Ukrainian and Slavic Studies: Holodomor

In 2008 the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University hosted an international conference entitled "The Great Famine in Ukraine: The Holodomor and Its Consequences, 1933 to the Present." The papers, most of which are contained in this volume, concern a wide range of topics, such as the immediate aftermath of the Holodomor and its subsequent effect on Ukraine's people and communities; World War II, with its wartime and postwar famines; and the impact of the Holodomor on subsequent generations of Ukrainians and present-day Ukrainian culture.

This book contains the conference papers given by Norman Naimark, on genocide; Andrea Graziosi, on Soviet history; Françoise Thom, on Stalinism; Olga Andriewsky, on Ukrainian history; and Stanislav Kulchytsky, on communism. An introductory article by Frank Sysyn provides an overview of thirty years of research on the Holodomor.

In this distilled account, Stanislav Kulchytsky ably incorporates a vast array of sources and literature that have become available in the past three decades into a highly readable narrative, explaining the motives, circumstances, and course of this terrible crime against humanity. As the author shows, the Holodomor was triggered by the Bolshevik effort to build a communist socioeconomic order in the Soviet Union. Excessive requisitioning of grain and other foodstuffs in the collectivization drive led to famine and deaths in grain-producing regions of the USSR by early 1932. In Ukraine, punitive measures authorized by the Kremlin's top leadership greatly worsened the famine in late 1932 and turned it into the Holodomor, which claimed more than three million lives in the first half of 1933.

The young Welsh investigative journalist, is revered in Ukraine as a national hero and is now rightly recognized as the first reporter to reveal the horror of the Holodomor, the Soviet Government-induced famine of the early 1930s, which killed millions of Ukrainians. This is the story of his life, his bravery, and his suspicious death.

The Holodomor Reader is a wide-ranging collection of key texts and source materials, many of which have never before appeared in English, on the genocidal famine (Holodomor) of 1932-33 in Soviet Ukraine. The material is presented in six sections: scholarship; legal assessments, findings, and resolutions; eyewitness accounts and memoirs; survivor testimonies, memoirs, diaries, and letters; Soviet, Ukrainian, British, German, Italian, and Polish documents; and works of literature.

Stalin's Genocides puts forward the important argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them.

Starving Ukraine examines both Canada's reporting of the famine and the country's response to it, highlighting the importance of journalists and protestors.
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The authors of the articles included in this collection, Women and the Holodomor-Genocide, argue that the actions of all strata, victims as well as perpetrators, in Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s need to be examined in order to understand why and how the fabric of society was torn apart and unraveled into genocidal violence. Two thirds of eyewitness testimonies have been narrated by women, and their voices and perspectives are key to understanding violence in societies where genocide occurs.