Understanding Ukraine E-Book

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Ukrainian Voices
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 260

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

The 2013–2014 Euromaidan Revolution’s call for justice, dignity, and liberty brought Ukraine, which had ’disappeared ’ behind the Iron Curtain for decades after the horrors of World War II, into the world’s public consciousness. Yet, the country was soon almost forgotten again. In early 2022, the rapid escalation of Putin’s war on Ukraine has put the country back into the spotlight. Without knowing the country’s past, one cannot understand its present. This anthology tackles the complex history of terror and violence in Ukraine – from the millionfold starvation of the Holodomor to the changing occupation regimes, from the ’Shoah by Bullets’ to the Chornobyl disaster. Those ready to delve deeper into the checkered, painful history of the country will better understand Ukraine’s current quest for independence, freedom, and democracy. The volume’s contributors are Serhii Plokhii, Timothy D. Snyder, Anna Veronika Wendland, Anne Applebaum, Eduard Klein, Gelinada Grinchenko, Gerhard Simon, Irina Scherbakowa, Jan Claas Behrends, Karel C. Berkhoff, Kateryna Mishchenko, Klaus Wolschner, Nikolai Klimeniouk, Nikolaus von Twickel, Oksana Grytsenko, Ottmar Trașcă, Rebecca Harms, Sebastian Christ, Sébastien Gobert, Viktoria Savchuk, Volodymyr Yermolenko, Wilfried Jilge, Christoph Brumme, and Yevhen Hlibovytsky.

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Contents

Preface to the New Edition April 2022

Preface

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1 Stalinist Repressions

Red Famine

Holodomor Understanding the History and Significance of the Great Ukrainian Famine

Executed Renaissance What the Ukrainian Intelligentsia’s Fate in the USSR Can Tell Us about Our World Today

Germans Search for Their Heritage in Declassified Ukrainian Archives

Deportation of Crimean Tatars A Thorny Path through the Decades

Chapter 2 Occupation Forces in the Second World War

The Legacy of the Hitler-Stalin Pact Ukraine between Nation and Imperial Rule

Ukraine Under Nazi Rule

Stepan Bandera On the Historical and Political Background of a Symbolic Figure

The Forgotten Koriukivka Massacre

Bremen Police Officers in the Holocaust

The Antonescu Regime and the “Jewish Question” in Romania

Volodymyr Kolchinsky A Life Story

Chapter 3 Remembrance and Responsibility

Repressed Memories of the Holocaust

Remembrance Must Go beyond the Concentration Camps

Forced Laborers from Ukraine Destiny and Memory

The Ukrainian Image of the Germans Thoughts on a Tragedy

Was Ukraine a Colony?

Chernobyl—Chornobyl A Place of Remembrance of Global Significance

Chernobyl Disaster without an Aftermath

The Dawn of an Open Society

Medusa and the Jellyfish Museum

A Successful Decommunization?

The Ukrainian Trauma

About the Authors

Preface to the New Edition April 2022

Marieluise Beck

We are creating a new edition of the book. On February 24, 2022, the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine under the completely absurd pretext that it had to protect the Russian population in the Donbas. Putin stated the “denazification” and demilitarization of Ukraine as the war’s goal. This is a cynical euphemism for the destruction of Ukraine’s national independence. For months, the Russian military had encircled Ukraine watched by world public opinion. However, the West would not believe the warnings that Putin was serious.

The Ukrainian president’s almost pleading requests to equip Ukraine militarily so it could withstand an attack have been met hesitantly. This creates the feeling of being left alone in Ukraine.

In this sense, the historical review of this booklet is extremely helpful.

The experience of the Holodomor has entered the DNA of the Ukrainian nation. So have the Soviet occupation and the terror under Stalin. Friendly recommendations that Ukraine submits to Putin’s demands and remains neutral—and thus unprotected—are blind to history.

For Germans, it is necessary to realize the scale of the immense campaign of extermination that the Wehrmacht, SS and police battalions wrought, especially on the soil of Ukraine. If this Germany does not now stand by Ukraine and give the Ukrainians all the support they need to defend their freedom, it will cause great disappointment and bitterness.

