The Holodomor Reader
In this article, Iaroslav Kovalchuk argues that the word Holodomor was not always synonymous with the Soviet genocide of Ukrainians — in fact, for much of the early twentieth century, it simply meant a starving person and was used in the Galician and diaspora press to describe malnourished paupers or circus performers who publicly displayed their emaciated bodies for money. Tracing the word's semantic journey through Ukrainian-language newspapers — from Lviv's Dilo to the North American diaspora press — this article argues that it was Ukrainian émigré writers who reframed holodomor as a deliberate state policy of starvation, and that it was in the pages of the New Jersey daily Svoboda throughout the 1970s and 1980s that the term gradually fused with the concept of genocide — eclipsing derivative coinages like holodomorstvo. By the late 1980s, Holodomor had crystallized into the term for the famine of 1932–33, ready to travel back to an independent Ukraine.
Key documents from The Holodomor Reader are highlighted on the "Key Documents" page. The documents describe developing famine conditions and what Soviet leaders most responsible for the Holodomor said or wrote during this period, providing clues as to their motivations and aims, as well as resolutions and decrees that point to the policies that induced mass starvation.
Holodomor Reader: A Sourcebook on the Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine
The Holodomor Reader is a wide-ranging collection of key texts and source materials, many of which have never before appeared in English, on the genocidal famine (Holodomor) of 1932–33 in Soviet Ukraine. The subject is introduced in an extensive interpretive essay, and the material is presented in six sections: scholarship; legal assessments, findings, and resolutions; eyewitness accounts and memoirs; survivor testimonies, memoirs, diaries, and letters; Soviet, Ukrainian, British, German, Italian, and Polish documents; and works of literature. Each section is prefaced with introductory remarks. The Reader is an indispensable guide for all those interested in the Holodomor, genocide, or Stalinism.
Bohdan Klid and Alexander J. Motyl, Holodomor Reader: A Sourcebook on the Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine. Toronto: CIUS Press, 2012.