Sweet Snow: A Novel of the Ukrainian Famine of 1933

I was looking for a novel on Holodomor for my final year project in college and stumbled upon it by chance. I couldn't read it in a go. I had to take a break every 5-10 pages because the vivid portrayal of events gets really into you that you feel like something is stabbing you in the chest.Such brilliant portrayal.

Its a crime that the world is so ignorant of the Holodomor. From 4 to 6 million Ukrainian farmers were deliberately starved to death by the Russian communists. Hollywood and the western media in general are guilty of suppressing this awful truth. And now we have Russian barbarians again killing Ukrainians.Will Hollywood deal with the subject ? Don't count on that happening.

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.

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!

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

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.