THE TENDENCY TO EXCUSE LIBERAL ENTHUSIASM FOR THE USSR...:

Applebaum's main storyline begins in early 1917, when the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II touched off a period of upheaval throughout the newly defunct Russian Empire. Nowhere was this chaos more pronounced than in Ukraine, whose short-lived experiment in democratic rule collapsed under the weight of foreign-backed coups, invasions, and peasant rebellions.

As she leads her reader through this dizzyingly complex period, Applebaum argues that these events taught the early Bolshevik leadership -- and Joseph Stalin in particular -- to "see Ukraine as potentially dangerous and explosive, and Ukrainian peasants and intellectuals as threats to Soviet power."

Desperate for grain, the infant Bolshevik regime in Moscow embarked on a policy of forced requisition throughout the Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian agricultural heartland that contributed to the first major Soviet famine in 1921-1922. Applebaum explains how the unexpected severity of this famine shook the Bolsheviks' confidence, leading them to pursue more liberal economic and nationalities policies, under which the Ukrainian language and culture experienced a brief state-sponsored revival.

By the end of the 1920s, this more lenient approach gave way to darker trends. To hasten the Soviet Union's industrialization, Stalin made the case for a radical rearrangement of the Soviet economy: the forced collectivization of the agricultural sector. Mass arrests and property seizures plunged rural Ukraine into chaos as Stalin sought to eliminate land-owning peasants as a social class. All the while, grain production plummeted. The countryside began to go hungry.

Applebaum convincingly illustrates how Stalin and his top aides had plenty of warnings from lower-level officials about the problems with the harvest during 1930 and 1931. Yet Ukrainian officials' requests for food aid and a reprieve from the quotas only enraged Stalin, who accused them of incompetence and deceit.

Applebaum dissects the fascinating communications between Stalin and his closest advisers to paint a picture of a leader gripped by paranoid visions of his enemies -- the Ukrainians chief among them -- conspiring to sabotage the grain-production effort. Recalling Ukraine's insubordination after the Bolsheviks seized power, Stalin wrote to a colleague that, without urgent changes, "we could lose Ukraine."

Leading up to the fall of 1932, Stalin could have taken any number of off-ramps to ease the crisis. Instead, he directed a series of measures that, according to Applebaum, "launched a famine within a famine, a disaster specifically targeted at Ukraine and Ukrainians." These cruel tactics included stricter food requisitions, trade sanctions against entire villages, and population-movement controls so that starving Ukrainian villagers could not escape their fates.

In tandem, Stalin reversed the earlier Soviet policy of supporting the development of Ukraine's national identity. Ukrainian party officials were purged for questioning the draconian requisition orders. Ukrainian history and language courses were abolished from universities. Within a few years, Applebaum writes, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian teachers, writers, artists, librarians, scientists, publishers, and religious figures -- an "entire generation of educated, patriotic Ukrainians" -- were fired, jailed, or executed.

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