UKRAINE IS THE WORLD’S CRUCIBLE

AS SHE LAY DYING IN A NORTH LONDON HOSPITAL, my grandmother started to hallucinate scenes from her Ukrainian childhood. All around the ward she saw starving children, skeletal, collapsing in the long white strip-light corridors—lying, leaning, barely breathing by the hospital beds. At first, my mother and I couldn’t understand what she was referring to. What children? There were only old people in the ward.

Then we realized Galina Ivanovna was surrounded by suppressed memories from her childhood. She was back on Sumska, the elegant high street of her hometown of Kharkiv. She was back in 1932, the height of Stalin’s man-made famine meant to break the resistance of the Ukrainian peasantry to his rule. His victims were staggering from the countryside into the city in search of food,