Anne Applebaum, "Red Famine"

we were always happy at politics supposed to give a warm welcome to n Applebaum sure she was born in Washington DC as most of you know I think today she teaches at the London School of Economics at their Institute of global affairs and she what she runs there is the program called arena which is a very specialized program about disinformation and Sylvia Russian propaganda in the 20 in the 21st century and actually I it was a year before our 2016 election that Ann was arguably the face book should take responsibility for spreading false stories and was I was actually the target of some Facebook's false stories these were false stories that were planted by the Russians and that facebook bore over should help undo the terrible damage that they had done to democratic debate and civilized discourse all over the world so it came as no surprise certainly to end up a bomb when the it turned out that the Russians had been interfering in our elections with postings on Facebook and in other places I hope everybody read less the column in last Sunday's outlook by and why does Putin want to control you correct Ukraine a Stalin and which that she wrote very into great detail about of why that the what is happening in Ukraine today echoes what happened to in Ukraine at the earlier part of the century actually during the period of the early 1930s the period of her book read famine about that Stalin's harshly cruel in position of heaven on Ukraine as somebody called called it mass destruction by famine more than three million some say four million Ukrainians died of starvation and although the events of this place of the events in this book took place some 90 years ago you'll recognize many echoes today as Ukraine fights to retain its autonomy after Russia the Russian invasion of Crimea and the propaganda campaign that has accompanied it thank you yes I'm really sorry you can blame Ober and yes it's my fault for using uber great mistake thank you so much I'm really pleased to see so many people here this is my home bookstore I grew up in walking distance from here and actually where I just came from was almost in walking distance from here too and I should have walked it so it's a fantastic place it's it's a it's one of the few bookstores I know that's not really a bookstore it's kind of like a club and I know that it attracts people from all over the place and you know everybody who who comes here knows why I this this is a the the book is it's a difficult book I'm going to begin by by taking you to the year 1932 which is just before the main action of the book begins and the reason why I'm choosing 1932 is because 1932 is a moment when there's beginning to be starvation all across the Soviet Union Stalin has just launched his famous policy of collectivization which forced the peasants to leave their farms to join collective farms and the the after some of them have rebelled some of them have fought back and refused to do it there's chaos all over the the entire agriculture system and the signs are coming in the warning signs that something is very wrong peasants are writing to Stalin himself asking for an explanation there they talk about police they talk about children swollen with hunger your families eating grass and acorns one peasant writes every day 10 to 20 families died from famine in the villages children run off and railway stations are overflowing the bourgeoisie has created a genuine famine here part of the capitalist plan to set the entire peasant class against the Soviet government but of course the bourgeoisie had not created the famine the policy of collectivization created the famine but Stalin was unable to admit that and although he kept receiving all through that spring and summer urgent messages from all over the USSR he resisted listening many people believed at that moment that a greater tragedy could still be avoided that the regime could ask for international assistance as it had done in 1920 and 21 during an earlier famine it could have halted grain exports it could have stopped demanding grain from the peasants altogether and instead what happened is that in the autumn of 1932 the Soviet Politburo the elite leadership of the Soviet Union took a series of decisions that widened and deepened the famine specifically in the Ukrainian countryside they increased the state's demand for food in Ukraine they required they blacklisted farms and villages they they asked them for not just grain but also meat and vegetables they refused to halt the export of grain which continued all through that year they prohibited Ukrainian peasants from leaving the Republic they drew a kind of cordon around Ukraine forbidding them to go to go across the border and even forbidding people from going from the countryside into the cities now they blocked the roads and at the height of the crisis there were organized teams of party activists who went from house to house motivated by hunger and fear and a decade of conspiratorial and hateful rhetoric and they entered people's homes and they took all of their food so they took potatoes and beets and squash and peas and everything edible and they took farm animals and they took pets and sometimes they took money and clothes and this time the result was really a total catastrophe within a few weeks people were eating horses and dogs they ate the bark of oak trees they ate moss and acorns that killed crows pigeons one survivor nuts how do you Letitia remembered that dogs frogs didn't last long people