Anne Applebaum's "Red Famine," Ukrainian nationalist narratives, and making important distinctions about grim events

Recently I did a series of posts here on Anne Applebaum’s Book Red Famine (2017) about the Ukrainian famine of 1933-34, also known as the Holodomor.¹ That famine took the lives of some 3.9 million Ukrainians who died of starvation.

The subtitle of her book is Stalin’s War on Ukraine. And she argues that the famine was a deliberate act of genocide, a standard talking point in Ukrainian nationalist narratives.

To her credit, she acknowledges the problems with that designation. One is that, by her own explicit description, the famine does not meet the criteria in the Genocide Convention, the defining international law that took effect in 1951. And there is a lack of any clear direct evidence that the Soviet leadership designed the farm collectivization to cause a mass famine and one specifically directed against Ukrainians on the basis of their nationality.

Those posts also touch on concerns that the concept of genocide is now so often used that its meaning has seemingly been inflated to to include events that to most people would seem far removed from the scale of the mass murders in the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, the two events that most influenced Rafael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish journalist who developed the term.

Much of the actual case history under the Genocide Convention comes from the 1990s in the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia and the mass killings in Rwanda. But it has also been applied to historical events like the transatlantic slave trade going back to the the 1500s and, in the present moment, to Russian actions in the current Russia-Ukraine War.

At some point, if every war and every act ethnic persecution becomes an act of genocide, the significant of genocide as a mass crime against humanity - the sense of Lemkin’s genocide concept and the Genocide Convention based in part on Lemkin’s idea - will lose its meaning as a distinct kind of atrocity. In eastern Europe including Ukraine, conflicts over language, culture and national identity have been very intense for the last two centuries. If we put “culture genocide” into the mix, then genocide could be taken to be anything in a spectrum from requiring the official national language to be used in schools to mass murder in concentration camps.

Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel have published a study that estimates the number of people in India who died as a result of British colonialism in the 1881-1920 period.²

They describe their findings this way:

[W]e used census data to estimate the number of people killed by British imperial policies during these four brutal decades. Robust data on mortality rates in India only exists from the 1880s. If we use this as the baseline for “normal” mortality, we find that some 50 million excess deaths occurred under the aegis of British colonialism during the period from 1891 to 1920.

Fifty million deaths is a staggering figure, and yet this is a conservative estimate. Data on real wages indicates that by 1880, living standards in colonial India had already declined dramatically from their previous levels. Allen and other scholars argue that prior to colonialism, Indian living standards may have been “on a par with the developing parts of Western Europe.” We do not know for sure what India’s pre-colonial mortality rate was, but if we assume it was similar to that of England in the 16th and 17th centuries (27.18 deaths per 1,000 people), we find that 165 million excess deaths occurred in India during the period from 1881 to 1920.³

They continue with an explanation that includes some comparative data:

While the precise number of deaths is sensitive to the assumptions we make about baseline mortality, it is clear that somewhere in the vicinity of 100 million people died prematurely at the height of British colonialism. This is among the largest policy-induced mortality crises in human history. It is larger than the combined number of deaths that occurred during all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, North Korea, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Mengistu’s Ethiopia. [my emphasis]

Comparisons are important. But they are also particular susceptible to being converted into “my-group’s-genocide-is-worse-than-yours” kinds of narratives.

Tarik Cyril Amar in a discussion of Red Famine makes the important point that distinctions matter, even in - perhaps especially in - such ghastly cases as mass deaths:

Regarding the Soviet famines of the early 1930s, linked to the “Great Break” of Stalin’s take-off modernization, there is wide agreement that it was state policies—of commission and omission—that caused excruciating death and lasting harm for many millions. Regarding the Soviet regime’s responsibility, experts and scholars debate not the fact but its nature: current assessments range, in essence, from lethally reckless and murderously callous to deliberately genocidal. None of them are forgiving, but they are not the same.⁴

As I also commented on Applebaum's book, Amar credits her with valuable descriptions of the actual event in Ukraine. "Using the strengths of its source base well, Red Famine exposes its readers to the experience of the victims in an acute manner." And he observes that she emphasizes "the facts of what happened over the discussion of what exactly to call it."