This war is not taking place in a history-free space. Anyone who wants to understand the Ukrainians and their struggle for freedom and self-determination will better understand what is at stake after reading this volume.

Berlin, March 2022

Preface

Marieluise Beck

We want to go to Europe! This call of the Maidan was one of the most powerful driving forces of the democratic awakening in Ukraine. Europe stood for democracy, the rule of law, freedom of travel and a better life. Historically, geographically and culturally, Ukraine belongs to Europe. This fact was forgotten after the division of Europe in Yalta. This division into East and West, which Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin sealed in the Crimea, lasted over half a century. Thus, our common history was forgotten. Forgotten were the old affiliations, the old names, languages were suppressed and the knowledge of geographical coordinates.

With the Iron Curtain, the national self-determination of Eastern Europe was also lost. Attempts to shake off the Soviet empire were bloodily put down in Budapest, Prague and Warsaw.

Following the establishment of the European Economic Community and eventually the European Union, a European community limited to the West emerged. The people in the East were increasingly lost from sight. People were ready to come to terms with the division of Europe. It was forgotten that Central Eastern Europe was multicultural, that the Memel was considered a Jewish river, that there was once a powerful Lithuanian-Polish kingdom, that the Hanseatic League stretched from Lübeck to Riga, that the nobility in St. Petersburg spoke French, that Odesa was a place of Italian master builders, gifted musicians and German piano makers. It was also forgotten that Armenia, like Georgia, saw itself as part of Christian Europe.

The fall of the Iron Curtain gave us the unexpected opportunity to rediscover this Europe as a whole. We encounter the forgotten and the repressed, the misuse and distortion of historical facts, and many taboos. We meet peoples long denied appearing on the map as independent nations and whose languages were systematically suppressed in favor of Russian. Monstrous acts of violence associated with the name of Stalin drove millions of people to their deaths through starvation, forced labor, and shootings. With inconceivable crimes, the SS and Wehrmacht systematically exterminated the Jewish population and treated the Slavs as “subhumans.” Timothy Snyder has called the stretch of land from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea the “Bloodlands”—the earth there is soaked in blood.

The powerful call for freedom and the end of the corrupt rule of the few over the many, for the end of arbitrariness and violence, was the Maidan of 2013/14, which put Ukraine back on the cognitive map of Europe. Nearly seventy years under the umbrella of the Soviet Union made the country almost invisible.

Deeply burned into Ukrainian DNA is the experience of the Holodomor: starvation by the millions in the land of fertile black earth, starvation, especially in the countryside, where even the seeds were confiscated. We do not know exactly how many millions fell victim to this deliberately brought about mass death. The fact that Stalin had the intelligentsia and the Ukrainian cadres of the Communist Party murdered in addition to the peasants’ points to all the characteristics of systematic genocide. Those who do not know this history may ask why most Ukrainians so vehemently reject Moscow's supposed protection. They have a keen sense that the masters of the Kremlin are striving to restore the Russian Empire. An independent, sovereign Ukraine stands in the way of these ambitions.

The imperial mania of Hitler’s Germany hit the “Bloodlands” particularly cruelly. World War II began in the West with the invasion of Poland by the German Wehrmacht on September 1, 1939. Just 17 days later, Stalin’s Red Army joined them from the East. Stalin and Hitler had concluded a devil's pact, the implementation of which destroyed Poland and made Galicia the site of cruel nationalist excesses. Among the followers of Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera, the German attack on the Soviet Union created the devastating illusion that the Germans would free them from the Soviet yoke.

Unimaginable crimes against the Slavic population were committed by the German Wehrmacht. Germans should know Koriukivka, where the Wehrmacht murdered almost 7000 civilians in two days in retaliation for partisan attacks. Adolf Hitler offered Transnistria, Bukovina and southern Ukraine to Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu as a reward for his cronyism. Thus, they murdered together. Romanian troops wiped out the Jewish population in Chernivtsi. German troops stood outside Odesa and left the killing to their Romanian allies. In October 1941, at least 25,000 Jews were burned to death in military barracks where they had been herded beforehand. The dimension of this crime is reminiscent of Babyn Yar.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews were deported to ghettos in Transnistria, where they perished miserably. In Ukraine, according to Yahad-In Unum, there were 2000 execution sites where SS, police battalions, soldiers of the Wehrmacht and local auxiliary police murdered mainly Jewish people. Slav partisans and French prisoners of war were also among the victims. The “Shoah by bullets” preceded industrial extermination camps such as Auschwitz.

This history of double tyranny by the two imperial superpowers, the Soviet Union and the Third Reich, gives rise in Ukraine, as in other Eastern European countries, to a deep-seated unease with Berlin when it concludes treaties at the expense of third parties, as it once did with Moscow.

It is time to face this history. Its long lines continue to have an effect. It will only lose its destructive power if the historical experiences, the violence experienced and the traumatic experiences of the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe are brought to the fore. Only the truth makes reconciliation possible.

We thank all those who made it possible for us to rediscover the forgotten and thus also to understand our history anew. Germany, Ukraine and 47 other countries: together, we are Europe. My special thanks go to the authors of this book and the editorial team of the Zentrum Liberale Moderne, especially Saskia Heller, Julia Eichhofer, Valeriya Golovina and Mattia Nelles.

Foreword

Dmytro Kuleba

Germany and Europe as a whole have come a long way since the first edition of this book in terms of truly understanding Ukraine. Furthermore, precisely this understanding proved to be the key to fully comprehending both Russia's imperial genocidal war of choice and Ukraine’s steadfast determination to fight until victory.

I am confident that in the coming years, Ukrainian studies will be introduced at major European universities—not as a replacement for Russian studies, but as an essential component of European studies. Without understanding Ukraine, it proved impossible to comprehend what Europe is now and what it will be in the future.

The essays in this book provide insightful looks into the psychological traumas—mostly terror traumas—survived by Ukrainians throughout the twentieth century. At the same time, it can and should be interpreted as the story of Ukrainian resistance and the people of Ukraine learning to resist. Ukraine’s path to healing itself and achieving independence.

Since last year, Germany and Europe as a whole have proven to be our true allies in defending our shared values, freedom, and democracy. But Ukraine has a lot of respect and gratitude for more than just this.

Given our bloody history, many generations of Europeans have been raised in a pacifist spirit. However, Russian aggression has made us all rethink pacifism. True pacifism entails actively defending peace rather than making abstract calls for it. And certainly not by leaving those who defend liberty defenseless in the face of a maniacal dictator attempting to drown Europe in blood.

Europe and Germany have shown they are willing to change their perspectives and adapt to the new reality.

Empathetic desire to comprehend Ukraine has changed the decades-long unfair view of our country through the crooked Russian lens. In November 2022, the German Bundestag made the historic decision to recognize the Holodomor of 1932-1933 as genocide. In Germany’s and Europe’s view of Ukraine, this marked another watershed, a Zeitenwende-momentum.

I appreciate this book’s authors, editors, and publishers. I am grateful to each and every reader for their interest. I hope my third foreword will be dedicated to a peaceful Europe after Ukraine’s victory.

Introduction

Timothy Snyder

Why should we be discussing historical responsibility just now, why, when a whole series of elections between populists and others is being carried out across Europe, why, when the Constitutional system of the USA is under threat from within, why, when Russia has invaded and occupied a part of Ukraine, why in this moment should we talk about historical responsibility?

My answer is that it is precisely for those reasons that one must talk about historical responsibility. There are many causes of the problems within the European Union and there are many causes for the crisis of the rule of law in the United States, but one of them is precisely the inability to deal with certain aspects of history.

Let me begin talking about Germany by talking about the United States. Why do we have the government that we have now? How can we have a president of the United States in 2017 who is irresponsible on racial issues? How can we have an Attorney General in 2017 who is a white supremacist? Because we have failed to deal with important questions of our own past, failed to take historical responsibility for certain important parts of our history.

