«Мy dead historian»: diaries’ notes on the Holodomor

Abstract

Diaries have a special importance for the research of the totalitarian past and crimes of this regime. They have been created in a private, non-controlled by the state space. Such sources record events witnessed by the authors of the diary notes without postponing in time. The goal of the research is structuring of narrative about the Holodomor through the prism of social and professional strata of their authors and preservation of the source base about the Holodomor. Scientific novelty is outlining by the author of a massive of both proverbial and less known today 27 diaries and diary notes about the Holodomor. The diaries were divided into six groups according to social and professional feature of their authors. The author investigates fate of these oral history sources, besides, their elimination by the security service, preservation by ordinary citizens or mentions of diaries during interviews. Methodology of the research is historical, analytical, comparative, systematic-structural methods that have allowed revealing potential level of informativeness and credibility of corresponding oral history sources. Conclusions. The researcher has demonstrated a spectrum of ideological views of the diaries authors, as well as reaction of victims, eyewitnesses and perpetrators to the famine and break of world outlook foundations as reaction to terror with the famine in UkrSSR. The article shows reflections of people about fear to write a diary and their motivation to turn to writing. It reveals perception of everyday life of Ukrainian villages by various social strata – peasants, children, teachers, party members, intellectuals etc. The author ascertains similar narrative from a point of view of the famine time frames, its beginning, course (scale of mortality, cannibalism, surrogate food), recorded in such oral history sources. This indicates about such scale of mortality exactly during that period in UkrSSR that stood out of all-Union starvation.