s War on Ukraine

By Anne Applebaum

461 pp. Doubleday. $35.

The Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum has long lived in and written about Eastern Europe and is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning “Gulag: A History.” But my favorite of her books is the quirky and original 1994 “Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe,” in which she travels from the Baltic to the Black Sea, entirely through regions and cities that had found themselves situated, over the course of the 20th century, in several different countries. Today’s Lviv, for example, in western Ukraine, was previously Lvov in the Soviet Union, and before that Lwow in interwar Poland, and prior to 1914 was Lemberg in Austria-Hungary. And that’s not even counting its occupation by czarist Russia in World War I, Nazi Germany in World War II and a short-lived Ukrainian nationalist group in 1918.

Most of the people she spoke to on that journey shared a sense of ethnic identity under threat by a nation in which they were now absorbed, or had been oppressed by in the past. They felt themselves to be unfairly Lithuanianized Poles, or Belarusified Lithuanians or Ruthenians denied a country when everyone else seemed to be getting their own. The book was prescient, for it is exactly that sense of aggrieved, wounded ethnic or national pride that has been cultivated so skillfully by politicians who have emerged in recent years, from Viktor Orban in Budapest to Vladimir Putin in Moscow to Donald Trump in Washington.

The specter of clashing nationalisms also runs through Applebaum’s new book, “Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine,” a richly detailed history of the great famine, peaking in 1933, which killed an estimated five million or more Soviets, more than 3.9 million of them Ukrainian. Stalin, beginning several years earlier, had ruthlessly forced millions of independent small farmers into the new collective farms that he was certain would increase production and feed Soviet cities. The farmers understandably resisted giving up their land, often slaughtered and ate the animals they were ordered to bring with them, and had little incentive to work once they were taken, sometimes at gunpoint, to the collectives.

This is certainly part of the story, but Applebaum puts more emphasis on something that has great relevance for today: Russia’s prolonged fear of losing a territory it had long treated as a lucrative colony. Even Alexander II, the reformer czar who freed the serfs, outlawed Ukrainian books and magazines and forbade the use of the language in theaters and opera. Schoolchildren generally had to be educated in Russian even when, despite the many ethnic Russians in Ukrainian cities, in the countryside most people spoke Ukrainian.