2020 Toronto Annual Ukrainian Famine Lecture | Bohdan Klid | The Last Stand: The Third All-Ukrainian Conference of the Communist Party (bolsheviks) of Ukraine and the Holodomor
9 October 2020
The Third All-Ukrainian Party Conference was called to address one topic only: the state of Ukraine's agricultural sector. The delegates included not only Ukraine's communist party leaders and district-level officials but also Kremlin emissaries Lazar Kaganovich and Viacheslav Molotov, dispatched by Stalin to attend the conference. The event took place 6-9 July 1932, in Kharkiv, on the eve of the harvest and campaign to collect grain to fill state coffers. Tens of thousands had already died of starvation. Ukraine’s Politburo members met with Kaganovich and Molotov to argue for a reduction in the unrealistic grain collection quota, marking the last opportunity of Ukraine’s communists to mitigate the severity of the famine. Dr. Klid will discuss how the famine was addressed at the party conference and will reveal discrepancies between archival copies of the conference proceedings and the published report.
Dr. Bohdan Klid is Director of Research at the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (HREC) of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), University of Alberta. He has written extensively on the Holodomor and is co-editor, with Alexander Motyl, of The Holodomor Reader: A Sourcebook on the Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine. He has written on the nineteenth-century historian Volodymyr Antonovych, on Ukrainian historiography of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and on contemporary Ukrainian culture and politics. Dr. Klid has served as both Assistant Director and Assistant to the Director of CIUS.
Sponsors
Holodomor Research and Education Consortium, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta
Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine (Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, University of Toronto)
Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies
Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Toronto Branch
About the Lecture
The Toronto Annual Ukrainian Famine Lecture began in 1998 at the initiative of the Famine-Genocide Commemorative Committee of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Toronto Branch.
Past Lecturers
James Mace, Frank Sysyn, Ian Hunter, Terry Martin, Hiroaki Kuromiya, Olexiy Haran, Mark von Hagen, Lynne Viola, Roman Serbyn, Alex Hinton, Andrea Graziosi, Oleh Wolowyna, Norman Naimark, Alexander Motyl, Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder, Serhii Plokhy, Jars Balan, Liudmyla Hrynevych, Olga Andriewsky