PositiveThe Washington Independent Review of BooksIn this riveting and well-researched new work, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum provides a vivid account of the chain of events and calculated political decisions that led to one of the largest, but relatively understudied, mass atrocities of the 20th century ... As she leads her reader through this dizzyingly complex period, Applebaum argues that these events taught the early Bolshevik leadership...chapters about the famine itself are at once breathtaking and deeply distressing. Applebaum has mined a vast trove of memoirs and oral histories, much of it material that has not been available to researchers until recently, to chronicle the physical, psychological, and societal impacts of mass starvation ... Applebaum continually returns to the themes of collective complicity and the impossible choices individuals had to make.
