The Geography of a Genocide: Putting the Holodomor on the Map - Instytut Pileckiego

The Geography of Famine: Putting the Holodomor on the Map - Prof. Serhii Plokhii

10.03.2022, 18.00 | Online lecture | 

Was the Ukrainian famine or Holodomor a genocide? Rafael Lemkin, the father of the concept, believed that it was, if considered together with Stalin’s attack on the Ukrainian culture, institutions and elites. In this talk Serhii Plokhii will discuss the findings of the scholars working on the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute project, “MAPA: Digital Atlas of Ukraine.” By using the GIS based mapping of the demographic and other data on the history of the famine, the members of the project uncovered a peculiar feature of the Ukrainian famine that sets it apart from the famine and starvation in other parts of the USSR.

The area hardest hit by the Holodomor was the central Ukrainian heartland around Kyiv, Poltava, and Kharkiv rather than the main grain-growing regions of Southern Ukraine. In the rest of the Soviet Union, it was the grain producing regions of Kuban and Low Volga that suffered the most. What is the reason for that peculiarity of the Ukrainian famine? The research provided by the members of the project points to the government policies that in case of Ukraine were driven not only by the desire to get out as much grain as possible but also by the determination to crush the Ukrainian political and cultural revival of the 1920s and arrest the development of the Ukrainian nation.