caught them all all the cats were eaten people ate everything I imagined the scent of delicious food as we ate weeds and beets some people survived because they hit a cow they managed to hold on to one or because they had a cousin or a friend in the bureaucracy some people slipped around the roadblocks and escaped some people survived because the state actually looking for another opportunity to exploit the famine set up hard currency shops all over all over Ukraine where peasants could trade gold and silver for food and people brought their wedding rings and their heirloom jewelry and their watches and their Czarist era coins and medals to the shops and at their peak in 1933 there were 1500 shops like that in Ukraine and they briefly became crucial factor in Soviet international trade they brought in so much money to the state another woman remembered for silver and gold my mother received porridge potatoes or flour all those products she mixed with different grasses and she gave us to eat once a day and in that way we survived as they grew hungry many people went mad law-abiding people began stealing food previously peaceful neighbors turned on thieves their neighbors and lynched them very famously there were instances of cannibalism as I described in the book people reported these instances to the police they were well known the authorities knew it was happy but there was no great reaction as a result of these decisions the the death rate spikes in the spring of 1933 and this is when there begins to be you know an extraordinary wave of mass mass death and people die in their homes in their yards their villages are spookily empty they travel to railways people die in the railway stations they try to work and die in the fields and they died in such large numbers that often there was nobody to bury them famine at this point was only half the story because because while the peasants were dying in the countryside the Soviet secret police launched a second attack on the Ukrainian intellectual and political elite and as the famine spread there was a campaign of slander and repression launched against intellectuals and professors and museum curators and writers artists priests theologians public officials really anybody who was connected to the Ukrainian language or history anybody with an independent literary or artistic career was liable to be vilified or jailed or sent to a labor camp one of the most famous Ukrainian communists actually killed himself as a result of this purge churches were destroyed historical buildings in Kiev even Ukrainian dictionaries were altered a letter was dropped from the alphabet in order to make the language seem closer to Russian taken together these two policies that Holodomor the famine in the winter and spring of 1933 and the repression of the intellectual class in the months that followed brought about the Soviet ization of Ukraine destroying the destruction of any Ukrainian national idea and the neutering of any Ukrainian challenge to Soviet unity Raphael Lemkin who's the Polish Jewish lawyer who invented the word genocide spoke of Stalin's assault on Ukraine as the classic example of his concept he said it's a case of genocide of destruction not of individuals but of a culture and a nation so the question is why now why did he do it why did Stalin do it why did so many people go along with him what was the purpose of this kind of mass event and I discovered when writing this book you know when I originally started it I thought some of you know I've written other books and some of them involved multiple countries over a long period of time in my instinct but this book was well it's you know two years in one country so that's a you know that's a fairly it's a fairly straightforward narrative it's not going to be difficult but one of the things that happen is that as I started to read about 1932 and 33 the years of this crisis I discovered that almost everybody who's talking about the famine and who's speaking about Ukraine at this moment it's particularly Stalin himself keeps referring backwards to an earlier year which is 1917 that's the year that many are we're marking this year is the hundredth anniversary you're not of one revolution is this commonly thought but if several of course there were two in Moscow there was the February revolution that ousted the Tsar and then there's the then there's the Bolshevik coup d'etat in October but there was also a revolution in Kiev one that we don't remember so much but which was very important of course to Ukrainians it was spearheaded by a group of intellectuals led I'm glad to say by a historian called me hallo Khrushchev Suki but from the first moment that it appeared and for the first moment they tried to create an independent Ukrainian state the Bolsheviks sought to undermine them and why well because the Ukrainian national leadership was revolutionary but not Bolshevik so it presented a kind of challenge to Moscow its economic plan was very radical they also wanted redistribution of land and their politics were very radical they wanted an independent Ukrainian state just like at that time lots of states were being created on the as empires collapsed austria-hungary and and Russia recreation of Poland at that time in the Baltic States and Ukraine wanted to join them but that desire ran immediately counter to the Bolsheviks priorities and even in some ways to their understanding of the world they were men educated in the Russian Empire they difficulty imagining a sovereign Ukraine you