The Holodomor Reader


Book Description

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 subject is introduced in an extensive interpretive essay, and 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. Each section is prefaced with introductory remarks. The Reader is an indispensable guide for all those interested in the Holodomor, genocide, or Stalinism.




The Holodomor and the Origins of the Soviet Man


Book Description

Anastasia Lysyvets’s memoir Tell us about a happy life ... (Skazhy pro shchaslyve zhyttia ...), published in Kyiv in 2009 and now available for the first time in an English translation, is one of the most powerful testimonies of a victim of the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine. This mass starvation was organized by the Soviet regime and resulted in millions of deaths by hunger. The simple village teacher Lysyvets’s testimony, written during the 1970s and 1980s without hope of publication, depicts pain, death, and hunger as few others do. In his commentary, Vitalii Ogiienko explains how traumatic traces found their way into Lysyvets’s text. He proposes that the reader develops an alternative method of reading that replaces the usual ways of imagining with a focus on the body and that detects mechanisms of transmission of the original Holodomor experience through generations.




Red Famine


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest crimes, the consequences of which still resonate today, as Russia has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more—from the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the National Book Award finalist Iron Curtain. "With searing clarity, Red Famine demonstrates the horrific consequences of a campaign to eradicate 'backwardness' when undertaken by a regime in a state of war with its own people." —The Economist In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization—in effect a second Russian revolution—which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil. Applebaum’s compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the twenty-first.




Bloodlands


Book Description

From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century. Americans call the Second World War “the Good War.” But before it even began, America’s ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single story. With a new afterword addressing the relevance of these events to the contemporary decline of democracy, Bloodlands is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history and its meaning today.




The Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine


Book Description

A distilled account of famine incorporating new sources during the past three decades.




Holodomor and Gorta Mór


Book Description

Ireland’s Great Famine or ‘an Gorta Mór’ (1845–51) and Ukraine’s ‘Holodomor’ (1932–33) occupy central places in the national historiographies of their respective countries. Acknowledging that questions of collective memory have become a central issue in cultural studies, this volume inquires into the role of historical experiences of hunger and deprivation within the emerging national identities and national historical narratives of Ireland and Ukraine. In the Irish case, a solid body of research has been compiled over the last 150 years, while Ukraine’s Holodomor, by contrast, was something of an open secret that historians could only seriously research after the demise of communist rule. This volume is the first attempt to draw these approaches together and to allow for a comparative study of how the historical experiences of famine were translated into narratives that supported political claims for independent national statehood in Ireland and Ukraine. Juxtaposing studies on the Irish and Ukrainian cases written by eminent historians, political scientists, and literary and film scholars, the essays in this interdisciplinary volume analyse how national historical narratives were constructed and disseminated – whether or not they changed with circumstances, or were challenged by competing visions, both academic and non-academic. In doing so, the essays discuss themes such as representation, commemoration and mediation, and the influence of these processes on the shaping of cultural memory.




Memory Crash


Book Description

This account of historical politics in Ukraine, framed in a broader European context, shows how social, political, and cultural groups have used and misused the past from the final years of the Soviet Union to 2020. Georgiy Kasianov details practices relating to history and memory by a variety of actors, including state institutions, non-governmental organizations, political parties, historians, and local governments. He identifies the main political purposes of these practices in the construction of nation and identity, struggles for power, warfare, and international relations. Kasianov considers the Ukrainian case in the context of a global increase in the politics of history and memory, with particular emphasis on a distinctive East-European variety. He pays special attention to the use and abuse of history in relations between Ukraine, Russia, and Poland.




Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust


Book Description

Seven million people in the "breadbasket of Europe" were deliberately starved to death at Stalin's command. This story has been suppressed for half a century. Now, a survivor speaks. In 1929, in an effort to destroy the well-to-do peasant farmers, Joseph Stalin ordered the collectivization of all Ukrainian farms. In the ensuing years, a brutal Soviet campaign of confiscations, terrorizing, and murder spread throughout Ukrainian villages. What food remained after the seizures was insufficient to support the population. In the resulting famine as many as seven million Ukrainians starved to death. This poignant eyewitness account of the Ukrainian famine by one of the survivors relates the young Miron Dolot's day-to-day confrontation with despair and death—his helplessness as friends and family were arrested and abused—and his gradual realization, as he matured, of the absolute control the Soviets had over his life and the lives of his people. But it is also the story of personal dignity in the face of horror and humiliation. And it is an indictment of a chapter in the Soviet past that is still not acknowledged by Russian leaders.




The Ukrainian Intelligentsia and Genocide


Book Description

This study focuses on the first group targeted in the genocide known as the Holodomor: Ukrainian intelligentsia, the “brain of the nation,” using the words of Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide and enshrined it in international law. The study’s author examines complex and devastating effects of the Holodomor on Ukrainian society during the 1920–1930s. Members of intelligentsia had individual and professional responsibilities. They resisted, but eventually they were forced to serve the Soviet regime. Ukrainian intelligentsia were virtually wiped out, most of its writers and a third of its teachers. The remaining cadres faced a choice without a choice if they wanted to survive. The author analyzes how and why this process occurred and what role intellectuals, especially teachers, played in shaping, contesting, and inculcating history. Crucially, the author challenges Western perceptions of the all-Union famine that was allegedly caused by ad hoc collectivization policies, highlighting the intentional nature of the famine as a tool of genocide, persecution, and prosecution of the nationally conscious Ukrainian intelligentsia, clergy, and grain growers. The author demonstrates the continuity between Stalinist and neo-Stalinist attempts to prevent the crystallization of the nation and subvert Ukraine from within by non-lethal and lethal means.




Gareth Jones


Book Description

"This excellent book serves as a warning to journalists not to be taken in by official sources and political ideology but to report what they actually learn through their own efforts. Gamache deserves commendation for his research and careful reconstruction of Jones' reportorial journeys." --Prof. Maurine H. Beasley, College of Journalism, U. of Maryland *** "...meticulously researched book [that] returns Gareth Jones to his rightful status, as one of the most outstanding journalists of his generation, in a tumultuous era that depended upon honest journalism as its main source of news."--Nigel Linsan Colley *** "Extraordinary...Jones' articles...caused a small sensation...Because [his] notebooks record immediate impressions and describe events as they were happening, they have an unusual freshness...in the past two decades, the fate of the two journalists has been slowly reversed. Duranty's work has become controversial; in 2003, the Pulitzer committee debated whether to retrospectively withdraw his prize...[whilst] Jones' reputation has revived thanks to the Ukrainian government's broader efforts to tell the history of the famine...the establishment of a Ukrainian state simply makes Jones seem less marginal, more central, more important."--Anne Applebaum, The New York Review *** Gareth Jones (1905-1934), the young Welsh investigative journalist, is revered in Ukraine as a national hero and is now rightly recognised 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. [Subject: Biography, History, Media Studies, Soviet Studies, Genocide Studies]