Decolonisation: Daria Mattingly on the Holodomor and Ukraine’s erased identity

In this episode, Daria Mattingly explains why all famines in the 20th century were man-made, how the Holodomor stripped Ukrainians of their heirlooms, and what signs point to its genocidal nature.

Let’s begin with the basics since our audience has varying levels of understanding about the Holodomor. Could you briefly explain what the Holodomor was in its simplest terms? And how would you describe it to someone who has never heard of it or doesn’t fully understand the details?

This is exactly what I face pretty much in my work because people in the West, even in academia in Britain, very rarely hear about Ukrainian history prior to the invasion of 2022 or the annexation of Crimea. In the narrowest sense, the Holodomor refers to the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine. To provide some context, I mention collectivisation, which was followed by a famine across the Soviet Union. However, in Ukraine in 1932–33, it was a famine within a famine — a man-made famine. In the wider sense, in the overarching definition of the Holodomor, I say that it was not just the famine — a man-made famine — but also the concurrent persecution of the Ukrainian political elite, intelligentsia, and Ukrainian church.

Can you explain why it was a man-made famine? And how did the Soviet government manage to engineer it on this scale?

People often ask me, “How could a man-made famine happen in 20th-century Europe? Does it mean taking away all the food?” And I tell them that’s exactly what happened. Collectivisation created the mechanism that made the Holodomor possible. First, collective farms were introduced, requiring all Ukrainian peasants — and all Soviet citizens living in the countryside — to work on them. This ensured that all the food they produced was accounted for and centrally procured by the state. What little was left — vegetables from their plots, pickles, or any other foodstuffs — was taken away by brigades organised locally and by plenipotentiaries sent from district centres. It was all centrally managed. Of course, it starts with somebody at the top issuing an order, which is disseminated to the bottom. On the ground, you have district officials and village officials, such as the head of the village council or the head of the collective farm, who oversee the enforcement of these orders. The orders were to procure everything produced because the state’s quotas for Ukraine’s 1932–33 grain procurement were completely unrealistic. They were lowered three times and still never met. And so, these brigades went from house to house, taking away all food and valuables that could be exchanged for food. There were also different legislative acts punishing people who went to the fields and tried to cut some ears of wheat, and so on. As a result, we have a very meticulously planned man-made famine. There was already a famine provoked by collectivisation because collectivisation destroys agriculture. It removes any motivation to work hard because you’re not paid money; you’re effectively a serf. So, when you enact such policies from the top to the bottom within a year, and when you remove food, it is reasonable to conclude that the politicians want the population to starve.

In this context, the concept of the “blackboards” is widely discussed in Ukraine but is rarely mentioned by experts outside the country. This tactic meant that Ukrainians were forbidden from leaving their villages, effectively trapping them. They couldn’t travel to other cities to find food or trade goods for it. Could you elaborate on the wider system that supported this man-made famine?

Ukraine’s famine was different from the rest of the Soviet Union’s famine. Ukrainians were specifically targeted, compared to other regions. There were legislative acts designed to prevent people from obtaining food elsewhere. Just imagine: all food is taken away from you, and you live in a small village — what would you do? You can’t even go to the fields to gather food because of a law from 7 August, 1932, commonly known as the Law of Five Ears of Grain or Five Stalks of Grain (the law that criminalised gathering more than five ears of grain from the field, subjecting accused peasants to labour camps, long prison terms, or execution – ed.). Everything is taken from you; naturally, you’d want to leave the village to seek food elsewhere or take your family. But then, in January 1933, a special decree prohibited Ukrainians from leaving the borders of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. You couldn’t cross into Russia or Belarus, and, of course, you couldn’t go abroad. Many tried to cross into Romania or Poland — most were unsuccessful, but some did manage to escape and survive. This measure wasn’t applied to other parts of the Soviet Union, except for the Lower Volga region in February 1933, where ethnic Germans lived in an autonomous republic (a short-lived administrative region in the USSR, established in 1924 and dissolved in 1941 – ed.). So, we see certain groups within the Soviet Union being deliberately targeted. In Ukraine, people were prevented from leaving, though that didn’t stop them from trying. Within four weeks of that decree, over 200,000 Ukrainians were detained. Some went through “filtration camps” and were forcibly returned to Ukraine. The authorities controlled people’s movements, stopped them from eating, and created policies to starve them.