The President wonders aloud why we fought a civil war, why it was after all that there had to be a conflict in America about slavery.

The question of slavery, precisely the question of what a colony is like, of what an empire is like, leads us directly towhat I take to be the blind spot in German historical memory.

Ukraine as a centre of Hitler’s ideology

The American frontier empire was built largely by slave labor. It was precisely that model of frontier colonialism that was admired by Adolf Hitler. And it was a question for Hitler: who will the racial inferiors be? Who will the slaves be in the German Eastern empire? And the answer that he gave in theory in Mein Kampf, and in practice in the invasion of 1941, the answer was: the Ukrainians.

The Ukrainians were to be at the center of a project of colonization and enslavement. They were to be treated as Afrikaner, as Neger as German documents from the war show. By analogy with the United States, the idea was to create a slavery-driven, exterminatory regime in Eastern Europe with the center in Ukraine.

The purpose of the Second World War, from Hitler’s point of view, was the conquest of Ukraine. It is therefore senseless to commemorate any part of the Second World War without beginning from Ukraine. Any commemoration of WWII which involves the Nazi purposes, the ideological, economic, and political purposes of the Nazi regime, must begin precisely from Ukraine.

German policies all focus precisely on Ukraine: The Hunger Plan, with its notion that tens of millions of people were going to starve in the winter of 1941; the Generalplan Ost, with its idea that millions of more people will be forcibly transported or killed in the 5, 10, or 15 years to follow, but also the final solution, Hitler’s idea of the elimination of Jews, all of these policies hung together in theory and in practice, with the idea of an invasion of the Soviet Union, the major goal of which would be the conquest of Ukraine.

Consequences of the German occupation of Ukraine

The result was catastrophic for Ukraine: 3.5 million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine, civilians, were victims of German killing policies between 1941 and 1945. In addition to that 3.5 million Ukrainians died as soldiers in the Red Army, or died indirectly as a consequence of the war.

Of course, the numbers are greater when one includes the entire Soviet Union. But it’s worth being specific here about the difference between Ukraine and the rest of the Soviet Union, for two reasons. Ukraine was the center of Hitler’s ideological colonialism. But beyond that all of Soviet Ukraine was occupied for most of the war,whileGerman armies never occupied any more than 5% of Soviet Russia, and that for a relatively brief period of time.

Without any doubt the Russian and Ukrainian peoplessuffered in WWII in a way that is unthinkable to West Europeans. But nevertheless, when we think about the Soviet Union, the place of Soviet Ukraine is very special, even by comparison to Soviet Russia. In absolute numbers, according to calculations of Russian historians, more inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine died in WWII than inhabitants of Soviet Russia. Which means, in relative terms, Ukraine was far more at risk than Soviet Russia during the war.

In other words, it is very important to think of the German Vernichtungskrieg against the Soviet Union. But at the center of this Vernichtungskrieg was not only Soviet Russia, but mainly Ukraine.

So if we want to talk about German responsibility for Russia, we must begin with Ukraine. The greatest destructive practice of the German war was precisely in Ukraine. If one is going to be serious for German historical responsibility for the East, the word “Ukraine” must be in the first sentence.

German historical responsibility starts with Ukraine

The Holocaust is organically connected to the Vernichtungskrieg of 1941, and to the attempt to conquer Ukraine.Had Hitler not had the colonial idea to fight a war in Eastern Europe to control Ukraine, there could not have been a Holocaust. Because it is that plan that brings German power into Eastern Europe where the Jews lived.

The actual war in Ukraine brings the Wehrmacht, brings the SS and the German police to the places where they could be killed. It became clear to Germans in 1941 that something like a Holocaust could be perpetrated because of massacres in places like Kamianets-Podilsky, or, more notoriously, Babyn Yar on the edge of Kyiv. It was there that for the first time in the history of humanity, tens of thousands of people were killed by bullets in a continuous large-scale massacre. It was events like this on the territory of Ukraine that made it clear that something like a Holocaust could happen.

