Kiev
Living in the former Soviet Republic of Ukraine, one becomes highly sensitive to public figures who look away from genocidal, government-created famines. The Holodomor or “Extermination By Hunger” was a 1932-33 famine in Stalin-era Ukraine that cost the lives of as many as 7.5 million people. This act of genocide has been officially acknowledged only in the last decade—more than 7 decades later and 15 years after the Soviet state responsible for it ceased to exist.

At the time of the famine, a steady parade of “useful idiots” kept the world from knowing what was really happening in the Ukraine and elsewhere in the USSR. This derogatory label has long been credited to Lenin, shorthand for those westerners who acted as propagandists and apologists for the atrocities of the Soviet government. The poster child for this class of western dilettantes is of course Lincoln Steffens, who returned in 1919 from a newly-created Soviet Union that was mired in civil war, hunger, terror and wholesale executions to declare, “I have seen the future and it works.”