Sweet Snow

80 years after the Ukrainian genocide of 1933, Alexander J. Motyl speaks for those millions of "saints" who died quietly of famine, devilishly orchestrated by Stalin and his sadistic GPU, and most of whom had never had their voices heard even in their native tongue, let alone English, understood by every educated person in the world.This is a much needed novel based on memoirs, documents, statistics and facts, retold in families from generation to generation.Millions of peasants: men, women, children died in their village huts, in the fields or on the roads, while looking for food, after being robbed of everything, last bag of seeds included, by armed bolsheviks. Those who resisted were murdered on the spot, priests and village elders crucified in their own churches.This is the genocide, which even descendants of the descendants of the executors are afraid to admit, happened in the middle of the famously fertile land of Central Europe.Their hateful denial is obvious to the world even today.That is why the topic of this novel is so actual, it gives us the knowledge about what autocratic military regimes may lead to.The "Sweet Snow" is an outstanding novel meant for a strong reader. One can only imagine the ordeal of creating those sentences, phrases and paragraphs, describing one horrific scene after another, filtering them through one's own self...The story's fictional characters quickly come to life and become objects of psychological studies, bone chilling graphic descriptions are extremely honest in quite a sickening way, and Mother Nature (snow in particular) takes significant part in the tragedy.The whole novel may be compared to a solid architectural masterpiece, well premeditated, put together and cemented by the author's iron-strong logical approach to creative process.Congratulations and many thanks to AJ. Motyl!

Sweet Snow is at once curiously gripping and sadly horrifying, a foray into the cold and hunger-threatened lives of four men who by chance end up imprisoned together in the dead of Ukraine winter, 1933. Alexander Motyl writes as if this were a biography, and the winter were a character -- cruel enough to put an end to thousands of people who starved and were stacked in frozen piles through famine-wracked villages. The scenes of the hungry men dividing a rat's raw meat for their only food are as sickening as they are compelling, and the reader somehow carries hope with these men that there will be even the slightest relief from their predicament.I did have some slight reservations about the book design, as the paragraph indentations were too deep, leaving the text to look ragged. There were also typos which distract from the reading flow.

Not exactly what I expected. Was looking more for a history of the time, not a story of a small group of characters.

Considering such an unforgiving - tragic, macabre - topic, namely, man-made Famine/Genocide (Holodomor) in Ukraine in the years of 1932/33 it took literary skill and sophistication to make this book a page-turner. There is deep knowledge of the historical background, interesting cast of characters, there is irony, satire, even a bit of humor; and yes, there are many chilling scenes. The novel is not for sea-side vacation reading but for a thoughtful reader who is interested in the history of the Soviet Union during Stalin's rule and for those who care for humanity. Kudos to Alexander Motyl, the author.

Interesting "twist" on a personalized holodimyr tale. recommended. It's a little different than his other novelas--all of which are superb.

Sweet Snowby Alexander J. Motylreviewed by Mykola Dementiuk Much as Dostoevsky's House of the Dead and Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago Alexander J. Motyl looks upon Soviet prisoners in his novel Sweet Snow but these prisoners are very different, since the year is 1933 and the worst enforced state famine, the Holodomer is tearing through the Ukraine while Stalin sits and smiles, smokes his cigarette and does absolutely nothing. Four prisoners are being transported to the prison camps, a Jewish Communist from New York City, a German nobleman from Berlin, a Polish diplomat from Lwow, and Ukrainian nationalist from Vienna. But their Russian guards are notorious vodka drinkers who crash and overturn their transport truck until the guards are dead or dying, freeing the prisoners from their captives. And oh, what a freedom it is! The frozen wasteland of Siberia lies before them, an emptiness every which way they turn. Still scarred and shaken from the accident they start trudging their way back, whichever way that might be. The description of the four surviving prisoners is grueling, even a few times this reader squirmed in revulsion from was being portrayed, lost men trying to make in back into life, if such a thing still exists. Along their way they do come upon people, dead children holding on presumably their dead mothers, all emaciated, their bellies distended and dead of slow starvation. This is not a book for the careless, fickle reader but one who dares to look upon and learn what really went on at the time, mass organized starvation by the powers that be, the 1933 Soviet Elites. I've read many of Motyl's books, Whiskey Priest, Who Killed Andrei Warhol, The Jew Who Was Ukrainian and others, but never before did I read one such as this, Sweet Snow, showing him at his masterful powers as a writer. Well done, Alexander Motyl, literary greatness is certainly yours!

Fascinating, edgy human story on the backdrop of the Holodomor--forced starvation perpetrated by Stalin in Ukraine in 1932-1933. Challenging read due to tragic history of the time. Characters are very interesting and author delves into the mentality of different classes of people and how the Holodomor becomes the great equalizer Each character brings different emotional and social baggage but in the end forced starvation makes them just humans struggling to survive. Author uses lots of short foreign phrases in German, Polish and Ukrainian in conversations, but they are not an impediment to understanding the story as the context explains them. Masterfully brings great understanding of the Holodomor as a colossal crime against humanity without politicizing this horrific genocide.