Conclusion: Aftermath

In Ukraine, the struggle for international recognition of the Holodomor as genocide is a national issue, symbolic of what Czech novelist Milan Kundera, the survivor of the Soviet occupation, called “the struggle of memory over forgetting.”¹ In the 1930s, Stalin’s policy of Ukrainization, cloaked in the language of modernization and synchronized with the drive for industrialization and collectivization, led to a shift in Ukrainian national identity.² In the words of Victor Rud, a son of Holodomor survivors,

[i]n number of victims and destruction of a nation’s fiber, psychology, sense of self, in terms of coming to the precipice of destroying a nation, in terms of its effects carrying through and being so manifest eighty years afterward, the Holodomor is without parallel in human history.

Rud has further argued that the Holodomor did not become a catalyst for the founding of the Ukrainian state but rather “interred the idea of Ukrainian independence for generations,” warning that its reverberations are felt in Ukraine today: “So much so that, though Ukraine is today nominally independent, it is, fundamentally, not a Ukrainian state.”³ This chapter addresses legal responsibility, as well as economic, social, and psychological effects of the Holodomor-genocide on subsequent generations of Ukrainians. It examines the representation of the Holodomor in historical writing and collective memory.

LEGAL RESPONSIBILITY

The Holodomor in a broad sense refers to Soviet genocide against Ukrainians, whereas the famine of 1932–1933 represents the culminating stage of the Holodomor, and as the act that itself constitutes a crime of genocide.⁴ Legal scholars argue that in accordance with Article II of the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, all enumerated genocidal acts do apply in the case of the Holodomor:

1. (a) people who resisted were killed;

2. (b) there was huge bodily and mental harm caused to all victims of the Holodomor (those who died and those who survived);

3. (c) there were artificially created conditions of life calculated to destroy the Ukrainians;

4. (d) all those measures prevented births within the Ukrainian national group; and

5. (e) famine caused transfer of children from their parents.⁵

According to Myroslava Antonovych the list of genocidal acts in Article II of the U.N. Convention on Genocide is exhaustive: (a) through (c) constitute physical genocide, (d) contains a concept of biological genocide, and (e) constitutes cultural genocide. Thus, in the Holodomor, there were acts of physical, biological, and cultural genocide.⁶

The U.N. Convention on Genocide prohibits “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” and anticipates responsibility for three categories: “constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials, or private individuals.” The Convention was ratified by the Russian SFSR and the Ukrainian SSR, on May 3 and November 15, 1954, respectively. The Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, adopted by the United Nations on November 26, 1968, expands the scope of prosecutions for genocide under the U.N. Convention on Genocide by eliminating any domestic barriers to such prosecutions. The Russian SFSR ratified the agreement on April 22 and the Ukrainian SSR on June 19, 1969. The Convention on Statutory Limitations, together with the jus cogens (compelling law) status of the prohibition of genocide, eliminates the argument that acts of genocide committed prior to the U.N. Convention on Genocide are not subject to prosecution. The prohibition of genocide is now universally regarded as jus cogens (compelling law of preemptory nature), and the duty to punish genocide as an obligation erga omnes (against all—states and individuals).⁷

Whereas lawyers refer to genocide as structural or system criminality, criminologists qualify crimes against humanity as state, organizational, or political crimes.⁸ Perpetrators of international crimes usually commit it in a context of mass violence, on behalf of the state, by members of a specific governmental or militarized unit or organization. As Ervin Staub noted, progressive use of violence, or “continuum of destructiveness,” toward one specific group, typically the upper class, intellectuals, privileged minorities, or those who represent the old regime, is legitimated by an ideology.⁹ On behalf of the state, the Communist Party and its local representatives in Soviet Ukraine, with support of the GPU, set up policies leading to social engineering through extermination.

German sociologist Max Weber argued that the notion of class was insufficient in understanding a complex stratified system of modern societies.¹⁰ While sticking to a definition of class in economic terms, based on ownership of property, he argued that social inequality also arises due to differences in status. Status is a hierarchical ranking of individuals along a dimension of social prestige, which leads to differentials in power and access to scarce goods. Bolsheviks instituted such a system in 1921.¹¹ Weber noted that Marx may have conflated class and status, and they do coincide in that one’s occupation is the source of wealth. Differences in status lead to culturally mandated patterns of deference or avoidance between inferiors and superiors. Bolsheviks realized the most important variable was a decision as to who had the most power in ensuring their interests would be met. Through “dictatorship of proletariat,” they placed themselves at the vanguard, displacing clergy and intelligentsia, and forced these strata of society to recognize status entitlements of Soviet commissars and security police, and to give authorities deference to further one’s interests and gain desired resources. As Weber foresaw, communism would require an even greater level of detrimental social control and bureaucratization than a capitalist system.

“For a long time, over a quarter of a century since the Twentieth Party Congress, we had deliberated where did Stalin’s unlimited cruelty toward his own countrymen originate. We could not even conceive a thought that the father of internal, merciless, and total terror was Lenin,” wrote Soviet historian Dmitrii Volkogonov.¹² Likewise, in Vasily Grossman’s memoir, Forever Flowing, “true believers” did not believe in God. Within them burned another faith—“a faith in the mercilessly vengeful retribution of the great Stalin.” They appreciated and respected “the mighty force and its great leaders, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin.”¹³ As soldiers of Stalin, perpetrators took his orders. Grossman defined the capital these “true believers” were accumulating—“the trust of the party, more valuable than gold or land.”¹⁴ Comparing two Soviet leaders, Grossman observed:

Seemingly, Stalin built the state Lenin had founded in his, Stalin’s, own image. But this is not, of course, the heart of the matter—his image was actually the likeness of the state, and that is precisely why he became its master.

In Stalin, in the Asian despot and the European Marxist combined in his personality and character, the nature of the Soviet state system was expressed precisely and uniquely.

Grossman noted that the despotic Soviet system disguised itself in Western clothing. All those revolutionary categories Lenin considered transitory expedients, such as dictatorship, terror, and the rejection of bourgeois liberties, Stalin transformed into the permanent basis of Soviet life. In his portrait of Stalin, Grossman diagnosed the gendarme:

In his unimaginable ferocity and cruelty, in his unbelievable falsity and treachery, in his talent for playing the hypocrite, in his cherished resentments and his vengefulness, in his crudeness, rudeness, humor—behold the Asiatic tyrant.

In his knowledge of revolutionary ideas and texts, in his use of the terminology of the progressive West, . . . in his quotations from Gogol and Shchedrin, in his mastery of the most delicate and conspiratorial tricks, in his amorality, he embodied . . . a person for whom any means at all were justified by the ends.

In his faith in administrative documents and police power as the moving force in life, in his secret passion for uniforms and medals, in his unexampled contempt for human dignity, in his deification of a system based on a rigid and autocratic bureaucracy, in his readiness to kill a man on behalf of the holy letter of the law, and immediately thereafter to flout the law with monstrous and capricious violence—in all these respects he embodied the police boss, the gendarme spirit.

In the combination of these three Stalins, the Stalin personality lay.¹⁵

The underlying principle of the state Stalin built was the absence of freedom. In a state where there is no individual human freedom, there can be no national freedom. Where there is no free intimacy or free antagonism, there is no sense of community. “Dead freedom,” writes Grossman, “became the principal figure in a gigantic stage presentation, in a tremendous puppet show on an unbelievable scale. The state, which had no freedom, created a stage set complete with parliament, elections, trade unions, and a whole society and social life.”¹⁶ Who actually made the decisions? The decisions were Stalin’s. Questions of secondary importance were decided by Stalin’s intimates, but they were always decided in his spirit. “Stalin’s spirit and the spirit of the state were one and the same.”¹⁷ The state without freedom always acted in the name of freedom and democracy. Mistaken is the opinion which maintains that events of collectivization were “meaningless expressions of uncontrolled, unlimited power in the hands of a cruel man.” In reality, the state required that blood be shed in the 1930s.

As Stalin used to express it, it was not shed for nothing: it left its mark. Without it the state would not have survived. After all, non-freedom shed that blood in order to destroy freedom. It was an old, old necessity. It had begun under Lenin.¹⁸

Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, likewise, traced Stalinist totalitarianism to Lenin, identifying stages of its growth and ripening before reaching its apogee.¹⁹

Among leaders who used violence as an instrument to stay in power, Alette Smeulers listed the “ruthless dictator” Josef Stalin, as well as the “charismatic almost divine but utterly destructive” Adolf Hitler, the “strict authoritarian” Augusto Pinochet, and the “power hungry careerist” Slobodan Milošević.²⁰ These perpetrators are typically male, very authoritarian, manipulative, vain, arrogant, harsh, cruel, and merciless, and are referred to as “criminal masterminds.”²¹ The criminal mastermind type of perpetrator stands apart because he will never submit himself to any authority as he perceives himself to be the ultimate authority. Leaders with criminal masterminds plan and order the crimes, then incite the masses.

The “paper trail” of statutes, decrees, and secret circulars provide a great deal of evidence of Soviet government actions, even though the intent may not be directly spelled out. Professor Chirovsky explained before the International Commission of Inquiry into the 1932–1933 Famine in Ukraine: “The decrees themselves say very little about the reasons, only the policy outlines. But before the decrees were read and pronounced and given to the public knowledge, meetings were held and speeches were delivered to explain the reasons why.”²² Out of a dozen decrees that have been identified as causing the genocidal famine, the law of August 7, 1932, on protecting socialist property, the speculation decree of August 22, 1932, and the internal passport decree of December 27, 1932, are the most important. These three decrees were signed by members of the Politburo. The decree on blacklisting of December 6, 1932, was signed by Vlas Chubar, Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR, and by Stanislav Kosior, Secretary of the TsK KP(b)U, who were also Politburo members. The Postyshev decrees, by the very nature of their implementation, hold Postyshev responsible for them, although there is no evidence who signed them. He was also a member of the Politburo.²³

Historians who studied the Soviet nationality policy in the Ukrainian SSR during the period from 1923 to 1934—Robert Conquest, James Mace, and George Liber among others—have concluded:

In the Ukraine, this ferocious war against the peasants [independent and collective farm workers] became a war against Ukrainians. Here, the center ruthlessly enforced grain requisitions until starvation began and maintained these quotas as millions starved to death. Forewarned of these tragic consequences by the Ukrainian [Communist] Party leaders, the center did not release grain stores. Instead, it directed a strident campaign against Ukrainian nationalism during this period.²⁴

Even scholars who deny that the famine in Ukraine was genocide point out, “Ukrainian nationalism was attacked because it was perceived as a threat to Stalin’s procurement policies.”²⁵

State policies were directed against Ukrainians as a national group throughout the Soviet Union. Stalin asserted the KP(b)U placed the local needs of Ukraine above the needs of the First Five-Year Plan and the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union. Stalin dispatched Pavel Postyshev to Soviet Ukraine because he had worked there from 1923 to 1930 and had been a member of the KP(b)U Politburo from 1926 to 1930. Postyshev was appointed the first secretary of the Kharkiv Communist Party committee to intensify grain confiscations, thus aggravating an already devastating famine. In his new capacity, he came to enforce two resolutions, adopted by the TsK VKP(b) on December 14, 1932, and January 24, 1933. The first resolution accused the leadership of the KP(b)U of tolerating a “nationalist deviation,” whereas the second resolution accused Ukrainian Marxist–Leninists of failing to fulfill grain delivery quotas. The language of the resolutions is reflected in a speech Postyshev delivered on November 24, 1933, stating that “any attempt to harmonize proletarian internationalism with nationalism must make it an instrument of the nationalist counterrevolution and therefore must be most vigorously combated in future.” He added that the reorganization of forms and methods of Bolshevik leadership in building up Ukrainian culture must consequently imply “a vigorous and consistent struggle for the elimination of nationalist prejudices.” Ewald Ammende, who followed Postyshev’s path and read reports in Pravda, asked,

What is the meaning of Moscow’s program as set out by Postyshev? It means that Moscow has definitely adopted the new course with regard to the nationalities and has abandoned the “rotten compromise” of the first period of Russian nationalism. The new program means war to the knife on all the national movements.²⁶

