Page 7 - Bitter Icons

As the excess deaths suggest, however, the Holodomor’s “murder by starvation” remains

the single greatest catastrophe endured by Ukraine during Soviet rule. Any attempt to re-
construct a national Ukrainian narrative must take a stand on a trauma of such propor-
tions—especially since all Soviet historians, propagandists, and officials assiduously ig-

nored the famine or dismissed it as an émigré delusion for decades. Unsurprisingly, the first
Ukrainians to draw attention to the tragedy of the Holodomor were survivors who had fled

to the West. (Motyl 2010:27)

The Holodomor for these various reasons has perhaps still not been thoroughly manifested in
the international or public memory, but it is a very important issue for Ukraine’s collective

memory and nationality. On the other hand, we can assume that Robert Conquests groundbreak-
ing work from 1986 created a wider awareness of the Holodomor and the question of genocide

and as of today there exists over twenty thousand scholarly titles on the topic (Kulʹchytsʹkyi

2015).

On a further note of the repression of the Holodomor memory we know that the Soviet regime

for a long period made sure there barely existed any public or collective memories of the famine
and Conquest (1986) also shows us that importance of Western journalists that also partook in

covering up and of denying the famine at the time it was taking place. We see thus, that there
existed and to some degree still exists a kind of conflict of memory on both sides of the camps.

When I refer to the wo camps I refer to the Western capitalistic and pro-Ukrainian camp on the
one side and Russia on the other side. This is of course of the highest importance for the Ho-

lodomor memory, because if there exist such conflicting views it that could create a barrier

which makes it much more complicated to establish it as a global memory. But the thing is that
memory of the Holodomor is not still not part of the global memory, but perhaps the creation

of a film like Bitter Harvest could make it more established as such.

Transnational Memories, International Icons and the Holocaust as Model
How then does all this affect the memory construction of the Holodomor in relation to the film

Bitter Harvest? I think it is of importance that we take the background of suppression and dis-

tortion of the Holodomor memory into consideration in context of the film. We can for instance
see these aspects of repression of the Holodomor in the example of the Holocaust. In her article

The Holocaust – A Global Memory Astrid Erll points to Enzo Travetso, which notes that the

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