What does this mean? It means that every German who takes seriously the idea of responsibility for the Holocaust must also take seriously the history of the German occupation of Ukraine.

German Judgements about Ukraine are not innocent

As a historian, I know the history of Ukraine is unfamiliar, and it can seem complicated. But this is not the only problem. Part of the problem has to do with habits of mind related to colonization, wars of aggression, to the attempt to enslave another people. The attempt to enslave another people cannot be innocent even for the generations to come. The attempt to enslave another people will leave its mark, if not directly confronted.

There are lots of reasons, but one of them is the mental temptations left over by colonization, the tendency to overlook a people, which was not regarded as a people. All of the language about Ukraine as a failed state, or Ukrainians not as a real nation, or Ukrainians divided by culture—in the German language, that is not innocent. That is an inheritance of an attempt to colonize a people not regarded as a people.

Judgements about Ukraine where Ukraine is held to other standards, but the application of terms like there not being a Ukrainian nation, or there not being a Ukrainian state, if those things are said in German, those words are not innocent.

I can say this from recent experience as an American: if you get the history of colonization and slavery wrong, it can come back. And your history with Ukraine is precisely the history of colonization and slavery.

Not to help Ukraine, but to help Germany

When I was in Ukraine in September 2016, talking about Babyn Yar, when I was standing in front of millions of Ukrainian television viewers trying to talk about these things in Ukrainian, the point that I tried to make was: you don’t remember Babyn Yar for the Jews. You remember Babyn Yar for yourselves. You remember the Holocaust in Ukraine because of its part in building up a responsible civil society and, hopefully in the future, of a functioning democracy in Ukraine. That holds for them, but it also holds for me, and all of us.

The point of remembering German responsibility for the 6.5 million deaths caused by the German war against the Soviet Union in Ukraine is not to help Ukraine. Ukrainians are aware of these crimes. Ukrainians live, the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of that generation, they live with the legacy of these crimes already.

It is much more to help Germany. Germany as a democracy, particularly in this historical moment, as we face a declining and decreasingly democratic USA. Precisely at this moment, Germany cannot afford to get major issues of its history wrong. Precisely at this moment, the German sense of responsibility has to be completed.

Getting the history of Ukraine wrong in 2013 and 2014 had European consequences. Getting the history of Ukraine wrong now, when Germany is the leading democracy in the West, will have international consequences.

Chapter 1Stalinist Repressions

Red Famine

Anne Applebaum

Preface1

The warning signs were ample. By the early spring of 1932, the peasants of Ukraine were beginning to starve. Secret police reports and letters from the grain-growing districts all across the Soviet Union—the North Caucases, the Volga region, western Siberia—spoke of children swollen with hunger; of families eating grass and acorns; of peasants fleeing their homes in search of food. In March a medical commission found corpses lying on the street in a village near Odesa. No one was strong enough to bury them. In another village local authorities were trying to conceal the mortality from outsiders. They denied what was happening, even as it was unfolding before their visitors’ eyes.

Some wrote directly to the Kremlin, asking for an explanation:

Honourable Comrade Stalin, is there a Soviet government law stating that villagers should go hungry? Because we, collective farm workers, have not had a slice of bread in our farm since January 1 [...] How can we build a socialist peoples’ economy when we are condemned to starving to death, as the harvest is still four months away? What did we die for on the battlefronts? To go hungry, to see our children die in pangs of hunger?

Others found it impossible to believe the Soviet state could be responsible:

Every day, ten to twenty families die from famine in the villages, children run off and railway stations are overflowing with fleeing villagers. There are no horses or livestock left in the countryside [...] The bourgeoisie has created a genuine famine here, part of the capitalist plan to set the entire peasant class against the Soviet government.