know they thought of Ukraine which had long been a colony Russia as they knew it as South Russia as Marxist they had mixed about peasants whose revolutionary credentials they doubted and they also knew that their own revolution had been the the February Revolution had been caused by bread riots and the Bolsheviks were always very aware that the tactics that they had used could be repeated Stalin himself was particularly aware of this issue because his job as we don't always remember was to be commissar of nationalities he was actually in charge of Ukraine and the problem of Ukraine in 1917 and 18 and when as the ukrainian state tried to create itself he launched a series of what we would now call active measures psychological games intended to destabilize the government in a number of cities and this will sound very familiar and i think it's not an accident local Bolsheviks tried to establish little independent mini Soviet republics tiny moscow-backed mini states that were of course not really independent at all Kiev they tried to carry two coup d'etat and Kharkiv they sought to create a rival government eventually they conquered Kiev in February 1918 they were expelled again conquered Kiev again in 1919 they ruled for a few months and in the wake of their first attempt to run Ukraine there was this massive violent peasant rebellion probably the largest ever to take place in Europe Ukraine in 1919 split into the kind of chaos that you know you you can you could think about modern Afghanistan or Syria lots of different warring factions people arguing over over over who and how the country should run in terminology became very confused people had shot down with the Communists up with the Bolsheviks or vice-versa and one of the effects of the chaos was that other armies came into Ukraine including the white armies led by former Czarist generals and thanks to the chaos they were able to march through Ukraine and came very close to Moscow you know they failed actually either to make common cause with the Ukrainians or the poles and eventually the white armies lost but for a very brief and terrifying moment in the autumn 19:19 the Bolsheviks were frightened and suddenly it seemed as if Moscow it would fall it didn't but the Ukrainian peasant uprising was something that stuck in the back of the Soviet leadership said for many many years it was it was always referred to as the cruel lesson of 1919 and although it led to some milder policies in night the 1920s it kept returning and in 1929 when they begin talking about collectivization and again in 1932 when when the famine begins it's something that Stalin keeps referring to he he sends his his his his associates letters in 1932 the most important issue right now is Ukraine things in Ukraine have hit rock bottom he writes unless we straighten out the situation we may lose Ukraine and he refers to he refers to view crania communists as you know secret nationalists direct agents of Poland we need to turn Ukraine into a real fortress of the USSR you know losing Ukraine was impossible because his experience told him that unrest there was uniquely dangerous that it might once again bring the counter-revolution to the outskirts of Moscow stepping back from history for a second you can see that he had a point because of course in 1991 Ukraine did break up from the Soviet Union it did call for its own independence and that was one of the reasons why why the Soviet Union came to an end I told this long and a little bit circuitous history tonight because it's a very important it first of all it explains why my book is structured the way that it is as I said it's not just about the famine it explains the origins of you know what was Ukraine what was Ukraine's attempt to create independence in 1917 it explains the thinking of the people who carried it out and also I think it explains it has a number of interesting and important lessons for today you know I I don't like to make direct parallels between the Putin's regime in Russia and Stalin's regime because of course they're very different we live in a different era Putin is not a mass murderer there are different different ideas about how to rule the world but there is a way in which this Russian paranoia of Ukraine and fear of Ukraine you know it's almost like it was part of the KGB KGB DNA you know from the time of the Revolution the Bolsheviks always knew they were a minority in Ukraine and so to subjugate the majority they used not only extreme violence but also virulent and very angry forms of propaganda you know the the the famine is preceded by a decade of what we would now call hate speech language that designated some people as loyal Soviet citizens and other people's enemy kulaks you know a privileged class of supposedly rich presidents that had to be destroyed to make way for the revolution and that ideological language justified the behavior of the men and women who facilitated the famine and who confiscated food from starving families and who arrested and killed their fellow citizens and it also provided them with a sense of moral and political justification you know very few of the men and women who organized the famine ever felt guilty about it they'd been persuaded that the dying peasants were enemies of the people a phrase that has come back in in modern politics and that they're dangerous criminals who have to be eliminated in the name of progress and this by the way is the origin of that term 80 years later the Russian FSB the Russian interest security services