Radical change in the Soviet nationality policy occurred at the Sixteenth Party Congress in 1930. Until then, the official party policy emphasized imperial Russian nationalism as the major threat to the Soviet state. The policy of Ukrainization, conceived as a concession to Ukrainian Bolsheviks, was initiated by the VKP(b) at the Twelfth Congress in 1923 with Lenin’s blessings, who warned that Great Russian chauvinism had “deep roots in the past.” Between these two congresses, the party interpreted local nationalism as an understandable reaction to Russian chauvinism. Then, in November 1933, Ukrainian “nationalist deviation” was declared the greatest danger to the unity of the Soviet empire. In early January 1933, nearly 15,000 functionaries of various ranks were dispatched to Soviet Ukraine from Moscow to occupy positions as chairmen and secretaries in collective farms, district party secretaries, and chairmen of district executive committees. With the arrival of this contingent, along with Vsevolod Balyts′kyi at the helm of the GPU in Soviet Ukraine, and Pavel Postyshev, new first secretary of the Kharkiv Regional Committee and secretary of the Central Committee of the KP(b)U, “the takeover of Ukraine by the central government was complete.”²⁷

In accordance with the new policy, Postyshev and Kosior, at the November 1933 plenum of the TsK KP(b)U, announced that “the Ukrainian SSR was no longer a backward Russian colony, but a highly industrialized socialist nation. As such, Ukrainians were no longer an underprivileged nationality. Further efforts to pursue the old Ukrainization policy, therefore, were unnecessary.” Although Russian chauvinism was on the rise, the greatest threat to the cause of communism in Ukraine at the moment was Ukrainian nationalism.²⁸ The use of violence against “Ukrainian nationalists” began on an unprecedented scale. Less than ten months after he arrived in January 1933, Postyshev reported the ousting of over 200 “nationalist elements” from the Soviet Ukraine’s Commissariat of Education, over 300 scientific and editorial personnel, 200 who occupied positions as managers of departments and sections in eight central organizations, and nearly 1,000 from cooperative and grain procurement agencies.²⁹ People were arrested, and after their dismissal were shot or exiled to the distant reaches of the Great Russian Motherland.

In the opinion of Jacob Sundberg, president of the International Commission of Inquiry, the Postyshev decrees should be seen together:

They clearly link the famine and the reversal in nationality policy and, in my view, the latter element takes preponderance so that the reversal is not incidental to the grain procurement but, rather, the other way around. The famine caused by the grain procurement has been instrumental in implementing the nationalities policy.³⁰

How Postyshev viewed his mandate can be established from his own words, quoted in Chervonyi shliakh (Red Path), published in Kharkiv in 1934, that “1933 was year the party had conducted the ‘Herculean labor’ of liquidating nationalist elements in Ukraine.”³¹ James Mace summarized Postyshev’s operation in Soviet Ukraine as follows:

His house cleaning was extremely thorough. By October 15 in those regions where the ongoing 1933 purge of the Party had been completed, of 120,000 members and candidates of the Communist Party of Ukraine that had been verified, 27,500 had been purged as hostile, vacillating, dissolute elements. Postyshev also revealed later, in November 1933 that he had brought in thousands of new appointees to Ukraine’s districts.³²

Teachers in rural districts constituted two-thirds (51,196) of 75,380 teachers on payroll in 1928–1929,³³ the turning point from the NEP to total state control, and their task was to bring about “socialist transformation” of society. Daria Mattingly has argued that teachers were driven by a variety of motives. Unlike professionals, such as the GPU, militias, and the army, who were trained to enforce policies with the use of violence, teachers recruited to assist authorities did not kill. Among teachers were opportunists (kar’ierysty) who used their position of power to benefit financially, settle scores with neighbors, or advance their career through deployment in collectivization, grain procurement, or propaganda campaigns. Fanatics (about 5 percent of perpetrators) were driven by ideology. Young female teachers could have been “compromised” because they were vulnerable; they participated because of explicit or implicit coercion, threats, or aggressive indoctrination.

The majority of perpetrators were conformists, who actively participated in grain procurement campaigns as evident from archival documents. In February 1933, a teacher-activist in the Kaniv district, Kyїv region, locked villagers in a dark room or poured cold water over their heads to force his victims to comply.³⁴ A member of the Militant Godless Society (bezbozhniki), M. K. Serhiïv, reported that teachers assisted authorities by questioning schoolchildren about any concealed grain at home. Typically, such questions were presented during high-stakes tests.³⁵ Delegates at local conferences reported about unearthing stockpiles of grain “hidden” by the kurkuli or by fellow teachers who allegedly “assisted” them.³⁶ Teachers who opposed grain requisitions in the Chernihiv region in March 1933 were purged from ranks of the Teachers’ Union and ended up in GPU prisons, being charged with “counterrevolutionary propaganda” for redistributing grain to the villagers and for helping the kurkuli “hide” the grain.³⁷ As Kas′ianov noted, by 1933, the society had been conditioned to use violence against intelligentsia that did not go along with the totalitarian system.³⁸ Teachers who survived the purges learned to comply with demands of the ruling elite.³⁹ Irrespective of their roles, their fate was quite fluid because perpetrators could easily turn into victims. Ultimately, as James Mace noted in his doctoral thesis: “The Ukrainian national intelligentsia, communist and non-communist, was virtually wiped out.”⁴⁰

ECONOMIC AFTERMATH

Scholars, who argue that the famine of 1932–1933 was a price to pay for rapid industrialization, fail to notice adverse effects industrialization had on the Ukrainian SSR. Economists have revealed that, as a result of the First Five-Year Plan, the republic, which in 1927 directly or indirectly controlled 81 percent of its industry, by 1932 controlled only 38 percent.⁴¹ Authorities in Moscow deprived the republic of its “economic capital,” thus undermining Ukraine’s bid to attain independent statehood. Industrialization demanded educated and experienced workers and supervisors, which meant dismissing an employee for not speaking Ukrainian was economically inefficient. Economic centralization necessitated that cadres, technical and political, become mobile and interchangeable from one end of the Soviet Union to another. In view of this need, in a multi-national state, language differences had to be de-emphasized. Language reforms increased Ukrainian divergence from Russian, and, from the point of view of Marxists, were “bourgeois nationalist” and “counterrevolutionary.” One common language, Russian, was the language of the Soviet industrial revolution.⁴²

Scholars also argue that Stalin faced an overpopulation crisis as Ukrainian provinces, after the emancipation of serfs and land redistribution in the late nineteenth century, had a surplus of 8 million farmers needing additional wages or land to subsist.⁴³ Migration of these Ukrainian farmers to Siberia and Kazakhstan partially solved the problem in the nineteenth century. However, in the 1920s, settlement of Siberia and Kazakhstan by Ukrainian farmers became involuntary. The Central Executive Committee of the USSR decreed the population transfer on July 30, 1926, and designated the Russian Far East, Siberia, Sakhalin, Murmansk, as well as free lands of the North Caucasus, Lower Volga, and South Urals as places of settlement for the Ukrainian agrarian population. This solution to the “overpopulation” of Ukraine in four years, from 1924 to 1928, forced nearly 142,000 Ukrainian farmers (24 percent of the internal migration) to resettle into grain-producing regions of the Russian republic.⁴⁴ They, too, became victims of famine, although demographers do not count them as Ukrainian losses.

Historically, migration to urban centers from Ukrainian provinces increased rapidly and followed the same pattern as in Russian provinces: between 1811 and 1910, population in Ukrainian cities increased by 600 percent⁴⁵ and in Russian cities by 800 percent.⁴⁶ By the 1930s, nearly 2.9 million Ukrainians were deported or exiled to the Russian republic, where their hard labor fueled industrial progress, while they subsisted on starvation diets in concentration camps and involuntary settlements servicing Soviet industrial projects.⁴⁷

Industrialization and urbanization, as George Liber has pointed out, “delayed the emergence of a mass-based Ukrainian nationalism.”⁴⁸ Migration to urban centers reoriented Ukrainian farmers’ sense of identity: they cut their ties to the countryside as well as to their mother tongue. Increased infusion of Russian speakers to Ukraine’s urban centers changed the balance of power in cities and in industrial occupations, as they became, in the words of Mykola Porsh, “cultural agents for de-nationalization.”⁴⁹ Therefore, attempts of the GPU to prosecute Ukrainian intelligentsia as leaders of the mass-based Ukrainian nationalist movement appear to be baseless. There was no mass-based nationalist movement, but a disorganized political opposition to Soviet policies of the 1930s.

Collectivization of agriculture achieved the opposite of what it was supposed to do; it broke the tie between cities and countryside. The ambiguous policy of korenizatsiia, the “rooting” of Soviet power in non-Russian provinces under the leadership of the urban proletariat, became irrelevant once the state initiated the liquidation of independent farmers, the carriers of the national tradition, and pushed them to work in collective farms. Over time, voluntary and involuntary migrants to industrial construction sites cut their bonds with their former villages and succumbed to pressures of Russification in urban centers or exile settlements in Soviet Russia. Defenders of local interests, including Ukrainian Marxist–Leninists, who stopped being unquestioning agents of the Kremlin, became “class enemies” and had to be destroyed. New cadres did not have to know the language of their own national group. S. D. Dimanshtein explained this ideological hegemony of the center as follows:

We do not need a “non-Russian in general,” we do not need an alien class element of any nationality. We need a non-Russian proletarian, a collective farmer, a fighter for socialism, a fighter for the working class. We need a non-Russian who is educated in international assignments of the proletarian revolution.⁵⁰

Scholars note that the conformity to Communist Party leadership in Moscow had to be reestablished in Soviet Ukraine. Periodic purges, coercion, and mass violence were the means to achieve these ends.⁵¹

Goals of a planned economy were closely linked to repressions. In 1930–1932, the Politburo of the TsK KP(b)U submitted lists to the TsK VKP(b) with the number of dekulakized farmers to be deported. In Moscow, these numbers corresponded to data on the “volume” of labor reserves required for construction projects in the Russian Far North and Siberia. Thus, repressions served as a means of mobilizing a cheap workforce, consisting mainly of forced labor, and covered up under various campaigns against clergy, well-to-do farmers, and “wreckers.”⁵² Communist leaders consciously deprived innocent people of their freedom, thereby committing crimes against humanity (Article 174 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, the deliberate prosecution of an innocent individual).⁵³ Peter Kardash has reminded that extermination of people on the grounds of their material status constitutes a crime against humanity under Article 6, clause (b) of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) Charter.⁵⁴ Executions of “anti-Soviet elements” were executions of people for their anti-communist beliefs. They constitute a crime against humanity under Article 6, clause (c) of the IMT Charter.⁵⁵ Indeed, the circulation of Soviet newspapers, posters, and books was paid for with lives of Ukrainians exiled to the Russian Far North to develop the lumber industry. Under pressure of evidence, attested to both by documents of perpetrators and testimonies of survivors, James Mace has noted: “the question ceases to become, How many millions died? One is forced to ask instead, How could so many still survive when literally everything was done to starve them to death? Each account is individual, but taken together their collective accounts of traumatization cannot fail to move even the most ‘scientific’ of historians.”⁵⁶

SOCIAL EFFECTS

Dispatches of foreign diplomats and oral histories of Holodomor survivors bear witness to dramatic shifts in national identity and social roles in Ukrainian society as a result of the historical trauma. In 1933, foreign diplomats openly acknowledged that Bolshevik policies in Ukraine were in part dictated by the necessity of “denationalizing those regions in which Ukrainian or German consciousness have awakened, threatening possible political difficulties in the future, and where, for the sake of the unity of the empire, it is better that a preponderantly Russian population reside.” These were observations of Sergio Gradenigo, Royal Consul of Italy, who wrote from the Kharkiv Consulate to the Embassy of Italy in Moscow on May 31, 1933, at the height of the genocidal famine:

This calamity, which is claiming millions of lives, is destroying the infancy of an entire nation and is really affecting only Ukraine, Kuban, and the Central Volga. Elsewhere it is felt much less or not at all.

