The Contested Politics of Knowledge of Holodomor, the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33.

• In Event: 1440 - Collective Memory

Abstract

Until recently, Holodomor, a massive artificial famine which occurred in 1932-33 in Soviet Ukraine was an unknown, if not to say forbidden, topic for generations of Ukrainians as well as academics in former socialist bloc and beyond. Since late 1980s the various attempts to collect the testimonies of the survivors led to the slow unraveling of this silenced past and the (re)conceptualization of knowledge of this humanitarian crisis, in the consequence of which almost 5 million people died.

In my presentation, by reading the Soviet archives of famine, oral history testimonies of survivors, and memoirs I ask, where and how do we look at the numerous actions we now call Holodomor? How do various local documents, reports, and news articles suppress, silence, and even deny the tragic situation in the Ukrainian countryside? How do survivors recall the traumatic situation in the Ukrainian countryside? And finally, to what extent the structural silencing of this tragedy influenced the ways in which past is remembered?

Theoretically informed by the new materiality turn and the sociological approaches to violence and denial, I argue that the silencing of mass atrocity cannot be separated from the socio-political conditions surrounding its memory frames. In the famine context, not only the long suppression of this atrocity by the Soviet state but also the Cold-War conditions of its knowledge production and post-Soviet Ukrainian struggle for independence informed the cultural transmissions of trauma and ways in which famine is conceptualized by its victims. The memory of this mass atrocity then is not a static object but a moving target that travels across time and space.

Author

• Karolina Koziura, The New School