and continues to demonize their opponents using propaganda and disinformation you know the nature in the form of hate speech and Ukraine have changed but the intentions of those who use it have not as in the past the Kremlin uses language to set people against each other to create first in class citizens to divide and distract in 1932 the Soviet state media described you know their own troops as Soviet Patriots fighting traitors and counter revolutionaries in 2014 the Russian state described Russian Special Forces carrying out the invasion of Crimea Ukraine as separatist Patriots who are fighting fascists and Nazis from Kiev and there was an extraordinary disinformation campaign as some of you will remember complete with all these fake stories fake photographs fake video not only inside Russia but on Russian state-sponsored media around the world and although it's a lot more sophisticated than anything Stalin could have devised in an era before electronic media the spirit of that dissing formation campaign remains the same 80 years later I think it's also possible to hear the echo of Stalin's fear of Ukraine or rather his fear of unrest spreading from Ukraine to Russia in the present as well you know he spoke obsessively about the loss of control and about polish or other foreign plots to subvert Ukraine he knew Ukrainians were suspicious of centralized rule he he knew they were attached to their land he knew that Ukrainian nationalists was a galvanizing force that was capable of challenging Bolshevism and even destroying it he knew that Ukraine could thwart the Soviet project not only by depriving the USSR of grain but also by robbing it of legitimacy Ukraine had been a Russian colony for centuries it was closely related to Russia the cultures were intertwined languages related and if Ukraine had rejected Soviet ideology and the Soviet system then that would cast doubt on the whole Soviet project which as I've said in 1991 it did Russia's current leadership knows this same history as in 1932 when Stalin told his aides that losing Ukraine was his greatest worry the current Russian government also insists on believing that a sovereign democratic stable Ukraine you know Ukraine that might be tied to Europe the rest of Europe by the links of culture and trade that that would be a threat to the interests of Russia or rather to the interest of Russia's elite of course for Russians themselves a European Ukraine would be marvelous because then it would be a stable prosperous neighbor you could trade with them but for the autocratic and corrupt elite that run the country the idea that Ukrainians you know who are so close and so closely related that they would choose Europe and they would choose to ah cracy over Russian influence this is unacceptable because of course it could give Russians themselves bad ideas the the ukrainian street revolution of 2014 represented the russian leadership nightmare and what was that there were young people standing on a square calling for rule of law denouncing corruption and waving european flags well a movement like that could have been contagious and so it had to be stopped by whatever means possible and today's Russian government continues to use disinformation and corruption and military force and even you know little fake Russian Republic's to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty and once again that that argument in those that language is very useful at home just as in 1932 this constant talk about war and enemies also remains useful to Russian leaders who can't otherwise explain their stagnant living standards or justify why they you know why a few hundred people are allowed to control a vast majority of Russia's wealth it is a tragic book there are a lot of a lot of difficult stories I think of the three history books I've written this is was the most difficult you know when you read when you read the stories of the gulag you know there were these marvelous writers who who were able to express what happened there and gain some lessons and and somehow rise above the you know the horror and tell beautiful stories you don't have an equivalent of that with the story of Ukranian peasants there's really nothing uplifting about the stories that you read nevertheless I you know and when I and I should say when I was when I was finishing the book I wrote a version of the conclusion and I showed it to a young woman a Ukrainian historian who'd been helping me and she read that and she said you know it was a it was a you know it was a conclusion that ended with with you know an expression of tragedy you said you know you can't end it that way because you know the the famine is a tragedy but the history of Ukraine which are also telling in this book doesn't have to be a tragedy you know Stalin failed and the Ukrainian language did not disappear and they put the letters back into the alphabet and they rebuilt the culture and the desire for independence didn't disappear either or even more importantly neither did the desire for whatever you want to call it democracy or a more just society or for a ukrainian state which truly represents ukrainians so you know the history of the famine as I say it's a tragedy there's no happy ending but the history of Ukraine isn't a tragedy millions of people were murdered but the nation remains on the map the memory of the famine was suppressed but Ukrainians today can discuss and debate their past and although the wounds are still there millions of Ukrainians can now finally begin to