Online Colloquium: Holodomor Denial in the 1940s, 1980s, and 2020s
Friday, 7 August 2026
10 a.m. MST (Edmonton) / 12 p.m. EST (Toronto) / 7 p.m. EET (Kyiv)
Online via Zoom
Even as Ukrainian peasants were being starved to death by the tens of thousands in the spring and summer of 1933 as a result of the Stalinist regime’s policies, its officials, proxies, and boosters were actively working to deny the forced famine that we now know as the Holodomor. However, this denialist campaign continued in the coming decades and continues into the present, and its contours and consequences are the subject of this colloquium. Bringing together three recent grant recipients from the Holodomor Legacy Initiative—funded by Global Affairs Canada and implemented by Cowater International and the Canada-Ukraine Foundation—this event, sponsored by the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, will offer new insights into the disturbingly long history of Holodomor denial.
Presenters: Henry Prown, Ruslan Siromskyi and Anneliese Schenk-Day
Chair: Dr. Bohdan Klid
Holodomor Denial in the 1940s: Through the Lens of Orwell
Dr. Henry H. Prown serves as a Research Associate with the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium at the Canadian Institution of Ukrainian Studies and as an instructor in the History, Classics, and Religion Department at the University of Alberta. His research examines the relationship between Stalinism and Anglo-American media in the mid-20th Century.
Dr. Prown’s current research project explores the influence of the Holodomor and its denial on the thinking and writing of famous British novelist George Orwell in the 1940s, utilizing the author’s own unpublished and published writing, as well as contemporary Communist media.
Soviet Disinformation and Ukrainian-Canadian Commemorative Efforts
Dr. Ruslan Siromskyi is a Professor and Dean of the Faculty of History at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv (Ukraine). His research focuses on the history of the human rights movement in the Ukrainian SSR, the history of the Ukrainian diaspora, and Soviet policy of covering up the Holodomor of 1932-1933 (particularly information campaigns abroad).
Dr. Siromskyi’s current research project examines Soviet countermeasures against the Holodomor memory campaign in Canada in the 1980s through a close analysis of archival documents from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, the KGB, diplomatic correspondence, and records of Ukrainian diaspora organizations.
Genocide Denial in Russian Discourse on the Holodomor
Anneliese Schenk-Day is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at Ohio State University. Her research interests surround political conflict and collective memory, and center on cases of mass violence, specifically the intergenerational dialogues surrounding violence and its aftermath in places like Rwanda and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Ms. Schenk-Day’s current research project will offer ground-breaking insights into Holodomor denial in contemporary Russian social media, utilizing new technology and a data-driven approach to analyze denialist discourse in the 2020s.
This colloquium is brought to you by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium.