The Last Soviet Famine, 1946/47: Mass Death across Ukraine, Moldova and Russia in War’s Aftermath

A lecture by Hiroaki Kuromiya, Emeritus Professor of History, Indiana University, Yuri Ivanovych Shapoval, Professor and head of the Center for Historical Political Studies, Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and Filip Slaveski, Senior Lecturer in Russian/Soviet and East European History, Australian National University.

Moderated by Serhii Plokhii, Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History and Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.

IN-PERSON and ONLINE via Zoom Webinar (live). Registration is required to attend online. 

About the Lecture

This project explores the most recent famine in Soviet and European History, which killed at least one million people in 1946-47, mostly in Ukraine and Moldova, but about which we know very little. The Soviet state repressed news of the 1946/47 famine at the time, and it remains largely absent in English-language scholarship and relatively neglected in Russian and Ukrainian scholarship compared to the Holodomor of 1932/33. Our project operates from archival sources across the former Soviet space to explore the interaction of numerous factors in understanding famine causation, duration, mortality, and its broader consequences, which endured for decades afterward.              

About the Speakers

Hiroaki Kuromiya is  a Japanese-American historian and Emeritus Professor in the Department of History, University of Indiana, studies modern and contemporary Ukraine in a wider context of Eurasian history. He has written on the Donbas, historical and contemporary, the Holodomor, the Great Terror, and other subjects mainly during the Stalin era. His publications include books Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s–1990s, The Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s, and The Eurasian Triangle: Russia, the Caucasus, and Japan, 1904-1945 (with Georges Mamoulia), as well as numerous articles.

Yuri Ivanovych Shapoval is a Professor and head of the Center for Historical Political Studies, Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv. He is the author of hundreds of publications on the history of Communist totalitarianism in Soviet Ukraine; Polish-Ukrainian and Jewish-Ukrainian relations and famine.

Filip Slaveski is a Senior Lecturer in Russian/Soviet and East European History at the Australian National University. He is a historian of Soviet Empire, primarily of Ukraine and Russia, his work focuses on the entanglements of mass conflict, famine and political repression, their aftermath and contemporary echoes across the former Soviet space. Some of his publications include, Slaveski, F. and Shapoval, Y. (2024) Stalin’s Liquidation Game. The unlikely case of Oleksandr Shums’kyi. HURI: Harvard University Press. in press; Slaveski, F. (2021) Remaking Ukraine after WWII: The clash of central and local Soviet power, 1944-1953. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Slaveski, F. (2013) The soviet occupation of Germany: hunger, mass violence and the struggle for peace, 1945-1947. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stalin's Liquidation Game: The Unlikely Case of Oleksandr Shumskyi, His Survival in Soviet Jail, and Subsequent Arcane Assassination by Filip Slaveski and Yuri Shapoval is forthcoming with HURI Books later this year. 

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This event is organized by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) as part of the Ukraine Study Group event series. 

Persons with disabilities who wish to request accommodations or who have questions about access, please contact Megan Duncan Smith, HURI Programs Coordinator, at duncansmith@fas.harvard.edu at least two weeks  in advance of the session.

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