The Russia Anxiety Review

Author: Mark B. Smith
Publisher: Allen Lane (imprint of Penguin Random House UK)
Edition: 1st Hardback
Price: A$55

Have you ever been told that Russians are naturally politically passive and naturally prone to dictatorship? That the Russian state is inherently prone to terror, violence and necessarily expansionistic? In The Russia Anxiety, historian Mark B. Smith holds up the most common stereotypes and assumptions the average westerner has towards Russian political culture to careful scrutiny.  Effectively, Smith’s latest book is a rather robust work of myth-busting rather than history writing as you might be used to it.

While Smith is a historian, this book is more about political culture and international relations rather than history in a traditional sense, especially since the book is arranged thematically. Historical analysis is the primary method and there is no discernible master narrative, like a Marxist or liberal theory underwriting the entire process, which has the effect of making the analysis appear slightly less rigorous and looser and more intuitive. However, the benefit of this is that it allows the analysis to remain flexible, inclusive and unblinkered. It also ensures a lack of hypocrisy, given that this kind of blinkered analysis, as well as path dependence more generally, is what is being criticised throughout the book. Additionally, it is not a comprehensive chronological history and the facts presented are largely utilised in a counter-argumentative fashion intended to reframe typical attitudes, with the facts themselves being generally accepted rather than startling or ground-breaking discoveries.

Smith’s book is divided in three parts. The first part introduces the core concepts that underpin the entire text, as well as providing a very brief lightning of tour of Russian history in general. The second part is the meat of the text, delivering strong analysis on the core assumptions about supposed predisposition to dictatorships, political terror, extremism, empire and the question of Russia’s European-ness. The final, and shortest part deals primarily with how Soviet people engaged with their recent Stalinist past during the Khrushchev Thaw, as well as providing some concluding remarks.

The titular concept, the Russia Anxiety itself is the core thrust of this book and is regularly described as typically having three stages in the cycle, of varying degrees of intensity depending on the exact time period and as something that comes and goes. It’s the seasonal flu of international affairs. The three stages are as follows: fear, contempt and disregard. Fear usually comes from periods, such as in the lead up to the First World War where the German military were concerned about the sheer size of Imperial Russia’s manpower and industrial progress. Contempt comes with events like the Great Terror. Disregard usually follows a Russian defeat, such as the immediate aftermath of the Crimean War or the collapse of USSR in the 1990s. Disregard is especially problematic because, even in circumstances where Russia has diminished power, it is still geopolitically important for balance-of-power relationships and ignoring her legitimate interests, such as bombing Belgrade during the conflict in Yugoslavia or further NATO encroachment simply breeds resentment and mistrust that can strain relations in the short and long term.

An example of a contemporary Western political cartoon relating to Russian politics.  Current cartoons feature familiar stereotypes and accusations.

In practical terms, the Russian Anxiety acts as a container or complex of negative attitudes towards Russia that are formed principally from orientalising prejudices or selective misreading of Russia’s history, leading to faulty conclusions that filter up to rhetoric and policy decisions that often unnecessarily strain relations with the Russian state.  As Smith points out later in the chapter about Empire and Russia’s relationship with Ukraine, specifically over the issue of Crimean annexation, even if the political leaders of NATO countries had less prejudiced attitudes towards Russia, the policy outcome of sanctions likely would have been the same, or at least similar, given issues of international law. You can be rest assured that the concept of the Russia Anxiety isn’t a reason to unilaterally excuse contentious policy actions of the Russian state, internationally or domestically.

One shortcoming of Smith’s book is that there is little attention paid to how mass media outlets,through film or news reporting, in the West or in Russia itself plugs in to each aspect of the cycle. For instance, in 2014, a Forbes article near hysterically compared Putin to Hitler for the annexation of Crimea, demonstrating Western fears of Russian military (Johnson, 2014), not to mention the alleged interference in the 2016 US elections. For contempt, Western reporting on Russia, such as reporting on the anti-gay propaganda laws serves to denigrate Russians as necessarily backward to liberal westerners feel superior about themselves (Wiedlack, 2017). Anecdotally, based on reporting I’ve seen in commercial news programs in Australia, any news from Russia, with the exception of the FIFA World Cup in 2018 has a tendency to be framed negatively regardless of the situation. The inclusion of this kind of analysis in more detail, while veering off from the broadly historical methodology, would have been a good fit for the subject matter of the book, be especially helpful to non-experts and flesh out the core concept better.