discuss what happened to to learn this history and to begin to heal them so thank you very much I will I will stop there because I know this is going to be a room that is full of people asking questions thank hi there yeah I actually have two questions but you can answer either one or both one is there were Nazis and fascists running around it wasn't that in 2014 or one no no no in 1932 1933 that people who were posed starved and oppressed by Stalin weren't some of them they weren't all you know Western European Democrats or plenty of not true so in 1932 there were no fascists in in Kiev I mean that's that's that's a little early no that I mean you know Central Europe in the 1920s and 30s was not a a wonderful place for democracy and not everybody there was a liberal or tolerant thinker and I wouldn't deny that in the book you know the book describes for example some of the more horrific aspects of the civil war in Ukraine which included you know one of the I mean before the Holocaust one of the most terrible pogroms in in European history which took place which took place during the Russian Civil War it's also true that in 1941 when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union that there were Ukrainians who welcomed German troops as saviors you know now finally you're going to save us from Stalin but that I would be cautious about particularly with hindsight blaming people for I'm given what one of the one of the things you learn from this book is what it meant to be living under Stalin and what you know what that you know what that did to people what it did to people intellectually and physically and it helps you understand why there was that reaction some years later you know Ukraine now you know Ukraine is a is a is a is a you know is a is a you know it's it's a place where there's you know very loud very argumentative politics I would say the you know there there are some left-wing extremists there's some right-wing extremists however there are left-wing extremists and right-wing extremists in most European countries and I think unfortunately indeed in this country nowadays and the you know the the you know what's important is that you know in several elections you've had you know big majority votes for and in particular in the most recent elections for for joining Europe which in in Ukrainian Minds means you know if not something that we would call perfect democracy than it means some idea of tolerance some idea of rule of law and some idea of fighting corruption and that alone puts them at odds with the modern Russian state which doesn't believe in those values at all so but you know I don't I think it's always wrong to read back into the 1930s things that and you know later in the 1940s anyway next question thanks so much for your book and I was just curious if in your research or in conversations with other historians you've kind of learned about the experience in the Jewish villages and talents of Ukraine during collectivization and also during the famine Thanks Thanks so there's unfortunately because of the way records are kept I don't I want two things I looked for was was specifically that was the Jewish experience of the famine I think most Jews in Ukraine were not farmers and so particularly by that point in time they were mostly in towns and so although there's and there's a explain what happened in the cities which was that most people in the cities had access to ration cards of some kind not everybody and actually there were people who starved for the cities too and the Jews mostly fell into that category there are some exceptions there were these Jewish agricultural villages and towns and collective farms which seemed to have suffered in a similar way from the peasants I mean the there are also some really you know there's several anecdotal stories about Jews who had access to food because of ration cards helping their Ukrainian neighbors you know I don't know how how typical that was but I mean there doesn't seem to have been an exceptional Jewish experience and those who were in the country had a similar experience of the Ukrainians those who were in the cities which was the majority had a similar experience to the to the other rest of the urban population thank you my question is when writing this book did you have a chance to get in touch with the Russian scholars that have studied discs if you have anything to say about that and and the second one is you you write a lot about this information and I think it's important how do we protect ourselves from that right so we're moving into yes contemporary politics so first of all I did yes there are a couple of Russian historians was one in particular who's written a lot about the famine period and I had some contact with him and I used his books which I read he has a different view from me about what happened in 1932 but you know I don't think everything that he writes is wrong and actually in the in the epilogue where I talk about the different Russian Ukrainian views of what happened I you know explain how I think my books and his books are compatible you know I he orders there wasn't really a Ukrainian famine there was a wider Soviet famine and you can't talk about a special role for Ukraine and I you know I disagree with that and I explain why but but there are you know there are some there Russians there it's important to note there's a massive huge numbers of Ukrainian scholars who now work on this I found weirdly the Ukrainian archives and all sometimes the heating doesn't