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• 1 2023-06-20T19:13:07-04:00 The term "Holodomor" 9 Although the genocidal famine of 1932-1933 has been part of the historical memory of Ukrainians and Ukrainian Americans for the past nine decades, the actual term "Holodomor" entered general usage relatively recently. plain 2023-07-05T15:38:54-04:00 Although the genocidal famine of 1932-1933 has been part of the historical memory of Ukrainians and Ukrainian Americans for the past nine decades, the actual term "Holodomor" (for "killing by famine") entered general usage only relatively recently.
  
  The first usage of this or any similar word was in the form of the Czech-language term "Haladamor", which appeared in publications by the Ukrainian diaspora in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. While the Czech word "Haladamor" or "hladomor" is a linguistic cognate of the Ukrainian "Holodomor", its meaning is broader, and the same or similar terms had been used for other catastrophic events of hunger-related mass death.
  
  It seems, though, that this term did not gain any traction in Ukrainian-language writing of that time or in the succeeding decades. Instead, it was referred to by less specific terms such as the "great famine" ("velykyi holod"), the "terrible famine" or "terror famine" ("strashnyi holod"), and the "artificially-created famine" ("shtuchnostvorenyi holod").
  
  The term "Holodomor" was possibly re-invented in Soviet Ukraine by members of the Sixtiers movement and used clandestinely by them, and it may have made it to the West via smuggled "samvydav" publications. But again, it did not catch on. Its first public use in Ukraine is attributed to Oleskii Musiyenko in a speech to the Writer's Union that was covered in the literary newspaper Literaturna Ukraina in February 1988.
  
  The Ukrainian writer and dissident Ivan Drach is generally credited with popularizing the term "Holodomor" in the late 1980s, and by the time of the disintegration of the Soviet Union it had become the de facto standard term for the 1932-1933 famine.
  
  Tracking the usage of the terms "Holodomor", "terror famine"/"terror-famine", and "genocidal famine" in the statistics collected by Google Books, we can see some interesting patterns.
  
  First of all, the overall usage numbers have until recently been quite low. This is not surprising, given that the Google Ngram data is based only on digitized books and does not include newspaper, magazine, or journal articles.
  
  The term "genocidal famine" (red line) first appears in English around the 50th anniversary of the Holodomor in 1983. It then seems to have been partially supplanted by "terror famine" (with or without a hyphen, blue line) around the time of the publication of Robert Conquest's seminal book "Harvest of Sorrow", which included the term "Terror-Famine" in its subtitle.
  
  "Holodomor" (black line) does not appear in English language books until the 1990s, and then only in the low single digits until 2008. Its use exploded in 2015, possibly as a result of increased interest in Ukrainian history after the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, only to plummet again into the single digits by 2019. Unfortunately, Google Books has not yet released the data for subsequent years, and it will be interesting to see how recent events will be reflected in the word usage statistics.