En 1929, la gran colectivización emprendida en la URSS forzó a millones de campesinos a entregar sus tierras. El resultado fue una hambruna sin precedentes; al menos cinco millones de personas, la gran mayoría de origen ucraniano, perecieron entre 1931 y 1934.

Pero esas muertes no fueron daños colaterales de una mala política pública, sino absolutamente deliberadas. Decidido a que Ucrania abandonara sus aspiraciones nacionalistas, Stalin optó por enterrar su verdadera historia junto a las víctimas.

Con acceso a archivos clasificados, testimonios de supervivientes y las detalladas investigaciones de académicos ucranianos repartidos por todo el mundo, Anne Applebaum analiza cómo el Estado soviético orquestó uno de los peores crímenes del régimen para deshacerse de un problema político, y demuestra hasta qué punto el pasado moldea el presente.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

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.