Argues that charges of a deliberate Soviet policy of genocide by famine directed against the Ukrainian nation in the early 1930s are based on inflated figures and fabricated evidence. This campaign was initiated by extreme right-wing forces in the USA and Nazi propagandists, and has continued since the 1950s by Ukrainian emigre organizations. Some writers have accused the Jews and "Stalin's Jewish government" of deliberately causing the famine. Ch. 9 (pp. 102-119), "Collaboration and Collusion, " discusses Ukrainian nationalist involvement in pogroms and assistance to the Germans during the Holocaust, particularly the faction led by Stepan Bandera and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. also describes how ex-members of these groups and of Ukrainian Waffen-SS units were enabled to enter the USA and Canada after the war.
A first attempt to present an approach to Ukrainian history which goes beyond the standard 'national narrative' schemes, predominant in the majority of post-Soviet countries after 1991, in the years of implementing 'nation-building projects'. An unrivalled collection of essays by the finest scholars in the field from Ukraine, Russia, USA, Germany, Austria and Canada, superbly written to a high academic standard. The various chapters are methodologically innovative and thought-provoking. The biggest Eastern European country has ancient roots but also the birth pangs of a new autonomous state. Its historiography is characterized by animated debates, in which this book takes a definite stance. The history of Ukraine is not written here as a linear, teleological narrative of ethnic Ukrainians but as a multicultural, multidimensional history of a diversity of cultures, religious denominations, languages, ethical norms, and historical experience. It is not presented as causal explanation of 'what has to have happened' but rather as conjunctures and contingencies, disruptions, and episodes of 'lack of history.'
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The march in Kyiv on the Sunday morning of 1 April 1917 was the first of its kind. It was the first time the Ukrainian national movement showed itself in such force on Russian soil. #2 The intellectuals of the Central Rada, who began as self-appointed spokesmen for the national cause, did seek democratic legitimacy. They held an All-Ukrainian National Congress on 19 April 1917, which supported the new Ukrainian government. #3 The Ukrainian government, led by the third and final Universal, declared independence on 26 January 1918. It was recognized by all of the main European powers, including France, Great Britain, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria, Turkey, and even Soviet Russia. #4 The first Soviet attempt to conquer Ukraine in January 1918 ended when the German and Austrian armies arrived and declared they intended to enforce the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Instead of saving the liberal legislators of the Central Rada, they threw their support behind Pavlo Skoropadsky, a Ukrainian general.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest crimes, the consequences of which still resonate today, as Russia has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more—from the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the National Book Award finalist Iron Curtain. "With searing clarity, Red Famine demonstrates the horrific consequences of a campaign to eradicate 'backwardness' when undertaken by a regime in a state of war with its own people." —The Economist In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization—in effect a second Russian revolution—which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil. Applebaum’s compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the twenty-first.
The path to a better world can’t be found without knowledge of history. "It’s Not Over" analyzes attempts to supplant capitalism in the past in order to draw lessons for emerging and future movements that seek to overcome the political and economic crises of today. This history is presented through the words and actions of the men and women who made these revolutions, and the everyday experiences of the millions of people who put new revolutionary ideas into practice under the pressures of enormous internal and external forces. This is history that can be applied to today’s struggles to shape our world, in which new ideas are emerging to bring about the economic democracy that is indispensable to a rational and sustainable future.
During the twentieth century, 80 percent of all famine victims worldwide died in China and the Soviet Union. In this rigorous and thoughtful study, Felix Wemheuer analyzes the historical and political roots of these socialist-era famines, in which overambitious industrial programs endorsed by Stalin and Mao Zedong created greater disasters than those suffered under prerevolutionary regimes. Focusing on famine as a political tool, Wemheuer systematically exposes how conflicts about food among peasants, urban populations, and the socialist state resulted in the starvation death of millions. A major contribution to Chinese and Soviet history, this provocative analysis examines the long-term effects of the great famines on the relationship between the state and its citizens and argues that the lessons governments learned from the catastrophes enabled them to overcome famine in their later decades of rule.
