The Holodomor Museum has launched an expedition to record eyewitness accounts of the Holodomor and the famine of 1946–1947
On Monday, 6 October 2025, the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide launched a scientific expedition to record eyewitness accounts of the Holodomor and the mass man-made famine of 1946–1947.
The expedition is part of the international technical assistance project ‘Support for the Exhibitions of the National Museum of the Holodomor in Kyiv, Ukraine,’ which is funded by Global Affairs Canada (GAC) and implemented by Cowater International and the Canada-Ukraine Foundation.
Two museum research teams will spend two months conducting expeditions to 10 regions of Ukraine, during which they will record eyewitness accounts of the Holodomor of 1932–1933 and the mass man-made famine of 1946–1947. Our colleagues plan to visit the Odesa, Cherkasy, Kirovohrad, Mykolaiv, Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Rivne, Volyn, Kyiv, and Poltava regions.
During the expedition, it is planned to conduct over 100 in-depth interviews with Holodomor survivors and witnesses to the post-war man-made famine. It is a unique opportunity to record the oral history of the genocide of the Ukrainian people from its last eyewitnesses. It will also be possible to record testimonies about the famine of 1946–1947, the 80th anniversary of which we will commemorate in 2026–2027.
The recordings will be added to the collection of the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide. Additionally, they will become part of the museum’s extensive Oral History Archive of the Holodomor. After processing, the video recordings and transcriptions will be published on our resources and made available to the broader public. They will serve for educational and research purposes as part of the project “Mosaic of History.Episode 3,” as in 2020 and 2021, the Museum, with the support of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation, conducted two similar expeditions as part of the project “Mosaic of History”. The interview recordings, along with artefacts brought back from the expedition, will be presented in the main exhibition of the second phase of the Holodomor Museum when it is completed.
In the meantime, we would like to thank all the caring people who responded to our call for witnesses and their contacts. The expedition routes are the result of our joint efforts.
We wish our colleagues success and a fruitful expedition!
We will keep you informed about its progress and results.
