The Book Club: Anne Applebaum

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🗓️ 3 January 2024

⏱️ 25 minutes

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Summary

The Book Club is taking a brief Christmas break, so we have gone back through the archives to spotlight some of our favourite episodes. This week we are revisiting Sam's conversation from 2017 with the Pulitzer Prize winning historian (and former Spectator deputy editor) Anne Applebaum about her devastating new book Red Famine.

The early 1930s in Ukraine saw a famine that killed around five million people. But fierce arguments continue to this day over whether the 'Holodomor' was a natural disaster or a genocide perpetrated by Stalin against the people and culture of Ukraine. Sam asks Anne about what we now know of what actually happened — and what it means for our understanding of the present day situation in the former Soviet Union.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, this is Sam Leith. I'm afraid the book club is taking a brief Christmas break. So in the meantime,
0:07.4	I very much hope that you enjoyed this from our archives and join us again in January. Happy Christmas.
0:18.3	Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, literary editor of The Spectator,
0:23.5	and this week I'm joined by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist Anne Applebaum.
0:29.6	Anne's new book is Red Famine, Stalin's War on Ukraine. And welcome. Now, the subject of your book is
0:36.7	the Holodomor, if I'm pronouncing that right,
0:39.7	which I'm probably not. No, no, that's fine. That's fine. Can you say what that word means and how
0:44.5	it's charged in the context of Ukrainian memory? The word is just a, it's a Ukrainian word that just
0:50.7	means death famine or deadly famine. And what it implies is an artificial famine or
0:58.6	deliberate famine, which was how the Ukrainians always remembered the famine of 1932, 33.
1:05.7	Subsequently, that idea that it was deliberately designed famine was disputed by many people,
1:12.7	not least by Stalin who first tried to deny that the famine had ever happened going so far as
1:18.1	to manipulate the census of 1937 to hide the fact that so many people had died.
1:24.3	Many years later, for many years afterwards, there were sometimes people would
1:27.9	concede, okay, lots of people had gone very hungry, but it was an accident. It was to do with the
1:31.7	chaos of collectivization. Some people said, well, there was very bad weather that year and so on.
1:37.6	My book seeks to go back to the story from the beginning of the story, which actually begins
1:43.2	in 1917, as I'm sure we'll discuss,
1:45.8	and explain why it was not an accidental famine. It was a designed famine. It wasn't because of
1:51.7	the weather or chaos. And it was targeted at Ukraine. And it was targeted at Ukraine. It took place
1:57.1	in the context of a wider famine. There was general chaos and hunger in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s.
2:04.4	But in essence, Stalin made use of that chaos in order to get rid of a problem.
	...

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