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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.

Tauger, Mark: Arguing from errors: On certain issues in Robert Davies' and Stephen Wheatcroft's analysis of the 1932 Soviet grain harvest and the great Soviet famine of 1931-1933'. - In: Europe-Asia Studies. - 58 (September 2006) 6. - S. 973-984

This article presents an account of the history of Soviet repression, which integrates our current understanding of the scale and nature of repression with a history of the agents responsible for carrying out these operations. It notes that the major shifts in the nature of repression were accompanied by shifts in the operational leadership within the security forces, and that it was largely the same groups of individuals who were responsible for the mass killing operations during the civil war, collectivization and the Great Terror. These were the groups associated with Efim Georgievich Evdokimov, which operated in Ukraine during the Civil War, in the North Caucasus in the 1920s, and in the Secret Operational Division within OGPU in 1929‐1931. Evdokimov transferred into party administration in 1934 when he became party secretary for North Caucasus Krai. But he appears to have continued advising Stalin and Yezhov on Security matters, and the latter relied upon Evdokimov's former colleagues to carry out the mass killing operations that are known as "The Great Terror" in 1937‐1938.

Comments on Vincent Barnett's "Understanding Stalinism -- The 'Orwellian Discrepancy' and the Rational Choice Dictator" (2006). Focus is on what are deemed Barnett's errors with respect to the author's (1996) article contrasting Joseph Stalin's purges with the Holocaust. It is argued that Barnett intends to reintroduce the moral question into the scholarship on Stalinism & speak in generalities, both of which are said to impede understanding of what happened. In this light, the author, with an eye toward objectivizing the debate, makes distinctions between Hitler's & Stalin's processes of killing. It is concluded that Barnett offers no improvements in the philosophical basis for understanding Stalinism. References. D. Edelman