THE TOOLKIT OF ORAL HISTORY IN THE FORMATION OF A MASS OF ORAL HISTORY SOURCES FOR THE HOLODOMOR IN UKRAINE IN 1932–1933

Tetiana Boriak

doi:10.23856/5204

Tetiana Boriak Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7472-0014

Keywords: Holodomor, oral history, oral history sources, trauma, memory studies, historical memory, interview

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to apply theoretical framework elaborated in oral history for the research of the Holodomor. The first aspect is relation of the collective and the individual. Regarding the Holodomor, one can find absence of pressure of official historical memory over the individual; massive of Holodomor oral history is huge (thousands of units of narrative) that allows to solve the problem of verification and to generalize the experience of the respondents in many parameters. The author also shows how problems of the degree of censoring, reference points and regarding the harmonization of the public and the private can be solves with the oral history of the Holodomor. Specificity of gender’s recalling of the past is also proposed. The second component of analyzed framework is correlation between memory and time. The author illustrates that there are no obstacles to non-trusting of the narrative of the Holodomor survivors. Third component of the framework is trauma. Using oral history, the author illustrates how witnesses to the famine express signals of the traumatic event. The article also points at such important aspect of dealing with investigating the trauma, as absence of words to express surviving through the famine. The historical method, analysis and synthesis, and also the comparative-historical method were used.

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