The content for these biographical sketches and definitions of key terms are drawn mostly from Volodymyr Kubijovyč, ed., Entsyklopediia ukraïnoznavstva, vols. 1–8 (Paris; New York: Vyd-vo “Molode zhyttia,” 1955–1976) and the English translation of these entries in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, hosted by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (2001), http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/. Terms specific to the Holodomor-genocide are drawn from authoritative and recently completed references: Vasyl′ Marochko’s Entsyklopediia Holodomoru 1932–1933 rokiv v Ukraïni (Drohobych: “Kolo,” 2018) and Holodomor-henotsyd: terminolohiia (Kyïv: Natsional′nyi muzei Holodomoru-henotsydu, 2019). Other specialized reference sources include A Dictionary of Scientific Communism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1984); Stanislav Kulchytsky, The Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine: An Anatomy of the Holodomor, trans. Ali Kinsella (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 2018), 149–60; and Matthew D. Pauly, Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923–1934 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 349–57.
ahitatsiia, or agitation (from Latin agitatus, to stir up public feeling), is a political activity, which uses all possible channels of information in order to influence the population behavior.
Agitprop, or agitation and propaganda departments, were tools of the Communist Party to control the minds of the population in the Soviet Union.
aktyv is a term used to describe active supporters of Soviet ideology and economic policy. The term was used in periodicals in the 1930s to laud loyalists of the Communist Party. Among activists were dvadtsiatyp’iatytysiachnyky (25,000ers), or Russian-speaking urban workers, dispatched to Soviet Ukraine. They also included village soviet members, appointed to oversee ten to twenty local households. They served as informers, who helped Bolshevik colonial authorities uncover so-called “anti-Soviet sentiments” among the local population. Activists also served in buksyrni bryhady that confiscated grain.
all-Union famine is a term introduced in 2007 by Russian historians to divert attention from the national component of the Holodomor as genocide.
Ewald Ammende (1893–1936) was an Estonian journalist, human rights activist, and politician of Baltic German origin, tapped in 1933 by Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Vienna to head an Interfaith Relief Committee to aid victims of the Great Famine, known as the Holodomor. In 1935, he published a widely circulated book in German, Muss Ruβland hungern? Menschen und Völkerschicksale in der Sowjetunion (1935). The following year, a slightly abridged English translation was published, Human Life in Russia (1936). His book was the best survey of press accounts of starvation in Soviet Ukraine, the only source at the time that pointed to the link between the genocidal famine and Soviet nationality policy.
ARA, or American Relief Association, was directed by Herbert Hoover, future president of the United States. The U.S. Congress appropriated $20,000,000 under the Russian Famine Relief Act of 1921. The ARA fed approximately 10 million people in Russia, mostly in the Volga region. In late 1922, the ARA extended its operations to Soviet Ukraine. The ARA operations were delayed until anti-Soviet resistance in the Ukrainian countryside was suppressed. The ARA services ended in 1923, when it became known that the Soviet government was exporting grain.
balanda was a low-calorie liquid soup, made from meat refuse, such as intestines, with mixture of flour, ladled to the prisoners of labor camps after the workday.
Vsevolod Balyts′kyi (1892–1937), born in Ukraine, was the first head of the GPU in the Ukrainian SSR from September 1923 to July 1931. Concurrently, he was deputy head of the OGPU in the Soviet Union from July 1930 to July 1934 and specially authorized plenipotentiary representative of the OGPU in the Ukrainian SSR between November 1932 and February 1933. From July 1934 to May 1937, he served as People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs (NKVD) in Soviet Ukraine. In 1937, he was arrested and executed during the Great Terror.
bandura is a Ukrainian stringed instrument of the lute family. It has fifty strings, including short auxiliary strings along the body. It evolved from an instrument that appeared in the sixteenth century. Traditionally, it was played by a kobzar or minstrel, often a Cossack who had been blinded in captivity. The repertoire consisted primarily of the duma, a type of a folk ballad about Cossack exploits. The duma was an epic song built around historical events and embedded with religious and moralistic elements. Although many themes deal with military action in some form, they impart a moral message in which one should conduct oneself properly in the relationships with the family and community. In December 1934, on Stalin’s order, 337 Ukrainian kobzars and lyre players were lured to a gathering and later shot, together with the boys who acted as guides for blind musicians, on the outskirts of the village of Kozacha Lopan′ near Kharkiv. Their unique Ukrainian banduras were burned. See Yuri Mischenko, “Orest Skop: Cossack Mamai,” The Ukrainian Museum, New York, NY, June 12–September 25, 2016, http://www.ukrainianmuseum.org/ex_160612_SkopCossackMamai.html.
bezbilkovyi nabriak was a typical diagnosis of protein deficiency dropsy that was written in civil registry records that concealed the true cause of death due to severe and prolonged starvation.
bezbozhniki (in Ukrainian bezvirnyky) were members of the Union of Militant Atheists of the Soviet Union, established in 1925 to fight against religious way of life. They participated in an anti-religious campaign of 1928–1929 that led to the destruction and confiscation of church property and icons. Their campaign undermined moral foundations of life in the villages guided by Christian values. During 1932–1933, most of the churches, monasteries, and worship houses were closed and destroyed or used for storing confiscated grain. The militant atheists were among members of the aktyv and buksyrni bruhady.
bezprytul′ni (in Ukrainian) were homeless orphans who lost their parents due to famines or deportations. At first, this anomalous social phenomenon was caused by the famine of 1921–1923, when tens of thousands of orphans traveled from famine-stricken areas to urban centers of Soviet Ukraine. In the 1930s, the causes of a huge influx of orphans in Soviet Ukraine were dekulakization, deportations, and political repressions. In May 1933, the number of homeless children reached 11,000 on the streets of Kharkiv, then the capital of Soviet Ukraine. At the time, orphanages could not accommodate all the homeless children; many were branded on the hand and deported to the outskirts of the city without the right to return, thus deprived of all means of survival.
Borot′bists, a left-nationalist political party of Socialist Revolutionaries in Soviet Ukraine. The party existed for two years. Initially, the Bolsheviks joined forces with the Borot′bists, who controlled the partisan movement in the countryside, but dissolved the party soon after the occupation of Ukraine. Some of the leading members, among them Hryhorii Hryn′ko and Oleksandr Shums′kyi, were coopted by the Bolsheviks and served as commissars of education in Soviet Ukraine.
buksyrni bryhady (in Ukrainian, tugboat brigades) consisted of village activists, teachers, students, inspectors from district control commissions, and Communist Party plenipotentiaries dispatched from Russian urban centers to enforce grain procurement in Soviet Ukraine. They disseminated propaganda, forced villagers to join collective farms, searched houses, and forcibly requisitioned grain, vegetables, cooked food from stoves, millstones, and farm equipment. These activities were often accompanied by violence and destruction of brick stoves or thatched roofs.
Central Rada (in Ukrainian Tsentral′na Rada), the first modern Ukrainian government, was founded in Kyїv in March 1917. Mykhailo Hrushevs′kyi was chosen in absentia as its chairman. By its four Universals, the Central Rada led Ukraine from autonomy to independence. In April 1917, a new presidium of the Rada was elected, with Hrushevs′kyi as president and Serhii Iefremov and Volodymyr Vynnychenko as vice presidents. During its existence the Rada held nine plenary sessions. By the end of July 1917, the Rada consisted of 822 deputies, who represented all strata of society, including Ukrainian farmers, soldiers, workers, as well as Ukrainian, Russian, Jewish, and Polish socialist parties, plus professional, educational, economic, and community organizations and the national minorities—Moldavians, Germans, Tatars, Belarusians. Out of the 822 deputies, the 58 members of the Little Rada were chosen, with 18 of these representing the national minorities. Its governments went through multiple changes under the leadership of Volodymyr Vynnychenko from June 1917 to January 1918, and Vsevolod Holubovych from January to April 1918.
Cheka was the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counterrevolution, Speculation, Sabotage, and Misuse of Authority, colloquially known as VChK (Vserossiiskaia chrezvychainaia komissiia po bor′be s kontrrevoliutsiei i sabotazhem). Officials of the Cheka were known as chekists (in Russian chekisty).
chorni doshky (in Ukrainian, literally “black boards,” or black lists), a repressive disciplinary measure of blacklisting villages, collective farms, village soviets, and independent farmers for failing to fulfill quotas imposed by central authorities. Stalin first used the term “blacklist” in a speech at the Fourth Conference of the KP(b)U in March 1920 to condemn miners of the Donbas region who were evading conscription in the countryside. The practice of blacklisting returned after the NEP ended in 1928. In November 1932, the measure was implemented in the Kuban (North Caucasus), then replicated on a mass scale in Soviet Ukraine. The December 6, 1932, resolution of the Council of People’s Commissars and Central Committee of the Communist Party spelled out the measures. This resolution created “Stalinist ghettos” in rural areas, with all village residents left to starve. Those caught trying to escape were arrested, some executed on the spot, and others forcibly returned to their villages. Blacklists were compiled by regional and district Communist Party representatives and published in newspapers.
Vlas Chubar (1891–1939), an ethnic Ukrainian, was chairman (from July 1923) of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR and deputy chairman (from 1934) of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR. He was arrested during the Great Terror in 1938 and executed in 1939. Along with Josef Stalin, Viacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Pavel Postyshev, Stanislav Kosior, and Mendel Khataievich, he was accused of organizing a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932–1933 by a Ukrainian Court of Appeal in January 2010, but criminal proceedings against them were quashed due to their deaths.
collectivization (in Ukrainian kolektyvizatsiia) was an economic policy of Bolshevik occupation authorities aimed at the liquidation of 5.2 million small farms by stripping owners of their plots of land, farm animals, and farming equipment, while forcing them into 25,000 collective farms owned by the state. Stalin’s 1929 article, “The Year of the Great Breakthrough,” spelled out the policy. Ukrainian farmers, who resisted the collectivization policy, were forced into labor camps, exiled into forced settlements in the Russian wilderness, or executed on the spot. Soviet Ukraine was one of the first republics subject to total collectivization in one to two years.