In conclusion: The current disaster will bring about a preponderantly Russian colonization of Ukraine. It will transform its ethnographic character. In a future time, perhaps very soon, one will no longer be able to speak of a Ukraine, or a Ukrainian people, and thus not even of a Ukrainian problem, because Ukraine will become a de facto Russian region.⁵⁷

After the suicide of Mykola Skrypnyk, Royal Consul Gradenigo sent a confidential report to the Italian Embassy in Moscow on July 19, 1933, describing details of Skrypnyk’s death and warning about genocidal capabilities of the regime:

The dying man was carried to the university clinic, where he regained consciousness during the blood transfusion. He told Postyshev, who had come by, that the real danger for Communism lay in Russian imperialism, which was on the rise.

Proceeding at all speed at present is the reform of Ukrainian spelling (it has been stripped of the vocative which Russian, unlike Ukrainian, does not have). In government offices the Russian language is once again being used, in correspondence as well as in verbal dealings between employees.

[W]e can only conclude that the Ukrainian people are about to go into an eclipse, which could well turn out to be a night without end, because Russian imperialism, with its present tender mercies (i.e., tender Communist mercies), is capable of wiping a nation—nay, a civilization—right off the face of the earth if we aren’t very careful.⁵⁸

The Moscow’s intent “to settle the Ukrainian problem once and for all” had been clear to foreign observers for quite some time. The Royal Consul General in Odesa, in a confidential letter to the Italian Ambassador in Moscow on February 19, 1934, wrote:

The persecutions conducted against the Ukrainian intellectuals, accused of sympathizing with their colleagues and brothers in Galicia and Poland; the suicide of Skrypnyk, the Ukrainian Commissar for Public Education; the incarceration of numerous Germans accused of sympathizing with the Ukrainians; the withholding of the grain reserves from the peasants, which has turned Ukraine over the spring of last year into the site of an unprecedented famine, which according to reliable evidence has sent 7,000,000 people to their deaths; all of these things betoken the Moscow Government’s intention to use every means at their disposal to crush every last vestige of Ukrainian nationalism.

Ukraine used to be the sole major population center endowed with some degree of ethnic, linguistic and historical cohesiveness that was resisting Moscow’s centralization program. This obstacle may now be said to have been overcome.⁵⁹

Three years later, a report based on personal impressions of a German Consulate official in Kharkiv, in May 1936, illustrates the effects of the construction of a “Ukrainian Soviet culture.” The German diplomat observed,

Ukrainian Ukraine has been destroyed. According to approximate estimates, one-fifth of its 30-million population, or about 6 million, died from famine in 1932–1933. The people were now sufficiently weak to suffer the final blows of Moscow’s centralism: the elimination of the hitherto obligatory Ukrainian-language examination for officials and administrators, the “reorganization” of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, the “purge” of higher education, the destruction of millions of books and other printed materials of the pre-Postyshev era.

What is the situation in Ukraine today, now that Stalin’s prefect has already had two and one-half years for the “construction of a Ukrainian Soviet culture”? Here are several examples:

. . .

I have the opportunity to visit the highest foreign-policy official of Ukraine. He speaks no Ukrainian. In the People’s Commissariat of Ukraine, as I learn from him, Russian is spoken.

In the cities one hears almost nothing but Russian. Whoever speaks Ukrainian thereby shows that he is from the countryside and is backward.

Neither in Kiev, nor in Stalino [Donetsk], nor in Kharkov could I acquire a Russian-Ukrainian or Ukrainian-Russian dictionary. “This sort of thing” is no longer available.

The Ukrainian press is rarely bought. . . . There is no Ukrainian literature. There is hardly a Ukrainian book that is not a translation from the Russian. There are no longer any Ukrainian history books.⁶⁰

The German consulate official, returning after a multi-week travel throughout Ukraine, reported his observations as follows:

I visited schools in various places. The impression is everywhere the same. The schools mostly consist of parallel classes. Class A has Russian as the language of instruction; class B has Ukrainian as the language of instruction. Parents may choose the language of instruction for their children. Completely Ukrainian schools are rare, as Ukrainians also frequently send their children to Russian schools. The sections with Russian as language of instruction devote 5 hours per week to Russian-language instruction and 3 to Ukrainian. The Ukrainian section has 5 hours per week of Ukrainian-language instruction and 3 hours of Russian-language instruction. This parallel system is intentionally constructed to enable Russian to dominate as the children’s conversational language. Moreover, the teachers in the Ukrainian section are primarily Russians, and in the Russian section they are often Ukrainians. I made this observation in 6 of 8 schools that I visited. The writing abilities of the pupils in the Ukrainian classes are noticeably bad. . . . Hardly a child completes school with adequate knowledge of Ukrainian orthography. . . . That the majority of even the urban Ukrainian population still chooses the Ukrainian language of instruction for their children, despite obvious discrimination against Ukrainian, shows how deeply rooted the consciousness of linguistic and cultural specificity still is in the people. Lectures in the universities of Kiev and Kharkov and in the higher educational institutions of Stalino are almost exclusively in Russian.⁶¹

In a report on the political situation in Ukraine in 1933, the German Consulate official under the subsection, “The Ukrainian Question,” assessed the population’s sentiment as follows:

Characteristic of the population’s mood is the widespread view that the Soviet government promoted the expansion of the famine so as to force the Ukrainians to their knees. The frequently heard cynical comment made by individual communists—“We do not fear the hungry; it is the well-fed who are dangerous to us!”—has contributed to strengthening this feeling, even if it hardly corresponds to the view of the party leadership.

Moscow has recognized the tenseness of the situation and has even artificially increased it by the claim of German and Polish attempts at separating Ukraine.⁶²

The report was written on January 15, 1934, and Hitler’s accession to power and the prospect of Ukraine’s liberation appeared politically dangerous to Soviet leaders. Assessing the role of Postyshev, Stalin’s confidant, who was sent to Khrakiv with unlimited powers to eliminate the danger of “separatist” tendencies in Ukraine, the report noted that he “produced the preconditions for an assault on the Ukrainian front.”⁶³ The report further described how the assault on the Ukrainian national development unfolded:

The signal was the removal of Education Commissar [Mykola] Skrypnyk, who had long been a representative of an emphatically Ukrainian Communist orientation. He was followed by high officials in the central apparatus in Kharkov and by leading personalities in the provinces. In the jurisdictional area professors of the Academy of Sciences and of Kiev University, directors of the Institute of Linguistics and the Kiev Film School, school directors, many employees of the “education front,” and officials lost their positions and sometimes their freedom. They were all accused of working on behalf of the counterrevolution by promoting Ukrainian chauvinism—be it in language, scholarship, or literature, or be it in administrative regulations. Secret organizations with supposed ties to “German and Polish fascism” were uncovered in ways that enabled the GPU [secret police] to demonstrate once again its talent for constructing highly treasonous intrigues. . . . Revelations of so-called organizations must be regarded with skepticism. They serve above all as a deterrent against any Ukrainian tendency and remind the people of the intensified vigilance of the GPU. A new phase in the struggle against Ukrainianism has begun with the well-known November resolutions of the supreme Party leadership in Kharkov. While they also mention the danger of “Great Russian chauvinism” in addition to “Ukrainian chauvinism,” this should be regarded as only a theoretical concession to the Ukrainian masses. In reality, a continually intensifying “Great Russian Communist chauvinism” is the current rule for Soviet policy in Ukraine.⁶⁴

These personal observations of the German Consulate official are corroborated by a Jewish journalist Mendel Osherowitch, who in early 1932 traveled to Ukraine, the land of his birth, to visit his family and write a series of articles under the title, How People Live in Soviet Russia.⁶⁵ One chapter in his travel notes is devoted to the fear of the GPU across the country. Without the “strongest pillar”—the GPU and many of its overt and covert agents—Stalin’s regime would collapse. Osherowitch mused that it would take another writer with Dostoyevsky’s talent to evoke a reader’s horror and let the world know just how much fear the GPU inspired in the population. Osherowitch’s brother served in the GPU.

In June 1934, the capital was transferred back to Kyїv, the historic capital of Ukraine dating from medieval times. In Soviet times, the capital of Ukraine had been Kharkiv, an industrial city, where Bolsheviks established themselves in their first attempt to take over Ukraine. The transfer marked the triumph over Ukrainian nationalism, and the reporter of the Christian Science Monitor (Boston) presented the news under the title, “Separatism in Ukraine Suppressed.” The reporter observed, “‘Symbol of victory over the nationalist elements in Ukraine’ is Izvestiia’s, the government’s newspaper, description of tomorrow’s official transfer of the Ukrainian capital from Kharkov to Kiev.”⁶⁶ The shift in capitals from Kharkiv to Kyїv in 1934 was not the victory of the Ukrainian countryside over the Russified industrial centers. Kyїv did not follow social trends of other industrialized capitals such as Budapest, Prague, or Warsaw. Instead, it was the victory of Soviet power over “nationalistic counterrevolution.”⁶⁷

Not only was national identity shifted but also social roles in families. Feminist scholars have identified cultural factors that accounted for gender differences in how men and women experienced the Holodomor. In a patriarchal Ukrainian society, most of the first victims were heads of households. In the absence of their husbands, arrested and exiled to the Russian Far North and Siberia, women had to assume responsibilities of defending themselves and their families. The state eventually took over the role of the “father” figure, thus destroying a traditional social structure and altering gender roles in the Ukrainian family.⁶⁸

State-sanctioned violence not only damaged women’s reproductive health but also undermined their role as mothers.⁶⁹ Physiological factors accounted for a lower mortality rate among women, a tendency observed in other famines.⁷⁰ Yet, there seems to be no physiological protection for those women, who against their biological instinct and socially cultivated image as self-sacrificing mothers, ate their own children in the madness of survivor cannibalism.⁷¹ Although such cases were reported in all regions affected by famine, they were rare (less than one-third of 1 percent of population). Many mothers, overcome by pangs of hunger, were forced to abandon their children on doorsteps of state-run orphanages⁷² in desperate hopes, largely futile, that the government would be a better caretaker.⁷³

PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS

Historians, who have examined the period from the 1920s to the 1930s, define it as a rupture in the life of Ukrainian society that “affected . . . social psychology, mentality, and culture.”⁷⁴ Section (b) of Article II of the U.N. Convention on Genocide states that causing serious bodily or mental harm is one of the elements of crime of genocide.⁷⁵ Hundreds of Ukraine’s intellectuals and thousands of its best farmers endured mental suffering in OGPU labor camps and forced settlements. An estimated 60,000 “counterrevolutionaries” were among the “labor army” building the White Sea–Baltic Sea Canal.⁷⁶

In 1930–1932, an internal investigation by a special commission of the OGPU uncovered abuse of power by a dozen notorious camp guards at the White Sea–Baltic Sea Canal. The guards systematically tortured, humiliated, and killed prisoners to cover up administrative crimes.⁷⁷ Besides beatings, bribery and drinking were rampant, women were forced into prostitution or raped, and food rations of the imprisoned were stolen. From the first steps in the Kem′ transit station, the imprisoned were greeted by guards and accompanied throughout the day with beatings and Russian expletives, so they internalize that “the power here is not Soviet, but Solovets” and there was no prosecutor with whom to file complaints. The imprisoned were put naked “on the stones” or kept in unheated cells. In summer, they were exposed naked to mosquitoes, or perched on a narrow plank where they were forced to sit still in a crouched position. For a minor violation of the rules, the imprisoned were beaten up by virtually everybody, from overseers to convoys to guards, or locked into “wagons” (unheated isolation log cells) to freeze, or incarcerated into a cube 1 meter in height with all the walls inside covered with sharp wooden slivers, so the condemned would lose their minds and die. When out in the forest on timbering assignments, they were routinely left to freeze. Mock executions were rampant. Mock “leave of absence notes” were given out for failure to complete an assignment, which resulted in carrying a log with a written note on it all the way from the forest a few kilometers back to the camp. The imprisoned were forced to carry water from one ice-hole to another, or to shovel snow from one side of the road to another side, or to cry out “gull one,” “gull two” up to 2,000 times. Lawlessness was absolute.⁷⁸

