This roundtable on the Soviet famines of the 1930s brings into conversation nine leading scholars from around the world working in the field of Soviet history. They were asked to address the following questions: 1) How have new sources (many of which have come to light in the last decade) and new methodologies of approaching these sources (by demographers, economists, etc.) altered or confirmed our understanding of the Soviet collectivisation famines? 2) What role did popular participation in the Soviet system play in creating these famines and how can we categorise the actions of mid- or low-level party bureaucrats working for the Soviet state? 3) How does the popular narrative of the Holodomor change if you broaden the narrative to include simultaneous mass famines elsewhere in the Soviet Union, including in the Volga region and Kazakhstan? 4) What are the stakes in classifying this as a genocide rather than by other terms such as ‘mass murder’ or ‘mass death’? And have these stakes changed over the last ten years or so?

The Holodomor Memorial to Victims of the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide of 1932–1933 was opened in Washington, D.C. in 2015. Source: Wikimedia Commons.