But the bourgeoisie had not created the famine. The Soviet Union’s disastrous decision to force peasants to give up their land and join collective farms; the eviction of “kulaks,” the wealthier peasants, from their homes; the chaos that followed; these policies, all ultimately the responsibility of Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, had led the countryside to the brink of starvation. Throughout the spring and summer of 1932, many of Stalin’s colleagues sent him urgent messages from all around the USSR, describing the crisis. Communist Party leaders in Ukraine were especially desperate, and several wrote him long letters, begging him for help.

Many of them believed, in the late summer of 1932, that a greater tragedy could still be avoided. The regime could have asked for international assistance, as it had during a previous famine in 1921. It could have halted grain exports, or stopped the punishing grain requisitions altogether. It could have offered aid to peasants in starving regions—and to a degree it did, but not nearly enough.

Instead, in the autumn of 1932, the Soviet Politburo, the elite leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, took a series of decisions that widened and deepened the famine in the Ukrainian countryside and at the same time prevented peasants from leaving the republic in search of food. At the height of the crisis, organized teams of policemen and party activists, motivated by hunger, fear and a decade of hateful and conspiratorial rhetoric, entered peasant households and took everything edible: potatoes, beets, squash, beans, peas, anything in the oven and anything in the cupboard, farm animals and pets.

The result was a catastrophe: At least 5 million people perished of hunger between 1931 and 1934 all across the Soviet Union. Among them were more than 3.9 million Ukrainians. In acknowledgement of its scale, the famine of 1932–3 was described in émigré publications at the time and later as the Holodomor, a term derived from the Ukrainian words for hunger—holod—and extermination—mor.4

But famine was only half the story. While peasants were dying in the countryside, the Soviet secret police simultaneously launched an attack on the Ukrainian intellectual and political elites. As the famine spread, a campaign of slander and repression was launched against Ukrainian intellectuals, professors, museum curators, writers, artists, priests, theologians, public officials and bureaucrats. Anyone connected to the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic, which had existed for a few months from June 1917, anyone who had promoted the Ukrainian language or Ukrainian history, anyone with an independent literary or artistic career, was liable to be publicly vilified, jailed, sent to a labour camp or executed. Unable to watch what was happening, Mykola Skrypnyk, one of the best-known leaders of the Ukrainian Communist Party, committed suicide in 1933. He was not alone.

Taken together, these two policies—the Holodomor in the winter and spring of 1933 and the repression of the Ukrainian intellectual and political class in the months that followed—brought about the Sovietization of Ukraine, the destruction of the Ukrainian national idea, and the neutering of any Ukrainian challenge to Soviet unity. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who invented the word “genocide,” spoke of Ukraine in this era as the “classic example” of his concept: “It is a case of genocide, of destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation.” Since Lemkin first coined the term, “genocide” has come to be used in a narrower, more legalistic way. It has also become a controversial touchstone, a concept used by both Russians and Ukrainians, as well as by different groups within Ukraine, to make political arguments. For that reason, a separate discussion of the Holodomor as a “genocide”—as well as Lemkin’s Ukrainian connections and influences—forms part of the epilogue to this book.

The central subject is more concrete: what actually happened in Ukraine between the years 1917 and 1934? In particular, what happened in the autumn, winter and spring of 1932–3? What chain of events, and what mentality, led to the famine? Who was responsible? How does this terrible episode fit into the broader history of Ukraine and of the Ukrainian national movement?

Just as importantly: what happened afterwards? The Sovietization of Ukraine did not begin with the famine and did not end with it. Arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals and leaders continued through the 1930s. For more than half a century after that, successive Soviet leaders continued to push back harshly against Ukrainian nationalism in whatever form it took, whether as post-war insurgency or as dissent in the 1980s. During those years Sovietization often took the form of Russification: the Ukrainian language was demoted, Ukrainian history was not taught.

Above all, the history of the famine of 1932–3 was not taught. Instead, between 1933 and 1991 the USSR simply refused to acknowledge that any famine had ever taken place. The Soviet state destroyed local archives, made sure that death records did not allude to starvation, even altered publicly available census data in order to conceal what had happened. As long as the USSR existed, it was not possible to write a fully documented history of the famine and the accompanying repression.

