Holodomor
On February 4, at Winnipeg’s Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), some 500 people interested in learning more about the Holodomor attended an evening organized by the CMHR and the Holodomor Awareness and Education Committee of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC), Manitoba Council. Titled “Covering or Uncovering the Truth: Media Reporting on the Holodomor,” the event examined how a free press could both alert the world and document human rights abuses, while at the same time contributing to their cover-up.
A poster for the international symposium on “Starvation as a Political Tool from the 19th to the 21st Century.”
An international symposium on “Starvation as a Political Tool from the 19th to the 21st Century,” held at the University of Toronto, brought together leading scholars to discuss how starvation has been used, or became a way to discriminate against, punish or eliminate national, ethnic, racial or religious groups. The October 22 symposium was the second major academic event examining the Holodomor in comparative perspective organized by the Holodomor Research and Educational Consortium.
Historian Timothy Snyder delivered the Toronto Annual Ukrainian Famine Lecture to a crowded auditorium at the University of Toronto on November 4. Speaking on the topic “The Ukrainian Famine as World History,” the speaker’s major theme was that a proper understanding of the Holodomor, aside from its centrality to the Ukrainian experience and Soviet politics, provides an opening to a more complete history of Europe.
International visitors
The noted Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov was invited by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) to deliver the 49th annual Shevchenko Lecture, which served as the keynote event of a three-day symposium held on the occasion of the first anniversary of the Euro-Maidan revolution. Mr. Kurkov’s talk, delivered on March 9 before an audience of almost 200 at the University of Alberta, was titled “How Many Maidans Does Ukraine Need to Become Different?” Before coming to Edmonton, Mr. Kurkov also gave lectures in Winnipeg and Toronto. In Winnipeg he gave two talks – one at the University of Manitoba and the other at the Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Center (Oseredok). In Toronto, Mr. Kurkov gave a lecture at the University of Toronto’s Munk Center, which was co-sponsored by the Petro Jacyk Center for the Study of Ukraine, the Center for East European Russian and Eurasian Studies and CIUS. Mr. Kurkov is a world-renowned Ukrainian novelist, movie scriptwriter and essayist, who has published 18 novels, seven books for children and more than 30 filmscripts. His works have been translated into 36 languages. He is Ukraine’s best-selling author abroad.
Father Bohdan Prach, rector of the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) in Lviv since 2013, on April 30 took part in the CIUS-cosponsored book launch at the St. Josaphat Cathedral Hall of his two-volume study on the clergy of Peremyshl Eparchy between 1939 and 1989. He then visited the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and the dean of arts at the University of Alberta on the following day. The objective of this meeting was the signing of a new memorandum of understanding between CIUS and UCU to facilitate the work of the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Modern Ukrainian History and Society.
In late April, Yale University announced that Svyatoslav (Slava) Vakarchuk, who holds an advanced degree in physics, has served in the Verkhovna Rada and leads the most popular rock band in Ukraine, Okean Elzy, had been selected to the prestigious Yale World Fellows Program Class of 2015. Throughout his Yale World Fellowship program, lasting from Mid-August to mid-December, Mr. Vakarchuk was active in contributing as a lecturer at various American universities, including Harvard, Columbia and the University of California, Berkeley, displaying a far-ranging knowledge of history and deep understanding of events in Ukraine.
At Fordham University on November 20, Mr. Vakarchuk delivered a lecture titled “Ordinary Citizens in Extraordinary Times: Civil Society in Ukraine,” primarily focusing on the role that civil society plays in the development of a country. He proposed that Ukraine can be transformed when young talented Ukrainians can get a Western education so that they can come back with new ideas and bring about change in their home country.