Iryna Skubii
Historian, PhD, Mykola Zerov Fellow in Ukrainian Studies at University of Melbourne (Australia). Dr. Skubii research interests include history of consumption, material culture, and the environment during the Soviet famines in Ukraine. She is the author of the monograph Trade in Kharkiv in the Years of NEP: economy and everyday life (Kharkiv: Rarytety Ukrainy, 2017), and a number of articles on the history of consumption, materiality, famines, and animal history in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s and 1940s.
Related sources:
Report of the Intelligence Unit ІІ of the Border Guard Service of Poland on the Food Supplies Situation in the Soviet Kharkiv
The document presents a report of the intelligence division of the Second Unit of the Border Guard Service of Poland in Kharkiv about the situation with food supplies in the city and the mass departure of foreign (German) specialists from Ukraine and the Soviet Union. The document is dated of March 5, 1933, the most critical time of the Holodomor famine in 1932-1933. The document’s author does not use the word “famine,” but the report includes multiple direct testimonies of starvation and food crisis. The author describes them and also adds his sarcastic and critical comments about the nature of Soviet rule and the impact of its political and economic course on the...
Report On The Economic And Food Supply Situation In Kharkiv In The Beginning Of Spring 1933
The document is a report of the Second Intelligence Division of the Border Guard Service of Poland in Kharkiv on the economic and food supply situation in the city as of the beginning of spring 1933. When analyzing this text, we need to consider that the events in question were taking place in the most critical time of the 1932-1933 Holodomor. The text of the document allows for an analysis of the conditions of survival of the urban population, the peculiarities of food supply for the staff of a foreign (Polish) consulate, and domestic animals. The document focuses on the accessibility of food supplies in the urban market that could be bought only...
Information on the provision of bread to workers of the radhosps of agricultural trusts, 1932
Ukrmolokotrest (state enterprise which united milk industry in Soviet Ukraine) sent this instruction to the Peoples Secretariat of Land Affairs of the USSR in the second half of 1932. The document contains important information on the situation at padhosps (Soviet agricultural farms), which belonged administratively to the trest. As the trest had the right to inspect the state of work on the controlled radhosps, its inspectors possessed the detailed information about the state of their work and the condition of food supply of their workers. Thus, the provided information about the “catastrophic” situation of food supply in the early 1932 testifies about the already existing famine conditions in the countryside while the peak...