The Red Famine
The Red Famine
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What a chilling book. It's superbly well-researched and surprisingly easy to read, given its subject matter. I was led to it after reading Michael Malice's book, The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil.
I'd be fascinated to read another couple of chapters from when the book left off with the events of 2014 and the secession of Crimea.
Just as a point of interest, I spent a year in Odessa in 1995–96 as a student of Russian, and at that time it seemed to be an exclusively Russian-speaking city, albeit with the Ukrainian ‘H' sound replacing the hard Russian ‘G' sound. And the household in which I rented a room from a Ukrainian woman and her son spoke Russian and watched exclusively Russian-language TV. Maybe Ukrainian was more common outside the city.
I had a similar experience when I spent two years in Almaty, Kazakhstan, although I did hear Kazakh more than I heard Ukrainian in Ukraine. I'd be interested to read a book like Red Famine about what went down in Kazakhstan, as it received only short mentions in Red Famine. If anyone knows of any that you can recommend, drop a comment!
It was interesting to read in Red Famine about Gareth Jones' walking trip through Ukraine. Michael Malice mentioned this in an interview I heard him give to either Chris Williamson or Lex Fridman. (I listened to both can can't recall which one it was). In the interview, he talked about a book called Experiences in Russia–1931—credited on Goodreads as being written by Gareth Jones, but it was actually written by the Jack Heinz II mentioned in Red Famine. The full text is available here.