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Depicting Genocide: 20th Century Responses to the Holodomor This exhibition was made possible by a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.

© 2023 by the Ukrainian History and Education Center, all rights reserved.

The term "Holodomor"

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.

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What exactly was the Holodomor? The Holodomor was a genocidal artificial famine engineered by Soviet government under Stalin that took place in Ukraine and other regions with significant Ukrainian ethnic populations in 1932 and 1933. The term "Holodomor" literally means "killing by famine" and derives from the Ukrainian words "holod" ("famine") and "moryty" ("to kill").

The Holodomor was the result of acts of omission and commission by the Soviet authorities. While there were food shortages and famines in multiple regions of the USSR in the late 1920s and early 1930s, in Ukraine and the Kuban region of the northern Caucasus the famine took a substantially different course. Not only was no relief provided to the starving, but measures were intentionally taken that guaranteed an even larger death toll among the very people who produced the food — the village farmers.

That death toll reached mind-boggling proportions. There were millions of deaths, constituting perhaps 20-30% of the population in the countryside. These deaths occurred very rapidly, with perhaps 30,000 daily cases of excess mortality at the famine's peak in the late spring and early summer of 1933. Urban areas were not shielded from the impact: in addition to hunger (though not as extreme as in the countryside), city dwellers were faced with dead or dying villagers who had come to find food.

Recent scholarship has made a very strong case that the staggering death rate during the Holodomor was the result of intentional actions by the Soviet regime that meet the definition of genocide. The goal of the Holodomor was never to physically destroy all Ukrainians. That is not a necessary condition for it to be considered a genocide: the 1948 UN "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide" includes in its definition "Deliberately inflicting on [a national, ethnical, racial or religious] group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" (emphasis added).
The Holodomor as cultural genocide
Rafael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide" and was the author of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, had a more expansive view that included cultural destruction as a significant component of the concept of genocide. Lemkin's early draft texts of the Convention had cultural destruction as part of the definition of genocide, but this was eliminated due to opposition from former European colonial powers and by nations whose history included the displacement and cultural disintegration of indigenous peoples (including the United States, Canada, Australia, and Brazil).

The targeting of Ukraine's agricultural base during the Holodomor was not an accident. It is hard to overstate the importance that agriculture has had in traditional Ukrainian society. Ukraine is at the western end of the extraordinarily fertile belt of chornozem ("black earth" or "black soil") that stretches across Eurasia. For centuries, most Ukrainians had lived in a society that was deeply linked to that land and to the cycles of nature. Collectivization, the Holodomor, and related anti-Ukrainian policies in the 1930s were a direct assault on those age-old traditions and institutions. They made obsolete many traditional occupations and trades, such as icon painters and itinerant musicians. It eliminated or severely restricted ancient cultural practices like weddings and seasonal rituals that had associated with them vast numbers of customs, songs, and traditions. The catastrophic impact that this had on the countryside was yet another aspect of the genocidal nature of the Holodomor era that went far beyond the actual famine.
Andrij Kowalenko
"Holodomor"

This large canvas, with its anthropomorphic shapes in black, gray, blues, and golds, and with faces reminiscent of Picasso's "Guernica", is perhaps the Ukrainian American artist Andrij Kowalenko's most aggressively cubist work.

Although it is superficially very different from the other works in this exhibition, it shares a common visual language. The faces staring out at the viewer are not unlike the eyeless screaming face of Cymbal's "The Year 1933", and the mass of figures are an echo of the tangled heap of bodies at the base of Dmytrenko's "One Can Go Mad". The effect is heightened through the angular and jagged placement of the figures that echo the contorted figures in Dmytrenko's "1933" and Pevny's "Zemlia".

We are not sure of the exact title that the artist originally gave to this work. "Holodomor" — the title we use here — is what was given in the catalog of the retrospective exhibition of Kowalenko's works presented by the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago in 2009-2010. The original title must have been something different, as the term "Holodmor" did not come into use until several decades after the creation of the painting in 1967. Regardless, this work has always been closely associated with the genocidal famine in Ukraine.
About the artist

Andrij Kowalenko was born in the city of Zaporizhzhia on October 17, 1913. He was fascinated by art from a young age, particularly by the shapes and decorations produced at the pottery shop located near his home. He completed his secondary education in Zaporizhzhia and attended the Art Academy there. As a city resident, he was not impacted by the Holodomor to the extent that people in the villages were, but he probably faced hunger, was aware of the horrors in the countryside, and certainly would have experienced the repressive anti-Ukrainian policies of the Stalin period.

Along with untold thousands of other refugees, Kowalenko made his way west with the retreating German army, ending up in the Displaced Person camp in Raitersaich east of Nuremberg. He was active in the artistic life of the Ukrainian community there, creating stage designs for the theater group and an iconostasis for the Orthodox church, and taught art classes. In 1947 he moved to Liège, Belgium to study at the St. Luke School of Art.

Thanks to a sponsorship from a family member, Kowalenko was able to resettle in the United States in 1956. He made his home in the Ukrainian American community of Chicago, where he would spend the rest of his life. He continued his artistic work, including the painting of portraits and other commissions from community members.

Kowalenko's training in the Socialist Realism of the Soviet Union and the conservative traditionalism of the St. Luke School evolved into his earliest individual style influenced by Cezanne. After his arrival in the United States, his paintings became more sparse, used greater color contrasts, and adopted a more abstract, cubist style. In the 1980s, he began experimenting with found objects, creating mysterious, icon-like works from bottle caps, wood, metal, cardboard, and other discarded materials.

Kowalenko participated in joint exhibitions with the Chicago "Monolith" group of Ukrainian American artists, had solo exhibitions in 1975, 1977, and 1980, and was the subject of an exhibition at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in 1986. He died in Chicago on February 28, 1989. His work was presented at a major retrospective exhibition in 2009 at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, which has a significant number of his works in its permanent collection.

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Google Ngram data on the usage of terms related to the 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine