How long does it take to read Red Famine?
Stalin's War on Ukraine
Red Famine by Anne Applebaum takes about 10 hours 51 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 10 hours 51 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2017. 592 pages, about 162,800 words.
22 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 18 hours 5 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 10 hours 51 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 6 hours 47 minutes |
The page count is the median across 12 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization—in effect a second Russian revolution—which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them. Applebaum proves what has long been suspected: after a series of rebellions unsettled the province, Stalin set out to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry. The state sealed the republic’s borders and seized all available food. Starvation set in rapidly, and people ate anything: grass, tree bark, dogs, corpses. In some cases, they killed one another for food. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil. Today, Russia, the successor to the Soviet Union, has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more. Applebaum’s compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the twenty-first.
Subjects: Genocide, Collectivization of agriculture, Famines, History, Ukraine, history, Mass murder
