Academic literature on the topic 'Holodomor denial'

The main narratives of denial of the Holodomor in independent Ukraine underwent a noticeable transformation. During the 1990s and early 2000s, widespread in Soviet times direct denials of the famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine were transformed into interpretive denials, which consisted in attempts to present the Holodomor as an event that does not correspond to the internationally recognized criteria of the act of genocide. Pro-Russian political environments became the main promoter of denial of the Holodomor in independent Ukraine. Representatives of these political trend considered denial of the Holodomor as an important tool for delegitimization of Ukrainian independence, as well as destabilization of the internal political situation in the Ukrainian state. Denial of the Holodomor was especially active during the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko (2005–2010). At that time, opposition pro-Russian politicians, propagandists and political technologists promoted the thesis that the restoration of the memory of the Holodomor will inevitably occur at the expense of the separation of Ukrainian society, and will also spoil the relations of Ukraine with its «main strategic partner – Russia». During Viktor Yanukovych’s rule (2010–2014), denial of the Holodomor acquired a latent character and was combined with the removal of references to the 1932–1933 famine from education and the public sphere. After the Revolution of Dignity of 2013–2014 and the beginning of Russian aggression in Donbas, denial of the Holodomor in Ukraine takes place mainly in a hidden form.

Hiding of the mass extermination, denying the very fact of extermination are essential components of the crime of genocide. The article analyzes the stages of denial of the Holodomor, highlights the models of this denial, as well as the evolution of the main narratives that opponents of the genocidal qualification of the Holodomor are trying to spread. The Soviet Union consistently denied the Holodomor 1932–1933 and actively opposed the dissemination of information about it. The communist regime’s denial of reality was so widespread and pervasive, that even in 1930th in official documents of state and party authorities marked “for official use” and in some cases even “top secret”, the word “famine” was hardly used. Soviet authorities called the catastrophic famine “food shortages” caused by crop failures. Simultaneously with the blocking of information about the Holodomor, the communist regime resorted to a counter-propaganda operation, which consisted in refuting those reports of starvation and deaths, which, despite all the efforts of the Soviet secret services, infiltrated the West. In the USSR communist authorities used tactics that could be described as “aggressive erasure” to deny the Holodomor. This campaign was a combination of destruction of documentary evidence of a crime with the active intimidation of witnesses, who were unequivocally made aware that they must forget everything they saw. Authorities used repression against those who tried to preserve the memory about the Holodomor. In the late 1980s the soviet communists had to admit that the famine of 1932–1933 did occur in Ukraine, but as an official explanation for those events was proposed a version that absolved the Kremlin of responsibility for the multimillion casualties of the Holodomor. Soviet propaganda claimed that the causes of the famine were: objective difficulties in the period of agricultural transformation, organizational weakness of the newly established collective farms, lack of experienced personnel and agricultural machinery, sabotage by the kulaks etc. The main negative role was allegedly played by the disorganization of agricultural production, which, in turn, was caused by the abandonment of “the Lenin plan of cooperation” of farmers, and the accelerated pace of collectivization. At the same time, the propaganda called the accelerated pace of collectivization a forced step by the Soviet government, which felt threatened by the external invasion of the imperialist states and therefore had to prepare country for war at a rapid pace. At the same time, soviet propaganda continued to deny fact that the famine was anti-Ukrainian. The communist regime claimed that the famine affected the entire territory of the USSR, ad had no local specifics in Ukraine and others regions of the country with densely Ukrainian population (especially the Kuban). Calling the famine a “common tragedy of the entire Soviet Union” authorities insisted that its intensity throughout the USSR seemed to be the same everywhere. Denial of the Holodomor did not stop after the collapse of the USSR. At the beginning of the XXI century struggle against the recognition of the Holodomor as an act of genocide has become one of the priorities of the policy of memory in the Russian Federation. The main narratives of denying the Holodomor today are the allegations that the famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine was not intentional, was not related to the anti-Ukrainian policy of the Bolsheviks, did not have fatal demographic and social consequences. A characteristic feature of the denial of the Holodomor in Russia in the second half of the 2000s was its twofold nature: along with the moderate denial of an academic nature there was an aggressive propaganda narrative of polemical and journalistic denial, the main purpose of which was anti-Ukrainian mobilization of Russian society.

