Commemoration of the Holodomor by Orthodox Ukrainians of the USA During the Cold War

Abstract

The Ukrainian community in North America played an essential role in the information campaign in the Western press about the situation in the Ukrainian SSR in 1932–1933 and in providing all possible assistance to the starving. Later, beginning in the 1950s, the political, social, and cultural activities of some of its members would take part in the commemoration of the Holodomor in the United States. However, despite the historical significance of the role played by the North American diaspora in this process during the Cold War, this topic has not been sufficiently studied in historical science.

Goal. The author has set a fundamentally new goal for historiography in recent years to consider the discourse created by the UOC of the USA around commemorating the victims of the Holodomor of 1932–1933 during the Cold War. She reflected here the commemorating anniversaries initiatives using by the community from St. Andrew Memorial Church, Ukrainian Orthodox cathedral in South Bound Brook (NJ). Methodology. In the article, the author applied a discursive-cognitive approach. Main results of the research.

The author presents the main conclusions about how the Orthodox Ukrainians of America remembered the victims of the Holodomor during the 1950s and 1980s; whether and how the culture of Holodomor memory in the North American diaspora changed; what metaphors dominated the public space of the Ukrainian diaspora in America and why they. Based on the analysed sources. The author concludes that since the 1950s, the Ukrainian diaspora has carried out a series of actions aimed at drawing attention to the events of 1932–33 in Soviet Ukraine, which influenced the initiation of academic research and the formation of social opinion on the form and manifestations of Soviet totalitarianism. It should be noted that the early forms of commemoration of the Holodomor in “places of memory” were deeply religious in nature, indicating that the Holodomor trauma was apparently understood as a “sacrifice” of martyrs for the freedom of Ukraine (as Ukrainian religious periodicals in the United States wrote about it). The Ukrainian tradition of commemoration of the dead and the Christian tradition of honouring the memory of martyrs for their faith was the first topos chosen to Ukrainians in North America (mainly Orthodox) in honour of victims of the Soviet regime. The victims of the Holodomor were referred to as “innocent victims”, “innocently killed”, “innocent martyrs”, and the struggle of Ukrainians for independence – as “Ukrainian Golgotha”. The sacred dimension of commemorating Holodomor victims was associated with a sense of moral duty to the Holodomor generation that was part of the community. And in this case, it was about the desire of the diaspora to remind the victims of communism to democratic societies constantly. It is symbolic, as it is evidence of the testimony of Americans of Ukrainian descent about the experience of the Holodomor generation.