The Last Soviet Famine, 1946/47: Mass Death across Ukraine, Moldova and Russia

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.

 

 

An historian of Soviet Empire, primarily of Ukraine and Russia, his work focuses on the collisions of mass conflict, famine and political repression, their aftermath and contemporary echoes across the former Soviet space.

 

Japanese-American historian, 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.

 

Moderator: Bohdan Klid, Director of Research, Holodomor Research and Education Consosrtium, CIUS, University of Alberta