The Foreign Office and the Famine


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SCOTT (copy 1) From the Johns Holmes Library collection.




Red Famine


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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest crimes, the consequences of which still resonate today, as Russia has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more—from the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the National Book Award finalist Iron Curtain. "With searing clarity, Red Famine demonstrates the horrific consequences of a campaign to eradicate 'backwardness' when undertaken by a regime in a state of war with its own people." —The Economist In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization—in effect a second Russian revolution—which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil. Applebaum’s compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the twenty-first.




Stalin's Nomads


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Robert Kindler's seminal work is a comprehensive and unsettling account of the Soviet campaign to forcefully sedentarize and collectivize the Kazakh clans. Viewing the nomadic life as unproductive, and their lands unused and untilled, Stalin and his inner circle pursued a campaign of violence and subjugation, rather than attempting any dialog or cultural assimilation. The results were catastrophic, as the conflict and an ensuing famine (1931-1933) caused the death of nearly one-third of the Kazakh population. Hundreds of thousands of nomads became refugees and a nomadic culture and social order were essentially destroyed in less than five years. Kindler provides an in-depth analysis of Soviet rule, economic and political motivations, and the role of remote and local Soviet officials and Kazakhs during the crisis. This is the first English-language translation of an important and harrowing history, largely unknown to Western audiences prior to Kindler’s study. The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Work in the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).




Famine Crimes


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Who is responsible for the failures? African generals and politicians are the prime culprits for creating famines in Sudan, Somalia and Zaire, but western donors abet their authoritarianism, partly through imposing structural adjustment programmes.




The Holodomor Reader


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The Holodomor Reader is a wide-ranging collection of key texts and source materials, many of which have never before appeared in English, on the genocidal famine (Holodomor) of 1932–33 in Soviet Ukraine. The subject is introduced in an extensive interpretive essay, and the material is presented in six sections: scholarship; legal assessments, findings, and resolutions; eyewitness accounts and memoirs; survivor testimonies, memoirs, diaries, and letters; Soviet, Ukrainian, British, German, Italian, and Polish documents; and works of literature. Each section is prefaced with introductory remarks. The Reader is an indispensable guide for all those interested in the Holodomor, genocide, or Stalinism.




The Russian Job


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An award-winning historian reveals the harrowing, little-known story of an American effort to save the newly formed Soviet Union from disaster After decades of the Cold War and renewed tensions, in the wake of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, cooperation between the United States and Russia seems impossible to imagine—and yet, as Douglas Smith reveals, it has a forgotten but astonishing historical precedent. In 1921, facing one of the worst famines in history, the new Soviet government under Vladimir Lenin invited the American Relief Administration, Herbert Hoover’s brainchild, to save communist Russia from ruin. For two years, a small, daring band of Americans fed more than ten million men, women, and children across a million square miles of territory. It was the largest humanitarian operation in history—preventing the loss of countless lives, social unrest on a massive scale, and, quite possibly, the collapse of the communist state. Now, almost a hundred years later, few in either America or Russia have heard of the ARA. The Soviet government quickly began to erase the memory of American charity. In America, fanatical anti-communism would eclipse this historic cooperation with the Soviet Union. Smith resurrects the American relief mission from obscurity, taking the reader on an unforgettable journey from the heights of human altruism to the depths of human depravity. The story of the ARA is filled with political intrigue, espionage, the clash of ideologies, violence, adventure, and romance, and features some of the great historical figures of the twentieth century. In a time of cynicism and despair about the world’s ability to confront international crises, The Russian Job is a riveting account of a cooperative effort unmatched before or since.




Eating People Is Wrong, and Other Essays on Famine, Its Past, and Its Future


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New perspectives on the history of famine—and the possibility of a famine-free world Famines are becoming smaller and rarer, but optimism about the possibility of a famine-free future must be tempered by the threat of global warming. That is just one of the arguments that Cormac Ó Gráda, one of the world's leading authorities on the history and economics of famine, develops in this wide-ranging book, which provides crucial new perspectives on key questions raised by famines around the globe between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. The book begins with a taboo topic. Ó Gráda argues that cannibalism, while by no means a universal feature of famines and never responsible for more than a tiny proportion of famine deaths, has probably been more common during very severe famines than previously thought. The book goes on to offer new interpretations of two of the twentieth century’s most notorious and controversial famines, the Great Bengal Famine and the Chinese Great Leap Forward Famine. Ó Gráda questions the standard view of the Bengal Famine as a perfect example of market failure, arguing instead that the primary cause was the unwillingness of colonial rulers to divert food from their war effort. The book also addresses the role played by traders and speculators during famines more generally, invoking evidence from famines in France, Ireland, Finland, Malawi, Niger, and Somalia since the 1600s, and overturning Adam Smith’s claim that government attempts to solve food shortages always cause famines. Thought-provoking and important, this is essential reading for historians, economists, demographers, and anyone else who is interested in the history and possible future of famine.




Mao's Great Famine


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Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize An unprecedented, groundbreaking history of China's Great Famine that recasts the era of Mao Zedong and the history of the People's Republic of China. "Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up to and overtake Britain in less than 15 years The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives." So opens Frank Dikötter's riveting, magnificently detailed chronicle of an era in Chinese history much speculated about but never before fully documented because access to Communist Party archives has long been restricted to all but the most trusted historians. A new archive law has opened up thousands of central and provincial documents that "fundamentally change the way one can study the Maoist era." Dikötter makes clear, as nobody has before, that far from being the program that would lift the country among the world's superpowers and prove the power of Communism, as Mao imagined, the Great Leap Forward transformed the country in the other direction. It became the site not only of "one of the most deadly mass killings of human history,"--at least 45 million people were worked, starved, or beaten to death--but also of "the greatest demolition of real estate in human history," as up to one-third of all housing was turned into rubble). The experiment was a catastrophe for the natural world as well, as the land was savaged in the maniacal pursuit of steel and other industrial accomplishments. In a powerful mesghing of exhaustive research in Chinese archives and narrative drive, Dikötter for the first time links up what happened in the corridors of power-the vicious backstabbing and bullying tactics that took place among party leaders-with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. His magisterial account recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.




Fraud, Famine and Fascism


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Argues that charges of a deliberate Soviet policy of genocide by famine directed against the Ukrainian nation in the early 1930s are based on inflated figures and fabricated evidence. This campaign was initiated by extreme right-wing forces in the USA and Nazi propagandists, and has continued since the 1950s by Ukrainian emigre organizations. Some writers have accused the Jews and "Stalin's Jewish government" of deliberately causing the famine. Ch. 9 (pp. 102-119), "Collaboration and Collusion, " discusses Ukrainian nationalist involvement in pogroms and assistance to the Germans during the Holocaust, particularly the faction led by Stepan Bandera and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. also describes how ex-members of these groups and of Ukrainian Waffen-SS units were enabled to enter the USA and Canada after the war.




Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid


Book Description

The terrible 1984 famine in Ethiopia focused the world's attention on the country and the issue of aid as never before. Anyone over the age of 30 remembers something of the events - if not the original TV pictures, then Band Aid and Live Aid, Geldof and Bono. Peter Gill was the first journalist to reach the epicentre of the famine and one of the TV reporters who brought the tragedy to light. This book is the story of what happened to Ethiopia in the 25 years following Live Aid: the place, the people, the westerners who have tried to help, and the wider multinational aid business that has come into being. We saved countless lives in the beginning and continued to save them now, but have we done much else to transform the lives of Ethiopia's poor and set them on a 'development' course that will enable the country to do without us?