A secondary concept, dubbed ‘instant history’ is something that is quite handy and useful in contexts outside of prejudiced attitudes towards Russian politics. An example of instant history presented by Smith would be tendencies among some historians to say, draw a straight line between Ivan the Terrible’s oprichina and the NKVD during the Great Terror period. The danger of instant history is that while the facts it draws from might be true, the links between them are often tenuous, misleading and are evidence of lazy analysis. Instant history as utilised in the context of Russian history is like taking a small number of outliers in a data cluster and using that as evidence of general trends. It can become even messier if framed in a form of path dependence, since the path would have shaky foundations and would undermine its own analysis.

Films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Red Dawn or even Hard to Be a God would have been useful and relatable and useful examples to help demonstrate and flesh out how media outlets plug into this cycle.

In the chapter The Dictatorship Deception, Smith tackles the issue of democracy in Russia and why it seems to have not been entrenched in the same way as has been experienced in the Anglosphere and Western Europe. The Speransky Conundrum, one of Smith’s novel terminologies, is essentially the problem of making democracy and autocracy safe for each other, or in other worlds, resolving a dialectical contradiction. Smith goes on to discuss Russia the Muscovite and Novgorodian foundations that provide a viable basis for democracy in the country or the zemstvos and volosts established in the 19^th century, the experience of ‘Soviet democracy’ which, while in effect just a pantomime given the obvious lack of choice, still provided a useful feedback mechanism for Soviet elites. He also discusses the experience of the Soviet collapse in the 1990s, which basically disillusioned much of the country to liberal democracy and the ravages of predatory capitalist excess backed by Americans. The fundamental argument from this chapter is the importance of contingency in historical events, an important point throughout the book, and how if forms of autocracy are the innate possibility of the Russian state, then something that is recognizably democratic is also possible. However, while the point is clear and the constellation of facts used to make it sound, the limitations of Smith’s analytical framework are apparent as they lack some broader considerations of sociology, international relations theories or structural analysis.

 

The next chapter revolves around Russia’s supposedly unique backwardness and barbarism in relation to political violence. Specifically, it focuses on Ivan the Terrible’s oprichina and Stalinist rule, specifically the Great Terror and the gulags. What is generally given little word count is Lenin and Trotsky’s laying the foundations of Terror and oppression during the civil war (Solzhenitsyn, 2007). Nevertheless, there are a few salient points to this chapter. First is that the kinds of violence experienced under Ivan the Terrible and his Oprichina, and with Stalin and the NVKD is that they are extreme outliers in the broad sweep of recorded Russian history. The second point is that the violence under Stalinist rule, whether that be the brutality of breakneck industrialization, the Holodomor or the Great Terror do not come out of some innate and fundamental Russian barbarism, but are the results primarily of Stalin’s personality, style of rule and Bolshevik political culture. The third main point utilises some comparative analysis with Tudor England and contemporary Muscovite rule for instance, demonstrates that for much of Russia’s history, the country’s rulers have acted within normal European parameters; a similar point which drives subsequent chapters as well. This is one way, Smith hopes, to deflate the Anxiety as it puts Russian state actions, historically and in the present, in a broader perspective that necessitates critical self-reflection. Smith anticipates multiple times that this point would be subject to accusations of whataboutism, but such accusations would be wasted as the point is not to deflect from or excuse certain policy criticism, it is simply intended to deflate unwarranted prejudice. The subtitle of this chapter asks if Russia is built on violence and the answer is in short, yes, but in a similar way to how European states, and indeed most states, generally are.