work but it's there among the easiest archives to use in Europe and you can more or less walk in with your driver's license and they'll let you nobody really asks you any questions and you can read whatever you want which by the way does not happen in Germany so you know so and there had been one of the advantages I had in writing this book was kind of a decade actually of Ukrainian scholarship people had been working on this subject they've been digging in the archives they've been putting together collections of things and people were unbelievably generous both with works that they published and with with you know with with their access to documents and you know the I felt the Ukrainian scholarly community really wanted a book to be published in English and I was glad that I could do it so disinformation so it is not an accident that a lot of my Washington Post columns hit talk about the subject of disinformation it's not an accident I work on this subject and from an more academic perspective and in London at the London School of Economics and it's not an accident that last spring when I was watching the American election I became so alarmed by some of the things I saw happening in social media because they reminded me so much of what I'd seen in Eastern European and indeed Ukrainian election campaigns I even wrote a column about the coming Ukrainian ization of American politics which I wrote when Paul Manafort was appointed to be Donald Trump's campaign manager I can't remember which month that was but it was it was early in the year you know the argument was that well you know in the in back in the 1990s we exported the democracy to the east and now the East was react sporting back techniques to manipulate democracy to us and you know I guess it might have seemed a little far-fetched in February and then it got less far-fetched over the summer so you know yes I do think that the the ways in which the modern Russian state uses disinformation the way for example in which they focus on they search out extremes you know they look for the extreme left in any given European country or the extreme right they don't invent them they never invent these things you know they didn't invent marine lepen whose the National Front leader in France but they did fund her they don't invent you know far left you know far left groups in Europe but they but they fund them or they help them on social media their you know their their interest is in how do we divide people how do we create division in society and this is something they've been doing you know starting in Ukraine in the 1930s continuing through the KGB's disinformation tactics during the Cold War and up to the present I mean again I don't I'm speaking in quite a facile way I can if you've got in like another hour and a half I can do it in a more sophisticated way and say why it's different now and how it's different to use social media but there is a there are some connections in these ways of thinking between the past and the present and that of that is exactly why I got interested in it you know I spent a lot of time working on Soviet history and when I see things that seem like echoes to me in the present I write about them that so so what we're gonna do about it I think we need another session I I don't think there's a silver bullet I think there we'll be multiple answers and some of the answers will involve journalism some will involve the tech companies some might involve government regulation you know I think in Europe some of the arguments about waste I mean even even not necessarily regulating the internet but simply applying the laws that are applied in other spheres of life to to to the Internet might might be one of the solution and why don't why don't truth in advertising laws apply online just like they would on television you know why don't why don't campaign advertising laws apply online just as they do on the radio it doesn't make sense why it should be an exception I think for a long time people didn't think of the Internet as real or it was somehow something happening somewhere else and the idea that it was somehow for a lot of people more real more people live on the internet than they do in real life maybe even I do mister that's that's come to be yeah I think I think this last election the last series of elections actually in Europe have come to reveal that but anyway next question thank you for writing this is very important topic so thank you it seems that you think that what the Soviets did and the Ukraine would be you know economically counterproductive that the starve peasants couldn't plant in the most productive area and the Soviet Union was was there a recognition by this of this by the Politburo and they just figured it was worth it in order to Soviet eyes the Ukraine or today so so after so in the in the spring of the summer of 1933 they they did change their policy so the famine does come to an end because they essentially make the decision to end it and they you know they they change their policy towards the peasants they they allow them to have private plots they allow them to have family cals you know some of the some of the some of the rules that had been enacted during the famine are kind of quietly dropped and I think they they do realize that they also had they realized that you know they had a huge problem bringing in the harvest that summer and they brought in sort of students from Kiev to you know to come and there's some amazing testimony actually people arriving in these