The fourth Saturday of November is Holodomor Memorial Day, which marks the loss of millions of Ukrainians in the man-made famine of 1932/33. Today, of course, the day of remembrance occurs during another man-made horror in Ukraine, as Russia’s war continues to take a terrible toll on Ukraine and Ukrainians.
We marked the 80th anniversary of the Holodomor in 2013 with a blog post about one particular book (here) and wrote again about the Holodomor in 2019, when the libraries put on a pop-up exhibition to tie in with a Cambridge Ukrainian Studies screening of the film ‘Mr Jones’ about the Welsh journalist whose unflinching reports of the horrors he saw were too easily ignored (blog post here).
Below are some of the most recent books in the Cambridge library catalogue about the Holodomor held in the University Library or in the MMLL Faculty Library. Many contain vital witness accounts of the terrible famine.
1932-1933 : khronika Holodomoru v Ukraïni / Vasylʹ Marochko, Olʹha Movchan.
- A carefully constructed day-by-day chronology of the Holodomor.
- The Holodomor and the origins of the Soviet man : reading the testimony of Anastasia Lysyvets / Vitalii Ogiienko (ed.) ; with forewords by Natalka Bilotserkivets and Serhy Yekelchyk ; translated by Alla Parkhomenko and Alexander J. Motyl.
- The first full English translation of Lysyvets’ shocking first-person account of the Holodomor.
- The Ukrainian intelligentsia and genocide : the struggle for history, language, and culture in the 1920s and 1930s / Victoria A. Malko.
- Currently available only on the Electronic Legal Deposit computers.
- How people live in Soviet Russia : impressions from a journey / Mendel Osherowitch ; edited by Lubomyr Y Luciuk ; translated from the original Yiddish edition by Sharon Power.
- The main focus of this witness account, first published in 1933, is the early stages of the Holodomor in 1932.
- This is the third volume in a series published by Kashtan Press in Ontario called ‘Holodomor : occasional papers series’. The second was the journalist Gareth Jones’ own Holodomor diaries: “Tell them we are starving” : the 1933 Soviet diaries of Gareth Jones.
- Ĭosyp Stalin : felʹdmarshal Holodomoru / Vasylʹ Marochko.
- A discussion of Stalin’s own role in the Holodomor.
- Women and the Holodomor-Genocide : victims, survivors, perpetrators / edited by Victoria A. Malko.
- This collection of works includes a contribution by Daria Mattingly ([Extra]ordinary women: female perpetrators of the Holodomor), whose 2019 Cambridge PhD is an important new source for Holodomor scholars. ʻIdle, Drunk and Good-for-Nothingʼ: The Rank-and-File Perpetrators of 1932-1933 Famine in Ukraine and Their Representation in Cultural Memory is available open access on the University’s Apollo repository.
- Hołodomor–Polska–polskie ofiary, 1932–1933 / redakcja naukowa: Michał Dworczyk, Robert Kuśnierz.
- Published by the Polish Government press, this book looks at the Polish victims of the Holodomor.
- Holodomor : silenced voices of the starved children / Lesa Morgan (editor) ; Philip Webster (editor).
- A collection of personal accounts.
- Grains of truth : a collection of UK materials on the Holodomor in Ukraine, 1932-33 / editors, Fedir Kurlak, Iryna Terlecky.
- Published by the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain.
- The famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine : an anatomy of the Holodomor / Stanislav Kulchytsky ; translated from the Ukrainian by Ali Kinsella.
- “… a distillation of thirty years of study of the topic by one of Ukraine’s leading historians”
The Holodomor continues to be a major topic that we collect in, in Ukrainian and English as well as in other languages. Recommendations for any titles interested readers can’t find in the catalogue are as ever very much welcomed.
Mel Bach (slavonic@lib.cam.ac.uk)
Languages across Borders 