Robert Conrad's book "The Harvest of Sorrow" broke the story of the terror famine to the broader audience of the west. (It was well known to historians but largely ignored for two generations, and in fact, the story was deliberately suppressed by the liberal press at the time.) It's a physically hefty, thick chunk of book. One of the most devastating statements comes early and has no lurid tales of cannibalism or bodies in the streets. He simply cautions the reader to keep it in their minds that for every character of type in the book, twenty people died. Orwell loudly decried the deliberate suppression of news of the crime by the leftist news media of the time and was almost entirely ignored. Plenty of journalists saw what was going on with their own eyes, but Stalin was still the hero of the European Left in those days, and Communism still in the process of birth. It was the collective opinion of the intellectual Left that to cover an atrocity of this scale honestly would be a terrible blow to the march of Communism in Europe. It wasn't a secret--the crime was too huge for even Russia to conceal--it was made one by us. The suicide of Stalin's own wife is said to have been over her guilt and shame for what was being done. Any honest person must agree with Orwell's prescient opinion that the moral damage of this cynical policy tainted European progressivism for generations. That we're only opposed to the genocides of the enemy.