HREC announces prize winner of 2025 Conquest Prize

The winners of the 2025 Conquest Prize for Contribution to Holodomor Studies are Andrei Markevich, Natalya Naumenko, and Nancy Quian for their article “The Causes of Ukrainian Famine Mortality, 1932-33,” published by in Review of Economic Studies (September 2024). A jury of eminent specialists determined the winner of the $2500 CAD  prize which is awarded biannually to the author of an outstanding article that contributes to a fuller understanding of the Holodomor.

University of Melbourne’s Mark Edele, a member of the Prize jury, remarked “After all the acrimonious debate on the origins of the famine and the question of genocide, I thought it extremely unlikely that new empirical conclusions could be reached. I was clearly wrong. The researchers have constructed an extremely impressive data set, and the sophisticated statistical analysis is well above what we usually see in the Holodomor debate, or in contemporary historical debate more generally. These research findings put to bed conclusively the theses of lack of intentionality on the part of the Soviet authorities.”

Jury member historian Andrea Graziosi commented, “This research team has produced what could be termed the definitive analysis of the causes of the Holodomor and have published it in one of the most respected journals in economics. In addition to its scholarly value, the article will thus have a remarkable impact worldwide, well beyond the specialized fields of Soviet or Ukrainian history. Given the findings and the extreme sophistication of the methodology, it should now be most difficult, if not impossible, to deny or even minimize in an academic publication the intentional causes of the famine and Stalin’s and the Soviet regime’s crucial role in it”.

The Conquest Prize honours historian Robert Conquest, author of the groundbreaking work The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, which marked a watershed in the study of the Holodomor at the time of its publication in 1986.