Your current research as a Max Weber Fellow explores the decades-long transnational struggles to recognise the Holodomor as a form of political violence. Can you briefly introduce the Holodomor?
As a Max Weber Fellow, I have been developing a book manuscript that explores decades-long transitional political contest surrounding the great Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, known as the Holodomor. Not many people know that the Holodomor was one of the most devastating human catastrophes of 20th century Europe, reaching over 3.9 million deaths in Soviet Ukraine alone. This famine wasn’t a natural disaster, but part of a broader crisis tied to the forced modernisation of agriculture under Stalin’s first five-year plan.
What makes the Holodomor unique is the Soviet regime’s complete denial of it, rejecting any attempt at humanitarian aid and silencing survivors. For decades, people couldn't speak openly about this experience, mourn their relatives, or commemorate their deaths. That only began to change in the late 1980s, during Glasnost and Perestroika, when the famine was acknowledged, archives were opened, and the first memorials were allowed, marking this process of memorialisation of the famine.
As one of the most contested episodes in Eastern European historiography, how has the Holodomor shaped Ukrainian national identity, and what role does memory activism play in this process?
What drew me to the Holodomor was the discovery that, as early as the 1930s, Ukrainians in exile, and others, formed transnational networks to raise awareness and counter Soviet denial. They published materials, exchanged telegrams, and appealed to international organisations to intervene, generating a different understanding of the phenomenon. This kind of early memory activism didn’t happen in response to other Soviet famines. From the outset, the Holodomor was understood by activists as political violence. Over time, their work laid the groundwork for a broader collective memory of the famine.
Collective memory is like a foundational block that shapes how nations perceive themselves and their political values. But memory can also be weaponised—used by populists and nationalists to promote selected histories, spread fear, or justify violence.
That’s why I’m trying to demonstrate that in the European context it’s very important to cultivate a progressive and nuanced understanding of collective memory, enhancing it to move away from those narratives that exclude or diminish Eastern perspectives, and instead creating bridges between different historical experiences, both from East and West.
What has your research uncovered about the role of early transnational activism in shaping the recognition and remembrance of the Holodomor?
In Ukraine today, archives related to the famine are widely available, and there is robust scholarship and activism surrounding the Holodomor. So, it wasn’t hard to find documents that reveal how the Soviet state managed denial internally. What was much more difficult was reconstructing the transnational activism that emerged as early as the 1930s. These networks existed across Lviv, Warsaw, Prague, Berlin, Paris, and beyond Europe. But the records of these organisations were scattered, often fragmentary, or simply lost. Many were private, and many were preserved only in small community archives.
It was in these personal archives—some of them not yet cataloged—that I found the most revealing material: letters, telegrams, and articles that documented this grassroots effort to make the famine visible, even when states and international institutions ignored it.
The outcome of this ethnography revealed how memory, activism, and information-sharing operated across borders long before the Cold War ended. It challenges the main narrative that memory work only began in the 1990s, when instead the roots of recognition go back much further.
How can the emphasis on one historical atrocity serve to obscure or silence complicity in others? In Ukraine’s case, how has the memorialisation of the Holodomor intersected with, or overshadowed, memories of Ukrainian collaboration during the Holocaust?
There are two aspects that I want to unpack. As a historical and cultural sociologist, I chose to focus on a single case—the Holodomor—to deeply unveil the political contest surrounding it. This allowed me to reconstruct the denial mechanisms of the Soviet regime and trace the development of transnational activism across decades. I worked in multiple state, institutional, community, and individual archives in seven countries across North America and Europe to trace this activism, and I wouldn't have been able to understand the full complexity of this case without a long-term, contextually grounded approach. But the Holodomor also needs to be understood in relation to other cases of mass political violence in the 20th century.
The Holocaust, of course, has become the dominant symbol for moral evil, but for Holodomor’s activists, this created a kind of dual reality: On the one hand, the Holocaust served as a model and point of comparison, but on the other, it often overshadowed other narratives of suffering, particularly from Eastern Europe. There are other important comparisons too: the Irish famine, for example, which shares a similar structure of political denial and silence, or the Armenian genocide, which to this day faces state-sponsored denial. These cases highlight how some atrocities become globally recognised symbols of suffering while others remain marginalised or contested for a very long time.
What are the main common traits that link famines, epidemics, and environmental catastrophes as forms of political violence, and how might reframing them change our understanding of structural injustice and state responsibility?
What links famines, epidemics, and environmental catastrophes as forms of political violence is their erasure—either through denial, indifference, or neglect. In many cases, the perpetrators are hard to pinpoint, and the violence unfolds slowly, which makes it harder to recognise as such. But that doesn't make it any less political.
Famines, for instance, can be rapid and direct forms of mass killing, but they also operate as structural and ‘slow’ violence, gradual processes of exhaustion and deprivation. They often stem from policy decisions, economic inequality, or environmental mismanagement, and they disproportionately affect marginalised groups. Historically, these kinds of crises have been dismissed as natural disasters or tragic accidents, when in fact they are often systemic and preventable. They can be deeply political—and reframing them as such forces us to rethink how we understand responsibility and justice. If we include famines, malnutrition, and hunger in our concept of political violence, we also open space for talking about them in the context of transitional justice. And this is where environmental injustice comes in. We are only beginning to understand how climate change, forced displacement, and resource scarcity are producing new forms of structural violence. I argue that we need to expand our frameworks of justice to include environmental violence as historical injustice—and think about what restoration or reparations might mean in those contexts.
What remains to be done or created on the path of decolonisation towards an inclusive sense of historical justice?
At the European level, I think the time has come to think about collective memory from a different angle than the dominant Western one. Europe’s foundational memory has been built around the Holocaust and World War II, but Eastern Europe experienced layers of repression, including Stalinist and later communist violence, that are still underrepresented in the dominant narrative.
We need a European memory project that bridges these different historical experiences, pushing towards a more inclusive education, public recognition, and stronger institutional support.
On a global level, instead, I believe we should take seriously environmental forms of violence—famines, epidemics, and ecological degradation—as political and historical injustices. They should be part of how we think about transitional justice, reparation, and restoration as well. These are no longer just historical questions or relics of the past: They are urgent and ongoing—they’re part of our future. Recognising them as forms of political violence is a necessary step toward building more equal and resilient societies.
Karolina Koziura, Max Weber Fellow at the EUI Department of History, is developing a research project exploring the transnational memory politics of the Holodomor—the Great man-made famine that devastated Soviet Ukraine. Her research will culminate in a monographic publication, titled ‘Politics of Hunger: The Great Ukrainian Famine and Its Transnational Legacies,1932-2022.’