One of the most insightful and moving eyewitness accounts of the Holodomor, or the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33, was written by Oleksandra Radchenko, a teacher in the Kharkiv re­gion of Ukraine.

In her diary, which was confiscated by Stalin’s secret police and landed the author in the Gulag for ten long years, the thirty-six-year-old teacher recorded not only what she saw around her but also what she thought about the tragedy un­folding before her eyes.

“I am so afraid of hunger; I’m afraid for the children,” wrote Radchenko, who had three young daughters, in February 1932. “May God protect us and have mercy on us. It would not be so offensive if it were due to a bad harvest, but they have taken away the grain and created an artificial famine.” That year she wrote about the starvation and suffering of her neighbors and acquain­tances but recorded no deaths from starvation. That all changed in January 1933, when she encountered the first corpse of a famine victim on the road leading to her home. By the spring of 1933, she was regularly reporting mass deaths from starvation. “People are dying,” wrote Radchenko in her entry for 16 May 1933: “People are saying that whole villages have died in southern Ukraine.”¹

Was Radchenko’s story unique? Did people all over Ukraine indeed suffer from starvation in 1932 and then start dying en masse in 1933? Which areas of Ukraine were most affected? Was there a north-south divide, as the diary suggests, and, if so, did people suffer (and die) more in the south than in the north? Were there more deaths in villages than in towns and cities? Were

small towns affected? Did ethnicity matter? These are the core questions that the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute’s Digital Map of Ukraine Project is attempting to answer by developing the Geographic Information System (GIS)-based Digital Atlas of the Holodomor. The maps included in the atlas are based on a newly created and growing database that makes it possible to link different levels of spatial analysis from the raion to the repub­lic level and to compare demographic, economic, environmental, and political indicators in relation to a given administrative unit.

Most of the questions we try to answer with the help of the GIS database have been informed by the vast literature on the Great Famine, with its focus on the causes of mass deaths from starvation, including environmental factors, levels of collectiviza­tion and, last but not least, nationality policy. By measuring the “footprint” of the Great Famine, we also seek to understand its dynamics, the intentions of the authorities, the fate of the survi­vors, and the consequences of mass starvation.²

The scope of our research has been determined by the avail­ability of geo-referenced maps and “mappable” data. We have been working with a variety of maps of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in its interwar borders prepared with the as­sistance of cartographers of Kartohrafiia Publishers in Ukraine, led by Rostyslav Sossa. Those maps served as a basis for the maps prepared specifically for this website by the chief cartographer of the Digital Atlas of Ukraine, Gennadi Poberezny, and its IT coordinator, Kostyantyn Bondarenko. They reflect administrative changes in Ukraine’s external and internal borders, allowing us to compare the results of the 1926 and 1939 population censuses with data from the famine years of 1932-33. These maps help us answer many important questions, but they also impose limitations on our research, as most do not go beyond the raion level. They also stop at the boundaries of Soviet Ukraine and do not include the neighboring areas of Russia, Belarus, Poland, and Romania, thereby restricting our focus to questions that could be answered within the boundaries of interwar Soviet Ukraine.

Another set of limitations we had to face was the absence of reliable data on population losses in Ukraine at the oblast and raion levels. Such data were produced specifically for the purposes of this project by a group of demographers, including Oleh Wolowyna (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Omelian Rudnytsky, Nataliia Levchuk, Pavlo Shevchuk, and Alla Savchuk (all four from the Institute for Demography and So­cial Studies in Kyiv).

What follows is the first attempt to make sense of the data we have collected and of the maps we produced on its basis. It is presented in the form of a chronologically based narrative that includes reference to the individual maps but is not and should not be viewed as an attempt at a comprehensive interpretation of the history of the Great Famine. Most of the archival documents used to discuss the meaning of the maps come from the most comprehensive collection of documents on the Great Famine, published in 2007 by Ruslan Pyrih.⁴