Stalin in historical memory functions in a complex way for both Russians and Westerners, eliciting various emotions depending on who you talk to, and is often used as a proxy for pro and anti-Russian feeling.

Later chapters deal principally with Russia’s European and Eurasian identity, largely through looking at Russian literature and cases of avant garde artists, with some wordcount dedicated to Eurasianism and providing insight into the ways ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Europe have been categorised, first through the lens of Christendom and schism, and then through the Cold War lens, which persists today. Another looks at Russia’s imperial heritage using a similar format to the chapter on state political violence, offering insight into Russo-Ukrainian relations and management of difference. Another deals with whether Russia is uniquely warlike or prone to invading other states. The short answer is no and that Russia has mostly been the victim of invasion by others, whether it be the Mongols, Napoleon or Hitler. He also engages critically with the work of Richard Pipes, who is probably one of the most influential Cold Warrior historians of Russia, especially given his political postings. While I cannot go exhaustively into every argument made in the book, these chapters are frequently insightful, well structured and decently written despite a few odd idiosyncrasies.

The final chapters, dealing with historical memory and the Khrushchev Thaw are fantastic, especially for me as it satisfyingly answers the perplexing overall positive attitude Russians seem to have for Stalin that comes out of independent polling results. It also effectively addresses the complexity of dealing with traumatic historical memory and helps understand how people dealt with it in the immediate aftermath of Stalin’s death, often utilising cases of exile playwrights and authors. Soviet science fiction, such as Hard to Be A God would have also been a good example as the substance is effectively Khrushchev’s Secret Speech.

To conclude this review, I will say this about Mark Smith’s book: it is frequently insightful, well structured and does a good job of framing Russian history in a way that counters typical views of Russophobic politicians, media pundits and historians (I’m looking at you, Richard Pipes) in a way that is convincing and cuts through all the sensationalism and romanticism, despite the limited methodology and a few other shortcoming. As to whether it achieves its goal of being an antidote to the Russia Anxiety remains to be seen. If you have any friends with the typical anti-Russian prejudices, put the book in their hands, see what they say. Furthermore, this book would be very useful for any teachers of any aspect of Russian history, or Cold War and contemporary politics, especially in discussions revolving around historiography and historical memory.
References

JOHNSON, P. 2014. Is Vladimir Putin Another Adolf Hitler? [Online]. Forbes. Available: https://www.forbes.com/sites/currentevents/2014/04/16/is-vladimir-putin-another-adolf-hitler/#43fe9e2f237a [Accessed].

SMITH, M. 2019. The Russia Anxiety-And How History Can Resolve It, London, UK, Allen Lane.

SOLZHENITSYN, A. 2007. The Gulag Archipelago: Abridged Edition, United States, Harper Perennial Modern Classics.

WIEDLACK, K. M. 2017. Gays vs Russia: Media Representations, Vulnerable Bodies and the Construction of a (Post)modern West. European Journal of English Studies, 21, 241-257.

 

Ethnos and Society Review

Author: Alexander Dugin
Publisher: Arktos Media Ltd, 2018
Available in: Paperback, Hardback, ebook

What is Ethnosociology? In most classes and international relations, and fields that heavily utilise the insights generated by sociology, typically use sociologies derived from the likes of Marx, Weber, Giddens and so on. These sociologies are often centred around contemporary industrial and post-industrial, typically Western, societies. Ethnosociology takes a different approach that includes the insights of anthropology, enabling theorists and researchers to utilise sociological models that don’t take contemporary industrial and post-industrial Western societies as the given baseline for analysis. However, this approach is little known in English-speaking academia. In Ethnos and Society (Dugin, 2018), notorious Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin presents his own ethnosociological model that is robust,incredibly fascinating in spite of losing steam and originality towards the end.

