On October 30, 2024, at 6:00 PM (Kyiv time), Tetiana Boriak will discuss a multidisciplinary approach to studying the Holodomor. Her presentation will be based on the recently published monograph Oral History in the Source Base of Holodomor Studies: The History of Formation and the Information Potential of the Corpus of Testimonies.”
The researcher proposes examining the Holodomor through the lens of several specialized historical disciplines. This approach allows for the integration of multiple aspects into the discussion. First and foremost, it highlights the Kremlin’s persistent and deliberate efforts on the information front, systematically erasing testimonies about the famine from archives—an act known as archivicide. Archival files from those years were deliberately destroyed, including original diaries and poems mentioning the famine, which were eliminated by the Chekists. The discussion will explore both what the archives reveal and what they conceal. It will also examine how the politics of memory in Ukraine and Russia have taken radically different paths—leading Ukrainians toward self-reflection and Russians toward what historian L. Yakubova describes as an abyss, ultimately culminating in the current genocidal war. The narrative of “Nazi collaborators” applied to famine witnesses will be analyzed, as well as their courageous yet unheard attempts to challenge the totalitarian machine of lies after World War II. The presentation will also address how memories of the famine unexpectedly surfaced in oral history projects conducted across different continents and time periods. It will explore how intergenerational ties among Ukrainians were severed due to fear, which became ingrained in their identity, and how the Holodomor devastated Ukrainian identity itself. Whenever possible, Ukrainians rushed to record testimonies about the famine, attempted to calculate the number of victims in their villages, and erected monuments—first during the Nazi occupation and later after the Ukrainian Communist Party officially acknowledged the famine in 1987. The accumulated body of over 100,000 testimonies directly challenges the claim that President Viktor Yushchenko fabricated or imposed an artificial memory of the Holodomor. Finally, the discussion will reflect on the criminal essence of Soviet totalitarianism, which engineered a diabolical mechanism to kill millions—without even wasting bullets.
TETIANA BORIAK – Doctor of Historical Sciences, Associate Professor, Researcher at the Faculty of History of Vilnius University. Author of three books. The second of them (“1933: “And why are you still alive?” / edited by Tetyana Boryak. Kyiv: LLC “Klio Publishing House”, 2016, 720 p.”) became the winner of the 2016 “Book of the Year” Rating Study in the “Research/Documents” category in the “Past” nomination. Scholar of the Fulbright Academic Exchange Program in 2013-2014 with a project for the “Testimony” module of the Holodomor GIS-Atlas. In 2010–2017, she was an assistant to the journalist, researcher, and columnist of The Washington Post, Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum, in the project of preparing an English-language work about the Holodomor in Ukraine for a Western audience (“Red Famine. Stalin’s War against Ukraine”, 2017). Co-editor of the directory of declassified funds of the Central State Historical and Cultural Heritage Administration of Ukraine (2012). In 2017–February 2022, she was the co-host and host of the educational program on history “History with Meat” (available on YouTube), about 70 episodes were published. Author of about 40 scientific articles about the Holodomor, more than 80 articles in total; participated in about 70 conferences.
Event Details
Date: October 30, 2024
Time: 18-00 (Kyiv time)
Language: Ukrainian
Details are here
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