Page 10 - Mapping the Holodomor Complex

“Conquest’s excellently and professionally written book The Harvest of Sorrow investigates the most
serious, although up to now least researched…crime of Leninist-Stalinist communism: its war against the
peasantry of the U.S.S.R. which, before its destruction, constituted 82 percent of the entire population.”

Apparently back in 1986 Solzhenitsyn did not call what Conquest termed a “terror-famine” a

“loony fable”. Earlier on I had questioned myself what the former Soviet dissident and Gulag-
author had said about the Holodomor and I naively assumed that he would condemn it to the

same level as other Stalinist crimes. While he did so in 1986, twenty years later his views had
seemingly changed in favor of Putin’s government. Or had they really? It is worth notifying

that his harsh comments in The Guardian on the Holodomor where made with regards to a

state-initiated commemoration, and not the more objective historical work of someone like
Conquest. Even Conquest’s work has been heavily criticized for relying too much on rumors,

hearsay, and dubious witness testimonies. What then is the difference between the two
narratives that made Solzhenitsyn spit vitriol for a global public and who do they belong to?

Part of this thesis’s goal is to illuminate exactly this. After reading more on the topic of

Solzhenitsyn’s vast work through reception and memory studies, in Elisa Kriza’s illuminating
doctoral work Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Cold War Icon, Gulag Author, Russian Nationalist?

from 2014, my insight increased on the current Russian view on past Soviet crimes, like the
controversial artificial famine in Ukraine. I then understood that to use Solzhenitsyn’s work and

views as a prism for understanding todays political climate would prove to be very fruitful.

Political and historical background

The contemporary political background for this study involves the two recent revolutions in
Ukraine, the first one in 2004, named the Orange Revolution, and the second in 2014, the so-

called Maidan Revolution. The latter eventually lead to escalated public outpouring of anger
and frustration with the corrupt oligarch and pro-Russian leadership and culminated in a divided

Ukraine with the west and center part waging war against the eastern part. Most relevant for

this thesis is the violence against Soviet monuments of historic personas like Lenin, entitled
Leninfall by Russian-American historian Serhii Plokhy (2017) and the construction of a

Holodomor museum and monuments. Volodymyr Ihschenko (2011), a senior lecturer on
sociology in Kiev, highlights the anti-Communist politics of Yuschenko’s presidency and

points to two main strategies employed in his politics of memory and following “war of

memorials:” Victimization, linked to the emphasis on the Holodomor and the glorification of

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