Red Famine

Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine / Anne Applebaum, 461 p.

Excellent review of the circumstances and decisions leading up to the famine of 1932-33 that killed just under 4 million.  Stalin feared Ukrainization.  He worried that a deepening interest in Ukrainian culture and language could lead to a political break which would have greatly weakened the USSR and the Revolution, not to mention depriving it of its highly fertile grain-producing breadbasket.  By harshly forcing family farmers (called kulaks if they owned much in the way of land, tools or livestock) onto collectives and wildly ratcheting up harvest expectations, he set the stage for a disaster.  Within the USSR and now Russia, the famine is widely considered the tragic result of inevitable circumstance and the vagaries of Mother Nature.  Applebaum is quite convincing in her argument to the contrary.

Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom

Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom by Condoleezza Rice, 486 pages. Narrated by Condoleezza Rice and Grace Angela Henry.
Former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, and current Denning Professor in Global Business and the Economy, Rice is well-suited to tell us the stories of governments in transition moving towards democracy, and then sometimes away from it again.
Rice witnessed the dissolution of the Soviet Union firsthand, as part of George HW Bush's National Security team, and she tells of how Russia, Ukraine, and other regions of the fomer USSR lurched toward a more democratic way of governing and then backed away, sometimes violently.
Yushchenko (leaning towards democracy) versus Yanukovych (leaning towards his good friend Putin) in Ukraine; Uribe against the FARC and the AUC in Colombia, and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf trying to rebuild Liberia after the warlord Charles Taylor was overthrown all have their stories told here. And Rice is an excellent storyteller. She comes across as a supremely intelligent, compassionate, and competent diplomat. Her insider's view of the George W Bush administration makes one nostalgic for a time when you only suspected the President didn't know what he was doing.

The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks,: Life and Death under Soviet Rule / Igort, 365 pp.

Igort is an Italian cartoonist who spent years in Russia and Ukraine capturing stories.  His investigations coalesce into two distinct threads: the great famine in Ukraine under Stalin and the murder of journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya.

The organization of the book is occasionally confusing, with occasional switchbacks from 1930s Ukraine to contemporary Moscow and the Chechen conflict and tangential testimonies from other Russians interfiled.  But the material is so intense, horrific, and graphic that it's almost a relief to be disoriented; a straightforward narrative might be unbearable.  

The drawings are perfect: evocative without calling attention to themselves or diverting from the narrative.