TA-NEHISI COATES: Grappling With Holodomor: Thoughts On Timothy Snyder’s The Bloodlands. “A few days ago, I listened to a chapter in Timothy Snyder’s The Bloodlands on famine in Ukraine during the 1930s. The famine was man-made–the result of Stalin making war against his own citizens in Ukraine. I listened (I have the book in MP3 format) to about 90 percent of the chapter before I just had to cut it off. I generally have a strong stomach when it come to reading about evil, but this was too much. . . . That people were starving to death in Ukraine, and that this was a political act, not an act of God, was hidden from the world. And then sometimes the world just looked away.”

Or, as in the case of The New York Times’ Walter Duranty, affirmatively helped to cover it up.