The Holodomor

The starvation of a specific group of people is an insidious form of genocide: slow, with far-reaching psychological and physical effects that strip people of their humanity, leading to choices and acts of violence previously unimaginable. This form of genocide is easily hidden and rationalized, as perpetrators deflect blame onto various environmental   factors, while for survivors, the experience may feel too painful to remember.

Although the exact numbers are unknowable, the number of deceased Ukrainians during the Holodomor  (1932–1933) is estimated between 3.5 and 7 million, with an additional estimated 1 to 1.5 million during a second famine between 1946 and 1947. The daily death toll reached about 25,000 people; desperation from hunger led many to eat leaves, pets, or even resort to eating the dead—there were reports of parents feeding their living children with their dead child’s remains. My grandmother was there.  

The lack of knowledge or remembering of the Holodomor was largely by design. Before the Holodomor, the Bolsheviks attempted to wipe out the Ukrainian identity by prohibiting Ukrainian language in schools, imprisoning Ukrainian intellectuals, and even shooting people who dared to speak Ukrainian. Many scholars hold that Stalin clearly used the famine as a tool in his genocide against Ukrainians. One of the reasons for food shortages was forced collectivization, which, along with accompanied mass arrests and executions, created an impossible situation. Blockades prevented food deliveries from outside regions and avenues of escape for those inside. Food was relentlessly confiscated; while people visibly starved, anything considered edible was snatched by Soviet enforcers. 

Soviet leadership denied the existence of the famine both inside the Soviet Union and internationally, forcing healthcare workers to change death certificates to list other causes of death; officials who dared to use the word famine were fired, and many of the census officials were arrested and executed. Even after the famine, survivors were silenced and prohibited to mourn publicly for those they had lost. The truth of what happened lived mainly within the hearts and minds of those who survived and their descendants. 

Both the Holodomor and the latter famine remain inescapably alive within my own rural family. My grandmother remembers experiencing the 1946–47 famine. She vividly recalls how she and her siblings fed their baby sister by letting her suckle on wet sugar in gauze because their mother couldn’t produce breastmilk due to starvation, while the older siblings ate rotten potatoes left behind. They witnessed the brutal beating of a woman who tried to grab leftover wheat stalks by Soviet officials who didn’t want any evidence of starvation to be captured on camera. To this day, she can’t bring herself to discard food even well past its expiration date. Yet I can’t recall any mention of the Holodomor during my high school years in America by my teachers, in any history books, or in movies about those years.

Stalin and the Soviet powers systematically repressed and prevented the truths of the famine they created from being fully recognized by the rest of the world. Institutional denial, and recurrent punishments of anyone attempting to speak about the famine, thwarted survivors’ ability to mourn and process. The world, for political and ideological reasons, also often denied or dismissed the reality of what had transpired, creating collective and systemic resistance.

Starvation during the Holodomor not only led to mass death but also threatened human and moral integrity: the need for survival under genocide forced breakdowns of communal trust, familial ties, and human boundaries. The trauma of resorting to cannibalism, especially, may differ psychologically from other forms of trauma. Due to the harrowing choices forced upon them, victims felt like they were also perpetrators; they were left with feelings of degradation difficult to symbolize and narrate as well as unique levels of shame and survival guilt.

The psychoanalyst Vamik Volcan’s conceptualization of “chosen trauma” is particularly helpful in understanding the intergenerational impact of the Holodomor. Volkan suggests that a chosen trauma acts as a shared mental representation of a catastrophic historical event that becomes central to group identity and gets transmitted across generations. While the Ukrainian people had experienced previous traumatic episodes, including serfdom and colonization, the uniqueness of the Holodomor made it as a “chosen trauma”—not consciously “chosen” in a colloquial sense but experienced as a uniquely devastating group-trauma of victimization that became a pivotal part of Ukrainian identity thereafter. The unconscious “choice” can occur due to “the past generation’s inability to mourn losses after experiencing a shared traumatic event resulting in feelings of humiliation and helplessness” (Volkan 2001). In the case of the Holodomor, mourning was further thwarted by systemic blocking of remembrance. Therefore, the trauma remained historically unresolved and unmourned while still being psychically active and transmitted across generations through family narratives and collective fears.