Those policies also included the “blackboards”. This tactic was applied extensively in Ukraine, earlier than anywhere else, and was used to punish collective farms, districts, or villages for failing to meet their grain procurement quotas. By “grain procurement quotas”, I mean the targets set by the state for how much grain your collective farm or district had to deliver. It wasn’t paid for, but was rather a tax; during the Holodomor, it essentially became a target that the peasants were forced to meet. If a village didn’t meet the target, it would be punished by being placed on a blackboard, meaning that all provisions — essential items like food, matches, kerosene, and salt — along with anything in storage or village shops, would be confiscated. Soldiers would sometimes surround the village to prevent anyone from escaping. This created conditions that were incompatible with life. For me, these were genocidal policies. They began in November 1932 in Ukraine, much earlier than in other targeted parts of the USSR.

And what did the USSR do with the food they took from Ukrainians?

The famine took place during the Great Depression in the West, which meant that only a small amount of money could be made from selling grain internationally. While the Soviet Union did sell it at a low price, this strategy helped undermine capitalist economies. Grain producers like the USA and Canada couldn’t make much from their grain, and, of course, those economies were already depressed, with people facing hardships. Therefore, Soviet grain exports further sabotaged capitalist economies and international trade. But ultimately, selling grain at low prices didn’t generate much money to finance industrialisation. This contradicts the common belief that Ukrainian grain was used for industrialisation. It was, but only partially. Recent studies show that the export of gold was the primary source of financing for industrialisation in the Soviet Union during the first half of 1933. And where did that gold come from? It didn’t come from industrial-scale gold mines in the 1930s. Instead, it was supplied by Torgsin, a state-owned chain of shops initially set up to trade with foreign citizens. During the famine and collectivisation, Torgsin essentially bought gold from the starving population at abysmally low prices in exchange for food. Imagine this: in the heart of Ukraine, far from the major cities, there would be a small branch of this network where peasants could trade their earrings, rings, family heirlooms, crosses, medals, awards — even historical artefacts like Kozak crosses or pieces of Orthodox icons, church gold, and silver. These items, now considered cultural heritage, were melted down. It was not only an assault on individuals but also on cultural heritage. When people lost everything that kept their family memories alive — everything material that connected them to their ancestors — they were left with nothing to remind them of a pre-collectivisation, pre-Holodomor past. This erasure of material identity effectively made them Soviet collective farmers. Their material culture — clothes, furniture, personal items — became indistinguishable from someone in Russia or Central Asia. Unfortunately, the majority of Ukraine’s rural population experienced this transformation.

You’ve mentioned the famine across the USSR, often debated in discussions about the Holodomor. Many claim it affected the entire Soviet Union without singling out Ukrainians. Can you explain how and why the Soviet regime intentionally targeted Ukrainians?

I think the current Russian-Ukrainian war is very illustrative of this approach, especially when the Russian opposition tries to present it as a shared experience, portraying both sides as equal victims of Putin’s regime. However, their experiences are not the same. Yes, people suffer, but Ukrainians are explicitly targeted because they are Ukrainians and live in Ukraine. Collectivisation indeed devastated agriculture in the USSR, and everyone suffered to some extent — there’s a similarity there. However, starting in the summer of 1932, we see these completely unrealistic grain procurement quotas for Ukraine. The Ukrainian leadership, including district officials, voiced concerns at a Communist party conference in Kharkiv that July. They warned that these quotas would worsen the famine. They spoke about the suffering and the facts, but Stalin, Kaganovich (the head of Soviet Ukraine’s government at the time — ed.), and Molotov (head of the Soviet government — ed.) refused to listen. We have excellent transcripts of these conferences showing resistance, but Stalin pushed forward. By August 1932, about 30% of Ukrainian local officials refused to procure grain during the autumn campaign. Some even put their party tickets down, wanting nothing to do with what was happening. A few officials sabotaged the quotas, leading to show trials. Though no one was executed, they were shuffled to other positions.