The camp administration pretended not to see these abuses. Violence was institutionalized, so prosecuting a dozen of the most notorious guards did not affect the system. Among the guards were former White and Red Army officers, former Soviet officials, and even former OGPU officers. After the investigation, twelve guards were convicted, three were executed, and the rest were sentenced from three to eight years in various OGPU camps as prisoners.⁷⁹ As one notorious guard stated during his testimony:

This entire system of beatings and torture of prisoners was precisely the system, and not just isolated cases. The civilian administration was well aware of it and condoned it by not taking any measures to stop it. . . . Thus, everyone, who applied beatings, knew it was permitted, and the bosses approved of it.⁸⁰

The thesis that the goal of the camps was to forge criminals into useful members of society does not hold water because the majority of these “criminals” did not commit any crime and were not in need of any “remediation.”⁸¹

The phenomenon of harmful psychological effects, according to Robert Conquest, can be explained by fear and lack of trust.⁸² How could this be otherwise in a society with a distorted moral code? The OGPU infiltrated all spheres of life with thousands of secret agents (seksot) who overheard conversations and denounced neighbors. In the atmosphere of total terror and suspicion, deliberately stimulated by the ruling regime, denunciations were regarded as an act of civic duty.⁸³ Olesia Stasiuk has convincingly demonstrated that the genocide led to the breakdown of moral foundations of society. Respect for the elderly, humaneness, kindness, honor, dignity, mercy were sanctioned, whereas denunciations were considered acts of patriotism and “class vigilance.”⁸⁴ Mass denunciations affected people’s psychological well-being, leading to depression, rage, irritability, and doom because the family fabric was torn apart when children denounced their parents and husbands denounced wives or vice versa for a reward of 10–15 percent of confiscated food.⁸⁵ The OGPU did not keep records of violations of law, so no traces were left of total lawlessness.⁸⁶ Arbitrary executions by troikas—a trio of party, OGPU, and a local lumpen activist—without a trial, further led to the deterioration of the sense of justice.⁸⁷

One of the most shocking manifestations of dehumanization during the Holodomor was cannibalism. Scholars have identified a thousand cases of those convicted of cannibalism, and this is a unique indictment of the communist regime.⁸⁸ Photographs that documented these cases have survived in the State Archives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Soviet Ukraine, but as Hennadii Boriak pointed out, “the public is still not ready today to accept these grisly photo and text records.”⁸⁹ Examining these cases of ultimate degradation, Olga Bertelsen explained that people’s mental activities and cognitive processes became fully subordinated to one obsessive thought: where to obtain food. Due to prolonged starvation and uncertainty about when and where to find food, “the flow of other thoughts and ideas was disrupted, which facilitated intellectual and moral degradation.”⁹⁰ When people are deprived of food, the human brain functions in a way that cultivates and strengthens the mode of primitive perceptions and limited intellectual strivings.⁹¹ Consequently, memory weakens but memories associated with food or activities related to food sharpen and stay vivid until the death of a starving person.⁹² According to Holodomor survivors’ memoirs, people no longer engaged in normal daily human activities, such as maintaining proper hygiene, cooking, marrying, sexual relations, and the like.

Starving people committed horrid crimes to survive, and in the process surrendered the ideals of freedom both on individual and collective levels.⁹³ In the words of the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev, “freedom is always difficult; slavery is always easy,” and a by-product of a hijacked enslaved mentality of “the fallen” is violence.⁹⁴ Scholars explain that food deprivation and the threat of dying paralyzes the will for freedom, free speech, and intellectual activities. Struggle for freedom becomes physically and mentally impossible for victims. Slavery appears to them a more attractive option than death. In the case of starving individuals in Soviet Ukraine, their inclination to violence was conditioned physiologically and biochemically. The fabric of society in Soviet Ukraine was transformed: social ties within families were weakened or broken, “altruism, humanism, and self-sacrifice, typical human phenomena in calamity-free times, evaporated and were replaced by extreme egocentrism and animalistic behavior.”⁹⁵

Like other historians and medical professionals who studied the effects of extreme starvation, Olga Bertelsen found that the genocidal famine of 1932–1933 had particularly catastrophic effects on the behavior, social conduct, and mentality of women; more women were prosecuted for cannibalism. Psychiatrists believe cannibalism is a symptom of a mental disorder and a delusion maintained despite being contradicted by socially accepted codes of behavior. Women turned to crime because they could not escape from the “double bind”⁹⁶ situations that threatened their survival and resulted in dramatic changes in their personality and self-identity. Women turned ovens and gardens into burial places for “unusable” parts of human heads and bones, either from their own child, husband, or passerby. Bolshevik henchmen and “devils in military uniforms” (the OGPU) created conditions incompatible with life causing mental suffering among victims-turned-criminals.

Although cases of cannibalism were limited to rural districts of Ukraine, teachers were aware of this phenomenon and warned their children to be vigilant and stay home instead of risk being kidnapped on the road to school.⁹⁷ The ghettoization inside the sealed Ukrainian borders concealed the crime, exacerbating the famine and the people’s transgressions. Bertelsen noted that archival documents, oral histories, and written testimonies about human suffering in 1932–1933 place Soviet Ukraine on the “map of moral geography”⁹⁸ and in the discourse about the depth of degradation, individual as well as collective provoked and instigated by the state.

Historical trauma of the Holodomor has been analyzed through the psychological prism of individual, collective, and cultural trauma. Historian Vitalii Ohienko pointed out that images of agony and death surrounding victims for prolonged periods of time in their homes, on the streets, or in schools led to stress, depression, dysfunction, and pathological behavior. Using methodology, proposed by psychologists who study post-traumatic stress disorder, Ohienko identified individual and collective characteristics of behavior that affected Holodomor survivors: apathy numbed the living, a defense mechanism survivors developed to distance themselves from painful realities; fear gave way to helplessness; the brutality of fellow human beings led to distrust and slavish passivity; resignation to the inevitability of death deprived victims of the will to live; desensitized witnesses were no longer disturbed by the sight of human skeletons heaped on roadsides or in backyards of railway stations; and burial rituals were no longer performed, and the process of grieving was disrupted.⁹⁹

Scholars studying the social and psychological consequences and long-term effects of the Holodomor concluded that tools of social control used by Bolsheviks included not only concentration camps and prisons to break the will of opponents of the regime but also propaganda campaigns to brainwash and whip up enthusiasm among their supporters. Ideology was used to monopolize collective consciousness. “Sticks-and-carrots” policies rewarded the enthusiasts with food rations, apartments, and promotions, while “rewarding” the objectors with starvation rations, bunkbeds in prisons, and eventually executions by the troikas. Some syndromes and symptoms of psychological disorders identified in scholarly literature include:

· fear (hunger psychosis, fear of authority)

· distrust (of neighbors and the world at large)

· degradation (moral and physical)

· misapplication of law (criminalization of society)

· learned helplessness (code of silence)

· loss of expertise (agricultural techniques, entrepreneurship)

· fatalistic disposition

· survivor syndrome

· escapism (living in a dual reality)

· identification with aggressors (the Stockholm syndrome)

· the Homo Sovieticus syndrome (inability to think independently, dependence on the state).

One of the durable characteristics of chronic collective trauma is a Stockholm syndrome. Iryna Reva found evidence among Holodomor descendants that suggests the existence of a psychological alliance between the Ukrainian people and the aggressor.¹⁰⁰ The result was an impulse to appear loyal to Soviet rather than national identity and a fear of using the Ukrainian language. Helpless and servile victims of the Holodomor in Ukraine had to identify with their perpetrators.¹⁰¹ Survivors of OGPU labor camps described how bread was given out ritualistically from the hands of perpetrators to condition their victims into submission. Ohienko noted that this method of disciplining was used on collective farms when food was distributed to those who worked in return for loyalty to the regime but left those jobless, infirmed, and young without means to survive.¹⁰² In her memoir “Skazhy pro shchaslyve zhyttia...” (“Speak of the Happy Life...”) Anastasiia Lysyvets′, who was attending school during the Holodomor, vividly described how food was used as a conditioning tool to punish the recalcitrant and to reward the compliant.¹⁰³ Was the underlying goal of the repressive regime to create a new Soviet identity, fostered by fears of re-traumatization, as some scholars argue? The goal was much more mundane: the regime had a large army of Communist Party bureaucrats and OGPU functionaries with their dependents, who did not produce but struggled to survive.¹⁰⁴ An investigation into the distribution of food rations for the privileged Soviet elite and the cost of their vacations at various health resorts is still shrouded in secrecy, and even today, files in the former Communist Party archive with this information are sealed and inaccessible to researchers. Full recovery from the effects of Stockholm syndrome plaguing the Ukrainian psyche might take several generations.

It typically takes more than two generations—Macauley says five—to destroy the memory of earlier times.¹⁰⁵ Outcomes of historical traumas, such as wars, genocides, and famines, are transmitted epigenetically and have a neurobiological impact on mental health of survivors and their descendants.¹⁰⁶ Additional mechanism of trauma transmission, sociocultural, has psychological consequences: changed worldviews, attitudes, and behaviors.¹⁰⁷ Ukrainian psychologists Viktoriia Gorbunova and Vitalii Klymchuk studied the sociocultural transmission of post-traumatic stress disorder among second, third, and fourth generations of Holodomor survivors (721 persons). They found close connection between a pattern of keeping silent about traumatic events that occurred during the Holodomor and the extent of suffering that respondents’ families experienced during the Holodomor. The researchers also found close connection between the avoidance of Holodomor-related topics and a denial and devaluation of Holodomor events within families, especially among individuals who did not know much about the traumatic events during the Holodomor. The most widespread behavioral strategies within families corresponded to trauma-related themes such as eating habits and attitude to food. Researchers suggested that truthful trauma-focused storytelling within families and within communities that have traumatic events in common can decrease the psychological consequences of transgenerational traumas.¹⁰⁸

HISTORY AND MEMORY

History was not taught as a separate subject in Soviet schools of the 1920s.¹⁰⁹ After a decade of Bolshevik rule in Ukraine, in 1931, the Central Committee issued a resolution “On the Primary and Middle School,” which listed history among basic subjects requiring systematic teaching. Fitzpatrick emphasized that drafters of the resolution were simply listing “basic subjects” that they themselves had learned at school rather than making any political or ideological point.¹¹⁰ In its resolution in 1932, the Central Committee noted that history programs had not been written, and urged a more historical approach to the teaching of social studies. In 1933, another resolution abolished “journal-textbooks” and directed that regular textbooks be prepared for all basic subjects. A year later, on May 15, 1934, the Central Committee and Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union jointly issued a decree “On the Teaching of Civil History in Schools.”¹¹¹ In a follow-up resolution, the Central Committee recommended: “Chronological historical sequence in the setting out of historical events, firmly fixing in the minds of pupils important historical events, historical personages, and dates.” It attacked “abstract sociological schemes” and “abstract definition of socio-economic formations.”¹¹² James Mace commented on the teaching of history in post-genocide Soviet Ukraine:

In November, 1934, a decree on the teaching of history was published. This decree condemned what had hitherto been the official interpretation of Russian history, that czarist Russia had been an empire which oppressed “its colonies and a new ideology of Soviet patriotism was enunciated, rehabilitating Russian imperial history, czars and all.”

In late summer of 1935, a decree, signed by Molotov and Stalin, took school administration out of the hands of Soviet republics, placing it under the control of authorities in Moscow. It ordered curricula and textbooks be standardized throughout the Soviet Union and, from January 1936, a school uniform—identical throughout the Soviet Union—be worn by all children.¹¹³

This uniformity remained decades later. In her autobiography, Eleanor Roosevelt confided that after her second visit to Soviet Russia in the late 1950s, her observations of the conditioning of children in the Soviet Union troubled and alarmed her. She wrote the Soviet youth were conditioned into “disciplined, amenable citizens, prepared to obey any orders given them and incapable of revolt,” and two pages later added: “they have little or no desire for freedom.” It was a remarkable achievement of the Soviet educational system seen through the eyes of an outside observer:

“Their conditioning and training has been carefully thought out to prevent deviation of any kind, on any level, from birth to death. . . . This large-scale conditioning of human beings is something so new in the world that we cannot grasp it.”¹¹⁴

This large-scale conditioning created a new type of Soviet historian. Often referred to as Homo Sovieticus, this human being was modern on the outside but a socio-psychological wreck on the inside, with a traumatized consciousness, dependent on ideological myths fed by Communist Party leaders. Not all Soviet historians were alike; there were conformists and non-conformists, national communists, internal opponents, and, of course, dissidents. The trend toward communization of history and historians started not in 1933, but soon after the Bolshevik reconquest of Ukraine in 1919. Soviet Ukrainian historian Iaroslav Kalakura admitted that the “ideology of vulgar Marxism” and stifling “historical materialism” became tools of the struggle for socialism; they constrained Ukrainian historians and teachers of history. Communist Party loyalty, rather than historical truth, served as the principle of objectivity. This led to distortion of the role of historians as social scientists who use primary sources to reconstruct the past and critique narrative constructions of reality. It turned them into “fighters on the ideological front” or servants of the Communist Party catering to the regime, interpreting and justifying its policies. Characteristics of this history writing system were

1. reliance on one methodology sanctioned by one political party;

2. commissioned topics for research;

3. strict censorship and review of manuscripts at all stages of publication;

4. centralized history curricula;

5. selection of cadres based on political rather than academic merit; and

6. privileges for heads of history departments or institutes equivalent to privileges enjoyed by Communist Party nomenklatura.¹¹⁵

Although Soviet authorities succeeded in editing the Holodomor out of public memory for as long as the regime lasted, memories persisted in families in Ukraine and beyond its borders in the diaspora. Among Ukrainian diaspora organizations in the United States, the Americans for Human Rights in Ukraine (AHRU) played a pivotal role in supporting human rights and establishing historical truth about the genocidal famine in 1932–1933, when Soviet authorities brutally punished any talk about this topic.¹¹⁶ The AHRU was behind several legislative initiatives bringing international attention to the persecution and imprisonment of Ukrainian human rights activists and establishing a U.S. Congress Commission on the Ukraine Famine to set a historical record some fifty years after the atrocity. The relevant bill was introduced in 1984.¹¹⁷ Public Law 99-180 authorized the Commission to gather available information on the famine perpetrated by the Soviets, to analyze its causes and effects on the Ukrainian nation, to study the response of the free world to this atrocity, and to provide an insight into the Soviet system of governance to bring about a realistic approach to dealings with the USSR.¹¹⁸ In 1987, the first report of the Commission circulated in the United States. After the report was sent to first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Volodymyr Shcherbyts′kyi, he acknowledged the famine in his speech to a party meeting on the seventieth anniversary of the establishment of Soviet rule in Ukraine.¹¹⁹ Scholars consider this one of the greatest achievements of the AHRU in that it influenced the Soviet policy and moved Ukraine closer to its eventual independence. Eyewitness testimonies were collected through oral history project interviews with more than 200 survivors willing to testify before the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine. The Commission published its report in April 1988, followed by three volumes of eyewitness accounts in 1990. Suppressed memories have spontaneously resurfaced in postindependence Ukraine, stimulated by writers and testimonies of living survivors and their children.¹²⁰

All individual stories told by witnesses have established a narrative of this traumatic historical event. The experience of trauma has left its traces on people’s psyches.¹²¹ Psychological reverberations persisting from generation to generation due to the enforced silence need to be further explored. Another direction for further research is the understudied area of deliberate shortages of food supplies to teachers in rural schools. Diaries and memoirs written by teachers and about teachers, educational periodicals, letters, and works of literature about schools during the 1930s need to be further studied to deepen our understanding of this chapter of history. Statistical data compiled by the Commissariat of Education, especially enrollments in primary schools, need to be systematically examined by demographers as an alternative way of estimating the extent of Holodomor losses in Ukraine. Analyzing the curtailment of the Ukrainization policy beyond the borders of Soviet Ukraine in ethnically Ukrainian settlements in Soviet Russia could dispel the myth of “all-Union” famine and shed light on the eradication of language and culture as a defining characteristic of genocide against Ukrainians.

On November 7, 2015, a new monument was unveiled in Washington, D.C. Written on the monument are the words “Holodomor 1932–1933.”¹²² As James Mace, executive director of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine, poignantly noted, “It is a unique term that has arisen from the depths of a victimized nation itself.”¹²³ The bronze rectangular sculpture bears an image of a wheat field; stalks progressively fading away from high relief on the left to no relief on the right, as if all wheat has disappeared. It is a symbol of genocide by forced starvation, masterminded by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union with its sentinel, the security police. Symbolically, in 1969, the design architect of the National Holodomor Memorial Larysa Kurylas was a student in the seventh-grade class in Taras Shevchenko School of Ukrainian Studies in Washington, D.C., and her teacher was Varvara Dibert, the oldest witness to testify before the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine twenty years later.¹²⁴

Ahead of a ribbon-cutting ceremony, in August 2015, a Russian news outlet Sputnik launched a disinformation¹²⁵ campaign, dismissing the Holodomor as a “hoax” created by neo-Nazis in Ukraine with financial support from the West.¹²⁶ After the Revolution of Dignity of 2013–2014, toppling pro-Russian corrupt government of Viktor Yanukovych, the Holodomor has become one of the most critical discursive formations for both Ukrainians and Russians, albeit for different reasons.

Putin’s history war has become part of his hybrid war against Ukraine. Although definitions can be imprecise and far from universal, Hans Petter Midttun, the Norwegian Defense Attaché in Ukraine from 2014 to 2018, offered his conceptualization of the Russian hybrid war as the parallel and synchronized use of both military and non-military means in an attempt to weaken and subdue Ukraine from within.¹²⁷ War in the information space has become part of a concerted strategy of total war encompassing the use of economic, political, diplomatic, religious, legal, security, cyber, and military instruments.¹²⁸

In Ukraine, a “post-genocidal society,”¹²⁹ Putin’s interpretation of history ignites traumatic memories of Stalin’s extermination by hunger in 1932–1933, when a theory of “unified proto-Russian people” was reestablished, jeopardizing the survival of Ukraine’s national historical narrative. For fifteen years, until the early 1930s, Mykhailo Hrushevs′kyi’s paradigm of Ukrainian national history and other historical accounts of Russia and Kyїvan Rus′, including Marxist historical narratives, “existed side by side.”¹³⁰ Although historians, like Matvei Liubavskii, embraced the statist approach to all-Russian history, “giving greater prominence to the history of Southwestern Rus′,” they had not gone as far as Hrushevs′kyi, who completely separated Ukrainian history from that of Russia.¹³¹ Hrushevs′kyi believed that Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians each “deserved a history of their own.”¹³² Yet, after Stalin consolidated his power and subdued Ukraine, Hrushevs′kyi’s interpretation was marginalized and replaced by the canon imposed by Moscow. Soviet disinformation succeeded in hiding the truth from the West about the 1932–1933 famine¹³³ and in rewriting Hrushevs′kyi’s history, emphasizing the friendship between the “brotherly nations,” Ukrainians and Russians, who together had fought the “enemies” of the Soviet state. Ukrainian teachers, who embraced Hrushevs′kyi’s narrative, and for whom their national Bard and Prophet Taras Shevchenko’s verses exemplified the national liberation struggle, were harassed and fired. One such teacher, among many, was Pastushko from Artemivs′k, who was denounced and dismissed as a “follower of ‘Ukrainian fascists’ (!?) Hrushevs′kyi, Iefremov, and Hermaize.”¹³⁴

In commemorating the eighty-fifth anniversary of the Holodomor-genocide in 2018, on the last Saturday of November, then President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko put historical responsibility for the Holodomor on the Russian Federation as the successor to the former Soviet Union.¹³⁵ He announced that he proposed to amend the constitution to make permanent a new direction in Ukraine’s foreign policy, affirming that Ukraine would be fully integrated into NATO and the European Union: “there will be no future Holodomor, no Great Purge, [and] no Russification.”¹³⁶ In response, on the following day, Sunday, November 25, 2018, President Putin ordered an attack on Ukrainian vessels in the Black Sea.¹³⁷ This action was not only an act of war, it also violated the Freedom of the Sea as enshrined in international law. Poroshenko appealed to Ukraine’s partners, the signatories of the Budapest Memorandum, and EU member states to protect Ukraine.¹³⁸ At a press conference, when asked about Russia’s commitment to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty under the Budapest Memorandum, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov changed the subject and suggested that Ukraine’s leaders are illegitimate. Lavrov went as far as to call Ukrainian people who stood on barricades of the Euromaidan, in 2013–2014, to preserve their freedom and dignity in the face of the corrupt pro-Russian Yanukovych regime “radical nationalists” and “neo-Nazis.”¹³⁹

As Russia has rediscovered a sense of geopolitical self-confidence, lost after the Soviet collapse, such conduct has become increasingly frequent. Putin, who was appointed Prime Minister in August 1999 by then ailing Russian President Boris Yeltsin, rose to power with the orchestrated outbreak of the second war in Chechnya, a prelude to Russia’s aggressive tactics in its “near abroad.”¹⁴⁰ Russia attacked Georgia in August 2008 behind the smokescreen of the Beijing Olympics, and in March 2014 annexed Crimea in southern Ukraine behind the smokescreen of the Sochi Olympics. Russia’s occupation of the Donets′k and Luhans′k regions in eastern Ukraine in April 2014 followed. Cease-fire after cease-fire has been violated, resulting in over 13,000 Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers being killed, and over 2 million people internally displaced as airports, schools, hospitals, and roads were shelled to rubble.¹⁴¹

Alongside the war for territory, the war for history has emerged as an important feature of Putin’s reign, becoming a symbol of the country’s bid to reassert its regional as well as global influence. In February 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a lengthy interview to the Russian state news agency TASS, in which he shared his views of Ukrainian history.¹⁴² This interview revealed his interpretation of the history of Russian–Ukrainian relations based on the idea of Russians and Ukrainians being “one people,” sharing a language and cultural traditions, but who had been artificially separated. Persistence of this understanding of history and the process by which Russian nationalists have subordinated and distorted Ukrainian history, emphasizing the narrative of “unification,” have been examined in numerous studies.¹⁴³ More recently, scholars have observed a new cycle of militarization in Russia,¹⁴⁴ in the tradition of Peter the Great and Joseph Stalin, which might propel Vladimir the (not so) Great¹⁴⁵ to world leadership and regional dominance, sustaining the Soviet historical narrative glorifying the greatness and the exclusivity of Russians, their language, and culture under a new guise—the “Russian World.”¹⁴⁶ Rival historical interpretations are both possible and desirable. However, as Oleksiy Goncharenko noted,

When history is weaponized by an aggressor as part of an attack on the country, there can be no room for ambiguity. The sooner we acknowledge the role of history within Russia’s wider hybrid war against Ukraine, the more effectively we will be able to respond to the challenges this creates.¹⁴⁷

The challenge for Ukraine is Russia’s global daily diet of misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies that seek to undermine Ukraine as a viable political state and exploit tensions to destroy society. In Ukraine, ethnic nationalism might not be strong, but civic identity is increasingly consolidated.¹⁴⁸ The danger is that amid the health crisis caused by the novel coronavirus pandemic, which may further exacerbate the economic crisis, pro-Russian forces in Ukraine might engage in hounding of Holodomor scholars and persecuting participants of the Revolution of Dignity while silencing voices of protest.¹⁴⁹ If the current Ukrainian authorities fail to promote a national historical narrative, a foreign and hostile force will attempt to fill the void with a narrative imposed from outside. “Defeat in the history war will automatically mean the loss of national identity. Ultimately, this will lead to the loss of the country itself,” warned Ukrainian lawmaker with the European Solidarity party Oleksiy Goncharenko.¹⁵⁰

When a resolution by Russia’s State Duma refused to recognize the Holodomor as genocide, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the author of The Gulag Archipelago ¹⁵¹ and Nobel Prize laureate, backed the official Russian line, dismissing the notion that the famine of 1932–1933 in Soviet Ukraine was a genocide by referring to it as a “fable.”¹⁵² Ideologically close to Solzhenitsyn and driven by his vision of Russia as a unique “state civilization,” Putin openly takes pride in his past as a chekist, restoring the old Soviet political police traditions, methods, and values.¹⁵³ Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, there are signs that a “new GULAG is emerging in Russia slowly and insidiously.”¹⁵⁴ To quote Robert Conquest,

[u]ntil this horrible piece of history is openly exposed and denounced by the successors of Stalin it remains a demonstration of the background against which they made their careers, and of the system as a whole. Until they publicly purge themselves of this guilt, until they break with this horror in their past, they remain not only its heirs, but also its accomplices.¹⁵⁵

Unfortunately, repentance for the crimes of their predecessors called for by Serhii Holovatyi, Minister of Justice of Ukraine, in a foreword to the ChK in Ukraine, goes against the principles of the chekists’ successors who view it as unnecessary and harmful because it might besmirch their reputation.¹⁵⁶

Putin is attempting to redefine the world order by imposing his own strategic narrative.¹⁵⁷ This new paradigm has been famously described by the Russian political analyst Lilia Shevtsova as “political schizophrenia” or the Kremlin’s Triad: “To be with the West; to be inside the West; and to be against the West.” In this way, Moscow is pursuing

“an exemplary post-postmodern policy comprised of incompatible elements and blurred lines between principles and norms, war and peace, right and wrong, reality and imitation, ally and enemy, law and lawlessness, and internal and external conflict.”¹⁵⁸

The Russian political regime is fighting for its survival, using a hybrid war saturated in deceptions, but has little to offer, except Global Order a la Russe.

