The Holodomor is invoked through a brief but devastating contrast between staged appearances and famine reality. In 1932, H. G. Wells judged how people were eating from an excellent meal served to him in Kiev, while the famine beyond that meal was so severe that peasants resorted to killing their own children. The episode gives the book’s later description of a showcase prison a historical precedent: an observer can mistake the carefully presented for the truth of a whole society.

The famine behind the meal

The passage places Wells’s visit at the height of a famine, and measures its severity in the starkest terms: peasants resorted to killing their own children. Against that reality, the excellent meal served to Wells becomes more than a detail of hospitality. It is the narrow evidence from which he draws a sweeping conclusion about how Ukrainians ate.

The polished display and the hidden reality

The comparison is made while describing Penal Colony 13 at Engels, a work camp presented to human rights advocates as evidence that prison conditions in Russia are improving. Its brightly colored walls, rosebushes, and pseudo Philippe Starck sinks make a persuasive display. The account sets that display beside Wells’s meal in Kiev: in both cases, a visible pocket of comfort risks being mistaken for the condition of people beyond it.

Narrative significance

The Holodomor reference sharpens the book’s warning about appearances without claiming that the two situations are identical. A meal and a showcase prison can both be real, yet still conceal the wider circumstances they are taken to represent. The comparison turns the prison’s cosmetic improvement into a question of what an official tour allows its visitor to see—and what it leaves outside the frame.