At the same time, we see the concurrent persecution of the clergy, political elites, and intellectuals — everyone who was instrumental in the Ukrainian struggle for independence or opposition to the Bolsheviks 10 years prior, following the October Revolution. Intellectuals who questioned Soviet rule and the colonial relationship between Ukraine and Russia were also put on trial, as seen in the show trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine in Kharkiv in 1930. We also have tens of thousands of intellectuals, teachers, and political leaders later put on trial under the same premise in the 1930s (a fabricated trial that accused and ultimately repressed leading Ukrainian intellectuals of alleged underground separatist activities — ed.). So, we see the systematic persecution of everything that made Ukraine uniquely Ukrainian — not Soviet Ukraine. Alongside this, there was the abandonment and closure of the policy of Ukrainisation or indigenisation, which promoted Ukrainian culture, education in Ukrainian, and the broader use of the language, along with other projects that stimulated cultural development.

None of this happened in other parts of the USSR, except perhaps Kazakhstan, where events took a somewhat different turn. In Kazakhstan, the famine began earlier, in 1931, overlapping with the broader Soviet famine. It targeted the traditional Kazakh lifestyle, particularly their migratory practices, as sedentarisation was enforced. The nomadic Kazakhs had migration routes that extended into China and back. Such practices were intolerable to the Soviet regime. On top of that, they were assigned grain procurement quotas that were utterly unsustainable, mainly since they didn’t even produce grain. Instead, they were forced to surrender their cattle — their lifeline — and their intellectuals were targeted. As Alex de Waal (a British researcher on humanitarian issues – ed.) points out — and I agree — all modern famines, at least in the 20th century, are man-made. Even if a famine wasn’t the intended outcome of a policy, it could always have been prevented, preempted, or mitigated. In the Soviet Union, nothing of the sort was done. That’s why we can definitively say that all the famines linked to collectivisation, including the Holodomor, were man-made.

I’d like to shift now to the concept of genocide, which I think is often misunderstood. It’s not just about the number of people killed, but the intent to destroy a specific group or nation. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the term “genocide” and played a key role in shaping the UN Genocide Convention, described the Holodomor — then called “The Great Famine” — as a classic example of genocide. Could you explain why it was considered genocide rather than just the result of Stalin’s brutal policies?

Although I typically leave the issue of genocide to legal scholars, I can’t avoid addressing it in my work because, to me, the Holodomor was exactly that — a genocide. This interpretation helps explain many of its complexities: why intellectuals were specifically targeted and why it was so crucial, even in part, to destroy a group and alter its identity. If we consider Ukrainians being targeted as a political nation, it makes sense. Ukrainians were not Soviet. Ten years earlier, there was little support for the Bolsheviks, except in some party cells in major industrial centres like Kharkiv or Kyiv. Most Ukrainians voted for other parties during the elections for the Constituent Assembly in what was then the former Russian Empire. Ukrainians didn’t support the Bolsheviks, and they resisted. In 1919, we saw major peasant uprisings against the Bolsheviks. In the Bolshevik, and particularly Stalin’s, understanding of nationhood — which blended primordial views with elements of political nationhood — the peasantry was seen as the grassroots base of Ukrainian nationalism. Subduing this base was crucial for Stalin because it continued to fuel Ukraine’s national movement and aspirations. However, Ukrainians weren’t just ethnic nationalists, even back then. Under Petliura’s government, for example, we see similar cultural developments in shtetls — small towns with majority Jewish populations. Unfortunately, these communities also experienced repression: Hebrew studies, religious activities, and non-Soviet Jewish families were targeted. During the famine, Jewish scholars of Hebrew were accused of being Zionists and persecuted. They weren’t seen as Soviet because they weren’t collective farmers loyal to the regime. Even those trying to escape famine by heading to Birobidzhan (a city in the Russian Far East, established in the 1930s as a homeland for Soviet Jews – ed.) in 1933 were prevented from leaving. People died trying to flee, stowing away on trains, only to be stopped at train stations. Nothing comparable happened anywhere else. The famine systematically eliminated anything that wasn’t Soviet — anything that could give rise to Ukraine as a non-Soviet republic.