To counter Russian ideological influence, experts suggest that Ukraine has to put its narrative into a broader international context, highlighting its central role in European history from the days of Kyїvan Rus′ to the Ukrainian experience at the epicenter of twentieth-century totalitarianism. This approach will debunk the Russian myth about the “all-Union” famine, as well as other myths emanating from the Soviet era (i.e., Ukraine and Russia being “brotherly nations”). As long as the plunder of Ukraine and the mass killing of Ukraine’s citizens by forced starvation in 1932–1933 and deportations go unrecognized by Russia and the international community at large, the risk of further violence remains. To stop the war against Ukraine, Russia and partners in the Normandy Four¹⁵⁹ must live up to their global responsibility and restore justice, letting the Ukrainian nation fulfill its historic mission without coercion from Russia, a member of the U.N. Security Council. In order to secure its future, Ukraine must first win the fight for its past.

Scholars have yet to agree on how to characterize the period from 1921 to 1934: historians refer to it as the “cultural revolution,” writers call it the “Executed Renaissance,” and lawyers define it as Soviet genocide against Ukrainians.¹⁶⁰ Despite disagreement over the chronological delineation, most scholars gravitate toward the broad rather than narrow definition of the Holodomor as genocide in the 1920s–1930s.¹⁶¹ Popularized by the writer and civic activist Ivan Drach the term “Holodomor” has been carved into the depths of Ukrainian national memory.¹⁶² Teachers as guardians of the historical memory have had professional and individual responsibilities. A sense of responsibility motivated nonconformity among teachers by focusing on preserving national traditions, rather than serving the regime under heightened pressure to conform, and by teaching their students that truth would prevail.¹⁶³ This stance echoes Václav Havel’s ideas, expressed in his influential essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” written in October 1978, when the revisionist historians challenged the totalitarian paradigm. Havel advised his readers that the potential power in counteracting constant and total manipulation of society by the brutal and arbitrary regime lay in being unafraid to make a moral choice and to live as a responsible individual, “in truth.”¹⁶⁴

NOTES

1. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 3.

2. Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 170.

3. Victor Rud, “Comments Re: Podcast on the Holodomor at The Pursuit,” email message to a group of the Holodomor scholars, February 25, 2020. Victor Rud is a board member of the Ukrainian American Bar Association and chairman of its Committee on Foreign Affairs.

4. Antonovych, “Individual and Collective Intent,” 59.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. See Orna Ben-Naftali and Miri Sharon, “What the ICJ Did Not Say About the Duty to Punish Genocide,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 5, no. 4 (2007): 859, 869. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague in its opinion of February 26, 2007, recognized an affirmative obligation to prevent genocide, showing that state has an obligation to prevent genocide under Article I. The Court articulated that “responsibility is not incurred simply because genocide occurs, but rather if the State manifestly failed to take all measures to prevent genocide which were within its power, and which might have contributed to preventing genocide.” See International Court of Justice, Press Release No. 2007/8, February 26, 2007, www.icj.cij.org. Thanks to Bohdan A. Futey, Senior Judge of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C., for bringing this court decision to my attention (personal communication, November 28, 2020).

8. Smeulers, “Perpetrators of International Crimes,” 233–65.

9. Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

10. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie, ed. Marianne Weber (Tübingen: Mohr, 1922; 5th ed., ed. Johannes Winckelmann, 1980), 531–40.

11. Hennadii Iefimenko, “Kozhnomu – za vyznachenymy partiieiu potrebamy. Iak bil′shovyky maizhe pobuduvaly komunizm,” Dilova stolytsya, February 28, 2021, https://www.dsnews.ua/ukr/nasha_revolyutsiya_1917/kozhnomu-za-viznachenimi-partiyeyu-potrebami-yak-bilshoviki-mayzhe-pobuduvali-komunizm-28022021-417232.

12. Dmitrii Volkogonov, Lenin: Politicheskii portret, 2 vols., vol. 1 (Moscow: Novosti, 1994), 186.

13. Grossman, Forever Flowing, 74.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., 227.

16. Ibid., 228–29.

17. Ibid., 229–30.

18. Ibid., 230.

19. Kołakowski, “The Marxist Roots of Stalinism,” 156–76.

20. Smeulers, “Perpetrators of International Crimes,” 244.

21. Ibid., 245.

22. International Commission of Inquiry into the 1932–33 Famine in Ukraine: The Final Report (Stockholm: Stockholm Institute of Public and International Law, No. 109, 1990). The text of the report is available at https://web.archive.org/web/20081001225745/http://www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/Holodomor/Holodomor-Commission.pdf. See also “International Commission of Inquiry,” in Holodomor, eds. Luciuk and Grekul, 315.

23. Ibid., 330.

24. Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 329–30; Report to Congress, 34–35; Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 166.

25. Barbara B. Green, “Stalinist Terror and the Question of Genocide: The Great Famine,” in Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, ed. and with an Introduction by Alan S. Rosenbaum with a Foreword by Israel W. Charny (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), 194.

26. Ammende, 144–45; quoted in Holodomor, eds. Luciuk and Grekul, 320.

27. Kolasky, Education in Soviet Ukraine, 19.

28. Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 170.

29. P. P. Postyshev, Borot′ba za Lenins′ko-Stalins′ku natsional′nu polityku partiї (Kyїv: Derzhavne vyd-vo Ukraïny, 1935), 64–65.

30. President’s Separate Opinion: Professor Jacob Sundberg, “International Commission on Inquiry into the 1932–33 Famine in Ukraine,” in Holodomor, eds. Luciuk and Grekul, 322.

31. Chervonyi shliakh (Kharkiv), nos. 2–3, 1934; quoted in Hryshko, The Ukrainian holocaust of 1933, 13; see also Holodomor, eds. Luciuk and Grekul, 320.

32. Mace, 66; quoted in Holodomor, eds. Luciuk and Grekul, 321.

33. Iefimenko, “Sotsial′ne oblychchia vchytel′stva,” 150.

34. TsDAVOU, f. 2717, op. 2, spr. 1673, ark. 21.

35. Arkhivni naukovi fondy rukopysiv ta fonozapysiv Instytutu mystetstvoznavstva, folklorystyky ta etnolohiï im. M. Ryl′s′koho NAN Ukraïny, fond M. K. Serhiiva, chlena Spilky voiovnychykh bezvirnykiv, f. 30, od. zb. 124, ark. 1 zv.–5.

36. TsDAVOU, f. 2717, op. 2, spr. 1689, ark. 11–12.

37. TsDAVOU, f. 2717, op. 3, spr. 1689, ark. 15.

38. Kas′ianov, “Ukraïns′ka intelihentsiia v 1933 r.,” 98.

39. Mattingly, “[Extra]ordinary Women,” 64.

40. Mace, 300; quoted in Holodomor, eds. Luciuk and Grekul, 321.

41. Vsevolod Holubnychyi, “History of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, 1917–1941,” in Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopedia, ed. Volodymyr Kubijovyč (Toronto: published for the Ukrainian National Association by University of Toronto Press, 1963–1971, 2 vols.), vol. 1, 818; Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 171.

42. Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 171.

43. M. N. Leshchenko, Klasova borot′ba v ukraїns′komu seli na pochatku XX stolittia (Kyїv: Politvydav Ukraïny, 1968), 33; Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 11.

44. B. D. Lanovyk, M. V. Traf’iak, R. M. Mateiko, and Z. M. Matysiakevych, Ukraïns′ka emihratsiia vid mynuvshyny do s′iohodennia (Ternopil′: Charivnytsia, 1999), 291.

45. I. K. Vologodtsev, Osobennosti razvitiia gorodov Ukrainy (Kharkov: Derzhvydav “Gosp-vo Ukrainy,” 1930), 49, 51; Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 11.

46. Thomas S. Fedor, Patterns of Urban Growth in the Russian Empire during the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago, Department of Geography Research Paper No. 163, 1975), 40; Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 12.

47. Lanovyk, Traf’iak, Mateiko, and Matysiakevych, Ukraïns´ka emihratsiia, 291–92.

48. Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 15.

49. Mykola Porsh, “Robitnytstvo Ukraїny: Narys po statystytsi pratsi,” Zapysky Ukraїns′koho naukovoho tovarystva v Kyїvi, no. 12 (1913): 134–35.

50. Andrew C. Janos, “Ethnicity, Communism, and Political Change in Eastern Europe,” World Politics 23, no. 3 (1971): 505; Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 173–74.

51. Janos, “Ethnicity, Communism, and Political Change in Eastern Europe,” 519; Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 174.

52. Chukhin, Kanalo-armeitsy, 209–12.

53. Peter Kardash, Genocide in Ukraine, trans. Daria Myrna (Melbourne: Fortuna Publishing, 2007), 8.

54. See Nuremberg Trial Proceedings, vol. 1, Charter of the International Military Tribunal, The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, 2008, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/imtconst.asp#art6.

55. Kardash, Genocide in Ukraine, 12.

56. James E. Mace, “Is the Ukrainian Genocide a Myth?” in Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Soviet Ukraine, eds. Lubomyr Y. Luciuk and Lisa Grekul (Kingston: Kashtan Press, 2008), 55.

57. Report by the Kharkiv Consulate Royal Consul, Sergio Gradenigo, May 31, 1933, “Re: The Famine and the Ukrainian Question,” in Report to Congress, 424–25, 427; original text in Lettere da Kharkov, ed. Graziosi, 168–74; quoted in The Holodomor Reader, eds. Klid and Motyl, 280.

58. Report by the Kharkiv Consulate Royal Consul, Sergio Gradenigo, July 19, 1933, “Re: After the Suicide of Mykola Skrypnyk,” in Report to Congress, 446–47; quoted in The Holodomor Reader, eds. Klid and Motyl, 282.

59. “Letter from the Royal Consul General in Odesa to the Italian Ambassador in Moscow, 19 February 1934,” in Report to Congress, 475; quoted in The Holodomor Reader, eds. Klid and Motyl, 283.

60. German Consulate, Kyїv, May 1936, “Bericht auf Grund von persönlichen Eindrücken bei einer mehrwöchigen Reise durch die Ukraine: Ukrainische Ukraine?,” in Holodomor v Ukraїni 1932–1933 rokiv za dokumentamy politychnoho arkhivu Ministerstva zakordonnykh sprav Federatyvnoї Respubliky Nimechchyny, ed. A. I. Kudriachenko (Kyїv: Natsional′nyi instytut stratehichnykh doslidzhen′, 2008), 326–28; quoted in The Holodomor Reader, eds. Klid and Motyl, 277.

61. Ibid., 278.

62. German Consulate, Kyїv, January 15, 1934, “Politischer Jahresbericht 1933,” in Holodomor v Ukraїni 1932–1933 rokiv, ed. Kudriachenko, 172–82, 187–88; quoted in The Holodomor Reader, eds. Klid and Motyl, 275.

