The official wall of silence erected around the events that precipitated the sentencing to death of what some commentators have approximated at 4 million people between the autumn of 1932 and the summer of 1933 in the Ukrainian socialist soviet republic and the Kuban region of southern Russia—an area in the northern Caucasus that was densely populated by ethnic Ukrainians—only began to crumble toward the end of the 1980s with the implementation of Gorbachev’s Perestoika. Further, it was only following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the subsequent emergence of various official documentation, once hidden, and harrowing personal accounts, once whispered, relating to what has come to be viewed by some as the most notorious of the pan-Soviet famines during the period of the early 1930s that a burgeoning body of scholarly literature began to appear. Subsequently termed the Holodomor, the literature on this famine has sought to analyze the political antecedents and those exacerbating factors that further deepened the severity of the famine felt by ethnic Ukrainians, and crucially the positioning of the Stalinist regime.
Read the full book review in Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal.