Red Famine
By Anne Applebaum (2017)
1. Among the five million victims of the famine that swept through the U.S.S.R. from 1931 to 1934, more than 3.9 million were Ukrainians. The calamity was brought on by Stalin's crash collectivization: Across the country individual farms were replaced with communal ones in just three years. Resistance was greatest in Ukraine. To crush it, Stalin increased the already unrealistic grain procurement quotas. Starvation began in 1932 following the violent expropriation of everything edible. As whole villages lay dying, the borders with Ukraine were sealed and the roads cordoned off to prevent the hungry from escaping. Later, Stalin's statisticians amended the death registries to erase any record of Ukraine's famine on paper. Empty villages were resettled with Russian and Belorussian peasants; mention of the famine became prohibited. Anne Applebaum's powerful book exposes the coverup of Stalin's war against Ukraine.
The Forsaken
By Tim Tzouliadis (2008)
2. Trapped in Stalin's Soviet Union, thousands of Americans vanished into the Gulag—a tragedy Tim Tzouliadis uncovers through letters, memoirs and government documents. In 1931 the New York-based Soviet trade agency received 100,000 applications from Americans seeking to emigrate to the U.S.S.R. American communists were part of this migration, but the majority were skilled workers seeking to escape the Great Depression. They were lured by the promise of jobs—not least at the “Soviet Detroit,” a huge automobile factory built by Henry Ford in the city of Gorky. Some migrants managed to escape before Stalin's mass arrests began in the mid-1930s, but the majority were trapped, their passports confiscated. Only a handful eventually returned home. Equally tragic is the little-known story of American POWs: Liberated from the Nazi camps by the Soviets, they were sent to Siberian uranium mines. American captives remained in the Gulag through the 1950s.
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