Toward an Understanding of the Holomodor

Toward an Understanding of the Holodomor: The How and Why of the 1932-1933 Famine in Ukraine | Lecture by Bohdan Kild, PhD

Dr. Klid’s presentation will point to several key policies and decisions of the Soviet leadership that in 1931 led to a severe economic crisis in the countryside and famine in Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union. He will point to further decisions by Soviet authorities in 1932 that intensified the famine and lead to the death of millions in what Ukrainians call the Holodomor, or Murder by Starvation.
Bohdan Klid is Research Director of the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (HREC) at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) at the University of Alberta. He received his PhD in history in 1992 from the University of Alberta, where he has taught and where he was Assistant Director of the CIUS until December 2016. He has also taught at the Grant MacEwan Community College (now Grant MacEwan University) in Edmonton. He is the co-editor with Alexander J. Motyl of, “The Holodomor Reader: A Sourcebook on the Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine (2012),” and the author of scholarly articles on the Holodomor, contemporary Ukrainian popular music and politics, and Ukrainian historiography which have appeared in scholarly journals and books.

About the cover photo:  Першій хліб державі or “The first bread goes to the government”

In 1931-1933, requisition gangs repeatedly visited and confiscated foodstuffs from villages in Soviet Ukraine, contributing to a famine that by 1933 killed millions.