In the wake of Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924, various protagonists grappled to become his successor, but it was not until 1928 that Joseph Stalin emerged as leader of the Russian Marxists’ Bolshevik wing. Surrounded by an increasingly hostile capitalist world, Stalin reasoned that Soviet Russia had to industrialize in order to survive and prosper. But domestic capital was scarce, so the country’s minerals, timber, and grain were sold abroad for hard currency for funding the development of heavy industry. Claiming total control of agricultural management and production, Stalin implemented the collectivization of farming, consolidating small peasant holdings into large collective farms and controlling their output. The program was economically successful, but it came at a high social cost as the state encountered intense resistance, and between 1928 and 1934 collectivization led to the deaths of at least ten million people from starvation and associated diseases. Hungry and Starving elicits the voices of both the culprits and the victims at the centre of this horrific process. Through primary accounts of collectivization as well as the eyewitness observations of ambassadors, reporters, tourists, fellow travellers, Russian emigrés, tsarist officials, aristocrats, scientists, and technical specialists, James Gibson engages the crucial notions and actors in the academic discourse of the period. He finds that the famine lasted longer than is commonly supposed, that it took place on a national rather than a regional scale, and that while the famine was entirely man-made – the result of the ruthless manner in which collectivization was executed and enforced – it was neither deliberate nor ethnically motivated, given that it was not in the Soviet state’s economic or political interest to engage in genocide. Highlighting the experiences of life and death under Stalin’s ruthless regime, Hungry and Starving offers a broader understanding of the Great Soviet Famine.
This book examines four dramatic periods that have shaped not only Ukrainian, but also Soviet and Russian history over the last hundred years: the revolutionary struggles of 1917-20, Stalin’s "second" revolution of 1928-33, the mobilization of revolutionary nationalists during the Second World War, and the Euromaidan protests of 2013-14. The story is told from the perspective of "insiders." It recovers the voice of Bolshevik historians who first described the 1917-21 revolution in Ukraine; citizens who were accused of nationalist conspiracies by Stalin; Galician newspapers that covered the 1933-34 famine; nationalists who fomented revolution in the 1940s; and participants in the Euromaidan protests and Revolution of 2013-14. In each case the narrative reflects current "memory wars" over these key moments in history. The discussion of these flashpoints in history in a balanced, insightful and illuminating. It introduces recent research findings and new archival materials, and provides a guide to the heated controversies that have today focused attention scholarly and public attention on the issues of nationalism and Russian-Ukrainian relations. The Euromaidan protesters declared that "Ukraine is not Russia," but the slogan was already current in 1917. This volume describes the process that led to its reappearance in the present day.
Ireland’s Great Famine or ‘an Gorta Mór’ (1845–51) and Ukraine’s ‘Holodomor’ (1932–33) occupy central places in the national historiographies of their respective countries. Acknowledging that questions of collective memory have become a central issue in cultural studies, this volume inquires into the role of historical experiences of hunger and deprivation within the emerging national identities and national historical narratives of Ireland and Ukraine. In the Irish case, a solid body of research has been compiled over the last 150 years, while Ukraine’s Holodomor, by contrast, was something of an open secret that historians could only seriously research after the demise of communist rule. This volume is the first attempt to draw these approaches together and to allow for a comparative study of how the historical experiences of famine were translated into narratives that supported political claims for independent national statehood in Ireland and Ukraine. Juxtaposing studies on the Irish and Ukrainian cases written by eminent historians, political scientists, and literary and film scholars, the essays in this interdisciplinary volume analyse how national historical narratives were constructed and disseminated – whether or not they changed with circumstances, or were challenged by competing visions, both academic and non-academic. In doing so, the essays discuss themes such as representation, commemoration and mediation, and the influence of these processes on the shaping of cultural memory.
