[intense_dropcap font_color="primary"]I [/intense_dropcap]n the middle decades of the bloodiest century in human history, new technology made it possible for civilian men, women, and children to be murdered in the millions simply for who or what or where they were. The Armenian genocide of 1915, the Holocaust of the 1940s, the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, and Pol Pot’s slaughter of the Cambodian urban population in the 1970s are the most notable on the list. But, as Anne Applebaum shows in her beautifully written and deeply disturbing new book, Red Famine, Stalin’s deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainian peasants in the early 1930s fully deserves its place among these, the worst infamies in human history. Applebaum, a columnist for the Washington Post and the author of highly regarded books on the history of Eastern Europe after World War II and the Soviet Gulag, has written a profoundly detailed but never boring history of this vast human tragedy.

In the histories of nations, geography is often destiny, and Ukraine is both fortunate and unfortunate in this respect. Its rich soil, ample rain, and low-lying topography, make it, like the United States Midwest and the Argentine Pampas, one of the world’s great breadbaskets. But that fact also makes it a highly desirable target for foreign aggression, and Ukraine largely lacks defensible borders. The Carpathian Mountains are on its southwest border with Moldova and Romania, but otherwise Ukraine is very difficult to defend.