Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine

Without the encouragement, advice and support of Professor Serhii Plokhii and his colleagues at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, this book would not have been written. The scholars at HURI understood a decade ago that new archival discoveries merited a new approach to the history of the Holodomor—and they were right. Different members of staff helped at different times, but I owe special thanks to Oleh Wolowyna and Kostyantyn Bondarenko of the MAPA project at Harvard, who have done extraordinary work on statistics, demographics, numbers and maps.

I also owe an enormous debt to Marta Baziuk of the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium in Toronto, as well as her Kyiv-based counterpart, Lyudmyla Hrynevych of the Holodomor Ukrainian Research Centre, both of whom shared their profound knowledge of the subject with great generosity. Many thanks to the documentary filmmaker Andrew Tkach and Vladyslav Berkovsky of the TsDKFFA photographic archive for assistance with photographs. Professor Andrea Graziosi at the University of Naples helped shape the original outline and acted as a sounding board all the way through the project. Two extraordinary young historians, Daria Mattingly and Tetiana Boriak, provided research assistance from Kyiv and other cities in Ukraine. Ian Crookston and Professor Oksana Mykhed, two brilliant Harvard former graduate students, read the text for accuracy of sourcing and transliteration. A host of other Ukrainian historians offered suggestions and let me borrow their books or unpublished articles. They are all listed in the preface, but I’d like especially to thank Iurii Shapoval and Hennadii Boriak here again. I am grateful to the colleagues who read early versions of the manuscript, including Geoffrey Hosking, Bogdan Klid, Lubomyr Luciuk and Frank Sysyn. Many thanks to Nigel Colley and Russ Chelak for help with the story of Gareth Jones. I am also indebted to Roman Procyk of the Ukrainian Studies Fund and to its benefactors, especially Luba Kladko, Dr. Maria Fischer Slysh, Arkadi Mulak-Yatzkivsky and Ivan and Helena Panczak, as well as the Semenenko Fund of the W. K. Lypynsky East European Research Institute.

As in the past, Stuart Proffitt at Penguin in London and Kris Puopolo in New York made a brilliant, transatlantic publishing team, and Georges Borchardt was a superb agent. This is now the third book I’ve been able to write with the help of this same trio. I will always be grateful to them. Richard Duguid managed the production of this book from London with customary efficiency, while Richard Mason was an excellent and meticulous copyeditor.

My final thanks go to Radek, Tadziu and Alexander—with love.

A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

The transliteration of Ukrainian names and place names in this book follows the standard set out by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. The Library of Congress transliteration rules for Ukrainian names and place names are followed strictly in the endnotes; in the text, names and place names are written without primes, since that seems more familiar to an English reader. Russian and Belarusian place names are transliterated according to the rules of those languages. A few well-known names and place names, including Moscow and Odessa, have been left in their better-known forms, also to make them recognizable to English-language readers.