Since gaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine has been engaged in a wide-ranging project of nation-building directed at overcoming its internal ethnic, religious, and regional cleavages and strengthening the state. As with so many similar endeavors in Europe and elsewhere, leaders of this project have sought to fortify Ukrainian national consciousness by way of appeals to history and memory. One of the most useable, if terrible, chapters of Ukraine's past for this purpose has been the Holodomor, the appalling famine induced by Stalin in 1932–33 as part of the process of collectivizing Soviet agriculture, leading to the deaths of millions. Understood as a deliberate assault on a defenseless national group, the Holodomor is frequently cast as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people and one of the worst crimes of the Soviet regime. As such, commemorations of the Holodomor potently combine anti-communist sentiment with feelings of Ukrainian victimhood. Discussion of the famine was, naturally, almost completely suppressed under communism but, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has become a vital means of bolstering Ukrainian national consciousness. Vladimir Putin may claim that Ukraine is not a real nation, but the ferocity of its citizens’ resistance to Russia's 2022 invasion suggests that its nation-building project has met with distinct success. Holodomor commemoration is part of that story
The central insight of Wiktoria Kudela-Świątek's book is that the Holodomor was originally recognized as an effective tool for deepening communal bonds not in Ukraine itself but among the Ukrainian diaspora abroad, especially in the United States and Canada, in the years after World War II. “On the wave of an emerging culture of memory,” she writes, “the Great Famine grew in status to an event that symbolically bonded the Ukrainian diaspora in North American, despite differences in the provenance of its members” (71). It was there and then that the meanings of the famine were first defined and the modes of its commemoration established. The Holodomor came to symbolize, in brief, the historic suffering of the Ukrainian people and especially its victimization at the hands of the Soviet regime. The diaspora's interpretation of the Holodomor not only had powerful resonance during the years of the Cold War, but was also well-suited to the post-Soviet era when the recovery of Ukrainian national sovereignty became associated with the rejection of the communist past.
Kudela-Świątek traces the emergence of Holodomor memorialization to the Ukrainian community in South Bound Brook, NJ, where the first dedicated shrine to the famine's victims was built in the years 1955–65. Monuments to the Holodomor were subsequently erected the world over—in Canada, Australia, Europe, and South America—basically anywhere that Ukrainian immigrant communities established themselves. It was only in the 1990s, though, that this practice took root in Ukraine, and there it was embraced with varying degrees of fervor depending on the pro- or anti-Russian tilt of the governing party.
The author rightly notes the resemblances between Holodomor and Holocaust commemoration and recognizes that the Ukrainian diaspora chose Holocaust memory as its paradigm even when other, perhaps closer, models were available, namely that of the Irish Great Famine. Yet Kudela-Świątek's analysis of the link between Holodomor and Holocaust commemoration and all the problems that accompany it is strangely anemic. For example, she offers no discussion of the validity of referencing the famine as a “Ukrainian Holocaust.” She is likewise silent on the question of the number of the Holodomor's victims and the curious fact that the diaspora embraced a contested figure (7–10 million) that exceeds the number of Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide by a wide margin. Even when quoting a Ukrainian émigré publication that made explicit the implication that the Holodomor was worse than the Holocaust (the paper described it as the “holocaust of holocausts” [156]), she offers no comment or analysis. Finally, Kudela-Świątek is sweepingly dismissive of the arguments of historians who see in the diaspora's modeling of Holocaust memory an attempt to combat the perception of Ukrainians as antisemites and Nazi collaborators. She suggests instead that the ardent commemoration of the famine by Ukrainian communities abroad merely “developed as individuals from the so-called ‘Holodomor generation’ came to live in the West and were able to share accounts of their experiences in the public space of the countries in which they settled” (75). This explanation is as anodyne as it is unlikely, not to mention contradicted by other evidence she presents.
There are many fine things about this book, but Kudela-Świątek's unwillingness to probe the more controversial aspects of Holodomor commemoration represents a missed opportunity.