When we go back to Lemkin and his understanding of genocide, it’s clear that events in Ukraine formed his views. In his writings, he mentions that the famine in Ukraine, which followed collectivisation, fits his definition of genocide. According to Myroslava Antonovych, a legal scholar, Lemkin has shown that the Holodomor had four key components. His approach suggests that we can infer intent from circumstantial evidence, as Stalin never directly stated his aim to target Ukrainians, but he expressed it through other means. The four components of this genocide involved targeting Ukrainians in Ukraine, and, as recent research by Naumenko, a Russian scholar, shows, Ukrainians were also disproportionately affected in Soviet Russia. Ukrainians there had higher mortality rates from starvation compared to their Russian neighbours in neighbouring districts. This is the result of years of research by these scholars. So, we have famine as one prong of the attack, but there was also a focus on eliminating the Ukrainian church, Ukrainian culture, and the political elite. This is how I understand it.

Lemkin beautifully explained how attacking the church was targeting the soul of Ukraine, attacking the intelligentsia was targeting its mind, and starving the peasantry aimed to destroy the national idea, as they were the primary bearers of Ukrainian culture and language. The fourth point was replacing large parts of the Ukrainian nation with other ethnicities, often Russians. Can you elaborate on how this fits into the intent to destroy the national idea beyond just starving the population?

There’s a temptation to say this happened right after the Holodomor, but this interpretation has been controversial among scholars. However, archival documents show that after the Holodomor, particularly in late 1933, many villages — especially in Dnipro Oblast (a region in southeastern Ukraine – ed.) — were devastated and needed to be repopulated for work. Not only Russians and Belarusians were brought in, but Ukrainians from other parts of Ukraine, especially from Chernihiv and Zhytomyr Oblasts (regions in the north of Ukraine – ed.), were also ordered to settle there. Some returned home, citing a lack of support for settling, while the Russians who arrived were unprepared for the climate, and many also returned. It wasn’t until after World War II that we saw mass migration from Russia into Ukraine, with around 10 million people resettling between the 1940s and 1970s. So, while this didn’t happen immediately after the Holodomor, policies designed to create Soviet citizens through population mixing ensured that these new settlers had no attachment to their original homeland.

This is exactly what happened with the heirlooms. Many heirlooms — rings, jewellery, coins, medals, crosses — were melted down and disappeared, symbolising how people were forced to become Soviet in every aspect, including clothing. This is a fascinating point because, since 1991, and even earlier, there has been a growing interest in embroidered shirts, or vyshyvankas, in Ukraine. People collect them to reproduce old patterns, and there is definitely a revival of this tradition. As a historian of the Holodomor, I noticed that during the famine, many embroidered items, like towels (rushnyky) or shirts, were taken to markets in cities and exchanged for food. Shirts were often the first items traded, along with shawls and scarves. The people receiving these items in exchange for food were typically those with access to rations, relatives of perpetrators, or neighbours with some means. So, any vyshyvanka that survived before 1933 likely changed hands, unless it was carefully preserved by a family that managed to survive without trading it. These exchanges often highlight the dynamics between victims and those with access to resources. Tracing the history of these shirts — who owned and traded them — can tell us incredible stories. Did a shirt save a life? Perhaps it was exchanged for a loaf of bread. In villages I’ve visited, people shared stories about entire homes being traded for a single loaf. The famine stripped away anything surplus — not superfluous, but anything that could be exchanged for survival. When you’re reduced to the bare instinct of survival, you give up everything, which only deepens the trauma caused by the famine.

