And behind it was not just one man — Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union from the mid-Twenties to 1953 — but an entire warped ideology which sought to remake a peasant society according to a Utopian Communist blueprint.
Even now, in an age when we are regularly assailed by images of horror and suffering, the details of the Holodmor are heartbreaking.
Starving children, mass graves, vigilantes, even cannibalism: the famine saw human nature stripped to the bone.
‘I was so frightened by what had happened that I could not talk for several days,’ recalled one woman who escaped after her emaciated body was mistakenly thrown into a mass grave. ‘I saw dead bodies in my dreams. And I screamed a lot.’
Today, almost unbelievably, there are still those who deny the famine happened. Indeed, in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the architect of the famine, Stalin, is routinely presented not as a monstrous tyrant but as an admirably strong leader who made Russia walk tall in the world.
A few years ago, Mr Putin even told a press conference there was nothing wrong with restoring the statues of a man who claimed millions of lives. Stalin, he claimed, was no different to England’s Parliamentarian leader Oliver Cromwell — a comparison simply grotesque in its inaccuracy.
Thank goodness, then, for the journalist and author Anne Applebaum, whose new book, Red Famine, leaves no room for doubt about Stalin’s responsibility for what happened in Ukraine.
Nor does she spare us the grim details of the fate of millions of innocent men, women and children who had the misfortune to find themselves guinea pigs in his monstrous Marxist experiment.
The roots of the famine lay in the tortured, blood-stained relationship between Russia and Ukraine, a source of international tension and human suffering to this day.