MixedThe Guardian (UK)\"For me, the most entertaining chapters of this book were about the dictators I was least familiar with ... we learn little about whom the dictators modelled themselves on (or against) and how they reacted to each other. Yet surely Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin kept an interested eye on each other’s PR practices and on occasion quietly imitated them; and Mao was scarcely indifferent to Stalin’s example. Questions of chronology, sequence and influence are not much discussed here. The mid 20th century is generally considered the heyday of dictators of the right and the left, but Dikötter does not explore why this might have been so, and even obscures the issue by including chronological outliers such as Mengistu. It is important to study dictators, he suggests, because they are an eternal threat to democracy and freedom – but not, it seems an acute current threat.\
Alexandra Popoff
PositiveThe NationWhat Alexandra Popoff’s new biography seeks to add to the mix is not altogether clear ... She praises [Grossman] as having \'the mentality of a man from the free world\' and implicitly makes an even stronger claim for his moral status in her epigraph, from Elie Wiesel’s 1972 Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters: \'His daring, his frankness were drawn from his very despair. So was his revolt.\' Both characterizations seem seriously off. Grossman, a quintessentially Soviet (meaning someone formed by operating within the Soviet context) literary figure, did not revolt, and he was not apparently all that despairing, either ... But perhaps Popoff’s most exalting claims in her epigraph and introduction need not be taken too seriously. After all, the detailed story of Grossman’s career in the body of her book is quite compatible with a less heroic view of him.
Anne Applebaum
PositiveThe GuardianGuardian readers may be inclined to approach a new book on Soviet atrocities by Applebaum warily. But in many ways it is a welcome surprise. Like her Gulag – which, if you held your nose through the introduction, turned out to be a good read, reasonably argued and thoroughly researched – Red Famine is a superior work of popular history. She still doesn’t like western academic Soviet historians much, but at least she mainly avoids gratuitous snideness and cites their work in her bibliography ... For scholars, the most interesting part of the book will be the two excellent historiographical chapters in which she teases out the political and scholarly impulses tending to minimise the famine in Soviet times and does the same for post-Soviet Ukrainian exploitation of the issue ... a vivid and informative account of the Ukrainian famine.
