There are very few photographs of the Holodomor, the genocidal famine that carried away the lives of roughly 4 million Ukrainians in the winter of 1932-1933. The reason for this is that in those years Soviet authorities created a virtual Soviet reality for the foreign world that included concealment and denial of the Holodomor.
They were careful to manage the image of the USSR abroad after the 1921-23 famine that was a PR catastrophe for the Bolshevik government. Then, the burgeoning Soviet state accepted the aid of foreign humanitarian agencies in return for their freedom to operate, as a result of which the world saw the full extent of the human misery on Soviet soil. Censorship and broad restrictions made documentation and reporting of facts challenging; nevertheless, some photos did leak out from behind the Soviet border.
The most famous ones were made by the Austrian engineer Alexander Wienerberger.
Read also:
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- Holodomor survivor stories come to life in mobile app for tourists
- Bread from tree bark and straw: students launch online “restaurant” with Holodomor “recipes”
- Stalin’s anti-Ukrainian policies in RSFSR prove Holodomor was a genocide
- Stalin’s management of Red Army proves Holodomor a Soviet genocide against Ukrainians
- Holodomor: Stalin’s punishment for 5,000 peasant revolts
- “Let me take the wife too, when I reach the cemetery she will be dead.” Stories of Holodomor survivors