The first thing you will notice when starting this monograph is that it throws a lot of unfamiliar terminology at you to start, such as ethnostatics, ethnodynamics and ethnokinetics and ethnocentrum. At the beginning, orienting yourself is quite dizzying if you are unfamiliar with the ethnosociological approach, but thankfully, these concepts and their essential phenomenological foundational concepts are well explained. As the book goes on, and once it has made you comfortable in understanding the essential concepts, it flows naturally, and theoretical concepts link together in a coherent system. Nevertheless, an introduction that goes into more detail about the history of ethnosociological approaches and general critiques of more common sociological approaches would have been much appreciated in easing readers in. It is only in the final sections of the text where we get Dugin’s explanation of what makes ethnosociology novel and important.

For Dugin, there are four principal forms of society. The first is the ethnos, which is a kind of primordial, fundamental and ‘pre-historic’ form of society which is often characterised by minimal social and ontological differentiation, an immanence of everything and an inclusive structure of thought. It can be agrarian, nomadic or hunter-gatherer. This structure of thought combined with the basic normative beliefs of an ethnos constitutes ethnostatics. Meanwhile, ethnodynamics refers to the rituals, games and practices that an ethnos does to reject the ‘new’ that might be over the horizon and to reaffirm the ethnos as the ethnos, effectively preserving it as is. Essentially, ethnodynamics is the impulse of tradition or more precisely as it can be applied to all social forms, is the conscious and repetitive work that goes into preserving the status quo.

Finally for the ethnos is ethnokinetics, which is the process of social change that precipitates the transformation into the second social form, the narod. This precipitation is characterised by such changes as the taking of slaves, the formation of male military union, the accumulation of surplus and the conquest of one ethnos over multiple, the dominant typically being of the nomadic type that becomes settled after the conquest. Finally, the ethnocentrum splits and this traumatic experience gives rise to the perception of the Other and the passionary impulse, which in the narod is present in distinctions such as immanence versus transcendence.

In this second form, the narod,this is where according to Dugin most of human culture comes from, borne of the traumatic split of the ethnocentrism and a polyethnic unit. This gives rise to the passionary, heroic impulse that is characterised in the triad of state-religion-civilisation, which each narod possesses to different degrees. Examples are sketched out by Dugin in this section, such as the Babylonians, Romans, Islamic or Greeks, which to different degrees possessed these things, where the ideal individuals of hero, prophet and philosopher correspond to each piece of the triad. Linear conceptions of time also become the norm, which is made particularly clear in Greco-Roman mythology, with the imprisonment of primordial entities, such as Chronos, in Tartarus. Also characteristic of the narod is increased social stratification,exemplified in tripartite class hierarchies, or ‘estates’. This stratification is not just economic but also in terms of relation to the world as the heroic, passionary impulse in concentrated primarily in the elite, aristocratic classes whereas the ‘masses’, especially in rural and peripheral regions, tend to be more like the ethnos, but not quite the same.

When I paused to think about this model and apply it to say, the Nordic dark age and subsequent Viking age, a case which is not mentioned at all by Dugin, I found that Dugin’s model is fairly generalisable. Although not able to account for every nuance, it could account for many that I could think of, making the two fundamental social types in Dugin’s model as a good analytic and narrative framework for the histories of ancient and medieval societies and for national general histories.

The third type, the nation, which is noted as principally a European phenomenon, takes another fundamental turn, characterised by such developments as language standardisation, the formation of political ideologies, such as liberalism, and the ascendance of the bourgeoisie in political life and their class dominance during industrialisation. Here, Dugin leans more heavily into the Marxist sociological tradition and other more familiar sociological territory. For Dugin, the nation, while claiming to be the successor to the narod, is merely a simulacrum as the passionary impulse starts to wane and transmute into economic competition. States become organised primarily on rational, economic grounds that also erode polyglossia and diverse regional cultures as a ‘national culture’ forms, in which urban centres project and impose its values throughout the provinces. The experiences of early Industrial Age England and Revolutionary France is what Dugin is alluding to here. Furthermore, the nature of classes changes as ownership over the means of production become a more prominent issue and society is dichotomised into proletariat and bourgeoisie.

