Among the past century's horrors, the Great Famine in Ukraine manages to stand out. First, for the scale of the mass starvation inflicted by Stalin on millions of people in Europe's agricultural breadbasket. Second, for how little the world knows about this genocide. A now-free Ukraine wants to change that and just marked the 75th anniversary of the 1932-33 "terror famine," or Holodomor.

Starting in the late 1920s, Stalin set out to collectivize and hobble the Soviet peasantry. His aim was to crush "the peasantry of the U.S.S.R....