Timothy Snyder is the Levin Professor of History at Yale University and the author, most recently, of “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century.”
In the spring of 1933, the Soviet Union was in the depths of a class war. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had sent workers and communists from the cities to extract grain from the countryside. “We realized,” as one of them put it, “that it was impossible for us to live on the same earth as these bloodsuckers.” The suppression of private agriculture, combined with unreasonable requisitions, caused millions to die that year in the Soviet Union. As Anne Applebaum reveals in “Red Famine,” Stalin and the Soviet leadership enforced policies that ensured that the disaster was worst in Ukraine. According to the latest work of demographers, some 3.9 million people died by starvation in that Soviet republic.