He also writes:

Applebaum notes some facts challenging her interpretation: for instance, that the Soviet famines of the early 1930s afflicted not only Ukraine but other parts of the Soviet Union, too, such as Kazakhstan and the Volga region (209). She acknowledges the Russian historian Viktor Kondrashin’s argument that in at least one part of these other regions, the regime did not only impose policies leading to famine but also policies that made it worse (359), a pattern that, on a larger scale, can be recognized in Ukraine as well. Applebaum surmises that in Kazakhstan, too, the Soviet rulers may have practiced something “more sinister than negligence” (36). Such findings—and her commendably citing them—are important because they challenge her reading of the famine in Ukraine as, in effect, a genocide aimed at Ukraine as a nation.

He also notes that Applebaum embeds her story of the Holdomor in a certain kind of Ukrainian national narrative:

Applebaum notes some facts challenging her interpretation: for instance, that the Soviet famines of the early 1930s afflicted not only Ukraine but other parts of the Soviet Union, too, such as Kazakhstan and the Volga region. She acknowledges the Russian historian Viktor Kondrashin’s argument that in at least one part of these other regions, the regime did not only impose policies leading to famine but also policies that made it worse, a pattern that, on a larger scale, can be recognized in Ukraine as well. Applebaum surmises that in Kazakhstan, too, the Soviet rulers may have practiced something “more sinister than negligence”. Such findings—and her commendably citing them—are important because they challenge her reading of the famine in Ukraine as, in effect, a genocide aimed at Ukraine as a nation.

In light of the recent scandal of the Canadian Parliament giving a standing ovation to a Ukrainian veteran of the German Nazi Party's armed Waffen-SS⁵, Amar's caution about the significant influence of certain kinds of national narratives among anti-Communists in the Ukrainian diaspora in the West is worth considering:

An important and homegrown movement of Ukrainian nationalism had its own aggressive antisemitism, prominently including the Judeo-Bolshevism denunciation as well as outspoken sympathy for both Italian Fascism and German Nazism, preached by key Ukrainian nationalist ideologists during the interwar period under little pressure but much inspiration from abroad. The Soviets—unsurprisingly, even if that seems hard for Applebaum to fully acknowledge—were not the only ones capable of systematically manipulating memory and history: after the war, nationalists in exile in the West produced a “self-serving historical mythology,” as Per Anders Rudling has aptly put it, excising nationalism’s wartime crimes and glorifying even units that had directly served the Germans. By now such tales inform official state policy in Ukraine. [my emphasis]

(Note to the New Cold Warriors: no, this does *not* validate false present-day Russian propaganda claims about the current Ukrainian government being controlled by Nazis.)

Amar also observes, "Applebaum makes the history of the famine into the center piece of a story of the persistence of Ukraine as a nation."

1. Beginning with: Anne Applebaum's "Red Famine" book on the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine (1 of 12) 08/21/2023.

2. Sullivan, Dylan & Hicke., Jason (2023): Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century. World Development 161. <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169> (Accessed: 2023-04-10).

3. Sullivan, Dylan & Hicke., Jason (2023): How British colonialism killed 100 million Indians in 40 years. Aljazeera 12/02/2022. <https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/12/2/how-british-colonial-policy-killed-100-million-indians> (Accessed: 2023-04-10).

4. Tarik Cyril Amar (2019): Politics, Starvation, and Memory-A Critique of Red Famine. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 20:1, 145-169.

5. Khatsenkova, Sophia (2023): How the Canadian Parliament's Nazi scandal fuelled a Russian disinformation campaign. Euronews 04-Oct-2023. <https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2023/10/04/how-the-canadian-parliaments-nazi-scandal-fuelled-a-russian-disinformation-campaign> (Accessed: 2023-04-10).