Breaking Silence

We would like to thank--and commend--you for breaking the silence on the man-made famine in Ukraine by your recent review of “Execution by Hunger, the Hidden Holocaust” (Book Review, June 16).

The calculus of genocide often loses some of its impact when the discussion runs in the millions of human beings. Nonetheless, you should know that the maximum estimate of the number of Ukrainians killed in the famine is materially greater than 10 million. Dr. W. Horsley Gantt, a British psychologist and member of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, was in the Soviet Union at the time of the famine as a collaborator in Pavlov’s laboratories. Gantt reported that in private conversations with Soviet officials the maximum estimate was 15 million persons killed. Today, that figure equals the population of all of Central America.

In 1921, Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov declared, “Food is a weapon.” VICTOR RUD Associate Director, Ukrainian Studies Fund Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.