Holodomor Roundtable at the Oral History Association Convention

HREC organized a roundtable panel titled “The Holodomor Remembered: New Critical Approaches to Oral Historical Research on the Man-Made Famine in Ukraine in 1932–33” at the annual conference of the Oral History Association, held at Concordia University in Montreal. Oral history is now a developed academic field, and the topics of genocide and the Holocaust have been well incorporated into its practice. HREC sought to bring to the attention of oral historians the wealth of interviews conducted with Holodomor survivors and the crucial role they have played in elaborating the history of the Holodomor, perhaps more so than for other genocides, given the denials of Soviet authorities until the demise of the USSR. HREC worked with Professor Natalia Khanenko-Friesen (University of Saskatchewan) to assemble the panel, composed of participants William Noll (Independent Scholar), Olga Andriewsky (Trent University), and Anna Shternshis (University of Toronto). William Noll discussed his fieldwork in the 1990s with elderly villagers across Ukraine that resulted in a groundbreaking publication, which HREC will be publishing in English translation (Transformation of Civil Society); Olga Andriewsky discussed the interviews with emigres who had left the Soviet Union found in the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System; and Anna Shternshis discussed her interviews with Ukrainian Jews and the impact of the Famine on Jewish life in Ukraine.