TORONTO – Thirty years ago, many in the academic community questioned the extent and even the validity of the 1932-33 man-made famine directed against Ukrainians, known as the Holodomor. This week, some of the world’s leading scholars put the subject at the forefront of academic study.
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the Holodomor, as well as the 30th anniversary of the Ukrainian diaspora’s efforts to place the study of the famine on the academic and public agenda.
To understand just how far they have come in the last three decades, scholars from North America and Europe gathered in Toronto on Sept. 27-28 for a conference to examine the impact of Holodomor research on the understanding of a range of disciplines.
“The conference addressed what the last 30 years of study of the Holodomor has meant for the understanding of major questions, such as Ukrainian history, the history of the Soviet Union, the history of Communism, genocide and Stalinism,” said Frank Sysyn, who heads the executive committee of the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (HREC) and is director of the Peter Jacyk Centre for Historical Research.
Established with the financial support of The Temerty Family Foundation, HREC conducts and supports research and study of the Holodomor and engages in a range of activities to promote teaching about the Ukrainian famine in schools.
Robert Conquest’s groundbreaking Harvest of Sorrow was the first history to investigate the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine. It was published in 1986 to a skeptical public that found it difficult to believe the Soviets orchestrated a famine that left millions of people dead in Ukraine. Even today, the number of victims remains a subject of debate, with some saying at least two million people killed and others putting the total of famine-related as high as 10 million people.
Since the book’s publication, however, there has been a sea change in opinion.
“Now you can get major scholars to address the Holodomor,” Sysyn said. “That is a sign of success of Ukrainian famine studies.”
The question for scholars involved in Holodomor studies is where to go from here, said Marta Baziuk, who runs HREC’s Toronto office.
“Now we have consensus among scholars, the disagreements are on points. Nobody denies it anymore.”
Olga Andriewsky, an associate professor at Trent University, said there is little doubt that the Holodomor transformed the Soviet Union. “The entire history of the Soviet Union would have been different if it had been stopped,” she said. “Ukraine was a terrible, terrible problem for [Moscow].”
Andriewsky presented a paper examining the impact of the study of the Holodomor on the understanding of Ukrainian history.
An often overlooked aspect of the Holodomor, she said, is the number of Ukrainian Communist Party members who were purged during the Holodomor because of their opposition to the policy. “They saw their people starving to death,” she said. “Villagers fought in different ways. It was a life and death struggle.”
One of the significant changes of recent years is that the Holodomor is taking its rightful place in genocide studies. “Genocide studies has been one of the important developments,” she said.
Crucially, however, is that Ukrainians themselves are changing their attitudes toward the Holodomor. Polls taken in 2012 show that 60 percent of the population believes the famine was genocide.
The new frontier in Holodomor studies will be investigating its social history and looking at how norms changed after the famine, said Andriewsky.
“It brought an end of a social order that started in the 17th century. We still don’t have a social document,” she said. “People were humiliated and beaten up. They began starving to death. This was a whole military action against an unarmed population.”
The conference, “Contextualizing the Holodomor,” was organized by HREC and the University of Alberta’s Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, as well as other leading institutions in Toronto. Twelve young academics received stipends to support their attendance at the seminar. HREC held a conference for teachers and educators about the Holodomor in May.
More information about the conference can be found at http://munkschool.utoronto.ca/ceres/events/.
Natalia A. Feduschak is a freelance journalist and former Kyiv Post staff writer.
