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"Ukrainian nationalism was seen from the beginning as a threat to the Bolshevik ideal, and was to be stamped out—at all costs.

During the famine of the 1930s, as peasants lay dying, the Soviet secret police began to repress all manner of Ukrainian intellectuals and officials who had tried to promote Ukraine’s language or history. Anyone with even the flimsiest connection to Ukrainian nationalism was liable to be vilified, arrested and sent to a labor camp or executed. It was a systematic assault not just on Ukraine, but on the idea of Ukraine. And it worked. The famine and repression of the Ukrainian intellectual classes eventually brought about “the Sovietization of Ukraine, the destruction of the Ukrainian national idea, and the neutering of any Ukrainian challenge to Soviet Unity.

And so silence marked the years that followed the famine. Ukrainians were prohibited from speaking of or writing on it: Soviet authorities expunged all traces of it from official accounts. Moscow’s destruction of all institutions of the Ukrainian countryside meant that the people lacked even tombstones to mourn over or churches to pray in. The Politburo wrote the official history of 1932 to 33. It was, so the version went, a history of some accidental but inevitable starvation due to Kulak corruption and problems with the climate and harvest. But alongside this an alternative history arose—an oral tradition in which parents passed on the details of what really happened to their children; the horrors of the famine would, they vowed, never be forgotten.

Ironically, the Nazi invasion of Ukraine in 1941, and the propaganda assault against Moscow that accompanied it, allowed S. Sosnovyi, an agricultural economist, to publish the first quasi-scholarly study of the famine in a Ukrainian newspaper. The famine, he concluded, had been designed to destroy Ukrainian peasant opposition to Soviet power; it was not the result of “natural causes” but was deliberate and imposed. The new climate made it acceptable—in this area at least—for the truth to finally begin to emerge.

But even as the decades wore on—even after Nikita Khrushchev’s speech condemning many of Stalin’s actions after the latter’s death in 1953—the truth of the famine was missing from official Soviet narratives. In fact, in an ironic twist, the German invaders’ use of this history as propaganda against Stalin during the war made it easy for Soviet officials and historians to label anyone talking of a deliberate famine against Ukraine as “fascists” and “Nazis” spreading “Hitlerite propaganda.”