In this broader sense, it changed the logic of Ukrainian society in many ways — Soviet policies during the Holodomor did this on a massive scale. For example, in the 1980s, a period often seen as the democratisation of the USSR, Soviet policies still targeted Ukrainian vineyards, gardens, and traditional farming practices. Is there any specific story or example of how the Holodomor impacted how Ukrainian villagers lived and worked before and after?

I would refer to a very specific and highly visual example of that — the film Earth by Oleksandr Dovzhenko, which depicts the tragedy of ploughing through the centuries-old boundaries between peasant plots during collectivisation. Unlike in Russia, only 25% of Ukrainians practised this obshchina or mir (a traditional Russian communal system where peasants shared land and resources, working collectively – ed.). Ukrainian peasants didn’t share the same agricultural traditions as Russian peasants; they had much more to lose. If you acquired land — and the land was sacred — this was what Dovzhenko inadvertently showed in what was supposed to be a propaganda film. The film could be read both ways, as it was criticised for depicting the tragedy of Ukrainian peasants losing their land.

In most Russian agricultural communities, you had the black repartition — land redistribution based on the number of eaters or individuals in a family. There wasn’t the same attachment to the land as Ukrainian peasants had, who preserved and cherished it. Of course, within one generation, you could become poorer or richer based on luck, hard work, and other factors, but there was always this deep attachment to the land. It was sacred — a legacy to be passed on to children. Ukrainians were settled; they worked their land, even if there was very little of it.

By contrast, in Russia, where every 12 years you’d work on one plot and then be given another, there wasn’t the same motivation to invest in or develop the land. This lack of continuity meant that Russian peasants didn’t form the same emotional or practical attachment. When Ukrainian land was taken away, as shown in Dovzhenko’s film, it caused cognitive dissonance — it was unthinkable. It destroyed Ukrainian society as it was. Soviet policies reflected the central government’s perspective, which didn’t care for individual rights or private property.

I’m not trying to idealise Ukrainian society, but arguably, private property rights were far stronger there than in Russia. Though tragic, pro-collectivisation didn’t have the same societal impact in Russia as in Ukraine. In Ukraine, it completely altered how people thought about themselves, their land, and their property. It introduced an acceptance — forced, of course — that private property rights could be violated.

It reminded me of a story from my own family, as many of the things you mentioned happened to us too. The Holodomor remains a deeply personal topic for many Ukrainians, even after all these years. With so much documentation now available, how did the USSR — and later Russia — manage to suppress information about the Holodomor for so long?

That’s an interesting question. The famine was systematically silenced until the late 1980s, even within Soviet Ukraine. Some Soviet writers, Ukrainian and Russian, touched on famine in their works, using euphemisms or indirect language. For instance, writers like Platonov (one of Russia’s key 20th-century writers, exploring the harsh realities of Soviet life – ed.) described Ukrainian peasants crossing into Russia, starving and dying in the streets. Some local Russian officials noticed and complained, unaware it was state policy. Open discussion of the famine was dangerous. Talking about it, even in private diaries, could result in severe punishment. A famous example is the Ukrainian teacher Radchenko, whose diary about the famine was discovered, leading to her imprisonment in the Gulag. Outside the USSR, the story was different. Ukrainian emigres, defectors like Kravchenko and Hoichenko, and visitors like Mandel Osherovich (Soviet diplomats who defected from the USSR in 1944 after being stationed in Soviet embassies abroad – ed.) shared their accounts. Memoirs and articles documented the horrors, and figures like Gareth Jones, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Rhea Clyman reported on the famine despite Soviet denials. Governments worldwide were well-informed, but only some acted. The contrast with earlier famines, like the 1921 Volga famine, is stark. Lenin appealed to the leaders, “all honest people”, to provide international famine relief. This aid did come from the enemies — capitalist powers, specifically the Entente, who had invaded Russia in 1919 (the allied forces invaded Russia to suppress the rise of the Bolsheviks to power – ed.). Despite the source, Soviet authorities were willing to accept this assistance. This reinforces the idea of every modern famine being a man-made famine. When something like that happens and the government doesn’t seek to hide it, you can always mitigate the situation by asking the international community for help. You can distribute resources within the country, or you can sell some assets, as they did after the revolution, to feed the starving in the Volga region. Back then, they sold works of art from the Tretyakov Gallery and the Hermitage – all these world-renowned galleries – to feed the starving. However, nothing of the sort was done during the Holodomor. In fact, it was silenced and denied.

