Origins of the Word Holodomor

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.