Comintern, or Communist International. The First International was founded in London in 1864. The Second International, an organization of socialist and labor parties, was established in Paris in 1889. The Third International (1919–1943) was launched in Moscow in March 1919. It advocated world communism and included representatives from thirty countries, among them the United States, Germany, France, Great Britain, China, Korea, Hungary, Poland, Finland, the three Baltic countries, Sweden, and Persia. The various parties were not independent but national sections of the Communist International, which controlled and monitored their activities.
dekulakization (in Russian raskulachivanie), in Ukrainian rozkurkulennia, was a form of political terror in the village that targeted well-to-do farmers, so-called kurkuli, and aimed at the liquidation of economic self-sufficiency of private and family enterprises. In Soviet Ukraine, the campaign of “eliminating kulaks as a class” camouflaged anti-Ukrainian policy of the Bolsheviks. Under the slogans of building socialism and fulfilling grain procurement plans, well-to-do and later poorer farmers were dispossessed of land, farm animals, equipment, even houses, and banished to forced settlements in Siberia, sentenced to death or decades of forced labor in concentration camps in the Russian Far North and Siberia. The confiscated property served as “capital funds” for collective farms.
dezinformatsiia, or disinformation, is a loan translation from Russian, derived from the title of a propaganda department within security service. The GPU established a “special disinformation office” in 1923 to spread false or misleading information to prevent leaks about forced labor camps for political opponents of the regime and deceive public opinion inside and outside the newly formed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Anatolii Dimarov (real name Harasiuta) (1922–2014) was born near Poltava. His father was a prosperous land owner, who fled persecution. His mother changed her last name and adopted the name of the late village teacher, Dimarov. The mother relocated with her three sons to the Donbas, where she found work as a teacher. Dimarov’s adopted name became his pen name. He was one of the first writers who mentioned the events of the Holodomor in his novel I budut′ liudy (1964). He was spared from persecution due to his popularity as a prose writer and as a handicapped war veteran.
Directory is a collective governing body of the Ukrainian National Republic (in Ukrainian Dyrektoriia UNR). It was the state authority created on November 14, 1918, for directing the overthrow of Hetman Pavlo Skoropads′kyi. The uprising against the Hetman was hastened by his declaration of a “federative union” with Russia on that day. The Directory was headed by Volodymyr Vynnychenko (representative of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers’ Party), and included the following members: the supreme otaman Symon Petliura (Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers’ Party), Fedir Shvets′ (Peasant Association), Opanas Andriievs′kyi (Ukrainian Party of Socialists-Independentists), and Andrii Makarenko (non-partisan member, delegate of the railway workers). The uprising led to Skoropads′kyi’s abdication in favor of his council of ministers, which, in turn, yielded power to the Directory. A new government—the Council of National Ministers of the UNR—was established by the Directory’s decree of December 26, 1918. It was chaired by Volodymyr Chekhivs′kyi. The Directory abolished many of the Hetman government’s laws and restored the legislation of the Central Rada. The most important of these laws dealt with land distribution, the establishment of Ukrainian as the official language, the autocephaly of the Orthodox Church, and the convening of the Labor Congress. The Labor Congress met in January 1919, and the Directory submitted its powers to the Labor Congress—the legislature of the UNR. In view of the state of war, the Labor Congress invested the Council of National Ministers with executive power. The ministers were appointed by the Directory and were responsible to it between sessions of the Labor Congress. On February 5, 1919, the Directory moved from Kyїv to Vinnytsia on the border with Poland. It frequently changed locations, depending on events at the front. To win the support of the Entente in the Ukrainian-Soviet War, Volodymyr Vynnychenko resigned from the Directory, and Symon Petliura became its head on February 11, 1919. When the talks with the Entente collapsed, a new socialist cabinet was formed by Borys Martos in Rivne on April 9, 1919. At the end of August 1919, it was replaced by Isaak Mazepa’s cabinet. Powers in the Directory were not clearly delineated. Besides carrying out their representative and legislative functions, its members sometimes interfered in the affairs of the executive branch and provoked conflicts with the Council of National Ministers. At a meeting of the Directory and the Council of National Ministers on November 15, 1919, at Kam’ianets′-Podil′s′kyi, it was decided that in the absence of the two leading members who went abroad on state business,
“the supreme authority in the affairs of the Republic [is] invested in the head of the Directory and the supreme otaman Symon Petliura, who, in the name of the Directory, will confirm all laws and decrees adopted by the Council of National Ministers.”
On May 21, 1920, the government of the republic issued an order, confirmed by Petliura, recalling the two members of the Directory for their failure to return from abroad. Thus, the Directory ceased to be a collective body, and all its powers passed to Petliura. After Petliura’s death on May 25, 1926, all powers were assumed by the head of the government-in-exile of the Ukrainian National Republic at the time, Andrii Livyts′kyi.
dvadtsiatyp’iatytysiachnyky (25,000ers) were Communist Party and Communist Youth League activists, recruited in 1930 to enforce collectivization. Out of 8,451 activists recruited in Russian urban centers, about 6,435 were dispatched to villages in Soviet Ukraine; the remaining volunteers were dispatched to the North Caucasus, Lower Volga, and Kazakhstan. Most of them (80 percent) served in village soviets. Their task was accomplished by the end of 1931, when 85 percent of farms in Soviet Ukraine were collectivized.
Felix Dzerzhinsky (1877–1926), ethnically Polish, was a professional revolutionary and the head of the Soviet security police, known as VChK (GPU, later NKVD, then KGB), from its founding in December 1917 to his sudden death in May 1926. In 1920, Lenin dispatched Dzerzhinsky to Ukraine to pacify the countryside and suppress Makhno and other insurgents, in an “anti-bandit” operation, for which the “Iron Felix” was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. In 1921, he was appointed as Commissar of Transportation in charge of shipping food assistance to the Lower Volga region, affected by famine, and combatting embezzlement and graft on railroads. In February 1924, concurrently with his duties as head of the security police, he was appointed chairman of the Economic Development Committee and tasked with stimulating economic growth through innovation. In May 1926, he criticized the Trotsky-Zinoviev anti-party bloc during a Politburo meeting, and on the last day of the session died of cardiac arrest.
enemy of the people (from Latin hostis publicus, dating back to Roman times and meaning “public enemy”). In the Soviet Union under Stalin, “enemy of the people” was a loosely defined term that could implicate anyone, for any reason, at any time. It was a term of denigration slurring the targeted person or group, and was cast against members of all social, political, and civilian classes. The so-called “enemies of the people” found themselves outcasts, without home, hearth, and work; arrested on trumped-up charges, for which no amnesty was granted; and under the threat of execution (immediate or delayed).
genocide, the term coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944 from the Greek root genos (race, tribe) and Latin -cide (caedere—to kill). It was enshrined in the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. Article I of the U.N. Convention on Genocide addresses responsibility, confirming that signatories will undertake to prevent and punish genocide, whether committed in time of peace or war. Article II of the U.N. Convention on Genocide specifically defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
1. (a) Killing members of the group;
2. (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
GPU (in Russian Gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie), or State Political Directorate, a successor of VChK. From 1922 to 1934, the GPU (Ukrainian abbreviation DPU) was a special organ of the Bolshevik occupational regime in Soviet Ukraine, which carried out political repressions, executions, arrests, and deportations. In 1928, the GPU was granted the right to conduct trials without prosecutor’s consent. In 1929, the so-called triika (see troika) were instituted to expedite the prosecution of legal cases. In 1932–1933, the GPU oversaw the implementation of the law on the “protection of socialist property” (known as the “five ears of wheat” law) and conducted arrests, deportations, and executions of all those who were charged for violating the law by gleaning kernels of wheat in the fields.
GULAG, also spelled Gulag or GULag (Russian acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei), or Main Directorate of Camps was the agency in charge of the Soviet network of so-called “corrective-labor” camps set up by order of Lenin in the 1920s, and reaching its peak during Stalin’s rule in the 1930s. The first three commandants of Soviet labor camps were Jewish. Fedor (Teodors) Eihmans, a Jew from Latvia, was the commandant of the Solovetsky labor camp from 1924 to 1930, when he became the head of the Soviet prison camp system, known under its acronym GULag. His successor was Lazar Kogan, the son of a wealthy Jewish merchant, who supervised the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Sea Canal in 1932–1933. Between 1932 and 1937, Matvei Berman, the son of a Jewish brickyard owner, was in charge of the GULag. During the Great Terror in 1937–1938, they were arrested and executed. Statistical reports on the number of prisoners and death rates in labor camps prior to 1934, when the GPU was reorganized into the NKVD, were nonexistent or destroyed.
holod (in Ukrainian) hunger, an acute desire for food, malnutrition due to food scarcity.
holodomor (in Ukrainian) means famine, an acute scarcity of food, caused by drought, crop failure, population imbalance, or war, typically accompanied by starvation and epidemics that lead to increased mortality. The word appeared in 1898 in a periodical describing destitute population suffering from extreme starvation. It is derived from holod (starvation) and mor (Latin root mort-death), meaning “death caused by starvation.”
Holodomor of 1932–1933 is the ultimate stage of the Holodomor-genocide, the man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine.
