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- In 1929, former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) launched his policy of collective farming, which some historians consider to be another Russian revolution after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 that brought the Communists (Bolsheviks) to power.

Millions of Soviet peasants were forced from their homes and private lands to join the collective farms by force, and the result was a catastrophic famine between 1932 and 1933, the deadliest in European history.

The term "Holodomor", meaning "the genocide of hunger", is applied to this period of Ukrainian history. At least 5 million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the Soviet Union, including at least 3 million Ukrainians.

New York Times writer Anne Applebaum's book, Red Famine. Stalin's War on Ukraine, claims;

Instead of sending relief or expediting measures to confront the disaster, Stalin used it to rid himself of a political problem and eliminate more than 3 million Ukrainians, at a time when the tendency of Ukrainian nationalism was rising, seeking independence from the Soviet Union.

Stalin's war on Ukraine

Applebaum's book - which came in 15 chapters and 496 pages - details the series of rebellions that Ukraine experienced against the Soviet state;

Seeking independence from it, and refusing to annex it to the Soviet Empire in which Russia controlled the fate of 14 other republics, and led to Stalin deciding to eliminate millions of Ukrainian peasants.

The book "Red Famine.. Stalin's War on Ukraine" was published in 2018, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum (Al Jazeera)

The famine was not the result of adverse climatic conditions such as severe drought, but rather a product of government policies, and government mismanagement and corruption.

The idea of ​​collective farms was essentially coercive, as was forced industrialization, and both were part of Stalin's super-modernization package launched in the first phase of his leadership.

Industrial growth had to be financed through grain exports, which were supposed to be facilitated by aggregation through mandatory government purchases and non-negotiable prices.

The problem was how to get the grain out of the country. The state did not know how much grain the peasants actually had, but it suspected (and rightly) that much of the grain was hidden, and an intense struggle ensued between state agents and the peasants over the delivery of the grain.

By early 1932, collective farm corruption had spread to the countryside, disrupting normal agricultural cycles and destroying established methods of cultivation, harvesting, and distribution.

The Soviet state closed the borders of the Ukrainian Republic, seizing all available food.

The famine began to spread rapidly, and people ate anything and everything: grass, leaves, dogs, corpses.

The book notes that in some cases people killed each other in order to survive.

Appelbaum's approach to understanding the Great Famine is to follow the two interrelated, and sometimes unclear, paths that dominate relations between Moscow and Ukraine in the post-Bolshevik Revolution;

The first path is the development of Ukrainian national consciousness, and the shift in Soviet policies after fierce fighting during the Civil War was seen by Moscow as a way to win Ukrainian loyalty to the Soviet cause.

The aim of promoting Ukrainian language, culture, and history in the mid-to-late 1920s was to bring Ukraine into line with Moscow's policies, while allowing Ukraine the opportunity to proceed with modernization, guided by the Ukrainian Communist Party that represented its people and their path to socialism.

When Stalin seized control of the Soviet political machine and inaugurated the "agrarian revolution," his plans encountered obstacles in Ukraine and elsewhere;

Ukrainian language and identity were seen as a threat to Moscow's goals, Stalin launched an attack on his Ukrainian opponents, Ukrainian political leaders were removed from office, Ukrainian cultural institutions were closed, and even the newly coined Ukrainian alphabet was banned from use.

Applebaum explains that the timing of the attack on the Ukrainian national elite and the arrest, deportation and shooting of the Ukrainian elite (about 200,000 people) - which occurred in conjunction with the famine - was not accidental;

To some extent, this reflected a concerted effort on the part of Stalin and his associates to curb what they felt were dangerous tendencies toward Ukrainian independence that first emerged during the Civil War, but accelerated, in their view, during the period of collectivization.

The second path that Applebaum explores is Moscow's war against the peasants of the Soviet Union, especially the Ukrainian peasants.

From the Communist point of view, during the Civil War, Ukrainian peasants aligned themselves with a variety of "counter-revolutionary" forces, and villages were subjected to a variety of "war communism" policies, which meant the forced seizure of their grain.

Violence in rural Ukraine - and indeed throughout the Soviet Union - was intense and persistent.

The lessons that the Bolsheviks, and above all Stalin, drew from the peasant rebellions was the need to crush the peasantry's resistance once and for all, because only that would guarantee the future of the Soviet state.

However, Stalin expressed fears that Ukrainian uprisings in the countryside would attract outside interference, and Stalin wrote a letter entitled "We Can Lose Ukraine" to his deputy for Ukrainian affairs Lazar Kaganovich in August 1932.

Ukraine from yesterday's famine to today's invasion

Some historians today attribute the invasion of Russia - the successor of the Soviet Union - to its rejection of Ukraine's independence, and its opposition to the Ukrainians' desire to move away from Russia and get closer to Western European countries.

Stalin had a particular hostility against Ukraine because of his fears of its border location next to the Soviet Union's historical enemies in the West.

Some commentators considered that Stalin committed an act of genocide on the part of the Soviet Union (Russia today) against Ukraine, similar in essence to what Putin is doing today, and the West classified it as acts of genocide.

Author Anne Applebaum compares what is happening today to what happened in the 1930s, and sees that once Ukraine began to gain some strength and self-confidence, Moscow viewed the Ukrainian national movement as a potential threat to Russia's imperial unity.

Like Georgians, Chechens, and other groups that sought autonomy within the Soviet empire, Ukrainians challenged the supremacy of the Russian language and the Russian interpretation of history that described Ukraine as a province in Russia's southwest, a province without any national identity.

Russia has always feared that Ukrainian peasants could gain economic influence, which might be followed by a demand for greater political rights.

Applebaum believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin is doing what Stalin did, using contemporary methods and justifications;

Such as the refusal of Ukraine to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or the European Union, to justify its systematic destruction of the Ukrainian desire for complete independence from Russia.

The dilemma of genocide

Applebaum leaves the "question of genocide" for the final chapter of the book, describing it as an exhaustingly controversial question, especially in the Russian and Ukrainian context.

The writer believes that the Great Famine and the events surrounding it were a targeted attack by Stalin on the Ukrainians and their independent national existence.

In this sense, she agrees that "the famine occurred, that it was premeditated, and that it was part of a political plan to undermine Ukrainian identity."

Ultimately, Applebaum does not embrace the Ukrainian argument and narrative that it was an act of genocide.

Who is Ann Applebaum?

Anne Applebaum is an American journalist and columnist for the New York Times. She is married to former Polish Minister of Defense and Foreign Affairs Radoslaw Sikorski.

Applebaum played a major role in covering the crisis of the "Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014," and called for the imposition of severe sanctions on Russia.

Appelbaum argued that Soviet atrocities should be recognized on an equal footing with those committed by Nazi Germany at the same period in European history.

The author has drawn on much of the material from the Ukrainian and Russian National Archives, including large numbers of memoirs of the Ukrainian famine.