Here Solzhenitsyn is clearly in the wrong. The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, drafted before much was really known about the ­Terror­-famine, opens by saying that “in time of peace or in time of War” it is a crime under international law to commit “acts with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such” by “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.

The convention was signed in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Though not based on an ethnic criteria, the Terror-famine is accepted by the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington as a comparable crime. Indeed, the museum’s website carries a talk I gave there on the subject some years ago. The Soviet regime did indeed, and openly, victimise a “group” of the population – the “kulaks”, of whom Vasily Grossman, whose mother died in the Holocaust, writes:

.?.?.?kulak families were treated as “enemies of the people”. There was no pity for them. “They’re not human beings.” What were they? Vermin. In order to massacre them it was necessary to proclaim kulaks as not human beings just as the Germans proclaim the Jews are not human beings.
In 1933, “the decree required that the peasants of the Ukraine, the Kuban and the Don, be put to death by starvation, put to death along with their little children”.

It is proven that the mass deaths from starvation were due to the removal of foodstuffs by the authorities, following decrees from above. The decrees applied to specified areas, especially the Ukraine, but also the largely ­Ukrainian-­inhabited Kuban, the Don and later other north Caucasus regions. There were also blockades against their getting food from the north (in each case the villages were harder hit than the towns). There is some dispute about certain points, but not on the essentials. Stalin starved others besides Ukrainians. But he was capable of various verbal variations – as when he and his supporters argued that the Doctors’ Plot of 1953 was not anti-­semitic since several gentiles were also arrested.

The quarrel has indeed been sharp on both sides. But one should not expect calm discussion from a country that has undergone a heavy death toll within living memory. My father, who won his Croix de Guerre at Verdun in 1916, often told me how in France the effects of the First World War had been psychologically devastating. When such sufferings are remembered, it is natural for strong emotions to arise.

Russia suffered terribly, and we must remember that it has produced heroes, as well as geniuses. Alexander Solzhenitsyn had an unbending mind. It sustained him through privation, imprisonment, persecution, exile. Whatever his faults, we should bow to his memory.