Holodomor-genocide is an intentional act of mass extermination of people in Soviet Ukraine and ethnically Ukrainian areas of the Russian SFSR as defined in Article II of the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted in 1948. This crime was perpetrated by the top leadership of the Communist Party and the GPU of the USSR as well as rank-and-file perpetrators on the regional and district levels. This genocide targeted Ukrainians as a national group to thwart the crystallization of the nation and prevent Ukraine’s secession from the Soviet Union. In Raphael Lemkin’s conceptualization, the first prong of the attack was aimed at Ukrainian intelligentsia, the second against the clergy, and the third against independent farmers. The ethnic composition was diluted by scattering Ukrainians around the USSR and by resettlement of Russian loyalists in the Ukrainian villages depopulated by the famine. According to Article II of the U.N. Convention, all enumerated genocidal acts do apply in the case of the Holodomor:
1. (a) people who resisted were killed (deported, imprisoned, executed, starved to death);
2. (b) there was huge bodily and mental harm caused to all Holodomor victims (those who died and those who survived);
3. (c) there were artificially created conditions of life calculated to destroy the Ukrainians (deportations, blacklisting, confiscations of grain and everything edible, passport regime, ban on travel to procure food, forced labor in concentration camps, forced resettlement outside the borders of Soviet Ukraine in the Russian Far North and Siberia);
4. (d) all those measures prevented births within the Ukrainian national group; and
5. (e) children were transferred from their parents (dispossessed, deported, executed) to state-run orphanages and children’s communes where they were brought up in obedience to the communist ideology and subservience to the colonial regime.
Among more than 7 million victims of the Holodomor were Ukrainian intelligentsia, clergy, and farmers in Soviet Ukraine as well as the North Caucasus, the Central Black Earth, the Lower Volga, and the Kazakh Autonomous region of the RSFSR, settled by ethnic Ukrainians, who were starved to death during 1932–1933 and who were deported, imprisoned, and executed in labor camps and forced settlements in the Russian Far North and Siberia. So far, sixteen countries have recognized the Holodomor as genocide. The European Parliament and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe officially condemned the Stalinist regime’s crime against humanity.
Mykhailo Hrushevs′kyi (1866–1934), born to a Ukrainian noble family in the Polish part of the Russian Empire, was a historian and the leader of the Central Rada in 1917–1918. He completed his studies at Kyїv University. In 1894, he was appointed professor of Ukrainian history at L′viv University, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He advanced the idea that the Ukrainian nation had, since the founding of Kyїvan Rus′, followed a distinct historical path from that of Russia. In April 1918, he was elected the first president of the Ukrainian National Republic (see UNR), but then emigrated after Skoropads′kyi’s coup against the UNR. He returned to Soviet Ukraine from Galicia in 1924, attracted by the KP(b)U’s promotion of Ukrainization. As the Chair of Modern Ukrainian History at the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, he was the object of GPU surveillance. In 1931, he was arrested and ordered to move to Moscow, where he was kept under house arrest. In 1934, he died in Kislovodsk, North Caucasus, where he was undergoing a minor medical treatment.
Serhii Hrushevs′kyi (1892–1937), a nephew of Mykhailo Hrushevs′kyi, was vice rector of the Donets′k Institute of People’s Education. He was exiled to the Solovetsky labor camp and executed at Sandarmokh in Karelia in 1937.
huberniia was the tsarist-era designation for a large administrative area, known by its Russian spelling, guberniia (gubernia).
Matvii Iavors′kyi (1885–1937), born in Polish Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was a Ukrainian historian and academician. He studied law in L′viv and Vienna Universities. After World War I, he serve in the Ukrainian Galician army. Following the army’s withdrawal from central Ukraine in 1919, he joined the KP(b)U in 1920. He used Marxist historiography to write several histories of Ukraine, some of which were used in primary schools in the 1920s. In 1929, he was forced to write a “confession” and dismissed from the Marxist historians ranks for his “nationalist deviation.” In 1931, he was arrested and exiled to the Solovetsky Islands. He was executed at Sandarmokh, Karelia, in the Russian SFSR in 1937.
INO (in Ukrainian Instytuty narodnoї osvity), or Institutes of People’s Education, replaced universities in Soviet Ukraine.
International Commission of Inquiry into the 1932–1933 Famine in Ukraine convened on May 23–27, 1988, in the Europa Hotel in Brussels, Belgium, and on October 31–November 3, 1988, in the United Nations Plaza Hotel in New York City, New York. The idea to organize an international commission was suggested by Toronto lawyer Volodymyr-Iuri Danyliw at the Fourth Conference of the World Congress of Free Ukrainians in December 1983. The Commission of Inquiry interviewed expert witnesses and issued a report which identified a number of statutory instruments as well as administrative actions characterizing the 1932–1933 famine in Ukraine as genocide. Findings of this commission were delivered to the U.N. Under-Secretary for Human Rights in Geneva on May 9, 1990, and to the president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on May 10, 1990.
Vasyl′ Ivchuk (1902–1938) was a school principal in the village of Dudarkiv, Boryspil′ district, Kyïv region. Ivchuk arranged a practicum for schoolchildren at a meat-processing plant so that after lessons they could work in exchange for a cup of soup. In this ingenious way, the principal saved all school-age children in his village from starvation. Ivchuk, who rescued children in 1932–1933, fell victim to the Stalinist totalitarian regime. On May 17, 1938, the troika of the Kyïv Regional Directorate of the NKVD arrested Ivchuk and accused him of being a member of the Polish Military Organization. On September 28, 1938, he was executed. He was rehabilitated in 1958. On November 21, 2007, he was awarded a medal of Hero of Ukraine, posthumously.
Lazar Kaganovich (1893–1991), born to Jewish parents in the Radomysl′ district, Kyïv Governorate of the Russian Empire (modern Ukraine), was the KP(b)U secretary general from 1925 to 1928 and secretary of the TsK VKP(b) from 1928 to 1939. In October 1932, he headed an extraordinary grain-procurement commission of the TsK VKP(b), which, under the pretext of grain procurement, confiscated all food supplies from farmers in the North Caucasus, especially the Kuban′ region, thereby condemning them to death from starvation. Along with Josef Stalin, Viacheslav Molotov, Pavel Postyshev, Stanislav Kosior, Vlas Chubar, and Mendel Khataievich, he was accused of organizing a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932–1933 by a Ukrainian Court of Appeal in January 2010, but criminal proceedings against them were quashed due to their deaths.
karbovantsi, abbreviated as krb., equal 100 kopecks, the name of currency before revolution and later in Soviet Ukraine. The first karbovantsi banknotes of the Ukrainian National Republic were designed by Heorhii Narbut in December 1917. They were printed in Kyïv and put into circulation in early 1918, prior to the proclamation of independence. The bills were printed with inscriptions in three languages: Ukrainian, Polish, and Yiddish. The design not only emphasized multiethnic populace of Ukraine but also brought together Ukraine’s aesthetic Cossack Baroque flourishes and medieval Volodymyr the Great’s insignia, the trident. In March 1918, when the Central Rada returned to Kyïv after subduing the Bolsheviks, the government introduced the new currency the hryvnia. In terms of exchange, 1 karbovanets = 2 hryvni. They went into circulation in September 1918, during the short administration of Hetman Skoropads′kyi, when it was decided to return to the original monetary designation of the karbovantsi. The karbovantsi were used during the Soviet period. After reinstating its independence in 1991, Ukraine reintroduced the hryvnia. See Myroslava M. Mudrak, The Imaginative World of Heorhii Narbut and the Making of a Ukrainian Brand (Kyïv: Rodovid Press, 2020), 75–77.
Tetiana Kardynalovs′ka (1899–1993) was a Ukrainian interpreter, language teacher, and writer. She was the daughter of a Russian general of artillery Mykhailo Kardynalovs′kyi. After graduating from a classical gymnasium, she enrolled at the Kyїv Polytechnic Institute, but her education was interrupted by the revolution and war. Her first marriage to Vsevolod Holubovych, the prime minister of the UNR from January to April 1918, ended in divorce. Nevertheless, she continued to work in the editorial office of Chervonyi Shliakh (Red Path), managed by her ex-husband. She later married a Ukrainian writer Serhii Pylypenko, who in 1919 joined the Bolsheviks. Pylypenko was murdered during the Stalinist purge in 1934. As a widow of the former “enemy of the people,” she lived in Ukraine until World War II, when in 1943 she was deported to Austria. After escaping from a labor camp, she lived in Italy, then Great Britain. After the war, she emigrated to the United States, where she worked at Harvard University teaching Russian and later Ukrainian languages. She wrote memoirs, Nevidstupne mynule (Persistent Past).
Petro Kholodnyi (1876–1930) was an avant-garde artist, chemist, and politician. He was one the founders of modern Ukrainian style, called neo-Byzantine. From 1899 to 1917, he worked as professor of chemistry at Kyїv Polytechnic Institute. During the national liberation struggle (1917–1921), he joined the Secretariat of People’s Education of the Central Rada. During the Directory he was appointed minister of education. In 1921, Kholodnyi settled in L′viv, then under Polish rule, where he worked on the restoration of icons and painted murals in the Uspensky Cathedral. In 1928, he visited Paris to gather materials for his painting to commemorate Symon Petliura’s assassination. The painting was left unfinished, when the artist suddenly died at the age of fifty-four.
Andrii Khvylia [real name Olinter] (1898–1938), born in Bessarabia, was a Communist loyalist and journalist. He joined the KP(b)U in 1918 and was in charge of its Press Section and the Cultural Propaganda Section. In 1933, he was appointed Ukraine’s deputy Commissar of Education. As a vocal opponent of Ukrainian nationalism, he was responsible for the death of many Ukrainian cultural leaders. He attacked Mykola Khvyl′ovyi’s publications in 1928 and 1930. After Mykola Skrypnyk’s suicide in 1933, Khvylia attacked Skrypnyk for introducing orthographic changes to the Ukrainian language in a collection of articles, Znyshchyty korinnia ukraïns′koho natsionalizmu na movnomu fronti (To Destroy the Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism on the Linguistic Front, 1933). In 1937, Khvylia was arrested and executed the following year.