empty villages not understanding why they're empty and to bring in the harvest and they actually brought in Russians and others from other parts of the Soviet unit to resettle parts of Ukraine which you know there's an argument about whether that was actively meant to be a kind of Russification as well a lot of them actually wound up going back because they couldn't get used to living and to living in the new places but one of the you know one of the things you keep one of reasons why actually why I don't want to ever write about him again is that Stalin you know I I feel I spend a lot of time with him I'm and I I had I had to try and understand how he thinks and one of the important things about him is that he you know you you come to understand the more you read his letters what he's writing in private you know what he writes to Kaganovich and these other sidekicks he believes his ideology and one of the things that's important about them about the Bolsheviks is they believed that Marxism wasn't just some kind of theory and it could be money they believed that it was a science and it was true and it's even more common because it's science and it's true and we define what it is and that means that whatever we've said you know is true and this is this is how things are going to be and if it doesn't work out in reality the way we thought it was going to then somebody else is responsible and who's responsible saboteurs wreckers kulaks enemies of the people enemies of the state you know and I actually believe now that a lot of the you know a lot of the violence the kinds kind of cycles of violence you have in the Soviet Union 1932 and 33 you had the famine a few years later you had the purges of 1937 and you have cyclical violence and that's almost always a response to policy failure you know it hasn't worked the revolution hasn't brought prosperity and made us happy there has to be a reason for it okay you know let's find the let's find the the parasites who are sucking the blood of the revolution and get rid of them and so that was you know and so the so so your point you know your logical point okay well look this agricultural policy hasn't worked let's change it that's not how they thought you know it wasn't let's change it love wheat you know it's not our policy that needs to change it's you know the people in reality that has to adjust our way of thinking and anyways I said I did now spent like many years with those people who think like that and it's enough I just wanted to make more of an observation than the total question when we look at the the who owns the land and and the redistribution and and that kind of thing that came out of the starvation and such from a Western point of view we look at and we say gee you know they didn't own the land well but they did who didn't own the land that the Ukrainians but of course they did because when the in was 18 whatever the freeing of the serfs they got some land oh no the Ukrainians absolutely own their land I mean until until collectivization there were lots of private big private farms there were lots of you know there was actually quite wealthy they had large farms and the houses with you know I mean it was not they were not serfs well but I mean the search themselves you know they they they had land they were they were they were they were they were private farmers yeah that was why they were so annoyed when it was taken away hi thank you what does this whole tragedy says about the whole what the communist ideology are they inherently bad no is communism bad so yeah I think horizon was bad you know I think I think the confusing thing about communism and Marxism is that some of the language of Marxism and not not just sounds very familiar to us and not just to those of us on the left you know Marxism is an Enlightenment project and you know this idea it's almost it's a it's and as I said it has a scientific idea you know there's a rational way of ordering the world we can't you know if we can just break up everything and reorganize it and we do central planning instead of this ridiculous waste of time that capitalism is and if we can eliminate greed you know it has a some of the aspects of it appeal even to you know sort of centrist liberals I mean there's an idea that if you know that if we could just if we just reconstruct society along rational lines it would work better you know and so one of the other oddities about Soviet history is that you know the one at one I said let me rephrase that there's a chapter in my book that's about the fad the cover-up of the famine which was very elaborate and actually involved Western journalists as well as Soviet bureaucrats and the you know and the you know and and and this one of the points about 1933 is that it comes in a moment when this question is why didn't the West acknowledge the famine when they had done a decade earlier but 1933 is a year when there's great depression in the United States and there's great economic chaos and so lots of people in the West begin looking for an alternative including Roosevelt who some of whose team went to Russia at that time and Russia and Roosevelt himself opened US relations with the Soviet Union also at the end of 1933 in the year of this great famine and this great total disaster and that's because we were always looking at the Soviet Union we were always we were always seeing some mirror of our own society we're always looking for some answer there that we could that we could bring home and so we haven't always had a lot