According to Dugin, in the proletariat is the remnant of the peasant, which is exemplified by the culture of proletarianized peasants in late Imperial and early Soviet Russia (Figes, 2017). Various models of nationalism are described by Dugin that have varying radicalism and socialist modernity is briefly mentioned as a special case, although with little detail. Socialist modernity in my view, at least based on the Soviet model imposed in Eastern Europe, follows the same basic structure as the nationalist project, just predicated on a different political theory and ‘rational’ economic model. The principal models of nationalism here are conservative or radical nationalism (‘big Nationalism’), autonomy and separatism (‘small nationalism’), irredentism and colonialism, all which Dugin explains clearly and provides easy to understand examples.

The final social form for Dugin is the civil/global society, which Dugin leans further into deference of conventional sociology, offering little original apart from stating that the characteristics of civil society are contained in the nation, but are constrained. Civil society here is best considered in the context of Soviet collapse to the present day, inclusive of all the technological developments, such as internet, especially in liberal societies. Much of the section on civil and global society are reframed versions of critiques of liberalism and communism that were more powerfully presented in The Fourth Political Theory (Dugin, 2012).

At one point in Ethnos and Society, Dugin claims that these sociological models aren’t meant to be seen as necessarily better or worse than one another, but to anyone who is familiar with Dugin’s other work, it is clear that the traditional societies embodied in the narod and its elite will to power is his ideal model, whereas the contemporary civil society has the air of Nietzsche’s last man and entropic liberal dystopia. The nation for Dugin is inferior to the narod, but better than civil society as at least in nation states, there is still a semblance of collective identity, whereas in civil society, this is rejected and increasingly voluntary. Another characteristic difference between the nation and civil society briefly mentioned by Dugin is that the bourgeoisie increasingly reject the nation since it starts to hinder their class interests, and thus they kick the nation away like a ladder.

One of the weaknesses of Ethnos and Society is that its examples and case studies are briefly presented, only sketched out, which makes the demonstration of the theoretical viability of Dugin’s ethnosociological framework a little more difficult to be convincing. Engagement with biological, racial and cognitive theories or data (beyond phenomenology, at least) is not present either, which lessens its potential for broad scientific validity, but the upshot of this omission is that it helps retain the generalisability of the theory.

This model is insightful for historians, but also students and scholars of international relations as this theoretical framework might be effectively utilised in trying to figure out the best approach for governance in periphery countries, especially remote and frontier regions. It can also provide helpful frameworks in having clearer understandings of why policies of migrant integration policies in European countries have little success. Finally, by using the ‘simple to explain the complex’ we gain a richer understanding of all the different types of society that has existed and that  we presently coexist with. While Ethnos and Society occasionally lacks nuance, it is frequently insightful, has compelling core concepts, mostly strong and easy to follow explanations, is potentially highly generalisable and is very easy to follow before too long. Ethnos and Society is a fascinating read and comes highly recommended for historians and anyone in the social sciences.

4/5

 

References

DUGIN, A. 2012. The Fourth Political Theory, London, United Kingdom, Arktos Media Ltd.

DUGIN, A. 2018. Ethnos and Society, London, UK, Arktos Media.

FIGES, O. 2017. A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 100th Anniversary Edition, London, The Bodley Head.

(Book Review) Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine

Author: Anne Applebaum
Publisher: Doubleday, New York
Price: AU$37 from Book Depository
Edition: 1st Hardback edition. Paperback edition releases in mid 2018.

Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine is a stunning and compelling work on the famine that struck Ukraine between 1932-1934. The central thesis of the book is this: that the famine in this time was not a normal famine and was instead created and intensified as deliberate policy on the part of Stalin to crush the vestiges of the national movement in Ukraine and for the liquidation of the kulaks.