But in 1991 Stalin’s worst fear came to pass. Ukraine did declare independence. The Soviet Union did come to an end, partly as the result of Ukraine’s decision to leave it. A sovereign Ukraine came into being for the first time in history, along with a new generation of Ukrainian historians, archivists, journalists and publishers. Thanks to their efforts, the complete story of the famine of 1932–3 can now be told.

This book begins in 1917, with the Ukrainian revolution and the Ukrainian national movement that was destroyed in 1932–3. It ends in the present, with a discussion of the ongoing politics of memory in Ukraine. It focuses on the famine in Ukraine, which, although part of a wider Soviet famine, had unique causes and attributes. The historian Andrea Graziosi has noted that nobody confuses the general history of “Nazi atrocities” with the very specific story of Hitler’s persecution of Jews or gypsies. By the same logic, this book discusses the Soviet-wide famines between 1930 and 1934—which also led to high death rates, especially in Kazakhstan and particular provinces of Russia—but focuses more directly on the specific tragedy of Ukraine.

The book also reflects a quarter-century’s worth of scholarship on Ukraine. In the early 1980s, Robert Conquest compiled everything then publicly available about the famine, and the book he published in 1986, The Harvest of Sorrow, still stands as a landmark in writing about the Soviet Union. But in the three decades since the end of the USSR and the emergence of a sovereign Ukraine, several broad national campaigns to collect oral history and memoirs have yielded thousands of new testimonies from all over the country. During that same time period, archives in Kyiv—unlike those in Moscow—have become accessible and easy to use; the percentage of unclassified material in Ukraine is one of the highest in Europe. Ukrainian government funding has encouraged scholars to publish collections of documents, which have made research even more straightforward. Established scholars on the famine and on the Stalinist period in Ukraine—among them Olga Bertelsen, Hennadii Boriak, Vasyl Danylenko, Lyudmyla Hrynevych, Roman Krutsyk, Stanislav Kulchytsky,

Yuri Mytsyk, Vasyl Marochko, Heorhii Papakin, Ruslan Pyrih, Yuri Shapoval, Volodymyr Serhiichuk, Valerii Vasylyev, Oleksandra Veselova and Hennadii Yefimenko—have produced multiple books and monographs, including collections of reprinted documents as well as oral history. Oleh Wolowyna and a team of demographers—Oleksander Hladun, Natalia Levchuk, Omelian Rudnytsky—have at last begun to do the difficult work of establishing the numbers of victims. The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute has worked with many of these scholars to publish and publicize their work.

The Holodomor Research and Education Consortium in Toronto, led by Marta Baziuk, and its partner organization in Ukraine, led by Lyudmyla Hrynevych, continue to fund new scholarship. Younger scholars are opening new lines of inquiry too. Daria Mattingly’s research on the motives and background of the people who confiscated food from starving peasants and Tetiana Boriak’s work on oral history both stand out; they also contributed important research to this book. Western scholars have made new contributions too. Lynne Viola’s archival work on collectivization and the subsequent peasant rebellion have altered the perceptions of the 1930s. Terry Martin was the first to reveal the chronology of the decisions Stalin took in the autumn of 1932—and Timothy Snyder and Andrea Graziosi were among the first to recognize their significance. Serhii Plokhy and his team at Harvard have launched an unusual effort to map the famine, the better to understand how it happened. I am grateful to all of these for the scholarship and in some cases the friendship that contributed so much to this project.

Perhaps if this book had been written in a different era, this very brief introduction to a complex subject could end here. But because the famine destroyed the Ukrainian national movement, because that movement was revived in 1991, and because the leaders of modern Russia still challenge the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state, I should note here that I first discussed the need for a new history of the famine with colleagues at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute in 2010. Viktor Yanukovych had just been elected president of Ukraine, with Russian backing and support. Ukraine then attracted little political attention from the rest of Europe, and almost no press coverage at all. At that moment, there was no reason to think that a fresh examination of 1932–3 would be interpreted as a political statement of any kind.