Mykola Khvyl′ovyi (1893–1933) was a Ukrainian poet and writer. Born as Mykola Fitil′ov to a family of teachers, Hryhorii Fitil′ov and Elisaveta Tarasenko, in Trostianets′, Kharkiv region, he dropped out of classical gymnasium to join Socialist Revolutionaries (SR). In 1915, he enlisted in the army. In 1917, during the February Revolution he headed the soldier’s soviet in the Ukrainian Fourteenth Division, where he conducted educational and propaganda activities. After the October Revolution of 1917, his political leaning moved left. In 1918, he briefly served as chief of staff for SR T. Pushkar, who led an uprising against the Bolsheviks in the village of Murakhva, Bohodukhiv district (in 1933, this entire settlement was starved to death). In 1919, he joined the Communist Party. His famous novel, titled Val′dshnepy (The Woodsnipes), described as “anti-party” and “counterrevolutionary,” remained unfinished and unpublished when he committed suicide in May 1933. His last, and most radical work, “Ukraïna chy Malorosiia?” (Ukraine or Little Russia?), was suppressed by authorities. His vision of Ukraine’s historic mission was known as Khvyl′ovism. His followers were physically destroyed during the Stalinist terror or were forced to reconstruct themselves as socialist realists. His works were banned in the Soviet Union.
KNS (from Ukrainian komitety nezamozhnykh selian, or komnezamy) were committees of “non-wealthy peasants” that existed in the Ukrainian SSR from 1920 to 1933. Together with state security police, they carried out policies of Soviet occupation authorities. They were controlled by the KP(b)U at the county (povit) level and, after the administrative and territorial reforms of 1923, at the district (raion) level.
kolhosps (in Ukrainian, kolektyvni hospodarstva, or collective farms). The Bolsheviks created three kinds of collective farms depending on the degree of the use of means of production: (1) the Association for Joint Cultivation of Land (Tovarishchestvo po sovmestnoi obrabotke zemli, in Russian Tsoz), (2) the cooperative (in Russian artel′), and (3) the commune. Like Lenin in 1919, Stalin in 1930 was unable to force Ukrainian farmers to join the communes, where all means of production were collectivized. The Tsoz, which allowed farmers to retain independent control of production, was not acceptable to the authorities. A compromise was found in the cooperative, which allowed farmers to keep their private garden plots.
koloniї, or children’s communes, were orphanages, administered by the GPU, where children of the dispossessed farmers, the kulaks, and other “enemies of the people” were indoctrinated in communist ideology and engaged in productive labor in factory workshops. Often, these children became ideal recruits for the state security police.
Komsomol, or Communist Youth League. The All-Union Leninist Communist Youth League (in Russian abbreviated as VLKSM) was founded on October 29, 1918. It was one in a sequence of youth organizations established by the Communist Party to indoctrinate the younger generations from the Octoberists (age 7–9), to the Pioneers (9–14), to the Komsomol (14–28) in communist ideology and loyalty to the ruling regime.
korenizatsiia (in Russian, indigenization), the policy of instituting Soviet power in non-Russian republics. It was an ambiguous policy, initiated in 1923, to overcome resistance to Bolshevik economic policy and engage the population of Soviet Ukraine in construction of the Soviet state. The nationality policy in Ukraine was dubbed “Ukrainization.” It was ostensibly designed to promote native language in schools and recruit administrative cadres proficient in the language of the republic. The “Ukrainization” policy was discontinued when the Holodomor-genocide reached its apogee in 1932–1933. Its promoters were prosecuted for “nationalist deviation.”
Stanislav Kosior (1889–1939), ethnically Polish, was first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine. He was executed in 1939 during the Great Terror. Along with Josef Stalin, Viacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Pavel Postyshev, Vlas Chubar, and Mendel Khataievich, he was accused of organizing a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932–1933 by a Ukrainian Court of Appeal in January 2010, but criminal proceedings against them were quashed due to their deaths.
KP(b)U (in Ukrainian, Komunistychna partiia (bil′shovykiv) Ukraїny), or the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine.
krai was the term introduced in 1924 to designate six territories of the Russian SFSR inhabited by ethnic minorities. One of these was the North Caucasus with a large ethnically Ukrainian population. Based on the 1926 census, over 3 million Ukrainians lived in the North Caucasus, where they constituted 37 percent of the population. The percentages varied from 0.1 in the southern regions to 61.5 in the Kuban′ district (Krasnodar region) in the Northwest.
Kuban′ is a geographic area west of the Crimean Peninsula, bordered by the Kuban′ River, the Black Sea, the Don steppe, the Volga delta, and the Caucasus Mountains. The descendants of the Zaporozhian Cossacks relocated to this part of the North Caucasus. A large percentage of the Kuban′ population was of Ukrainian ethnicity.
kurkul′ (in Russian kulak, literally “fist,” and figuratively, a greedy, money-grubber, skinflint) was an ideological label, created by the Bolsheviks to brand small proprietors as enemies of the Soviet state and to eliminate them. In 1930, the label was applied to all those who resisted collectivization irrespective of land ownership or wealth. They were dispossessed of property, evicted from their homes, resettled to village outskirts, shot if they resisted, or exiled to Siberia.
Emmanuil Kviring (1888–1937) was a Soviet politician and statesman. Born in the Volga German settlement in the Russian Empire, he joined Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) in 1906. In 1912, he joined the Bolsheviks. After World War I, he was appointed a leader of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine from October 1918 to March 1919, and from April 1923 to March 1925. He opposed the “Ukrainization” policy, so he had to leave Kharkiv for Moscow. He worked as an economist in the State Planning Committee. In 1937, he was arrested and executed by the NKVD. In 1956, he was posthumously rehabilitated.
Iurii Lavrinenko (1905–1987) was a literary scholar, critic, and publicist. In 1930, after graduation from the Kharkiv Institute of People’s Education, he completed a doctorate at the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. During the Stalinist terror he was arrested several times between 1933 and 1935, and from 1935 to 1939 he was imprisoned in a concentration camp in Noril′sk, Russia. He was exiled after his release. During World War II, he became a refugee in a displaced persons camp in Germany. In 1950, he emigrated to the United States. In 1955–1960, together with Ivan Koshelivets′, he edited Ukraïns′ka literaturna hazeta. He wrote Sotsiializm i ukraïns′ka revoliutsiia (Socialism and the Ukrainian Revolution) in 1949 and Ukrainian Communism and Soviet-Russian Policy toward the Ukraine: An Annotated Bibliography, 1917–1953 in 1953. He published the anthology Rozstriliane vidrodzhennia (Executed Renaissance) in 1959.
Dmitrii Lebed′ (1893–1937) was the son of a Russian unskilled worker, who aligned with the Bolsheviks and led a party cell in his native Katerynoslav after the February Revolution. He was second secretary of the TsK KP(b)U from 1920 to 1924, and later held several high-level all-Union and Russian governmental posts. An outspoken opponent of Ukrainization, he was arrested in 1937, accused of Ukrainian nationalism, and executed.
Anatoly Lunacharsky (real name Antonov) (1875–1933) was a Poltava-born author, essayist, and journalist who served as the Commissar of Culture and Education in the first Soviet government until being dismissed by Stalin in 1929. Lunacharsky died in 1933 in Menton, France en route to take up the post of Soviet ambassador to Spain.
lychaky were sandals made from wood bark or straw rope. Since ancient times they had been widely used as footwear in Eastern Europe and Russia, especially in rural areas until the 1930s. They were woven from wood bark (linden, willow, or birch). The sandals were tied to the foot with twisted ropes. This type of footwear was common among the Baltic and Finnish peoples. A similar type of footwear was used by the Japanese (waraji), North American Indians, and even Australian aborigines.
Vasyl′ Lypkivs′kyi (1864–1937) headed the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC). In May 1919, he celebrated the first Liturgy in the Ukrainian language—after translating many of the liturgical books into modern Ukrainian—in St. Nicholas’s Cathedral in Kyїv. Although this action was opposed by the Russian hierarchy, who defrocked Lypkivs′kyi, it was welcomed by supporters of the emerging Ukrainian national church. In the summer of 1919, Lypkivs′kyi became parish priest of St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyїv. In October 1921, the All-Ukrainian Orthodox Church Council in Kyїv, which had declared the establishment of the UAOC in May 1920, elected Lypkivs′kyi the first metropolitan of the church. Without a traditional episcopal ordination, Lypkivs′kyi was vilified by the Russian church as a non-canonical bishop outside the apostolic succession. Lypkivs′kyi visited more than 500 parishes after his election and oversaw the growth of the UAOC. By 1927, the church claimed 36 bishops and over 2,500 priests. Insisting on the active participation of the laity in church affairs, he propagated many church reforms, and he modified many Orthodox canons and traditions, including the celibacy of bishops, with the result that married men were admitted to episcopal ordination. He was also insistent on preserving the independence of the Ukrainian church vis-à-vis the Moscow Patriarchate. Lypkivs′kyi's popularity soon earned him the enmity of the Soviet authorities, who, after arresting him a few times, had him dismissed by the All-Ukrainian Orthodox Church Council in 1927. From 1927 to 1937 he lived in a Kyїv suburb, under virtual house arrest and in poverty. He was arrested by the NKVD in 1937, charged with anti-Soviet activity, and executed.
