INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE IN VIENNA

On November 3, 2023, an international conference on “Famine and Genocide” was held in Vienna, the capital of Austria. The organizer was the Institute of East European History of the University of Vienna and the Austrian-Ukrainian Commission of Historians. The meeting aroused the great interest of Austrian humanitarian scientists and was called to discuss at a professional level the question of the place of the Holodomor of 1932-1933 in Ukraine in the context of studying the phenomenon of genocide in the history of mankind in the 20th and 21th centuries.

Five speakers were invited to the conference, each of whom had a half-hour speech to highlight current issues on the topic of the international conference. Professor Wolfgang Müller, director of the Institute of East European History of the University of Vienna, opened the conference and gave an introductory speech. Swiss historian Professor Andreas Kappeler, who is a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, devoted his report to the coverage of the famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine in the press of Central and Western Europe at the time. Historian, professor at Stanford University (USA) Norman Naimark, author of the high-profile studies “Fire of Hate: Ethnic Cleansing in Europe in the 20th Century” and “Stalin’s Genocides”, analyzed the place and significance of the Holodomor in a number of genocides experienced by mankind. Leading researcher of the Institute of Ukrainian History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Doctor of Historical Sciences Valery Vasiliev devoted his report to the dynamics of relations between the center and the sub-center of power on the example of the leadership of Ukraine and Russia in 1932-1933.

November 3, 2023. Professor Wolfgang Müller speaks at the opening of the conference (Photo by Y. Shapoval)

 The chief researcher of the Department of Theory and History of our Institute, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor Yuriy Shapoval took part in the conference. He focused on the problems of the methodology of reading the memories of contemporaries of the famine of 1932-1933, those who were not victims, but because of their ideological convictions took an active part in the implementation of the tragic Bolshevik social experiment.

It is important that the work of the conference on such a significant topic was not deprived of attention by the Embassy of Ukraine in Austria: Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ukraine, Candidate of Historical Sciences Vasyl Khymynets took part in the work of this scientific forum. It was he who in 2006, working as the first secretary of the Embassy of Ukraine in the Federal Republic of Germany, invited Professor Y. Shapoval to give a public lecture on the Holodomor in Ukraine at the Museum of the Berlin Wall.

Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ukraine, Candidate of Historical Sciences Vasyl Khymynets and Yuriy Shapoval

They have known each other for about 40 years. From left to right: one of the participants of the conference, Head of the Department of Modern History and the History of Eastern and Southeastern Europe at the University of Klagenfurt (Austria), Professor Dieter Pohl, Yurii Shapoval, Professor Andreas Kappeler