Run jointly with Harvard Summer School, our summer program offers seven intensive weeks of accredited study on Ukraine.

Bringing together scholars and policy makers, TCUP fosters new conversations on contemporary Ukraine.

Open to the public, our weekly seminar series, lectures, and special events feature scholars from around the world.

HURI's publications program is conducted at the high standard of scholarship and editing expected of Harvard. Our books are distributed by Harvard University Press and reviewed internationally.

HURI Books website

Harvard Ukrainian Studies (HUS) serves as an international forum for new scholarship in Ukrainian studies. All submissions undergo a rigorous double-blind peer review.

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By Serhii Plokhy

As people began dying en masse in central Ukraine in the late spring and early summer of 1932, the government in Moscow sent the republic new quotas for grain procurement in the fall of that year. As there was no sowing in regions already affected by famine, and the rest of the collective farms were in disarray, Ukrainian party officials sounded the alarm, pleading with Stalin for the reduction of quotas. He refused. Keeping the 1932 quotas in place and maintaining pressure on the peasantry, Stalin opened a new front in his war on Ukraine. His enemies were the Ukrainian party and government officials who were trying to defend the peasantry instead of toeing the party line and extracting grain no matter what.

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By Stanislav Aseyev

This one day, though, I was on my way back from my latest wander through Donetsk and was crossing the bridge between two bus stops: Pasta Factory and Motel...To the right of the bridge are some small garages and a wooded area, and on the rails of a train track next to them I noticed two militants with a young guy in a tracksuit and no jacket. The young man looked exhausted and seemed to be having trouble standing up. What happened next took place in an instant, in the time it took me to cross the bridge. Without saying a word, without giving a warning, without the tiniest acknowledgment that this was a human being, —one of the militants pulled the trigger of his gun, there was a crack, and the young man fell. That was it. They shot him like an animal, without saying a word.

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By Stanislav Aseyev

Isolation, however, was intended to be more than just a prison for the untrustworthy. Yes, many of my fellow inmates landed here for “inappropriate correspondence” or posting on social media in support of the Ukrainian side in the war. That type of thing was instantly labeled extremism and came with a minimum sentence of five years. In fact, I received my own five years for the quotation marks I put around the phrase “Donetsk People’s Republic” in the stories I published in Ukrainian media, which later were published in book form as In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas. I used the quotation marks to indicate that DPR’s government wasn’t recognized by either the international community or Russia itself. This choice of punctuation eventually resulted in my name on a piece of paper that proudly proclaimed me a captured criminal who had “denied the state sovereignty of the DPR.”

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Edited by Andrea Graziosi, Lubomyr Hajda and Halyna Hryn

In the first week or so of April 1934 (the famine ended in 1933), Jan Łagoda, the deputy commerce counselor for the Polish embassy in Moscow, undertook a railway tour of areas affected by the famine, including Kyiv, Korosten, Zhytomyr, Berdychiv, and Koziatyn, among others. He reported that there were still large numbers of starving people in the areas he visited. “I have seen many people who were visibly starving. Railway stations are full of abandoned children living however they can. Passengers having a snack at the station are stared at not only by starving children, but by adults as well. At the Uman station I counted twenty-three abandoned children between the ages of five and twelve.”

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