Conference of the Canadian Association of Slavists

HREC organized the panel “Refugees and the Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine: Accounts of Flight, Early Testimonies, Memoirs and Other Writings (1930s-1950s)” held at the University of Calgary at the conference of the Canadian Association of Slavists (CAS), the major Canadian professional organization in Slavic studies and part of a larger gathering of 69 member organizations of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Professor Olga Andriewsky discussed the “hidden transcript” on the Holodomor in the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System and what the project reveals about the place of the Holodomor in early US Cold War thinking. Serge Cipko presented his paper “Flight across the Dnister: Attempted Crossings from the USSR to Romania in 1932-1934,” discussing new stories about attempts of peasants to escape Soviet Ukraine, including a report in The Toronto Star that forty Ukrainians had been shot by Soviet frontier guardsmen while attempting to swim across the river into Romania to flee “an impending famine.” Bohdan Klid discussed “Early Assessments of Collectivization and the Holodomor in Memoirs and Other Writings of Ukrainian Refugees in the Late 1940s and Early 1950s,” looking at the questions that most occupied the refugees, how they arrived at their conclusions, and terms they used to describe what they witnessed. The panel was chaired by Zenon Kohut, former director of CIUS. Andrij Makuch, Associate Director of Research at HREC, served as discussant.