I started Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith before going to bed last night. The first chapter, set in 1933 in a small Ukrainian village during Stalin’s imposed famine on peasants, is simply chilling. It opens thusly:

Since Maria had decided to die her cat would have to fend for itself. She’d already cared for it far beyond the point where keeping a pet made any sense. Rats and mice had long since been trapped and eaten by the villagers. Domestic animals had disappeared shortly after that. All except for one, this cat, her companion which she’d kept hidden. …

Maria waited until nightfall before opening her front door. She reckoned that by the cover of darkness her cat stood a better chance of reaching the woods unseen. If anyone in the village caught sight of it they’d hunt it. Even this close to her own death, the thought of her cat being killed upset her.

As horrors like this were unfolding in real life in 1930s, Walter Duranty, the Moscow bureau chief of The New York Times, was writing things like this:

“There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be.”
–New York Times, Nov. 15, 1931, page 1

“Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.”
–New York Times, August 23, 1933

If Duranty had written the truth about Stalin and the famine instead of covering it up for the good of world socialism, imagine how different the world might be.