of trouble saying that it's evil or that it was wrong or that it was a dastur ok the ideas were good it was the people who failed or if only Trotsky had stayed in charge instead of Stalin then it would be all right I mean the truth is that you know one the you know difficulty is that one Marxist regime after the next going up to in our day to North Korea which is still surprisingly Stalinist in its language and in its behavior and has wound up creating these incredibly tragic and disastrous societies and so you know at some point you have to conclude that the problem does lie in the original ideas and not just in the execution of it that's sorry long answer two short questions the the Ukrainians suffered horribly in 1932 and in 33 and so forth and right next door the Ukrainians in Poland were they weren't starving they were maybe weren't living grandly but they weren't starving six years later when the Soviet Union invaded Poland the Ukrainians rose up and killed 88,000 polish ethnic poles in that area did the Ukrainians blame the poles for something or no I do that's this is the massacres I mean so those massacres I think are more to do don't belong in the context of the famine but belong in the context of the Nazi invasion and the politicization of ethnicity that you had across that whole region during the war I don't think it's a you know I don't think the I don't think the poles were blamed for the famine and that in that sense did they try to help at all I mean they they would be people who would know the truth so yeah so there's an interesting role that the Ukrainians outside of Ukraine play both during the famine and years later during the famine they were they did a lot of them did of course know what was going on and they tried to talk about it I mean one of the other very interesting I mean I've alluded to it interesting aspects of the story is it's a very interesting illustration of what it is that we know about the world at any given moment and why and so of course there are people who knew about the famine the Ukrainians on the other side of the border but actually lots of diplomats the Polish - Polish government knew they had they had consoles and Kharkiv who were paying attention there was this amazing console Italian in who lived in Kharkiv and wrote these very eloquent lovely letters back to Rome describing what he saw the Germans had pretty good sources the British had excellent sources people people didn't know about the famine it wasn't it wasn't secret in that sense but for a lot of historical reasons one of them as I say was that you know the United States was looking at the Soviet Union at that point as looking for new ideas because we seem to have run out of them another reason was because of the rise of Hitler people were focused on that as the great European story that in 1933 and not and not the famine another is because of the role that some Western journalists played journalists at that point in history if you were based in Moscow you were really only there at the pleasure of the Soviet state you could be kicked out at any moment and so people wanted to keep their jobs and they knew they weren't allowed to write about the famine and so they didn't there's one very exceptional exception can you say that exceptional exception famous exception famous exhibit there was a Welsh journalist named Gareth Jones who in 9th in March of 1933 he kind of talked his way into the Soviet Union he persuaded them to give them a Visia visa on the grounds that he was lloyd George's private secretary which he had a loose relationship with Lloyd George and he knew about the famine and he actually took a train he got a permission to go to hark he took a train from Moscow to hark even got off the train about halfway there and started walking down the train track and he walked through you know through you know the wart one of the worst suffering parts of Ukraine at the height of the famine he kept these very elaborate notebooks he you know described what he saw he was very affected by tea then left the Soviet Union a few days later and he went to Berlin and held a press conference and he says this is what I've seen and he presented it to the world and he got some attention for it he himself wrote some articles and he was then slapped down by the very famous New York Times correspondent walter durante who was the grand Moscow correspondent of his era who wrote an article entitled Russians hungry but not starving which is reprinted in the book you know and Durante being more famous and so on eliminated eliminated Gareth Jones you know who you know who was then who was then forgotten so the you know what what we know and what we you know what we don't know at any given moment there are a lot of factors you know in retrospect it seems obvious there was this terrible factor at famine we should have all known about it and some people did as I say the Ukrainians in the Diaspora in Poland but they weren't able to make the subject rise to the level of I don't know of the top leadership and you can think of lots of examples of similar stories today I want to thank in appabob she was worth waiting for you

Channel: Politics and Prose

Views: 22,754

Rating: 4.3821988 out of 5

Keywords: P&P TV, Washington DC, Politics and Prose, Authors, Books, Events, Literature, Anne Applebaum, Red Famine, Ukaraine, Stalin, Josef Stalin, USSR, Soviet Union, 1930's, Crimea, Putin

Id: N58mZEU9T40

Length: 49min 41sec (2981 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 08 2017