Silenced Archive of the Holodomor: The Ukrainian Civil Committee for Saving Ukraine, Transnational Humanitarianism, and Networks of National Compassion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is a commonly held contention among scholars that the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33—denied by the Soviet authorities while it was happening—received no relief in the form of organized international humanitarian aid. Thus, accounts of the famine rarely (if ever) feature a humanitarian narrative. By analyzing the activity of the Ukrainian Civil Committee for Saving Ukraine (Ukraїns'kyi Hromads'kyi Komitet Riatunku Ukraïny), this article challenges such views, as it situates interwar famine-related humanitarianism within the context of small-scale ethnic aid committees working in the interests of the starving across Europe. The records of the Ukrainian Committee stored at the National Library of Poland, as a group, constitute the “silenced archive of the Holodomor”—namely, scattered evidence of the famine that has been affected by displacement and erasure. Analyzing these largely understudied materials, this article argues that the official denial of the famine triggered the deployment of a transnational humanitarian narrative based on what the author calls “national compassion”—a moral duty and obligation uniting Ukrainians across borders. The article, moreover, points to the importance of situated knowledge, information networks, and documentation as tools in countering acts of violence and the power of repressive regimes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".