'Red Famine' by Anne Applebaum

My grandparents came from Ukraine, arriving in Britain after WW2. I went to Ukrainian school on Saturdays until I was 12, though I hated it: I was consistently the worst in my class, by a huge margin, largely because outside of Ukrainian school I would not be speaking Ukrainian, while many of the other children would be speaking Ukrainian a lot at home with their parents. I felt like my Saturdays were being wasted on a humiliating and dispiriting chore which made me feel stupid (the impatience of the teachers at my struggling didn’t help). I was overjoyed when I was finally able to stop going.

(I credit the disparity between doing well at English school and doing poorly at Ukrainian to in some part to making me less arrogant than I may otherwise have been, and more able to empathize with those who struggled to understand things that came quite easily to me.)

On the odd occasions when we went to church, the services were in Ukrainian, and so I had no idea what the priest was talking about, and it felt like we were just arbitrarily standing up and sitting down. It all felt very confusing and pointless.

Consequently, I have generally felt quite disconnected from my Ukrainian heritage; it has basically been reduced to it being a fun fact about the origin of my surname. I have never been to Ukraine, don’t know much about it, and “Ukrainianness” became a very, very, very small part of my identity as I grew up. I can read Cyrillic, and I know some words and phrases, but I never got more than an extremely basic grasp of the language – and that has since faded. I celebrate Ukrainian Christmas and occasionally eat verenyky (potato dumplings), and that’s about it – other than a lingering sense that I should know about Ukraine, its history and culture.

My grandparents didn’t talk much about their experiences before coming to Britain. I know they were peasants in Ukraine, and that some relatives had died in the Holodomor, the Soviet famine in Ukraine in the 1930s. After the Nazis conquered Ukraine in WW2, my grandparents were moved to Germany as forced labourers, and ended up in an area controlled by Britain when the war ended. Britain was in ruins and had a significant labour shortage – a large proportion of its working age people had died in the war – so workers were being imported. And so my grandparents came to Britain.

Anne Applebaum’s ‘Red Famine’ was a revelatory book for me, putting my upbringing and what little I know of my family history into a proper context.

Soviet terror in Ukraine was especially brutal; the Communist Party believed that a successful nationalist, separatist movement in Ukraine would precipitate the collapse of the USSR, and therefore it must absolutely be crushed. The Ukrainian language was suppressed, Ukrainian churches destroyed, village dancing banned. The Soviets wanted to wipe out Ukrainian culture to destroy the national movement and with it the threat of separatism; the old backward peasant culture would be replaced with a new Soviet culture that wouldn’t threaten the bloc’s stability.

Ukraine is an extremely fertile country, but a series of decisions by the Communist party meant that very little food was produced 1931-33, and most of what was produced was seized and exported to Russia or abroad: Moscow needed money, and wanted to have large food exports to show the West how successful communism was. The severity of the famine was denied and downplayed, and efforts at famine relief were blocked. The peasantry that were dying, the communists told themselves, were counter-revolutionaries who deserved their fate.

Applebaum’s chapters on the peak of the famine are very hard-hitting. She blends the overarching narrative of the huge, widespread Terror-Famine, which is difficult to comprehend in its scale and callousness, with witness testimonies which bring it down to a brutal, understandable human level of everyday horror in the famine years, when bodies littered the streets and people resorted to cannibalism.

Allegedly, it was Stalin, referring to the famine in Ukraine, who said, “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.” Applebaum ensures that you do not lose sight of all the manifold individual tragedies that occurred in Ukraine during the famine, which is a difficult thing to achieve when talking about deaths and horror at such scale.

It is no wonder my grandparents did not talk much about their lives before they came to Britain.