Genocide or “A Vast Tragedy”?

From January to April 2009, I audited an undergraduate history class at the University of Alberta, taught by John-Paul Himka under the rubric “Topics in Ukrainian History.” The topic we studied—the Great Famine of 1932–33 in Soviet Ukraine “in History and Memory”—had been virtually ignored by western historians until 1986 and the publication of works commemorating the event’s 50th anniversary, although famine had killed seven times as many people as the much more familiar Great Terror of 1934–39. Famine in 1932 followed by Holodomor (death by starvation) in 1933 had been produced in the context of the staggering achievement of the Soviet economy, urban industrialization and the mass collectivization of the countryside. ((A Pravda editorial of January 1933 was titled, “Ukraine: The Deciding Factor in Grain Collection.” Although Ukraine accounted for 27 percent of the total grain harvest of the Soviet Union, it was made to deliver 38 percent of its quotas (see...