Anastasiia Lysyvets′ (1922–2011), who witnessed the genocidal famine in Berezan′ near Kyїv, lost almost her entire family, including her parents, younger sister, and brother as well as aunts and uncles. In the 1950s, she started working as a teacher of Ukrainian language and literature in the village of Kuianivka, Bilopillia district, Sumy region. Lysyvets′ wrote her memoir forty-three years after the events, without hope that it would ever be published. Her memoir, “Skazhy pro shchaslyve zhyttia . . .” (Kyїv: KIS, 2019) has been translated into English by Alexander Motyl “Speak of the Happy Life . . .” (2021).
James Edward Mace (1952–2004) was of Cherokee origin, born in Muskogee, Oklahoma. He received his doctorate in history from the University of Michigan in 1981. His doctoral dissertation was published as a book, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918–1933. He spent his postdoctoral years at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. From 1985 to 1988, he served as staff director of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine. In 1993, Dr. Mace moved to Ukraine and became a professor of political science at the National University Kyїv-Mohyla Academy. He died in Kyїv in 2004 at the age of fifty-two. Seven thousand people attended his funeral, and a monument was later constructed over his grave as befitting a national hero.
Nestor Makhno (1889–1934) was an anarchist leader in 1917–1921. He aspired to become a teacher. In 1905, he joined an anarchist party. He was sentenced to life in prison for terrorist activities. In the Butyrki prison in Moscow, he acquired a general and political education. In 1918, he began to mobilize resistance to the Central Powers and Hetman Pavlo Skoropads´kyi, conducting raids on landlords’ estates. His volunteer light mobile cavalry units used horse-driven carriages upon which machine guns had been mounted. His forces controlled the entire Huliai-Pole region in Ukraine. In March 1919, the Bolsheviks coopted him into a temporary alliance against Anton Denikin. Makhno’s forces concluded a brief pact with Symon Petliura’s regular army of the UNR in September 1919, but Makhno continued to operate against Denikin’s forces independently. With the defeat of Denikin, Makhno reached the zenith of his influence in Ukraine. His troops, numbering approximately 15,000 to 20,000, controlled about one-third of the present territory of Ukraine (Left-Bank Ukraine and southern Ukraine). In October 1920, Makhno concluded a treaty with Bolsheviks and launched the offensive against Petr Wrangel’s army; the Bolsheviks then used this opportunity to deal decisively with the Makhnovites. Makhno was forced to make a dash for the Romanian border, and by way of Poland and Germany, escaped to France, where he remained active in anarchist circles. Nestor Makhno’s memoir Russkaia revoliutsiia na Ukraine was published in Paris in 1929.
mangruppy (in Russian literally “maneuverable groups”), or mobile units of the GPU that blockaded villages, and carried out arrests, deportations, and executions.
Manifesto of the Communist Party was written by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and printed a few weeks before the February Revolution in France in 1848. In 1848, the Communist Manifesto was translated into several European languages—French, Polish, Italian, Danish, Flemish, and Swedish. First published in German, it was reprinted in twelve different editions in Germany, England, and America. It was first published in English in 1850, and in 1871 in three different translations in America. A Russian translation was published in Geneva in 1869. Marx and Engels wrote a preface to the second Russian edition published in 1882.
Borys Matushevs′kyi (1907–1977) was a son of the former ambassador of the Ukrainian National Republic to Greece and a member of the Ukrainian Party of Socialists-Federalists. From 1923 to 1929, he was a student at the Kyїv Institute of People’s Education. As one of the defendants in the SVU trial, he was sentenced to five years of imprisonment. He survived, obtained a passport, left Ukraine, and settled in Khibinogorsk in the Russian SFSR, where he worked at a meteorological station in the vicinity of the Solovetsky camp. He served as a go-between for Ukrainian intelligentsia, forwarding correspondence to their relatives. He was rearrested in 1938, but survived exile in Karelia. During World War II, he served in the Soviet Army. He was unable to obtain release for his mother from a concentration camp. He died in Kyїv of heart failure in 1977.
Mensheviks formed a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (in Russian abbreviated as RSDRP) after the schism at its Second Congress in 1903 in Brussels. Together with the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), they played a crucial role in workers’ and soldiers’ councils. Their activities were outlawed by the Bolsheviks in 1923.
Oleksandr Mizernyts′kyi (1883–1947) was a former Borot′bist, who in the spring of 1924 became head of the Teachers’ Union in Soviet Ukraine. He served as the editor of the periodical Radians′ka osvita (Soviet Education) and the newspaper Narodnyi uchytel′ (People’s Teacher), published by the Teachers’ Union of the Ukrainian SSR. He defended Commissar of Education Oleksandr Shums′kyi in a February 1927 meeting of the Politburo of the KP(b)U. In 1934, he was arrested and spent fourteen years in labor camps in Siberia.
Viacheslav Molotov (né Skryabin) (1890–1986) was a leading figure in the Soviet government from the 1920s, when he rose to power. Skryabin took the pseudonym “Molotov,” derived from the Russian word molot (hammer) because it had a “proletarian” ring to it. In 1920, he became secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Lenin recalled him to Moscow in 1921, elevating him to full membership of the Central Committee. As a protégé of Joseph Stalin, Molotov became a member of the Politburo in 1926. Molotov served as Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR from 1930 to the outbreak of World War II. In this position, he oversaw collectivization of agriculture and the implementation of the First Five-Year Plan. He signed laws that led to mass executions and personally led the commission that confiscated grain from Soviet Ukraine. Along with Josef Stain, Lazar Kaganovich, Pavel Postyshev, Stanislav Kosior, Vlas Chubar, and Mendel Khataievich, he was accused of organizing a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine by a Ukrainian Court of Appeal in January 2010, but criminal proceedings against them were quashed due to their deaths.
Valentyn Moroz (1936–2019), a leading figure in the Ukrainian national movement, spent thirteen years in Soviet prisons and camps. In 1979, at the JFK airport in New York he, along with four other dissidents, was exchanged for two Soviet KGB agents. For a year, he worked as a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Department of History. In 1997, he moved back to Ukraine, where was a university lecturer until he passed away in April 2019.
NAN (in Ukrainian Natsional′na akademiia nauk), or National Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. It was founded in 1918, dissolved in 1929, and absorbed into the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. It served as an element of governmental control over the political activities of the intelligentsia.
NEP stands for the New Economic Policy, which was initiated in 1921, when prodrazverstka (expropriation of agricultural produce) was suspended and replaced with a fixed tax, giving farmers the opportunity to sell their produce on the free market. The legalization of the market forced the Bolshevik leaders to allow entrepreneurial activity. Industries were nationalized and organized into trusts based on principles of cost accounting. The production was revived after the restoration of the credit and banking system, the introduction of a stable currency, and the promotion of cooperative and private enterprises. The policy was curtailed in 1928.
Nepmen is a derogatory label for those who benefited from the freer economic opportunity of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP).
NKO (Narodnyi komisariat osvity), or People’s Commissariat of Education in Soviet Ukraine.
NKVD (in Russian Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del), or People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, a successor of the GPU. It was reorganized in 1934.
nomenklatura (from Latin nomenclatura, meaning a system of names) were a ruling elite in the Soviet Union who held key administrative positions in the government bureaucracy, in media, trade, industry, agriculture, and education. Appointments to these positions were granted only with approval by the Communist Party.
oblasti (regions) were administrative areas, introduced in 1932 (see okruhy).
OGPU, or the Joint State Political Directorate, was the security police of the Soviet Union from 1923 to 1934 (see GPU). The political police functioned as extrajudicial and punitive organ of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR. It was established on November 15, 1923, to silence opponents of the Soviet regime. The headquarters in Moscow controlled its sectoral branch in Soviet Ukraine and directed “show trials” that eliminated progressive intelligentsia, clergy, and farmers with the use of “special operations,” repressions, and executions.
Okhranka was a secret political police, gendarmerie, in the Russian Empire.
okruhy were administrative areas smaller than hubernii, introduced from 1923 to 1925, abolished in 1930, and replaced with oblasti in 1932 in Soviet Ukraine.
otaman in Ukrainian Cossack forces was a position of a military leader. The supreme military commander of the Cossack army in Ukrainian was Hetman (a cognate of German Hauptmann or “captain,” literally “head-man”). Otamans were usually elected by the Cossack Host Council or could have been appointed during the military campaigns.
paiok was a special ration card that guaranteed minimum monthly amount of products distributed among Communist Party and state functionaries, security police officers, court judges, prosecutors, military, industrial workers, and intellectual and cultural elites and their dependents due to shortages of products in stores. After 1931, a hierarchical system was instituted for food distribution. Food was also allocated to volunteers who implemented grain expropriation, members of village councils, as well as teachers and village correspondents who assisted in carrying out grain-requisition campaigns. The assortment of products depended on the category. At the beginning of 1933, the supplies were substantially diminished; dependents of industrial workers and intelligentsia were cut off from the lists. In rural areas, all central supplies were cut, except for village activists, plenipotentiaries, and political commissars at tractor stations.
passports were introduced by the Soviet government decree of December 27, 1932. The reason behind introducing the internal passport system was to stop the exodus of starving Ukrainians to procure food in urban areas of Soviet Ukraine, neighboring Russia, and Belarus. Only persons possessing a passport had a right to migrate within the Soviet Union. Passports were not issued to residents of villages, thus limiting their freedom of movement during 1932–1933 to procure food to survive.
Mykola Pavlushkov (1907–1937), born in Tula, Russian Empire, was among the students arrested in 1929 and put on trial with other leading members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in 1930. As a student at Kyïv Institute of People’s Education, he was denounced in the press for allegedly organizing the SUM in 1925 with the goal to establish an independent democratic Ukrainian republic. He was pressured by GPU investigators to implicate his uncle, academician Serhii Iefremov, in organizing the “counterrevolutionary” underground organization, the SVU. He was exiled to the Solovetsky camp, later executed at Sandarmokh in 1937.