Through an analytic lens, it appears that historical repetition was enacted when—independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 notwithstanding—some Ukrainians fell under the influence of Russian and Soviet-leaning politicians. In 1994, Ukraine was pressured into giving away thousands of nuclear warheads to Russia as a condition of an agreement between Russia and the United States to protect Ukrainian sovereignty. Similarly, in 1997, Ukraine agreed to lease naval facilities in Sevastopol to Russia as part of an agreement that also formally recognized Ukraine’s existing borders, including Crimea. Of course, as we know now, Russia under Putin violated all agreements with its illegal 2014 annexation of Crimea and the full-scale invasion in 2022.

Volkan describes a phenomenon called “time collapse” in which a past “chosen trauma” gets reactivated and fused with present threats. Both familial and communal repetition can occur due to the traumatic event being part of the mental self-representation of the individuals within the group. Now, with the current war, an authoritarian ruler of Russia is again trying to break Ukrainian culture, democratic ambitions, and spirit through human-rights violations, destruction, and death. In addition to the very genuine political realities, psychoanalysis might add to our understanding of this geopolitical threat by shining light on the emotional meaning of how the current threat may reactivate annihilation fears from the past. 

Freud stressed that working-through is an arduous task, requiring not only insight but also gradual tolerance and reconciliation of repressed memories and engagement with and overcoming of resistance. Working-through is paramount for both Ukraine and the world at large. Russia, especially under authoritarian rule, views Ukraine as strategically vital in its colonialist ambitions. Yet many outside Ukraine failed to appreciate the gravity of the Crimea annexation. Even now, many are surprised, possessing misconceptions of why Ukraine continues fighting. Volkan notes how each subsequent generation becomes tasked with either mourning the loss or reversing the humiliation, until the task gets completed. Psychologically, the unconscious task may be not only to defend autonomy but also to heal the wounds left by the Holodomor—an idea that sheds light on the resilience of many Ukrainians and their unwavering determination to protect their culture and sovereignty. Consciously and unconsciously, this may be as much of a fight about the dehumanization and helplessness of the past as it is about those same issues now. 

James Mace, a descendant of the Cherokee tribe of Native Americans displaced by the government in the 1830s, said, “Just as one cannot study the Holocaust without becoming half Jewish in spirit, one cannot study the Famine and not become at least half Ukrainian” (Anisimova 2024). Through this observation he captures something essential about working-through: a willingness to bear witness to another group’s suffering. Working-through of the trauma of the Holodomor requires collective remembering and reconciliation: open acknowledgement by Ukrainians and by the international community such that memorialization and mourning become a part of articulated history, integrated into the personal and global identity of the Ukrainian people and others worldwide. 

As both an analyst and a person of Ukrainian descent, I hold a commitment to bear witness to pain, allowing memories to be spoken and worked-through. Psychoanalysis seeks to transform repetition into remembrance. To remember the Holodomor is not only to remember that millions died but to also remember that starvation can erode dignity, force impossible choices, and leave people burdened by shame and grief long after the pangs of hunger have subsided. As Volkan proposed, these traumas remain in the psyche of the generations that follow, awaiting recognition and mourning. Despite all the decades of denials and silence, the memories remain in many Ukrainians like my grandmother. They have also remained alive in me, perhaps even before I had the words to understand them. Previously, it was each time I planted a seed in the soil on the farm to grow food. Currently, it is through writing this essay and finding a way to bring these memories into public consciousness through print. The task of working-through belongs not only to survivors and their descendants but also to the wider world. Working-through helps illuminate the risk of future genocide and enables the international community to recognize when authoritarian regimes weaponize hunger, denial, and dehumanization against entire populations. It provides insight into how the current war cannot be understood apart from the historical traumas that preceded it, and why Ukrainians are defending their sovereignty with such determination. Allowing silenced truths to enter the collective consciousness is not only an act of mourning but also an act of responsibility to the present and the future. Personally, societally, and globally, working-through tasks us with remembering painful truths without disavowal, freeing us from the curse of unconscious repetition of the past.