WHEN:

28 September 2017, 5:15pm registration, for 6pm start

WHERE:

Main Auditorium, The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 1 Exchange Square, London EC2A 2JN

Admission:

This event is free but prior registration is required.

A triumph of original research and human sympathy, this book describes the famine, engineered by Stalin in 1932-33, that was meant to destroy Ukraine. It begins in 1917, with the Ukrainian revolution and the Ukrainian national movement that challenged Bolshevik rule. It ends in the present, with a discussion of the ongoing politics of memory in Ukraine. Published at a moment when Russia is once again attempting to subvert and subdue Ukraine, Anne Applebaum’s book is witness to a genocide that killed nearly four million people, destroyed the aspirations of Ukraine for two generations and has real echoes in the politics of the present.

Reflecting 25 years worth of scholarship on the Ukraine and several national campaigns to collect oral history and memoirs, this recent research has yielded thousands of new testimonies from all over the country. From these sources, Applebaum has sought updated answers to troublesome questions:

What happened in the autumn, winter and spring of 1932–3? What chain of events, and what mentality, led to the famine? Who was responsible? How does this terrible episode fit into the broader history of Ukraine and of the Ukrainian national movement? And what happened afterwards?

The moderator of this talk to be confirmed.

Books will be available for purchase and the author will be on hand to autograph copies purchased.

Speaker’s biography:

Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum is a columnist for the Washington Post. She is the author of several books, including Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction and Iron Curtain, which won the 2013 Cundill Prize for Historical Literature. Since 1989, her writing has frequently focused on the politics of post-communist transition in Russia and Europe, but she also writes extensively about British, American and European politics. Anne is a former member of the Washington Post editorial board, a former deputy editor of the Spectator magazine, and a former Warsaw correspondent of The Economist. She has been a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and has lectured at many other universities, including Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Zurich and Heidelberg.

This event is organised in partnership with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Ukrainian Institute in London and Penguin Books.