The Holodomor (derived from the Ukrainian words “to kill by starvation”) (1932-33) was the largest famine in Ukrainian history. This article presents the results of a psychological study of personal attitudes to Holodomor events and of worldviews and behavioural strategies connected to famine exposure in the family histories of the survey participants. The results of a survey of 721 respondents showed (1) close connections between a respondent’s pattern of keeping silent about traumatic events that occurred during the Holodomor and the extent of suffering that the respondent’s family experienced during the Holodomor, and (2) close connections between the avoidance of Holodomor-related storytelling and a denial and devaluation of Holodomor events within families. The most common family behavioural strategies of descendants of Holodomor victims showed proper feeding, substantial food storage, and regular health check-in. The most common respondent attitudes comprised a distrust of authority, disappointment with the government, and a priority of family needs over community needs.

This paper explores the way that the Holodomor – the famine-genocide that took place from 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine under Stalin’s rule – is remembered in contemporary contexts. It analyzes how the opposing systems of capitalism and socialism are portrayed through this memory to answer the question: how has the dominant memory of the Holodomor been used to invalidate or vilify the idea of socialism? The paper draws on the empirical example of University of Alberta lecturer Dougal MacDonald’s denial of the Holodomor in November 2019, specifically through a discussion of the reactions to this statement. It discusses the concept of historical denialism and draws on the comments of Alberta Premier Jason Kenney in response to MacDonald, arguing that his comments grouped all communists and socialists with Holodomor deniers. Finally, the paper draws on how the memory of the Holodomor is used in international relations, concluding that it has become a ‘living’ history and a constant reminder of the supposed dangers of communism in any form as the villain is no longer Stalin’s regime, but the entire ideology.

The study describes stages of spreading information about the Holodomor1932-1933 by national and world public highlights specifics and features of it in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Historiography has been analyzed. The main features of the Soviet period are analyzed: total denial of the USSR leaders to the Holodomor and introduction of an information blockade on the territory of the Union; prosecution for any mention of the Holodomor; discrediting persons who spread information; concealment, falsification or destruction of incriminating documents; creation of agents network and introduction of fake versions in order to minimize the socio-political consequences of the truth about the Holodomor; absence of this topic in socio-political and scientific discourses. Among the main characteristic of the post-Soviet period are the following: joining of the Holodomor topic as a genocide of the Ukrainian people into socio-political and scientific discourses; using it in political or geopolitical struggle, organizing controversies over its territorial and chronological boundaries, pressuring international organizations and governments to deny or not recognize the Holodomor as genocide, and introducing controversies to maximize the neutralization of social and political consequences publicizing the truth about it. Keywords: Holodomor (the Great Famine), genocide, information, scientific research, Soviet period, post-Soviet period, USSR, USSR.

The article highlights the problems and prospects of establishing of criminal lability for Holodomor denial in the context of the experience of criminalizing genocide denial, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in European countries. Significant part of western researchers considers that the prosecution of persons who deny genocide should take place primarily in those countries where the mass extermination of large human groups took place in the past and whose society has knowledge of the relevant historical context. Criminalization of denials of genocide in European countries took place in stages. During the 1990s, France, Germany and Belgium established criminal liability for denying the crimes of the Third Reich, including the Holocaust. At the beginning of the XXI century several countries in Eastern and Southern Europe introduced responsibility for the denial of crimes committed by Nazi and communist totalitarian regimes. The next stage of the criminalization of genocide denial began in 2015–2016, it consisted in the establishment of a general ban on denial of all cases of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, without excluding. Spain, Italy, Germany and others countries of Europe adopted laws of this plan. Currently, international law does not require punishment for genocide denial, but there are noticeable trends leading to the establishment of such a universal norm. Between 2003 and 2008, the European Court of Human Rights and the European Parliament issued a series of decisions that justified the right of democratic countries to restrict freedom of speech on issues related to the denial of the Holocaust and others crimes of the Nazi totalitarian regime of the Third Reich. Genocide denial is a violation of the right to respect for human dignity – not only victims of genocide, but also their descendants are considered victims in cases of this kind.

