The International Academic Conference | Soviet Ukraine’s National Minorities during the Period of the Holodomor: Losses, Trauma, Memory

In historiography, the experience of Ukraine’s national minorities during the period of the Holodomor is one of the most important but still insufficiently developed aspects of the study of Stalin’s policy of masterminding the famine. Recent decades have seen major developments in terms of clarifying the specifics of the sociopolitical, economic, cultural, and religious life of ethnic minorities in Ukraine, which was part of the polyethnic empire that was the USSR. At the same time, our knowledge and understanding of the causes and nature of the Holodomor in Ukraine have deepened. Historical writing on this tragic phenomenon has gone boldly beyond the simple ac- cumulation of empirical data. Today it covers diverse aspects of the problem, ranging from reconstructions of local historical events and daily practices to broad historical comparisons and the conceptualization of discourses on totalitarianism, communism, genocide, empires/dependent territories, and ways of remembering the past. All this creates the foundation for the deeper integration of the history of national minorities into contemporary studies on the Holodomor. This international conference will focus on a set of scholarly problems in an effort to understand the historical, demographic, social, political, cultural, and psychological contexts of the experience of Soviet Ukraine’s national minorities during the period of the Holodomor. The panel discussions at the conference will focus on the following topics: national minorities and ethnic groups in the social structure of Ukrainian society and political space of the USSR as a polyethnic empire; Stalin’s “revolution from above” in national districts and villages; grain procurement, dekulakization, deportations, and the forced collectivization of agriculture; the roles played by members of national minorities during the Holodomor: as neighbors, activists, criminals, saviors, eyewitnesses, victims; national minorities and ethnic groups in the cultural memory of the Holodomor.

The conference idea and its initiators:

Liudmyla Hrynevych (Institute of the History of Ukraine, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; Holodomor Research and Education Consortium [HREC in Ukraine], Kyiv, Ukraine)

Bohdan Klid (Holodomor Research and Education Consortium [HREC], Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, Edmonton, Canada)

Download the Conference Program in Ukrainian and English. 

Organizers:

• Ukrainian Institute of National Memory
• Institute of the History of Ukraine, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
• M. V. Ptukha Institute for Demography and Social Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
• Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (HREC) at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta
• Holodomor Research and Education Centre (HREC in Ukraine) German-Ukrainian Historical Commission
• Research Center for Postcolonial and Posttotalitarian Studies, Wrocław University
• Center for the Studies of the History and Culture of East European Jewry (Judaica Center), National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy
• Tkuma Holocaust Research Institute