Writing in 1946, George Orwell lamented “the fog of lies and misinformation that surrounds such subjects as the Ukraine famine ...” Even the fall of communism has done little to dispel the fog.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the famine, known as the Holodomor, in which millions of peasants perished owing to Stalin's forced collectivisation of agriculture. Ukraine's authorities are erecting a series of national monuments. Russia objects (see page 29).

Memory is bound up with politics. Ukraine's President, Viktor Yushchenko, seeks support from Western nations in having the Holodomor declared an act of genocide. Russia opposes fiercely what it sees as a politicised and nationalistic campaign. There must be a historical reckoning for one of the great humanitarian catastrophes of the last century. But the manner of that commemoration risks inflaming relations between Ukraine and Russia, and exacerbating the Kremlin's distrust of the West.

The fault in this case lies with an increasingly erratic Russian regime. It is true that the famine afflicted more regions of the Soviet Union than the Ukraine alone. But if the effects of the famine were widespread and indiscriminate, the intent of Stalin's campaign was deliberate and ferocious. It attacked the peasant's ties with the land; and it attacked the Ukrainian peasant's sense of national belonging.

No one has illuminated this episode more than the historian Robert Conquest in his great work The Harvest of Sorrows. He recounts a pitiless use of starvation as a political tool to destroy a nation. Ukraine's borders were sealed; Ukrainian peasants were repelled from Russian villages to starve. The word “genocide” is a postwar and sometimes politically charged coinage. As a description of Stalin's assault on Ukraine's peasantry, it is far from hyperbole.

It is not Ukraine that is pressing a nationalist agenda. Russia under Vladimir Putin and Dimitri Medvedev has consistently taken an overbearing and obstructionist approach to relations with the former Soviet republics. Obscuring the national character of the Holodomor is consistent with Russia's meddling in Ukraine's presidential elections in 2004, or its economic blockade of Georgia in 2006.

The reaction of Western democracies has been too accommodative lately, more doormat than sentry - witness the barring in April, after intense Russian lobbying, of Georgia and Ukraine from the first stage of joining Nato. Recognition of the peculiarly national character of the famine is about historical truth. The Cold War was won, among other things, to ensure that states admit the facts and their faults.

The struggle between East and West was neither an accident nor a mistake, but an inevitable outcome of the diplomacy adopted by Stalin during and after the wartime alliance. It was not only a competition for power, but also an argument over ideologies, a contest between the State's authority and individual liberty.

It would be a betrayal of that record, and of history, if we were to temper our public understanding of Stalin's crimes in the interests of an easier relationship with the Kremlin's current occupants. Relations between states fluctuate; the victims of history remain.