The purpose of the article is to analyze the evolution of the United States policy toward Ukraine vis-à-vis Russia during three presidential administrations of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Biden, with an emphasis on the genocide of Ukrainians. The scientific novelty of the research consists in the analysis of the genocide of Ukrainians within the context of the century-old Cold War between Russia and the West using primary sources from the American military intelligence archives. Methodology. The author used historical research methodology to collect and triangulate primary and secondary sources and applied critical analysis of the content of governmental reports, archival documents, newspaper articles, and scholarly monographs. Conclusions. For the third time in history, Ukraine has become a battlefield in the geopolitical struggle between Russia and the West. While Woodrow Wilson made «the world safe for democracy», his principle of self-determination did not apply to Ukrainians; thus, Ukraine’s independence was sacrificed for the sake of «Russian unity». The consequences were the Red Terror and Lenin’s famine of 1921–1923 in Ukraine that drowned in blood its national liberation movement. Lenin’s disciple, Joseph Stalin, consolidated the totalitarian system and implemented his predecessor’s policy toward Ukraine which led to physical, biological, and cultural genocide against the largest non-Russian captive nation. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration not only did nothing, but also never acknowledged publicly Stalin’s crimes. American journalists along with politicians participated, albeit indirectly, in the Holodomor denial. The rehabilitation of Stalinism in Russia, revision of the past, and Holodomor denial have led to further escalation of violence on the eve of the ninetieth anniversary of the crime. President Joseph Biden called Russia’s actions in Ukraine a genocide. The next step is to draw a parallel to the Holodomor and respond to that denial by bringing the perpetrators of today’s genocide before an international tribunal to restore the rule of law and justice.

Notion of Holodomor as an invention of “Ukrainian nationalists” and “Nazis” circulated in world information sphere since the end of WWII. Gradually, with more oral history written, with more documents being declassified and more researches done, Holodomor reconstituted its place in Ukrainian historiography, collective memory and state commemorative traditions. The goal of the article is to reveal five vectors, and at the same time – means of Soviet/Russian propaganda, applied toward theme of the famine in the frames of the genocide denial instrument called «manipulation». These are: direct accusations of involvement into Nazism; deepening of mental abyss between free and Communist worlds; exploitation of a thesis “conquerors are not judged” as the result of the victory in WWII; legal proceedings; Sovietology studies. Weigh of each component varies and is of more or less power. The first proposed instrument had the most long-lasting and powerful effect. It basically tied the whole national Ukrainian movement and ideology to Nazism. Its consequences and echo were still visible till the beginning of full-scale war in 2022. The next three instruments were connected to WWII and thus their influence gradually weakened. Chairs of Sovietology, like the first vector, also remained strongholds of anti-Ukrainians and pro-Soviet/Russian imperial narrative till 2022, when many historians faced the necessity to rethink their previous assessments of Ukrainian history, including the Holodomor. Therefore, proposed by the author vectors and instruments used in propagandist campaign against the Holodomor both show their long-lasting influence and deconstruct the Soviet-Russian imperial myth.

The paper considers repressions and Holodomor as a kind of literary practice and traumatic experience in the works and biography of the Ukrainian diaspora writer Olha Mak. The analysis covers fiction, memoirs, and journalistic texts, in particular the memoirs “From the Time of Yezhovshchyna”, the essay “Capital of Hungry Horror”, and the story “Stones Under Scythe”, considered in the context of the fi ction and documentaries of the postwar Ukrainian diaspora. In this case, the writing appears to be a vital natural resource for recreating the memory, where one’s own individual experience becomes a material, an object for self-refl ection. The process of writing is associated with moral and ethical duty of witnessing the past; it has a powerful therapeutic meaning and protects from immorality integrating individual experience and history into collective, social, cultural, etc. The memoir “From the Time of Yezhovshchyna” by Olha Mack, dealing with the theme of Soviet terror and repressions, is a peculiar form of re-experiencing a personal tragedy associated with the arrest and deportation of the author’s husband. It shows the self-denial of the Soviet human, the wife of the ‘enemy of people’, and records her traumatic experience and memories.The Holodomor theme, elaborated by Olha Mack in various genres and forms, was not only a material, an object of research, but also a part of her personal biography and family history. The Holodomor in the perception of Olha Mack symbolized the threat to social, national (spiritual) life connected with various social, cultural, and mental illnesses; hence, it involves the idea of eliminating Ukraine not only as material and spatial entity, but also as abstract and spiritual one. The story “Stones Under Scythe”, dedicated to the memory of the Holodomor, is considered as a kind of the classical bildungsroman genre’s variation. Its conceptual fi gures are images-archetypes of the child-victim, the female martyr, the great mother. The Holodomor (both physical and spiritual, which destroys the foundations of national dignity, national solidarity and so on) in the story by Olha Mack is not only the topic, but also a continual metaphor and key motive.