The trajectory of the work begins us with the significance of Ukrainian national identity and the independence movement  and peasant rebellions that marked the country, which had long felt the pressures of Tsarist Russification policies, as a hotbed of anti-bolshevik resistance from the very beginning of their regime. After this, we get an overview of the civil war period, of how the countryside was brutalized by both the recently formed Red Army, as well as the White Army’s habit of requisitioning grain from peasants. A particular sub-point I found here was that Applebaum ascribes Denikin, a White general, as being too blinded by the dismissive attitudes towards Ukrainians, to properly utilise the local populations in the fight against Bolshevism and thus as one of the reasons the Whites lost the civil war.  Another faction of the civil war that I had previously not known about, known as the Black army under Makhno, who were essentially anarchists, provided interesting reading.

From here,we move on to the famine of the civil war. This is a fundamental and important part of the text to understand Anne’s central thesis as it lays the groundwork for the distinction between genuine famine caused by war, bad weather and disastrous economic policies versus one created with the intent to weaken or destroy the population. Here we see how the nascent Bolshevik regime under Lenin, tried to squeeze Ukraine for all it’s grain, but as anyone who has studied the bolshevik revolution will know, international aid was allowed and indeed requested by the government to aid at risk populations. However much of it could have still been avoided without the disastrous set of policies known as ‘War Communism’ and the continued export of grain whilst the countryside was starving, a policy that would continue well into the Stalinist era, for the purposes of purchasing industrial equipment from abroad. We also see how the organs of the regime, primarily the Chekists, engineered class warfare and pushed the concept of the kulaks as the class enemy, but as Applebaum explains, the definition of kulak deliberately became a very loose word, liberally used to describe any peasant who might not have been well off, but might have had two cows instead of one or simply disagreed with or resisted bolshevik ideology.

Further on, we have multiple chapters dedicated to collectivization policies and resistance (and compliance) with them. In these chapters especially we are shown how brutal and coercive the bolsheviks were in implementing their policies towards the peasantry. We see the paranoia, the arrests, how the secret police (known at this time as the OGPU) worked and presented their findings to the party. We see how neighbours were often turned against each other, and also how the Ukrainian intelligentsia, who were not communist approved, or were at least under suspicion by them, were often targeted, harassed and liquidated. But Anne presents a nuanced account of events, especially in the following chapters about the Holodomor itself, where there were people at various levels in the Ukrainian Communist Party, as well as the party in Moscow, who showed dissent, especially towards collectivization and the unrealistic grain fulfilment quotas. While this book focuses on, and is generally sympathetic to Ukrainians, those who suffered in other regions of the USSR, such as those in Kazakhstan and the Russian heartland are given mention, this book isn’t Russophobic and the blame is firmly assigned to Stalin himself and the Bolshevik regime more generally, although it is noted that the peasantry often viewed those committing the crimes against them as foreigners, typically Russians or Jews in their eyes. Moreover, we see how people actively collaborated with the bolshevik policy, those in Ukraine and how people were incentivized to turn against each other. The line between perpetrator and victim is shown to at times be a blurry and difficult distinction to make, as the same person can often be both.

These chapters on the collectivization process, and the famine itself are incredibly harrowing even though they are presented in an un sentimental fashion, especially when it talks about the process of starvation and how the soviet authorities created the situation. Roads were blocked, villages were blacklisted, aid was denied, peasants were not allowed to trade, especially if you were not on a collective farm. At first there was resistance but the population was starved into submission. Activist brigades regularly raided homes and searched thoroughly for every last morsel of food. This is why the early chapters on previous famines were so important: the character of famines were clearly different and no genuine famine has representatives of the state actively taking away food from those in need of it. The crisis, engineered as it was, continued to worsen, lead to chaos in the cities, the absolute devastation of the Ukrainian countryside and the degradation of the population into emaciated husks, driven to madness and some to the point of cannibalism. These parts are particularly horrifying and distressing, but crucial, to understanding the absolute horror of this time. The book as a whole is a very depressing read and is not for the faint of heart.