We had these fellow travellers, or useful idiots, or people on the payroll spreading propaganda, which is very similar to what happens today, with propaganda operating in the same way. Soviet Russia was financing the lifestyles of these fellow travellers, including Walter Duranty. We have grassroots efforts by Ukrainian émigré societies and various organisations and friends of Ukraine, such as journalists Malcolm Muggeridge, Gareth Jones, and Rhea Clyman drawing attention to what was happening in Ukraine. However, at this point, the national interests of particular countries come to the fore. We see the US establishing diplomatic relations with the USSR later in 1933. Geopolitics and the global context affect such decisions. And of course, with Hitler coming to power, as Churchill said, he would say a good word for the devil in the House of Lords if it meant making a coalition against Hitler. You can see these processes at play when countries have to choose sides. And the Soviet Union seems to be the lesser evil. Ukraine, which was then part of the USSR, was overlooked. 

At the time, many international journalists, like Walter Duranty of The New York Times and Bernard Shaw, visited the USSR and downplayed the famine. Duranty famously wrote, “Russia is struggling but not dying of hunger.” Did they genuinely believe what they reported, or were they kept in a controlled Moscow bubble?

The motivations of these fellow travellers varied case by case, but in general, true believers justified the famine and other atrocities as “collateral costs” for what they saw as great transformations. For example, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, prominent socialist thinkers in Britain, were aware of the situation but chose to overlook it, framing it as part of progress. This attitude often carried an orientalist undertone — viewing Ukrainians as “others”, backward peasants who were naturally accustomed to suffering. The logic held that it was acceptable for these people to starve for the greater good, a rationale not applied to those closer to home. This imperial mindset mirrors attitudes during the Irish Potato Famine, where a more significant percentage of the Irish population perished under similar indifference. Walter Duranty, for instance, provides a stark example. He came from a humble background in Britain but enjoyed a lavish lifestyle in Moscow, indulged by Soviet authorities. Documents and personal accounts reveal him as a hedonist who prioritised his comfort over ethics; Ukrainians and their suffering were far from his concerns. In contrast, some journalists later expressed regret, but figures like Bernard Shaw or Édouard Herriot (a prominent French statesman, who held a series of key ministerial posts during the 1920s and 1930s – ed.) appeared indifferent, choosing to believe the “Potemkin villages” presented to them during orchestrated visits. Those who defied the Kremlin’s narrative, like Gareth Jones and Rhea Clyman, faced expulsion, ridicule, and concentrated efforts to silence their accounts. The parallels to contemporary events, where propaganda and misinformation are used to suppress dissenting voices, are striking.

Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who dedicated himself to exposing the truth about the Holodomor, was likely killed by the KGB for his efforts. In contrast, Walter Duranty, who had a cosy relationship with the Kremlin, won a Pulitzer Prize for his Soviet reporting. This brings me to the way the Holodomor is studied and debated. Christopher Hitchens once remarked that he learned more about the Holocaust by reading Holocaust deniers, suggesting the importance of engaging even with controversial opinions to deepen understanding. From an academic perspective, do you think it’s appropriate to allow debates claiming “it wasn’t genocide” or “everyone suffered”, or should such discussions be avoided?

When a historian claims, for example, “everyone was starving”, it naturally prompts questions about the differences between Ukraine and other regions of the USSR during the famine. The Holodomor was distinct, and comparing excessive mortality in Ukraine to that in the Volga region has been an important area of research, even though access to data is now more restricted. This kind of denial highlights areas to study and ultimately deconstructs their arguments. It’s also crucial to examine the positionality of those making these claims. Take, for instance, a Ukrainian historian who dismissed the cultural memory of the Holodomor, claiming it was an invention of the Ukrainian diaspora. When you consider his background — descended from those who enforced collectivisation — it’s clear his views align with colonial narratives that downplay Ukraine’s significance. This brings us to the broader need to decolonise the study of the Holodomor and the USSR. 

