Article content continued

Anne Applebaum, a Washington Post writer and an expert on eastern Europe, tells this tale in a deeply absorbing new book — Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (McClelland and Stewart). It illustrates that Ukraine’s recent struggle to remain free of Russia is a continuation of conflicts that go back to Stalin and beyond.

When the truth finally came out, many treated the story as dubious, possibly false

In January 1918, Lenin sent soldiers into Ukraine to assert the power of the Bolshevik revolution and discourage nationalism. The Bolshevik commanding officer ordered the execution of those suspected of being nationalists. Soldiers shot anyone who spoke Ukrainian in public.

Lenin had no patience for Ukrainian nationalists. He knew the place mainly as Southwest Russia, the breadbasket of the region. Food was a major political tool. His army needed bread, and so did the cities that he was drawing into the Bolshevik cause. In January 1918, he wrote to the Red Army commander on the scene: “For God’s sake, use all energy and all revolutionary measures to send grain, grain and more grain!! Otherwise, Petrograd may starve to death. Collect and store.” Revolutionary measures apparently meant theft and, when necessary, killing.

In the 1930s, with Lenin dead and Stalin his successor, Ukraine faced a harsher enemy. Stalin’s food program called for peasants to give up their land and join collective farms. He particularly disliked the Ukrainian “kulaks,” who were slightly more prosperous, and therefore more dangerous, than poor peasants. Kulaks were turned out of their homes and sent to labour camps. At the peak of the crisis, in 1933, policemen barged into their farmhouses and seized everything that could be eaten — not just grain but potatoes, squash, peas, everything in the cupboards.