1956–
A historian of the Holodomor’s mechanisms and memory
In 2009 he urged keeping, not toppling, monuments to the communist figures behind the Holodomor, setting a 'black board' beside each reading that its subject created the Holodomor and that his policy was criminal.
Vasyl Marochko is a Ukrainian historian whose work examines the countryside of the 1920s and 1930s and the Holodomor. He treats the famine not as an abstract disaster but as the outcome of state policies combining grain requisitioning with control over rural society. His calculation that blacklisting covered 252 of the Ukrainian SSR’s 405 districts shows the scale at which food deprivation and administrative isolation were imposed on peasants.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1981–1995Postgraduate student and researcher, Institute of History of Ukraine
- 1985Earned a candidate of historical sciences degree with a dissertation on the Soviet way of life in Ukraine’s collective-farm countryside
- 1996Defended a doctoral dissertation on Ukrainian peasant cooperatives
- 1996Head of the Association of Holodomor Researchers in Ukraine
- 2008–2015Head of the Association of Holodomor Researchers in Ukraine
- 2013–Professor of Ukrainian history
- 2022Leading researcher, Holodomor Research Institute, National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide
Related historical events
From peasant cooperatives to famine history
Marochko’s scholarship addressed the institutions and social relations of the Ukrainian countryside over an extended period. In 1985 he defended a candidate-of-sciences dissertation on the formation of the Soviet way of life in Ukraine’s collective-farm villages from 1929 to 1937. In 1996 he defended a doctoral dissertation offering a historical and theoretical study of Ukrainian peasant cooperatives from 1861 to 1929. His research interests subsequently ranged across agrarian relations and peasant cooperation, the famine of 1932–1933, mass political repression, and the people labeled “former people” in Soviet Ukraine. He was one of the founders and leaders of the Association of Holodomor Researchers in Ukraine. The Institute of History of Ukraine’s biographical page gives his directorship of its Center for the Study of the Genocide of the Ukrainian People as 2002–2007, while the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine lists him as founder and director from 2002 to 2009. In 2003 he led the authors’ collective for an 888-page study of the famine’s causes and consequences. This trajectory connects cooperatives and collectivization, famine, and repression as subjects in the changing history of Ukraine’s countryside.