Colonial relationships between the Kremlin and Soviet Ukraine must be interrogated, and we need to understand how individuals — both perpetrators and those complicit in silence — rationalised their roles. This approach challenges Western academia, where for much of the 20th century, Ukraine was overlooked or misrepresented, often through the lens of Nazi occupation or collaboration narratives. It wasn’t until scholars like Robert Conquest (a British-American historian, best-known for his extensive research of Stalin’s crimes – ed.) published their work that this began to change, and even now, the war has forced a reevaluation of Ukraine’s long history within the framework of colonial oppression. Ireland under British rule provides a useful parallel. Like Ireland, Ukraine was treated as a colony, with its identity suppressed and its subjugation framed as “progress”.

We still see many Russia-centric views of the region, especially in fields like Slavonic studies, which often focus primarily on Russia. What steps can we take to decolonise studies about the Holodomor? What needs to change to make them more Ukraine-centric?

That’s an essential question and the answer lies in education. We need to discuss Ukraine more in the West, especially academia. The more people learn about Ukraine, the more they’ll be able to locate it on their mental map and take an interest in it. For instance, at Cambridge, students used to go to Russia for their year abroad as part of their degree. Many would return deeply sympathetic to Russian perspectives, often overlooking the histories and struggles of countries like Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, or Ukraine. However, after the annexation of Crimea, more students chose to go to non-Russian republics due to increasing repression in Russia, including against Western scholars. When students began studying in places like Kyrgyzstan, they returned with a more critical view of Russia. They learned the local language and gained insight into the oppression these nations faced under Soviet rule and their struggles for independence.

In contrast, earlier generations of British scholars who studied in Soviet Russia during the Cold War often returned with a deep affinity for Russia. They had experienced a different narrative that seemed to challenge Western propaganda at the time — and many developed personal connections, forming relationships and building careers centred on Russia. This made it difficult for them to critically assess Russia’s actions, even now, with the ongoing war in Ukraine. Their long-standing focus on Russia has left them less willing to shift attention to Ukraine or other former Soviet republics. 

To truly decolonise, we need to prioritise the study of Ukraine, ensuring it becomes an essential part of academic discourse. We must also combat what Olesya Khromeychuk (a British historian and the director of the Ukrainian Institute London – ed.) calls “Ukraine fatigue” in the media. Institutions like the Holodomor Museum and other cultural organisations inside and outside Ukraine are vital in raising awareness about Ukraine and its history, especially the Holodomor. These efforts are essential to making Ukraine and its struggles better known globally.

A final, more philosophical question: No one was held accountable for Soviet crimes, and Russia has even been praised since then. From a historical perspective, what do you think could bring closure to Ukrainians about the Holodomor?

Russia should be held accountable, and I hope that after Ukraine’s victory in the war, Russia will be held responsible not only for the current war crimes and genocide against Ukraine but also for the Holodomor. This recognition would have significant symbolic value. Of course, most of the top perpetrators are gone now, and we can’t prosecute local perpetrators, many of whom have intermarried with descendants of the victims. However, the recognition would symbolise the rule of law and Ukraine’s democratic future. Ukraine is not perfect, but it is moving in the right direction, and I hope for the rule of law to prevail. It will never be absolute, but in Ukraine, it would mean that no one can follow criminal orders, even from the top, and no one can assume they will get away with a crime, whether they are part of the local elite, a judge, prosecutor, or police officer. Many officials during the Holodomor believed they would get away with it, and unfortunately, they often did. For Ukrainians, closure would mean a responsible and responsive state with checks and balances, free and fair elections, and the rule of law. The Holodomor and the current war highlight what Ukrainians need and deserve. I remain optimistic about it and hope for the best.