Oral history sources about Holodomor in Ukrainian occupation press during World War II

Abstract

For decades history of Ukraine, first of all its tragic pages, was silenced and falsified. Before the Second World War, testimonies about the famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine seldom penetrated through the through Soviet border despite informational blockade to the countries of Western Europe and Northern America. These testimonies were published in press, mostly in diasporic one. From summer of 1941, when after the German invasion Ukrainian lands were occupied, first during the years after the tragedy, sudden possibilities to openly tell the truth about the famine by survivors were opened. Main ground for revealing the facts of Stalin regime crimes was Ukrainian local legal occupation press. The goal of the research: to make revealing, comprehensive analysis and classification of oral history sources about the Holodomor on pages of legal Ukrainian press from the period of Nazi occupation. Methodology is based on usage of totality of general scientific (historical, structural-functional, comparative, analytical), as well as special methods of research (historical-bibliological, bibliographical). Scientific novelty consists in the declared task. Publications about oral history sources of the famine of 1932-1933 on pages of occupational press in Ukraine during the Second World War are absent. 184 testimonies from 184 newspaper issues are analyzed. The author, researching corresponding publications, separates five groups of oral history sources about the famine of 1932-1933. Conclusions. Survivors’ testimonies fit well into anti-Bolshevik ideological narrative of new regime. One has to take unto accout that survivors were allowed to talk loudly about physchological trauma and to tell horrible details about extermination of them with famine for the first time, almost 10 years after the famine. And occupational regime used this as full as it could. Topic of the famine is intertwined in various contexts, first of all - in repressed past on level of a village and a state, including collectivization, Ukrainization, dekulakization etc. On pages of occupational press the topic of the famine was presented in several types of publications - memoirs, articles, letters, art and folklore. With some corrections on style of material presentation, “occupational” narrative quite correlates with massive of the first testimonies of prewar period in terms of content.

Keywords

• oral history, holodomor, second world war, press, occupation.