63. Ibid., 276.

64. Ibid.

65. Mendel Osherowitch, “The Fear of the GPU Across the Country,” in How People Live in Soviet Russia: Impressions from a Journey, ed. Lubomyr Y. Luciuk, trans. Sharon Power (Toronto: University of Toronto Chair of Ukrainian Studies and The Kashtan Press, 2020), 187–96.

66. Holodomor, eds. Luciuk and Grekul, 322.

67. Liber, Soviet Nationality Policy, 170.

68. Oksana Kis, “Defying Death: Women’s Experiences of the Holodomor, 1932–1933,” Aspasia, no. 7 (2013): 42–67.

69. O. Pakhl′ovs′ka, “Maty i antykhryst: vidlunnia holodomoru v literaturi,” Urok ukraїns′koї, no. 1 (2004): 36–38. See also Oksana Kis, “Women’s Experience of the Holodomor: Challenges and Ambiguities of Motherhood,” Journal of Genocide Research, October 23, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2020.1834713.

70. Margaret Kelleher, “Woman as Famine Victim: The Figure of Woman in Irish Famine Narratives,” in Gender and Catastrophe, ed. Ronit Lentin (London: Zed Books, 1997), 241–54; David Fitzpatrick, “Women and the Great Famine,” in Gender Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Public and Private Spheres, eds. Margaret Kelleher and James H. Murphy (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1997), 50–69.

71. Vasyl′ Marochko, “Kanibalizm v roky Holodomoru,” in Holod 1932–33 rokiv v Ukraїni: prychyny ta naslidky, eds. Valerii Smolii et al. (Kyїv: Naukova dumka, 2003), 568–75. See also Snyder, Bloodlands, 62–64.

72. Artem Kharchenko, “‘. . . potribni bil′sh kvalifikovani robitnyky’: kolektyvnyi portret personalu syrotyntsiv naperedodni Holodomoru,” Ukraїna moderna, January 5, 2019, https://uamoderna.com/md/kharchenko-orphans.

73. Kis, “Defying Death,” 55–56; idem, “Women’s Experiences of the Holodomor,” 12–16.

74. Oleksandr Udod, “Istoriia povsiakdennosti iak skladova istoriï Ukraïny XX st.,” Istoriia ta pravoznavstvo, nos. 19–21 (2007): 105.

75. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 280.

76. Chukhin, Kanalo-armeitsy, 219.

77. Known as case No. 877, the investigation found the following to be guilty of “criminal deviation in class approach to correctional policy of the Soviet government”: (1) Igor Kurilko, (2) Konstantin Belozerov, (3) Abram Shreider, (4) Vladimir Goncharov, (5) Sergei Belykh, (6) Kuzma Rzhevsky, (7) Valentin Brainin, (8) Aleksander Maisuradzhe, (9) Timofei Gnipp, (10) Leonid Khoruzhik, (11) Wilhelm Kanep, and (12) Aleksander Zubov. See Chukhin, Kanalo-armeitsy, 231.

78. Chukhin, Kanalo-armeitsy, 232–33.

79. Ibid., 235–37.

80. Ibid., 238.

81. Ibid., 211.

82. Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 288.

83. Lidia Kovalenko and Volodymyr Maniak, eds., 33-i holod: Narodna Knyha-Memorial (Kyїv: Radians′kyi pys′mennyk, 1991), 212–13.

84. Olesia Stasiuk, “Donosy, kradizhky, samosudy v roky Holodomoru iak naslidok represyvnoї polityky,” in Holodomor 1932–1933 rokiv: Vtraty ukraïns′koї natsiї. Materialy mizhnarodnoï naukovo-praktychnoï konferentsiï, Kyїv, 4 zhovtnia 2016, eds. Olesia Stasiuk et al. (Kyïv: Vyd. Oleh Filiuk, 2017), 178.

85. Svidchennia T. S. Lytveniuk (born 1922), Pryburivka village, Lypovets′kyi district, Vinnytsia region, and Iu. F. Berezny (born 1933), Brovky Pershi village, Andrushivs′kyi district, Zhytomyr region, in Arkhiv Natsional′noho muzeiu “Memorial zhertv Holodomoru”; quoted in Stasiuk, “Donosy, kradizhky, samosudy,” 176, 178.

86. Solovey, Golgota Ukraïny, 169.

87. Stepan Drovoziuk, “Vysvitlennia dukhovnykh aspektiv henotsydu 1932–1933 rr. v ukraïns′kii istoriohrafiï,” in Henotsyd ukraïns′koho narodu: istorychna pam’iat′ ta polityko-pravova otsinka: Mizhnarodna naukovo-teoretychna konferentsiia, Kyїv, 25 lystopada 2000 r., eds. V. A. Smolii et al. (Kyїv–New York: Vyd-vo M. P. Kots′, 2003), 300.

88. Boriak, Sources, 27.

89. Ibid., 14.

90. Olga Bertelsen, “Women at Sites of Mass Starvation: Ukraine, 1932–1933,” in Women and the Holodomor-Genocide: Victims, Survivors, Perpetrators, ed. Victoria A. Malko (Fresno: The Press at California State University, 2019), 36.

91. Ancel Keys, Josef Brožek, Austin Henschel, Olaf Mickelsen, and Henry Longstreet Taylor, The Biology of Human Starvation, 2 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1950). Conquest also pointed out to cannibalism as a manifestation of mental disorders caused by starvation. See Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 257–58.

92. Sorokin, Man and Society in Calamity, 29.

93. Olga Bertelsen, “‘Hyphenated’ Identities during the Holodomor: Women and Cannibalism,” in Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators, eds. Elissa Bemporad and Joyce W. Warren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 77–96.

94. N. A. Berdiaev, “O rabstve i svobode cheloveka: Opyt personalisticheskoi filosofii,” Biblioteka “Vekhi,” 2001, http://www.vehi.net/berdyaev/rabstvo/012.html.

95. Bertelsen, “Women at Sites of Mass Starvation,” 37.

96. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), 206–10; quoted in Bertelsen, “Women at Sites of Mass Starvation,” 42–43.

97. Personal communication with Dr. Lubow Jowa, daughter of Holodomor survivors, and president of the Ukrainian Heritage Club of Northern California. Together with her late father, Dr. Jowa played a crucial role in activities of the Americans for Human Rights in Ukraine (AHRU) in support of human rights movement in the Ukrainian SSR.

98. Bertelsen, “Women at Sites of Mass Starvation,” 45.

99. Vitalii Ohienko, “Posttravmatychnyi stresovyi syndrom i kolektyvna travma v osobystykh naratyvakh svidkiv Holodomoru,” Ukraïna moderna, April 6, 2018, http://uamoderna.com/md/ogienko-holodomor-trauma.

100. Iryna Reva, Po toi bik sebe: sotsial′no-psykholohichni i kul′turni naslidky Holodomoru ta stalins′kykh represii (Dnipropetrovs′k: A. L. Svidler, 2013).

101. Andrii Bondarchuk, “‘Stokhol′ms′kyi syndrom’ iak kintseva meta totalitarnoho rezhymu: vid vytokiv do suchasnosti,” Litopys Volyni, no. 20 (2019): 55–64, http://www.litopys.volyn.ua/index.php/litopys/article/view/153.

102. Vitalii Ohienko, “Holodomor ochyma zhertvy: immobilizatsiia ta upokorennia pratseiu iak stratehiia vyzhyvannia,” Ukraïna Moderna, January 20, 2020, http://uamoderna.com/md/ogienko-holodomor.

103. Anastasiia Lysyvets′, “Skazhy pro shchaslyve zhyttia . . .” (Kyїv: KIS, 2019).

104. Stanislav (Taras) Mel′nyk (b. 1929, Kyїv, Ukraine), personal communication, July 15, 2019. In 1933, he was only four years old, when his starving mother, jeopardizing their own lives, sent her child to crawl to steal grain from a state stockpile, located in the vicinity of a railway station in Luk’ianivka. Given his young age at the time of the event, his memories could be shaped by stories of his mother. After World War II, he was mobilized to serve in the Soviet army. He recalled that soldiers were always hungry and often violated the leave of absence policy to procure bread. The Communist Party recruited cadres aggressively, especially in the army. After his service in the army, he inherited his father’s tailor shop. All his life until retirement, he worked as a tailor in a special atelier “Kommunar,” a designer bureau for dressing up Ukrainian Communist Party and government officials and members of their families. He headed workers’ union and stood in defense of workers’ rights. In his last conversation with the author, Stanislav Mel′nyk emphasized that the key to understanding the Soviet food policy was the system of privileges and food rations created by Lenin to feed Bolsheviks. The system had been in place until the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is the system of perks and privileges that the ruling elite of the former Soviet Union cherished the most because they had instant access to delicacies and products that were out of reach to the masses of workers.

105. Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 28.

106. Natan P. F. Kellermann, “Epigenetic Transmission of Holocaust Trauma: Can Nightmares Be Inherited,” The Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences 50, no. 1 (2013): 33–39; Kelly Skelton et al., “PTSD and Gene Variants: New Pathways and New Thinking,” Neuropharmacology 62, no. 2 (2012): 628–37.

107. Brent John Louis Bezo, “The Impact of Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma from the Holodomor Genocide of 1932–1933 in Ukraine” (doctoral diss., Carleton University, 2011); Brent Bezo and Stefania Maggi, “The Intergenerational Impact of the Holodomor Genocide on Gender Roles, Expectations and Performance: The Ukrainian Experience,” Annals of Psychiatry and Mental Health 3, no. 3 (2015): 1–4; Brent Bezo and Stefania Maggi, “Living in ‘Survival Mode’: Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma from the Holodomor Genocide of 1932–1933 in Ukraine,” Social Science & Medicine, no. 134 (2015): 87–94.

108. Viktoriia Gorbunova and Vitalii Klymchuk, “The Psychological Consequences of the Holodomor in Ukraine,” East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies 7, no. 2 (2020): 33–68.

109. Nicholas S. Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, Inc., 1946), 165.

110. Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 230–31.

111. Narodnoe obrazovanie v SSSR, 166–67; quoted in Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 231.

112. Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 231.

113. Ammende, 144, note 1; quoted in Holodomor, eds. Luciuk and Grekul, 322.

114. Roosevelt, Autobiography, 389, 391–92.

115. Iaroslav Kalakura, “Kompleks ‘sovkovosti’ postradians′koï istoriohrafiï,” Ukraïna – Ievropa – Svit: Mizhnarodnyi zbirnyk naukovykh prats′ (Ternopilʹ: Vyd-vo TNPU named after V. Hnatiuk, 2015), vol. 2, 163–74.

116. For more on the history of the organization, see Tetiana Perga, “Role of Americans for Human Rights in Ukraine in the Support of Human Rights Movement in Ukrainian SSR,” American History and Politics, no. 5 (2018): 63–71.

117. Ihor Olshaniwsky, head of the AHRU, studied documents of the U.S. Congressional Commission on the Jewish Holocaust and proposed to create an identical commission primarily for research on the Ukrainian famine. New Jersey Congressman James J. Florio and Senator Bill Bradley supported the idea. However, when Florio introduced the bill in 1984, Democratic Party leaders in the House did not agree to submit the bill for consideration, arguing that American taxpayers’ money should not be spent on something that happened decades ago. Ukrainian grassroots organizations sent thousands of individual and collective petitions to the White House, Congressional committees and subcommittees, and the House of Representatives. The eventual passage of the bill in the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee was in large part due to personal influence of Dr. Myron Kuropas, deputy head of the AHRU. See “Four to Testify at Senate Hearings on Famine Commission Measure,” Ukrainian Weekly, July 29, 1984, 1; Perga, “Role of Americans for Human Rights in Ukraine,” 67–68.

118. “Bill to Establish a Commission to Study the 1932–1933 Famine Caused by the Soviet Government in Ukraine (H.R. 4459 in the House of Representatives, S. 2456 in the Senate),” Ukrainian Weekly, April 1, 1984, http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/1984/148419.shtml.

119. “Shcherbytsky Says Famine Was a Result of Collectivization of Soviet Agriculture,” Ukrainian Weekly, January 10, 1988, http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/1988/028801.shtml; Stanislav Kulchytsky, “James Mace’s Role in Exposing Stalin’s Greatest Crime,” Day, June 15, 2004, https://day.kyiv.ua/en/article/history-and-i/james-maces-role-exposing-stalins-greatest-crime.

