Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine (2017)
Book Review
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7557/13.5021Keywords:
Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017), Anne ApplebaumAbstract
The theme setting and particular relevance of artificial or man-made famines seems to come up in intervals, when tensions re-arise between ‘Western’ powers and Russia and seems to be useful for the purposes of ‘demonizing’ ‘Putin’—the current President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin (2000–2008; 2012–)—, ‘the Kremlin’, the Russian government; or simply ‘Russia’ in the eyes of ‘the West’. In recent years, the famine of 1932–1933 has reached new heights as a politicized event to be instrumentalized in a ‘memory war’ on many discursive levels (history, mass media, memorialization, etc.) between key-representatives of the current countries Ukraine and Russia (Hordijk 2018). This should, symptomatically, remind us of the sheer power that media narratives have in shaping public imaginations.
The reviewed book: Anne Elizabeth Applebaum. Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. ISBN-13: 978–0–241–00380–0. London: Allen Lane, September 2017. Hardcover; 512 pages; recommended retail price: £25.00.
References
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Applebaum, Anne. 2017. Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. London: Allen Lane.
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Kulchytsky, Stanislav V. 2015. “How the West Interprets the Ukrainian Holodomor: Robert Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft vs. Robert Conquest”, Deń [The Day], November 25. Available online: https://day.kyiv.ua/en/article/topic-day/how-west-interprets-ukrainian-holodomor [January 29, 2019].
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Mendeluk, George (dir.). 2017. Bitter Harvest. Feature film. Los Angeles: Roadside Attractions; Kyiv: B&H; Toronto: D Films.
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Tottle, Douglas. 1987. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard. Toronto: Progress Books.
Vogt, Carl Emil. 2007. Nansens kamp mot hungersnøden i Russland 1921–[19]23. Oslo: Aschehoug.
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