Page 8 - Mapping the Holodomor Complex

Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION

“This provocative outcry about genocide ... has been elevated to the top government level in contemporary
Ukraine. Does this mean that they have even outdone the Bolshevik propaganda mongers with their rakish
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juggling?” Solzhenitsyn asked.
He added that “western people” - unlike Russians - had had little exposure to “monstrous lies”, and were
therefore more willing to believe historical errors. “They have never really got into our history. All they
need is a loony fable,” he wrote. (Harding 2008)

The above citations originate from an article published in The Guardian in 2008 by Luke

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Harding, which includes comments from the famous Soviet dissident, novelist, and historian
Alexander Solzhenitsyn on George W. Bush attendance in 2008 to a commemoration in Kiev

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of the victims of the Holodomor. This context and Solzhenitsyn’s statements will serve as an
entry point and prism for this study as it perfectly captures one side of the debate on whether
the famine constitutes genocide or not. More importantly, it illustrates how the words of an

authority can be instrumentalized to shape public views of historical events. However, my main

task will not be to ponder the question of genocide in relation to the famine, but instead look at
its constructed images in various media. Furthermore, I look at the construction of the fascist

image of western Ukraine in memory narratives because this image can be seen as the negative
to that of the image of Ukrainians as victims of a “hidden Holocaust.” The image as victims of

foreign state terror and the mirror image as Nazi collaborators are important tools in what can
be termed as a memory war between Ukraine and Russia that has only escalated since the

Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine in 2014. Since the Orange Revolution the Holodomor

narrative has been reconstructed in museums, monuments and even in a western film
production. While Russia has been producing many big-budget films depicting the glorious

battles and sacrifices in the Second World War in the last decade, we now see Ukrainian
national film production starting to pump out their own depictions of their national heroes and

even more importantly that of the nation’s victimhood.

1 A short note on transliteration of Russian and Ukrainain names: I have used the more simplified version of the
names. For example, Plokhy instead of Plokhii.
2 The original article by Solzhenitsyn is titled ‘Swallowing Shameless Lies’ and found at:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/apr/03/swallowingshamelesslies
3 The Holodomor was a famine that struck Ukrainian SSR and other parts of the Soviet Union during the years of
1932 to 1933 claiming millions of dead in its wake.

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