The editors of Contemporary European History are delighted to present this roundtable on the Soviet famines of the 1930s, which brings into conversation leading scholars from around the world working in the field of Soviet history.

Both Sheila Fitzpatrick and Anne Applebaum are fine historians who have made important contributions to the historiography of the Soviet Union. Applebaum works as a journalist and writer. But that is no reason to sniff at her contributions as ‘popular history’ or ‘history light’. In the books I have read, Gulag: A History (2003), Iron Curtain (2012) and Red Famine (2017), she has always strived to document her assertions, present logical and well-honed arguments and use archival and other documentary material where possible to forge new paths. One might not always agree with her conclusions, but that is a different question. If only more of our colleagues could write as well as Applebaum, think as clearly and attack important subjects the way she does, we would have a richer historiography as a result.

Anne Applebaum is one of the most prominent public intellectuals and opinion makers battling the on-going authoritarian and populist drive on both sides of the Atlantic. Her public commitment to denouncing Putin's authoritarian regime and its aggression against Ukraine is closely related to the pages of Red Famine, which tackles the most contentious historical event dividing the Russian and Ukrainian political classes.

In German historiography, the Ukrainian famine has not received adequate attention. A few exceptions exist, such as the 2004 special issue of the journal Osteuropa edited by Gerhard Simon and Rudolf Mark, but no single monograph in the German language nor any research project deals with the Holodomor. Moreover, amongst the broader German public, the Soviet famine of 1932–3 is relatively unknown, despite being one of the great catastrophes in twentieth-century European history and (in terms of its death toll) one of the biggest single crimes of Stalinism. How can this obvious omission on the part of German academic researchers of Stalinism be explained?

My research has been about repression within the Soviet Communist Party, so the Ukrainian famine has been on the periphery of my interests. I therefore come to it as a bit of an outsider. But some aspects of the debate are dismayingly familiar. These include wild accusations of defending Stalin and an interpretive consensus that is resistant to the anomalies of new evidence and, sometimes, of logic.

Can we distinguish between those historical events – wars, revolutions or man-made catastrophes – that were intentional and those that were not? Does this distinction matter, and in what way? Somehow the issue of intention has become central in the debates about the Ukrainian Famine. Writing her review in The Guardian, Sheila Fitzpatrick puts the question in the title: ‘Did Stalin Deliberately let Ukraine Starve?’. In this forum J. Arch Getty pronounces that ‘the question of Holodomor is a question of intention’. Since ‘we still do not have a single document directly stating [Stalin's] motivations and intentions’ – we cannot blame him of this catastrophe. The historians of the Soviet Union cannot use the concept of genocide because the Soviet leaders did not articulate their intention to kill the millions of their compatriots.

The collectivisation famines of the 1930s are one of the darkest and most contested chapters in Soviet history. Carried out in the name of agricultural modernisation, Stalin's policy of forced collectivisation led to immense human suffering. Somewhere between 5 to 9 million people are believed to have perished in these famines, with the burden falling disproportionately on several major food-producing regions, including Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the Volga Basin and the Don and Kuban regions of the North Caucasus. Those who survived these terrifying events found their lives transformed, and collectivisation and the accompanying famines played a crucial role in integrating the Soviet Union's vast rural population into the institutions of a ‘workers’ state’.

Anne Appelbaum's work is a very readable and accessible story about the famine. In her own words, her objective was to tell ‘what actually happened. . . . What chain of events, and what mentality, led to the famine? Who was responsible?’ (xv). Right from the beginning she indicates that she thinks that the famine was the result of someone's mentality, and that her objective is to find who should be blamed for it. Her's is a very simple story. It conforms to an increasingly popular trend in Soviet history to ignore or oversimplify complex economic explanations and to reduce everything to moral judgements.

Ten or more years ago I informally proposed to a friend sitting in the editorial board of a major historical journal to organise a forum on Soviet famines in the light of the new sources and interpretations that were emerging. The answer I received struck me: it was a good idea and the topic was indeed important, but times weren't yet ripe. At first I was reminded of what Mikhail Suslov supposedly told Vasily Grossman: people weren't yet ready for Life and Destiny, whose essential ‘truth’ he did not therefore question. Then, I came to the conclusion that the answer was in itself a sign of the relevance of the topic and of its potential impact upon our reading of the past century. In fact, as I will try to briefly show in my conclusions, within Soviet famines keys can be found that open doors to an array of new, conceptual questions which force us to reconsider many of our basic ideas and representations. This is for historians a fascinating opportunity, but it can also prove a harrowing personal experience, so that in a way my colleague – being unquestionably wrong – was also unquestionably right: big questions have their times, and we can ‘force’ these times only up to a point, and at a risk, as is often the case with ‘forcing’.

Between academic writing of history – what professional historians, usually employed by universities, do – and popular history – what journalists, celebrities and independent writers usually with some claim on fame do – there is a growing intermediate genre, which I will call ‘history light’. While popular history is produced rather quickly and often with armies of researchers working for the celebrity author, history light is artisanal. It takes more time and bears the mark of the scholar/journalist author. Such writers, smart people with a flair for fluid prose, have turned out bestsellers and prizewinners that have found a broad reading public. They can be read with enjoyment and profit by the general public and scholars alike. History light may not be as sensationalist or prurient as many popular histories, but neither is it as thickly evidenced or balanced as the best academic histories. Such books usually have a strong point of view, often supportive of the liberal/conservative status quo in the United States, and in the case of those that deal with Russia or the Soviet Union, usually condemnatory of the Soviet Union, communism and extremes of left and right. They often tend to be indictments rather than historically empathetic; that is, they shape evidence to a particular conviction instead of allowing a more complex, perhaps even ambiguous, reading.