Symon Petliura (1879–1926) was a native of Poltava. As a theology student, he joined an underground socialist movement, working as a journalist and editor. For a brief period, he worked as an archivist in the Kuban′, studying history of the Ukrainian Cossack settlements in the North Caucasus. He was Secretary of War in the Central Rada (Council), then a member of the Directory and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the UNR. He later became the head of the Directory (in May 1919) and head of the Ukrainian government-in-exile (after November 1920). He was assassinated in Paris in May 1926 by a Soviet security police agent.
Petliurite (in Ukrainian petliurivtsi), or followers of Symon Petliura, head of the Directory of the UNR. It was a derogatory Soviet term for nationally conscious Ukrainians in general, as well as for real and imagined anti-Soviet elements in Ukraine.
Hryhorii Petrovs′kyi (1878–1958) was a Ukrainian Soviet politician. He was a member of the Russian delegation during signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1917. He participated in signing the treaty on the creation of the USSR. As Chairman of Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union, Petrovs′kyi was one of the officials responsible for implementing Stalin’s policy of collectivization.
post-genocidal syndrome is a set of stable psychological and behavioral characteristics caused by the genocidal famine. The term “post-genocidal society” was coined by James Mace to refer to the long-lasting consequences of the Holodomor. The prolonged stress and the “experience” of surviving the Holodomor led to the eradication of distinguishing characteristics of the Ukrainian national group (business entrepreneurship, initiative); the deformation of social relations (denunciations, mob justice); and the erasure of Ukrainian self-identity (avoidance of the use of Ukrainian language, traditions). The forced Russification led to lowering of self-esteem, which impedes the renewal of the national statehood and national historical memory.
Pavel Postyshev (1887–1939), born in Ivanovo in the Vladimir Governorate of the Russian Empire, was a Soviet politician. He had worked in the Ukrainian SSR from 1923 to 1930, and had been a member of the KP(b)U Politburo from 1926 to 1930. In January 1933, he was sent to Soviet Ukraine as Stalin’s personal representative. He was elected second secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine and first secretary of the Kharkiv city and regional party organizations. Postyshev’s mission in Soviet Ukraine was to eliminate any remaining opposition to Stalin by purging all traces of “nationalist deviation” from the Party and to end the policy of Ukrainization. In January 2010, a Ukrainian Court of Appeal accused Pavel Postyshev along with Josef Stalin, Viacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Stanislav Kosior, and Vlas Chubar of organizing a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932–1933 but quashed criminal proceedings against them due to their deaths.
propaganda comes from the name of the Catholic organization Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, or Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, created by Pope Gregory XV in 1622 for missionary work. The dissemination of propaganda aims at spreading ideas to attract supporters.
prodrazverstka (in Russian, expropriation of agricultural produce), a means of requisitioning grain and other food by the Soviet authorities in 1919–1920 and 1930–1932. The state would set the grain quota for agriculture depending on its needs, after which the quota was apportioned to the republics, regions, districts, collective farms, and independent homesteads regardless of the availability of leftover grain on the farms. Failing to fulfill the quota brought on various repressive measures, up to liquidating the farms, and exiling the debtors to the Russian Far North and Siberia to dig canals, build roads, extract ore or gold, or chop timber.
Provisional Government (in Russian Vremennoie pravitel'stvo) was established immediately following the abdication of Russian Emperor Nicholas II in March 1917. The Provisional Government lasted approximately eight months, and ceased to exist when Bolsheviks gained power after the so-called “October Revolution” in 1917. It was led first by Prince Georgy Lvov (1861–1925) and then by Alexander Kerensky (1881–1970).
pud is a unit of weight of the Russian Imperial measurement system equivalent to 16 kilograms.
rabfak (in Russian, from rabochii fakul′tet in Ukrainian spelled robfak), or workers’ faculty, was a preparatory school for workers, designed to prepare graduates for entry into institutes of higher education and to produce a technological elite drawn from the proletariat’s ranks.
Oleksandra Radchenko (1896–1965) worked as a teacher in a rural school from 1912 to 1936 in the Kharkiv region. She kept a diary, in which she recorded events that unfolded in Soviet Ukraine from 1926 to 1935. Her first entry that described famine was dated February 1930, and the last entry dated February 1935. In her April 5, 1932 entry, she wrote that the famine was man-made. On July 7, 1945, she was arrested and sentenced to ten years of hard labor in Soviet prison camps. She died in 1955, after serving the full term in the prison camps. She was rehabilitated posthumously, on July 23, 1991.
radhosps (in Ukrainian, radians′ki hospodarstva), or state farms, were established on the former estates expropriated from landowners and transferred to state control. They were subsidized by the state. They were different from kolhosps (collective farms).
raion is a district, an administrative area in an okruh or oblast′.
Christian Rakovsky (1873–1941) was a French-educated physician of Bulgarian origin, and Rumanian subject, who became a Russian Bolshevik in 1918. He headed the Soviet Ukrainian government from January 1919 to July 1923. Believing in internationalism, he questioned the existence of a distinct Ukrainian nationality. However, by the end of 1921, he had changed his views. He insisted on greater sensitivity with regard to the Ukrainian national question and also sought to expand the political and economic autonomy of the Ukrainian SSR. In April 1923, at the Twelfth Party Congress of the RKP(b) he sharply criticized Joseph Stalin’s position on the national question. After being removed from the Ukrainian leadership, he served as Soviet ambassador to Britain (1923–1925) and France (1925–1927). In December 1927, he was expelled from the Communist Party, and a month later he was exiled. In 1929, he joined the opposition. In 1937, he was arrested as a spy, and in 1938 he was sentenced to twenty years of imprisonment. He was shot in a Soviet prison.
Red Terror was a period of repressions and mass killings carried out by the Cheka beginning in 1918, against political enemies of the Bolsheviks. In Soviet Ukraine, the system of Bolshevik extrajudicial killings included two methods: summary executions of randomly selected civilians accused of harboring or aiding “bandits” (see vidpovidachi) and hostage taking used to terrorize and disarm the countryside (see zaruchnytstvo).
RKP(b) (in Russian Rosiiskaia Kommunisticheskaia partiia (bol′shevikov)), or Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks).
RNK (in Ukrainian Rada narodnykh komisariv), or Council of People’s Commissars in Soviet Ukraine.
Robos (from Ukrainian, robitnyky osvity) was a union for educational employees in Soviet Ukraine, which replaced the All-Ukrainian Teachers’ Union, dissolved by Bolsheviks in 1920.
RSFSR abbreviation of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.
sabotage is a deliberate action to destroy or obstruct something for political or military advantage. During the Holodomor, the term was used to denote an open resistance to ideological and economic policies of Soviet occupational authorities. The GPU classified the following activities as “acts of sabotage” in reports: agitation against joining collective farms; escape from villages; beating or murder of activists, heads of village soviets, and representatives of security police. Acts of passive sabotage included hiding grain, milling the flour for personal consumption, slaughtering one’s farm animals, refusing to surrender seeds for seed funds, delaying fulfillment of planting or harvesting plans. Repressive measures included confiscations of property, arrests, and deportations.
Iurii Sambros (1894–1957?) served as inspector in the Sumy school district in Soviet Ukraine and editor of periodical Nasha osvita (Our Education). Sambros taught Ukrainian language and literature for teachers during the 1920s. Together with his friend, Borys Antonenko-Davydovych, Sambros founded an orphanage. He was an advocate of teaching Ukrainian language and culture. In 1930, Sambros published results of his study of language use among students in teacher training institutes. That year, Sambros joined faculty of the reorganized teacher training institute in Sumy, where he taught theory of education and teaching methodology courses. In October 1930, Sambros was apprehended by the GPU during a wave of arrests following the SVU trial. Interrogators pressured him to admit his participation in a military nationalist organization. A meticulous self-defense strategy helped him get out of prison. Fearing further reprisals, Sambros decided to escape from Sumy across the border to Soviet Russia in search of work. He settled in Omsk, then Novosibirsk, and finally Komyshlov in the Sverdlovsk region. In Komyshlov, Sambros taught in a teacher training college from 1946 to 1954. He earned a doctorate and was a recipient of an honorary teacher title in the Russian SFSR. His autobiographical sketches, Shchabli: Mii shliakh do komunizmu (Stages of Life: My Journey Toward Communism), written in 1957, were published in 1988 in New York.
scientific communism was one of three major elements of Marxism–Leninism practiced by the Bolsheviks. It is defined in a dictionary as the science dealing with general sociopolitical laws and patterns, ways, forms and methods of changing society along communist lines, according to the historical mission of the proletariat (the socialist revolution). It is the science regarding the working-class struggle and the socialist revolution, about the laws behind the building of socialism and communism, and about the world revolutionary process as a whole.
seksot, the term coined by blending first syllables of two Russian words sekretnyi sotrudnik, meaning “secret collaborator.” They were recruited by state political police from all strata of society, mainly by threats and blackmail. They were required to inform the GPU about public sentiments, private comments, and anti-Soviet activities in the organizations where they worked and communities where they lived.
Oleksandr Shums′kyi (1890–1946) served as Commissar of Education in the Ukrainian SSR from July to August 1919 and later from September 1924 to February 1927. He was a member of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries. He pushed for Borot′bists’ merger with the Bolsheviks. He led the KP(b)U’s Agitprop (agitation and propaganda department) from 1923 to 1925. Shums′kyi’s protest against Kaganovich’s policy in Soviet Ukraine raised Stalin’s ire. Shums′kyi was dismissed from his post in 1927 and reassigned to Leningrad, where he was appointed as director of the Institute of National Economy. He was arrested in 1933 and sentenced to ten years of imprisonment. He was poisoned on Stalin’s order on the train, when he was returning to Ukraine in 1946.
