Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

Pidhainy initiated the founding of the Ukrainian Association of Victims of Russian Communist Terror. He also became a prominent émigré organizer and often spoke to émigré groups, encouraging them to write down their memories, not only of the famine but of life in the USSR. Other émigré institutions did, or had already done, the same. The Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre in Winnipeg, founded in 1944, held a memoir-writing competition in 1947. Although aimed at collecting material about the Second World War, many of the memoirs submitted concerned the famine, and the Centre eventually built up a substantial collection.38 The Ukrainian community around the world also responded to an appeal from a diaspora newspaper in Munich for memoirs that would “serve as a severe accusation of Bolshevik arbitrariness in Ukraine.”