Ideological Zealots Fighting a Non-Existent Ukrainian Nationalist Enemy: A Reply to Tarik Amar’s Review of Red Famine

Abstract

Tarik Cyril Amar’s review “Politics, Starvation, and Memory” of Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine. Stalin’s War on Ukraine, a book about the Holodomor, was published in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History (vol. 20, no. 1, 2019). Applebaum’s Red Famine was published in Ukrainian by the Institute of History, National Academy of Sciences as Chervonyi holod. Viina Stalina proty Ukrainy. In December 2018, the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy awarded Applebaum an honorary doctorate at an evening to honor her long record of writing about Ukraine and her then new book Red Famine. In my own review of Red Famine published in the academic journal Europe-Asia Studies (vol. 70, no. 8, October 2018) I described Applebaum as a “contemporary Robert Conquest.” In 1986 Conquest, the well-known historian of the USSR, published the groundbreaking Harvest of Sorrow about the Holodomor at a time when research was reviving about Joseph Stalin’s crime against Ukraine just after its 50th anniversary and also on the eve of revelations that became public during Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost. The Holodomor was denied by the Soviet regime until 1990 and Conquest had to work with no access to Soviet archives but nevertheless, he provided a history of this Stalinist crime that the academic world could no longer ignore. In contrast, Applebaum was able to access archives because the 2015 de-communization laws gave Ukraine the most liberal access to USSR archives of any former Soviet state outside the three Baltic republics. Amar was one of the Western academics who condemned the de-communization laws in an open letter published in Krytyka.1 Amar’s review is unusually long and surprisingly, it discusses the topic of her book on only 5 of its 24 pages. Although Amar was given 24 pages to review a book the editors of Kritika only provided 2 pages to respond, which would be insufficient to provide a full discussion of his ideologically driven discussion. Amar used his review of Red Famine to continue an ideological campaign by him and a number of his other colleagues where they discuss all aspects of Ukrainian history through the alleged “evils of Ukrainian nationalism.” Applebaum’s Red Famine is clearly a book about the Holodomor of 1933 and not about Ukrainian nationalist groups in the 1940s or Ukrainian nationalist émigrés in the Cold War.