Pavlo Skoropads′kyi (1873–1945) is a Ukrainian general, statesman, scion of the family of Cossack military leaders dating back to the seventeenth century. Before the revolution, he was a major general and commander of a cavalry regiment in the emperor’s House Guard. During World War I, he commanded cavalry divisions and army corps. After the revolution, he oversaw the establishment of the first Ukrainian army corps. He disarmed and demobilized pro-Bolshevik military units returning from the southwestern and Romanian fronts, preventing them from plundering Ukraine. In April 1918, he was proclaimed Hetman of Ukraine. His government overturned all Central Rada policies. The government’s social and economic policies were dictated by Germany’s imperialistic aims, as well as the interests of Ukraine’s large landowners. In December 1918, following Germany’s withdrawal from Ukraine, Skoropads′kyi abdicated and fled to Germany. The Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic succeeded in ousting him in a coup. A collection of essays about Skoropads′kyi, edited by his daughter Olena Ott-Skoropads′ka, appeared in 1993 as Ostannii het′man (The Last Hetman). His memoirs, edited by Jaroslaw Pelenski, were published in 1995.
Mykola Skrypnyk (1872–1933) was the Old Bolshevik and Ukraine’s Commissar of Education from 1927 to 1933. After 1917, he was instrumental in the formation of the first and second Ukrainian Soviet governments. He was a strong defender of cultural autonomy of ethnic Ukrainians beyond the republic’s borders in the Russian SFSR. Skrypnyk at various times held the Ukrainian posts of secretary of Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, attorney-general, People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs, Justice, and Education, vice-chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, and chairman of the State Planning Commission. He was also a member of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (TsK RKP(b)) and the Executive Committee of the Communist International, six times a delegate to Communist International congresses and leader of the Ukrainian delegation. In the inner party struggles, he supported Stalin against the opposition. In recognition of his prolific literary contribution, Skrypnyk was made a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. He also edited one of the leading journals for educators in Ukraine. In July 1933, he committed suicide.
Skrypnykivka, or the Kharkiv orthography, was prepared in 1926 by the State Commission for the Regulation of Ukrainian Orthography of the People’s Commissariat of Education. It was formally approved in September 1928 by Skrypnyk; thus, the name. It was the first universally recognized standard Ukrainian orthography. Subsequently, it was reformed in 1933 because of its alleged embrace of “nationalist deviation.”
SNK (in Russian Sovet narodnykh komissarov), or the Council of People’s Commissars, was highest executive and administrative authority of the Soviet Union from 1923 to 1946.
Dmytro Solovey (1888–1966) was a Poltava-born historian, economist, and publicist. A graduate of Kharkiv University, he at various times worked at the republic’s statistical bureau and the Institute of Ukrainian Culture. In 1944, he escaped to Germany and later immigrated to the United States. He is the author of Ukraїna v systemi kolonializmu (Ukraine in the System of Colonialism, 1959) and Ukraїns′ka nauka v kolonial′nykh putakh (Ukrainian Science in Colonial Shackles, 1963) that deal with colonial status of Ukraine and its science.
Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) were members of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries. In Russia, the party was organized in 1906, and by the summer of 1917 it had more than a million members. The party relied on terrorism in the struggle for political power. In November 1917, the party split, and the Left SRs entered into an alliance with the Bolsheviks. In May 1921, the SRs were put on trial. The Right SRs seized to exist in 1925.
sotsvykh is a blend of the first syllables from two Ukrainian words sotsial′ne vykhovannia, meaning social upbringing in preschool and primary schools.
spetspereselentsy (in Russian, “special resettlers”) were Ukrainian farmers stripped of their property and deported to inhospitable areas in the Far North, Urals, Western Siberia in Russia, as well as steppes of Kazakhstan. They were at the bottom of the centralized hierarchical system of food distribution in the Soviet Union, one rank above the forced-labor camp inmates.
SRSR (in Ukrainian) stands for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or the former Soviet Union.
stanytsia (in Ukrainian) was a Cossack settlement in the North Caucasus.
Ivan Steshenko (1873–1918) was a Ukrainian civic and political activist, writer, translator, member of the Ukrainian government, and member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. He served as the first minister of education of Ukraine. He was murdered by the Bolsheviks in July 1918.
SUM (in Ukrainian Spilka ukraїns′koї molodi), or the Union of Ukrainian Youth.
supriah was a joint operation that involved a lot of time and effort. In order to carry on farm work, implements and draught power had to be collected from all over the district and the various pieces of machinery and animals teamed up for the task at hand.
SVU (in Ukrainian Spilka vyzvolennia Ukraїny), or Union for the Liberation of Ukraine.
Iurii Tiutiunnyk (1891–1930), born in the Cherkasy region, and a graduate of an agricultural college in Uman, started his military service in the 6th Siberian Regiment in 1913 and was wounded during World War I. In 1917, he became a member of the Central Rada and organized a 20,000-strong force in Zvenyhorod. In 1918, this unit had control over large territories in central and southern Ukraine. In 1919, Tiutiunnyk joined the Army of the UNR. As a brigadier general, he participated in the First Winter Campaign and organized the Second Winter Campaign in 1921. He was lured to Soviet Ukraine in 1923. Tiutiunnyk played himself in Piłsudski Bought Peliura, a film that slandered the Ukrainian national liberation movement. In his memoirs, the former otaman claimed that he had done everything possible to help people understand that the movie was a lie. A fierce enemy of the communist government, Tiutiunnyk nevertheless taught the tactics of guerrilla warfare in the Kharkiv Red Officer School, where he told about his exploits to those against whom they had been directed. Tiutiunnyk was arrested in 1929 and shot in 1930.
Torgsin is an abbreviation from Torgovlia s inostrantsami (in Russian, “trade with foreigners”). This was a chain of special state-run stores, established in 1930. Foreigners who visited the Soviet Union or foreign experts who worked on Soviet construction projects could purchase goods in these stores using hard currency. Beginning in 1931, branch stores expanded to the district level and became accessible to Soviet citizens. During the genocidal famine, the stores extorted gold and anything valuable from the population in exchange for food and foreign-made products. In January 1932, store employees began receiving food rations to stave off stealing and to minimize a turnover of personnel. A store employee was entitled to 1 kg of butter, 1 kg of smoked meat, 3 kg of flour, 2 kg of macaroni, 1 kg of rice, 1 kg of sugar, 1 kg of herring, I kg of cheese, cans of fish in oil, and a bar of soap per month. Often these products were sold on the black market for exorbitant prices. At the time, starving people were bringing valuables (wedding rings, medals, or jewelry) to be weighed in exchange for food. In May 1932, only twenty-six stores functioned in Soviet Ukraine, but by October 1933, the network numbered 263. In 1932–1933, an estimated 66 tons of gold (21 tons in 1932 and 45 tons in 1933) in exchange for food on the territory of the USSR were extorted to pay for imported American and European goods and industrial equipment for Dnipro HES (hydroelectric power station) and Kharkiv tractor factory. In 1933, groceries constituted 90 percent of Torgsin sales. Due to shortages of food, thousands of receipts received in exchange for valuables were never redeemed.
troika (in Russian, Ukrainian triika) was a trio of party, GPU, and a local lumpen activist who conducted arbitrary executions without a trial.
trudoden′ (a blend of trud and den′ or a “workday”) was a form of payment for workers on collective farms. This form of payment was introduced in 1930 because the state had no functioning banking system for money circulation. By spring 1931, this system of payment was imposed on 84 percent of collective farms in Soviet Ukraine. In theory, the payment was based on the quantity and quality of work calculated in workdays. In practice, it did not guarantee that collective farmers would be compensated materially for their work on farms. Payments were disbursed twice a year, an advance payment in July or August, and the full payment by the decision of the farm administration at the end of the year. Payments for agricultural work were stratified into five categories, averaging one to two workdays, so the compensation ranged from 60 kopeks to 1 krb. 20 kopeks. There was no minimum guaranteed payment. It was determined by a variety of factors: the crop size, the principle of distribution, and the procurement plan imposed from “above.” For instance, ploughing 6 hectares of farm land was equivalent to 1.5 workdays, whereas digging out 600 quintal of potatoes or a ton of sugar beets was equivalent to 1.75 workdays. Distribution of seed grain was forbidden until collective farms fulfilled imposed grain procurement quotas. Often, the collective farms had nothing left over after fulfilling their obligations to the state. In fall 1932, collective farmers were stripped of one-third of their “earned workdays” for failing to fulfill grain procurement quotas, and in the blacklisted collective farms, workers were stripped of their grain seed advances. In 1933, nearly 48 percent of collective farms in Soviet Ukraine did not pay workers for their earned workdays, which means that an estimated 4 million collective farm workers and 14 million of their dependents were deprived of means to survive.
TsChO (in Russian Tsentral′nyi chernozemnyi okrug), or the Central Black Earth area of the Russian SFSR (1928–1934), included Voronezh, Kursk, and Tambov, with a reported population of 11 million in 1931. Based on the 1926 census, from 1.5 to 2 million Ukrainians lived in the Central Black Earth region, including approximately 1.1 million Ukrainians in the Voronezh region and 600,000 in the Kursk region.
TsK (in Russian Tsentral′nyi komitet), or the Central Committee.
TsKK (in Russian Tsentral′naia kontrol′naia komissiia), or the Central Control Commission.
Kost′ Turkalo (1892–1979), son of a priest, graduated from a seminary in Kam’ianets′-Podil′s′kyi and later studied engineering at the Kyïv Polytechnic Institute. He was a member of Central Rada (1917–1918). He was one of the leading figures in implementing Ukrainization from 1924 to 1926. He served as editor in a technical section of the Institute of the Ukrainian Language (1926–1929). He was arrested in 1921, rearrested in 1930, and exiled until 1939. After World War II, he immigrated to America. He compiled a list of defendants in the SVU trial, first published in The Black Deeds of the Kremlin in the 1950s.