120. In 2017, the Holodomor Research and Education Center (HREC) in Ukraine initiated a “Holodomor Family History Global Database” project with the goal to create the world’s largest online source of stories of individual people and entire families—Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, Greeks, Russians, Germans, Bulgarians, and others—before, during, and after the Holodomor of 1932–1933 in the Ukrainian SSR. Coordinators of the project are ethnologist and journalist Iaroslava Muzychenko and collector of Holodomor victim testimonies Vira Annusova of Luhans′k. The electronic database has over 3,000 testimonies from family archives and small print-run scholarly publications. Access to the resource was scheduled to open on the eve of the eighty-fifth anniversary of the Holodomor on the portal HREC in Ukraine. See “HREC in Ukraine,” Ukrinform, April 27, 2018, https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-society/2450243-we-will-preserve-the-memory-of-the-holodomorgenocide-and-the-fates-of-our-families-and-bring-life-stories-to-the-world-that-will-inspire-people-in-the-future.html.

121. Oksana Kis′, “Kolektyvna pam’iat′ ta istorychna travma: teoretychni refleksiï na tli zhinochykh spohadiv pro Holodomor,” in U poshukakh vlasnoho holosu: Usna istoriia iak teoriia, metod, dzherelo, eds. Helinada Hrinchenko and Nataliia Khanenko-Friezen (Kharkiv: Skhidnyi Instytut Ukraïnoznavstva im. Koval′s′kykh, 2010), 180–91.

122. Located at the intersection of North Capitol Street, Massachusetts Avenue, and F Streets N.W., the memorial was designed by Larysa Kurylas and built by the National Park Service and the Ukrainian government to honor the victims of the genocidal famine in Ukraine and educate the American public. See Deborah K. Dietsch, “Local Architect Designs Washington Memorial to Victims of Genocidal Famine in Ukraine,” Washington Post, July 24, 2014; and “Holodomor Memorial Presented in Washington,” UNIAN, August 5, 2015, https://www.unian.info/world/1108244-holodomor-memorial-presented-in-washington.html.

123. Mace, “Is the Ukrainian Genocide a Myth?,” in Holodomor, eds. Luciuk and Grekul, 57.

124. Larysa Kurylas, “With Gratitude to the Sisterhood: Reflections on the Creation of the National Holodomor Memorial,” Our Life (published by UNWLA), November 2020, 20–21.

125. Ladislav Bittman, The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider’s View (Washington: Pergamon-Brassey’s International Defense Publishers, 1985) and Martin J. Manning and Herbert Romerstein, “Disinformation,” Historical Dictionary of American Propaganda (Westwood: Greenwood Press, 2004).

126. Ekaterina Blinova, “Holodomor Hoax: Joseph Stalin's Crime That Never Took Place,” Sputnik News, August 9, 2015, http://sputniknews.com/politics/20150809/1025560345.html#ixzz3iXdnBIyY.

127. Hans Petter Midttun, “Hybrid War in Ukraine – Predictions for 2019 and Beyond,” Euromaidan Press, April 18, 2019, http://euromaidanpress.com/2019/04/18/hybrid-war-in-ukraine-predictions-for-2019-and-beyond/.

128. Janis Berzins, “Russia’s New Generation Warfare in Ukraine: Implications for Latvian Defense Policy” (report from the National Defence Academy of Latvia and the Center for Security and Strategic Research), Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners Blog, April 30, 2014, http://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2014/04/russias-new-generation-warfare-in.html.

129. Mace, “Is the Ukrainian Genocide a Myth?,” 57.

130. For a discussion about pre- and post-revolution Russian historical writings, see Plokhy, Unmaking Imperial Russia, 346; Panteleimon Kovaliv, Vstup do istorii skhidn′ioslov’ians′kykh mov (New York: Shevchenko Scientific Society, 1970), 24–25.

131. Plokhy, Unmaking Imperial Russia, 106.

132. Ibid.

133. Taras Kuzio and Paul D’Anieri, “The Soviet Origins of Russian Hybrid Warfare,” E-International Relations, June 17, 2018, https://www.e-ir.info/2018/06/17/the-soviet-origins-of-russian-hybrid-warfare/.

134. Iurii Mytsyk, “Chystky natsionalistiv u shkolakh 1934 r. (za materialamy kolyshn′oho Dnipropetrovs′koho oblasnoho partarkhivu),” in Ukraїns′kyi holokost, ed. Mytsyk, vol. 3, 260.

135. “Poroshenko Blames Russia as USSR Successor for 1930s Famine,” Interfax-Ukraine, November 24, 2018, https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/547761.html.

136. “Poroshenko: Istorychna vidpovidal′nist′ za Holodomor – na Rosiis′kii Federatsiï,” Ukraïns′ka Pravda, November 24, 2018, https://www.pravda.com.ua/ukr/news/2018/11/24/7199187/index.amp.

137. Alex Johnson, “Russia Attacks, Seizes Ukrainian Vessels in Black Sea off Crimea,” NBC News, November 25, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ukraine-crisis/russia-attacks-seizes-three-ukrainian-naval-vessels-coast-crimea-black-n939876.

138. The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances was signed on December 5, 1994 by the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States, guaranteeing Ukraine’s sovereignty in return for dismantling its nuclear arsenal. Neither the Russian Federation nor the United Kingdom have recognized the Holodomor as genocide.

139. “Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s Remarks and Answers to Media Questions at a News Conference,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, November 26, 2018, https://www.mid.ru/en/press_service/minister_speeches/-/asset_publisher/7OvQR5KJWVmR/content/id/3420700.

140. Victoria A. Malko, The Chechen Wars: Responses in Russia and the United States (Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2015), v.

141. Catherine Wanner, “Commemoration and the New Frontiers of War in Ukraine,” Slavic Review 78, no. 2 (2019): 329.

142. See Andrei Vandenko’s video interview with President Vladimir Putin, “20 Questions with Vladimir Putin: Putin on Ukraine,” TASS, February 20, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG6dxqwxGE4.

143. Among others, see Serguei Ekeltchik, “History, Culture, and Nationhood under High Stalinism: Soviet Ukraine, 1939–1954” (thesis, University of Alberta, 2000), 30–31; Konstantin Sheiko and Stephen Brown, History as Therapy: Alternative History and Nationalist Imaginings in Russia, 1991–2014 (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2014). One of the first attempts to remedy Soviet and Russian nationalist historiographical deformations was undertaken in 1981 in the West: see Ivan L. Rudnytsky, ed. (with the assistance of John-Paul Himka), Rethinking Ukrainian History (Edmonton: University of Alberta, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1981).

144. See interview with Igor Kliamkin on cycles of militarization and demilitarization in Russian history in Irina Chechel and Aleksandr Markov, “Zatukhaiushchaia tsyklichnost′,” Gefter, November 6, 2012, http://gefter.ru/archive/6660.

145. Leon Aron, “Vladimir the (not so) Great,” Wall Street Journal, May 31–June 1, 2014, C1.

146. Kuzio, “Putin Forever.”

147. Oleksiy Goncharenko, “Ukraine Cannot Stay Neutral in Putin’s History War,” Atlantic Council, April 21, 2020, https://atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/ukraine-cannot-stay-neutral-in-putins-history-war/.

148. Hans Petter Midttun, “What If Russia Wins in Ukraine? Consequences of Hybrid War for Europe (Part 2),” Euromaidan Press, May 22, 2020, http://euromaidanpress.com/2020/05/22/what-if-russia-wins-in-ukraine-consequences-of-hybrid-war-for-europe-part-2/.

149. In April 2020, the State Bureau of Investigation summoned Volodymyr V’iatrovych, the former director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, and charged him with “abuse of power” (conviction carries with it a term of five to eight years of imprisonment) and “embezzlement of state funds” for organizing a scholarly forum. The International Forum “Ukraine Remembers! World Acknowledges!” was held in November 2018. It brought scholars from fifty countries to the scholarly meeting which raised international awareness about the Holodomor. Criminal charges were also brought against ex-President Poroshenko. The most extraordinary of charges was “action aimed at the violent change or overthrow of the constitutional order or seizing of state power” (Article 109 paragraphs 1, 2 of Ukraine’s Criminal Code). The number of criminal investigations against the previous administration, known for its pro-Western stance, has been on the rise. These developments prompted participants of the Revolution of Dignity to publish an open letter warning that under neglect of the authorities, “the pro-Russian forces and agents of the Kremlin” in Ukraine have engaged in revisions of the national historical narrative.” The signatories of the letter—some 200 individuals and a dozen organizations—raised their concern that Ukraine’s European orientation and chances of EU membership may come to naught. They demanded that the avalanche of fabricated criminal cases against the leaders of the Revolution of Dignity and defenders of Ukraine’s freedom cease. See “Zvernennia uchasnykiv Revoliutsiї Hidnosti proty revanshu,” Tyzhden′, May 6, 2020, https://m.tyzhden.ua/Politics/243374.

150. Goncharenko, “Ukraine Cannot Stay Neutral in Putin’s History War.”

151. The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, a three-volume, non-fiction text written between 1958 and 1968, was first published in 1973 in the West, followed by an English translation in 1974.

152. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Possorit′ rodnye narody??,” Izvestiia, April 2, 2008, 2.

153. Julie Fedor, Russia and the Cult of State Security (New York: Routledge, 2011), 119.

154. Paul Goble, “A New GULAG Is Emerging Just as Stalin’s Did Slowly and Insidiously, Gudkov Warns,” Euromaidan Press, August 17, 2018, http://euromaidanpress.com/2018/08/17/a-new-gulag-is-emerging-just-as-stalins-did-slowly-and-insidiously-gudkov-warns/; on the consistency of Solzhenitsyn’s and Putin’s views vis-à-vis Russia and Ukraine, see Taras Kuzio, “Disinformation: Soviet Origins of Contemporary Russian Ukrainophobia,” in Russian Active Measures: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, ed. Olga Bertelsen (Stuttgart and New York: ibidem-Verlag and Columbia University Press, 2021), 137–75.

155. Conquest, Kolyma, 231.

156. Bertelsen, “A Trial in Absentia,” 64.

157. Douglas E. Schoen and Evan Roth Smith, Putin’s Master Plan to Destroy Europe, Divide NATO, and Restore Russian Power and Global Influence (New York: Encounter Books, 2016).

158. Lilia Shevtsova, “The Kremlin’s Triad as the Means of Survival,” The American Interest, April 19, 2016, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/04/19/the-kremlins-triad-as-the-means-of-survival/.

159. The Normandy Four is a consultative body of the foreign affairs ministers of Ukraine, Germany, France, and Russia. In October 2019, the Bundestag refused to recognize the Holodomor as genocide, leaving many convinced that economic profits from the German-Russian joint venture of Nord Stream 2 pipeline traversing the Baltic Sea had taken precedence over the human rights and historical justice.

160. Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 116; Michael David-Fox, “What Is Cultural Revolution?” The Russian Review 58, no. 2 (1999): 181–201; Iurii Lavrinenko, Rozstriliane vidrodzhennia: Antolohiia, 1917–1933 (Kyïv: Smoloskyp, 2004); Lemkin, “Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine,” 1–8.

161. “Holodomor in the Context of Genocide: A Narrow vs Broad Definition of Genocide,” 3, 9. A summary of survey findings was distributed by Lana Babij via email to members of the Holodomor Educators Network on October 19, 2019.

162. Olga Andriewsky, “Toward a Decentered History: The Study of the Holodomor and Ukrainian Historiography,” in Contextualizing the Holodomor: The Impact of Thirty Years of Ukrainian Famine Studies, eds. Andrij Makuch and Frank E. Sysyn (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2015), 15.

163. Personal communication with Vira Annusova (b. 1956), a school teacher from the village Baranykivka, Bilovods′k district, Luhans′k region, Ukraine, November 20, 2019.

164. Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless” (Essay), October 1978, 21. First published in the International Journal of Politics in 1979; available from the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict at https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/resource/the-power-of-the-powerless/.