After these chapters, we see the aftermath of the famine and how the authorities covered up the famine, both abroad and domestically. But the cover up abroad couldn’t have succeeded without a press corp in Moscow at the time that is shy of being outright accused of cowardice by the author, as it is said that they were generally aware of what was happening but kept their mouths shut because of coercion. As well as statesmen in Western European countries and America who were mislead or kept quiet, especially British and American authorities, who wanted to maintain positive diplomatic ties with the USSR to keep Hitler in check. These statesmen, especially the Stalin fanboy, Roosevelt, should be utterly condemned by posterity for their cowardice and refusal to simply speak up about this.

The final chapters of the book conclude with a solid discussion and overview of the historiography of the Holodomor and how it is remembered in Ukraine, Russia and abroad during the Second World War and after, being utilised propagandistically in Nazi occupation of Ukraine, and as a part of modern Ukrainian national identity that helps justify it’s grievances towards Russia as well as sovereignty. And like Solzhenitsyn said about Bolshevism and gulag breaking “the back of Russia”, Bolshevism did the same to Ukraine and it explains the current state of things in that country. The final chapter, an epilogue is primarily about this, helping to summarise the text and place in the context on contemporary Russo-Ukrainian relations, offering a fairly pointed and convincing criticism of the Russian Federation’s attitude towards the Holodomor and current policy towards Ukraine. This must be the chapter that fires up negative amazon reviews of the book that claim it is a conspiracy made to subvert Russia in the same way the excellent film, The Death of Stalin, was accused of by Russian government officials, which are honestly laughable accusations that miss the point.

Now that I have given a brief, but nowhere near extensive overview of some of the main points of the book, what did I think overall? As you can probably tell, I found Red Famine compelling, convincing and worthy of praise. Applebaum’s prose, while some might find dry, is generally excellent as it is uncluttered, readable and perfectly structured, with social, political and economic history seamlessly woven together. Events, individuals, institutions are described and analysed well, without excessive editorialising or moralizing and everything is very easy to follow. The central thesis is well supported by rigorous research that pulls from plenty of primary sources, such as diaries and memoirs, OGPU archives, Soviet archives, cultural works and the most up to date scholarship from Ukrainian sources from inside Ukraine itself or research institutes in the West, as well as pulling from many scholarly works on Soviet history. Familiar names like Richard Pipes pop up from time to time and Robert Conquest, something of a pioneer on the subject whose work Harvest of Sorrow (1986) was one of the early works on the subject in english, is given it’s just due. I actually considered purchasing Harvest of Sorrow, but decided on Red Famine instead, given it is more up to date, being released in 2017.

The subject of the Holodomor, in the English speaking world at least, is semi obscure. At least, as far as I’m aware, the general public lacks awareness of the subject beyond vague and ephemeral anti-communism. It definitely doesn’t have the traction and imprint in the mainstream anglophone consciousness that holocaust narratives do, especially since I have yet to see a major hollywood film on the subject. IMDB lists about 10 films that deal with the subject, all of them obscure. Indeed, the general public is typically ignorant of Soviet history and the region in general. One occasionally comes across those that still believe that Russia is communist, or don’t know who Stalin was, for instance. Hopefully works like Red Famine can generate more awareness of this terrible tragedy and improve understanding of Russia and Ukraine, as well as how states, in the past as well as now, deal with dissent.

That said, considering the academic tone of the work, I do not think this will have wide appeal to the general public in Anglophone countries, but it should appeal to anyone with an interest in Soviet history, international relation, as well as students studying the Bolshevik revolution in high school or any study on the Soviet Union more generally. The first 100 pages or so would be especially useful for those studying the Bolshevik revolution and civil war up to 1924 and would be of great interest for history teachers to include in their lesson plans, class discussions or as suggested reading to curious students. Additionally, those who study genocides might find this work valuable. But my hope is that awareness of this tragedy isn’t relegated to the relative obscurity of academia or students simply looking to impress their teachers and examiners, but for a genuine understanding of the past and present state of Ukraine and Russia, as well as the capacity for human suffering and cruelty. It would definitely make a great companion to The Gulag Archipelago, despite the different focus. Red Famine is a brilliant work of scholarship that is presented perfectly. It is essential reading.