UNR (in Ukrainian Ukraїns′ka narodnia respublika), or Ukrainian National Republic. After the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, the Central Rada proclaimed the Ukrainian National Republic, designating its territory and its federal relationship with Russia in its Third Universal of November 20, 1917. The Central Rada had the support of the majority of the population of Ukraine. At the end of November 1917, the Bolshevik government of Russia was preparing to seize power in Ukraine, and, on December 17, 1917, sent an ultimatum to Ukraine, which the Central Rada rejected. The Bolshevik army then began its military campaign against Ukraine. The All-Ukrainian Congress of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies met in Kyїv on December 17, 1917, and proclaimed its support for the Central Rada. The Bolshevik deputies left for Kharkiv, where, on December 25, 1917, they established a rival government opposed to the Central Rada. At the same time the Rada sent a delegation to the peace negotiations with the Central Powers in Brest. At the height of the Ukrainian war against Russian Bolsheviks in the mid of the peace negotiations, the Central Rada proclaimed the Fourth Universal on January 25, 1918, which declared the Ukrainian National Republic an independent and sovereign state. The Central Rada passed a series of laws, establishing the eight-hour workday, land reform, and, during its stay in Volyn′, laws on the monetary system, a national coat of arms, citizenship in the UNR, and the administrative-territorial division of the territory of Ukraine. The most important legislative act of the Central Rada was the adoption of the Constitution of the UNR on April 29, 1918. After the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty on February 9, 1918, the German army took over the Ukrainian territory that had been occupied by the Bolsheviks, but conflict ensued between the Germans and the UNR because of German interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine. On April 29, 1918, a coup took place with the support of the German army, and General Pavlo Skoropads′kyi was proclaimed Hetman of the Ukrainian State. Hetman Skoropads′kyi dissolved the Central Rada. In December 1918, following Germany’s withdrawal from Ukraine, Skoropads′kyi abdicated and fled to Germany. The Directory of the UNR succeeded in ousting him in a coup. The UNR government created a ministry of nationalities with deputy ministers for the Jewish, Polish, and Russian minorities. Minority schools were established in areas of compact settlements of the respective minorities. The government-in-exile of the Ukrainian National Republic continued its existence abroad until 1992, when it formally ceased to exist with the creation of an independent Ukrainian state.
USRR (in Ukrainian Ukraїns′ka Sotsialistychna Radians′ka Respublika), or Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (see URSR).
URSR (in Ukrainian Ukraїns′ka Radians′ka Sotsialistychna Respublika), or Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. After the adoption of the Soviet constitution of 1936, known as Stalin’s constitution, the official name was changed by switching two words, Soviet preceding Socialist.
USSR stands for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (in Russian Soiuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated SSSR), or the former Soviet Union.
Mykola Vasylenko (1866–1935) was Ukrainian historian and minister of education during the Hetman administration. At the invitation of Mykhailo Hrushevs′kyi, Vasylenko joined the Central Rada. Vasylenko was appointed minister of education by Hetman Skoropads′kyi on May 3, 1918, and served in that position until October 25, 1918. During his brief tenure, Vasylenko played a prominent role in founding the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and two universities, one in Kyїv and another in Kam’ianets′-Podil′s′kyi. In 1920, Vasylenko headed the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. In 1924, he was arrested and sentenced to ten years of imprisonment for allegedly being a leader of the Kyїv Regional Center, plotting to overthrow the Communist dictatorship and establish democratic people’s councils. Under the pressure from the scientific circles, the academician was freed. Due to severe psychological stress, his health condition worsened. In 1929, Vasylenko was dismissed from his post in the academy. His wife, Natalia Polons′ka-Vasylenko, a distinguished historian, wrote a history of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and a volume on Ukrainian women in history.
Hryhorii Vashchenko (1878–1967) was a teacher and educational theorist from the Poltava region. In 1923, he joined the Poltava Institute of People’s Education. As the chair of the pedagogy department, he devoted his work to developing Zaluzhnyi’s theory of the collective upbringing. In 1933, he was forced to resign. In search of a job, he moved to Moscow, and after two years without stable employment, he secured a position as a chair of the pedagogy department at the Stalingrad Pedagogical Institute. In 1943, he immigrated to Munich, where he became professor of pedagogy at the Ukrainian Free University. Till the rest of his life, he dedicated his work to the moral and patriotic education of Ukrainian youth in diaspora. In 1957, he authored a draft of the system of education for independent Ukraine. In 1995, a pedagogical society was named after him to popularize his legacy in Ukraine.
VChK (in Russian Vserossiiskaia chrezvychainaia komissiia), or All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, commonly spelled as Cheka, was the first of a succession of Soviet security police organizations. Established in December 1917, it was headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky.
versta (in Russian) was approximately one kilometer.
vidpovidachi were civilians selected at random, accused of harboring or aiding “bandits,” and executed by the Bolsheviks as part of the system of extrajudicial killings. The decree issued on May 30, 1921, signed by Volodymyr Zatons′kyi, then head of the council on combatting bandit activities in the Kyïv military district, provided instructions on how two plenipotentiaries have to select one civilian from every twentieth household in a village or at least one civilian from every independent farmstead to be executed as responsible for carrying out acts of “banditry”; the number of civilians executed doubled if a Soviet government official was murdered.
VKP(b) (in Russian Vsesoiuznaia Kommunisticheskaia partiia (bol′shevikov)) was the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks).
VTsIK (in Russian Vserossiiskii tsentral′nyi ispolnitel′nyi komitet), or the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.
VUAN (Vseukraїns′ka akademiia nauk), or All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. It was founded in 1918, dissolved in 1929, and absorbed into the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. It served as an element of governmental control over the political activities of the intelligentsia. VUTsVK (in Ukrainian Vseukraїns′kyi tsentral′nyi vykonavchyi komitet), or the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee.
vykonavtsi perpetrated the genocide known as the Holodomor. They included rank-and-file Communists dispatched from Moscow and other Russian urban centers as well as regional and district branches of the party and repressive security police, the GPU. They were forced to carry out collectivization, grain confiscation, and propaganda campaigns. In addition, teachers were forced to provide the ideological cover for these campaigns. The supply of food for teachers was conditioned on their “participation” in these campaigns as members of buksyrni bryhady.
War Communism was the term used by Vladimir Lenin to describe the onslaught of 1918–1920. Lenin claimed that the measures aimed at building communism had been precipitated by wartime conditions. However, the term did not appear until 1921, after the transition to the New Economic Policy (see NEP).
ZAGS (in Russian Zapisi aktov grazhdanskogo sostoianiia), or Registry of Vital Statistics, for the years of 1932–1933 in the Ukrainian state archives contain 3 million deaths, which cover a maximum of one-third of the territory afflicted by the Holodomor. Mortality records directly attributed to the Holodomor constitute no more than 1.5 percent of the total mortality records of civil registry offices. Soviet archival documents were sanitized in 1929–1930, 1937–1938, and during the summer of 1941 on the eve of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. After the re-evacuation of archives in 1945, inventories conducted in 1949, 1955, 1957, 1962, 1965, and 1968 led to thousands of records for the period of 1928–1935 being deliberately destroyed.
Oleksandr Zaluzhnyi (1886–1938), a teacher and educational theorist from the Dnipropetrovs′k region, published several monographs on the role of the collective in the upbringing of children. Between 1907 and 1910, he studied in Sorbonne, Paris. In 1917, he returned to Ukraine and served in the Central Rada. In 1922, he went to Japan, where he studied its education system. Upon return to Ukraine in 1924, he lectured at the Kharkiv Institute of People’s Education. In 1926, he joined the first Ukrainian educational research institute, where he was in charge of the section studying collectivism. His transfer to Moscow in 1935 did not save him from persecution for his experimental work with educational testing and his interest in reflexology. In 1938, he was arrested and imprisoned; rehabilitated posthumously.
zaruchnytstvo was a system of hostage taking, used by occupying Bolshevik authorities.
zatirka, or zatyrushka, was a variety of a low-calorie soup made of flour added to water, with a mixture of surrogates, such as grasses, leaves, oat or rye chaff. In August 1932, after the law of “five ears of wheat” was adopted, bread was given out to tractor drivers only, whereas collective farm workers in the fields were fed “hot meals” and had to eat their own bread. In November 1932, public kitchens on collective farms stopped functioning because all grain and food were confiscated due to failure to fulfill grain procurement plans. Mass deaths from starvation and appeals to the government for help in spring of 1933 led to the opening of 22,000 field kitchens on collective farms to feed those who had strength to sow and plant a new crop.
Volodymyr Zatons′kyi (1888–1938) was People’s Commissar of Education in the Ukrainian SSR. He was the only Commissar of Education in the 1920s to complete a postsecondary degree, graduating from Kyїv University in 1912. In 1917, he joined Bolsheviks and served twice as Commissar of Education in the first Soviet Ukrainian governments and was instrumental in the formation of the KP(b)U. Zatons′kyi was again appointed the Commissar of Education in October 1922, after Hryhorii Hryn′ko’s tenure. Although the reorganization of Ukrainian schools continued under Zatons′kyi’s tenure, Ukrainization of schools did not accelerate until Oleksandr Shums′kyi assumed leadership of the People’s Commissariat of Education. Zatons′kyi also served as deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars from 1927 to 1933 and was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. He reassumed the position of Commissar of Education after Mykola Skrypnyk’s dismissal in 1933. He was arrested in 1937 and later executed in 1938.