The book is preceeded by a wonderful introduction written by Adam Ulam, an expert on Soviet and Eastern European politics, and a brother of the world renoun mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, whom I, as a historian of scientific and technological ideas, consider one of the co-creators of the hydrogen bomb. The book itself is written by Miron Dolot, a pen name of a survivor of Stalinist famine in the Ukraine. He vividly describes decisive actions of the communist regime against the Ukrainian peasants. These actions are underhanded and heavyhanded at the same time. No trick, no deceit, and no brutality was spared to crush the peasants and Ukrainian nationalism. The Soviet elite, almost all of which consisted of humanistic intellectuals, despised private property and the markets. They wanted to destroy every vestige of peasant independence, and they dispossessed them by forcing them into government-owned collective farms. These kolhozes were exmamples of inefficiency and apathetic attitude. In the meantime, the hunger that resulted from dispossesssion and vicious persecution of somewhat-well-off peasants who were called "kulaks" and "enemies of the people" devastated entire villages. The regime rewarded productivity and initiative with death and exile to Siberia.
This book strongly suggests that utopias do not work. They are concocted by resentful intellectuals who have no technical training (writers, historians, lawyers) and who despise what they cannot understand: the markets, rural life, international finance, and major corporations. When power is acquired by a small group, everybody outside this group is a potential victim. No more ominous sign of the truth of this statement exists than the Soviet government's successful attempt to starve millions of its subjects in the name of ideological slogans and visions.
This book details the tragedy. It is a good accounting of this very hidden history, unknown to the west until years later. In fact many western jurnalists were duped into beleiving Stalin had created a 'maricle' in the Ukraine. THe only miracle was the disappearence of millions of people, whose only crime was that they were peasents.
The author stresses also another aspect of this genocide (or was it the principal one): nationalism.The Party members, who imposed the murderous collectivization, were Russians. Miron Dolot sees the organized famine as a deliberate attempt to annihilate the Ukrainians as a people.
Apart from its uncontested historical value, this book should be read as a warning against the madness of pure ideologists, who, once in absolute power, implement their insane policies, accepting at the same time millions of human casualties without the slightest form of remorse.
For a more general evaluation of the organized famines in the 1930s in the USSR, see Robert Conquest's 'Harvest of Sorrow'.