I first came across the Holodomor during my studies at the University of Warsaw. After enrolling on a course that promised to guide us through the complex field of both historical and contemporary Ukrainian politics, I logged on every week to a lecture delivered by a fantastic professor who, while teaching from Kyiv, had taken up a temporary position in Poland due to the invasion. As we were taken through Ukraine’s long history of erasure and subjugation by its neighbours — and, most importantly, due to the professor’s insistence on highlighting this point — I began to realise the parallels between historical injustice and russia’s war in Ukraine today. It is because of historical and contemporary efforts to minimise and suppress the Ukrainian language, culture and national identity that the writing of Ukraine’s history is vital in ensuring these aims of erasure do not succeed. I therefore hope to make a small contribution to this effort here, with a discussion of how denial has functioned as a barrier to the recognition of the Holodomor as an act of genocide.

The key aspect of the Holodomor period (1932–1933) that sets it apart from the earlier (1921–1923) and later (1946–1947) famines is its artificial and intentional nature. Marc Jansen (2017), among others, addresses this in his scholarship, asserting that although many claim that poor harvests and weather conditions played a role in the famine, the primary cause was ‘chaos following the forced collectivisation of agriculture,’ a policy implemented by the Soviet regime. Moscow had rejected requests from Ukrainian officials to reduce grain quotas and instead pursued a policy of searching Ukrainian collectivised farms, confiscating any last ‘hidden’ remnants of grain that had been kept for survival (Jansen, 2017). The level of starvation reached by May 1933, the time when ‘little help’ had arrived, had driven people to desperation (Jansen, 2017).