This public lecture starts by analyzing various aspects of Stalin’s and Lenin’s theory of nationality, including its roots, ties to nationalism, and divergence from Marx and Engels’s original ideas as well as the role it assigned to peasants as possible agents of national liberation, and therefore of revolution. The legacy of the 1917–1922 conflicts, and particularly that of the Bolshevik’s 1919 defeat in Ukraine, will then be assessed. This defeat played a crucial role in the establishment of Soviet “indigenization” policies, yet it also left Soviet authorities with a deep-rooted distrust for the Ukrainian village. The third part of the lecture will be devoted to the Holodomor in the light of the more general social and economic crisis caused by Stalin’s 1929 “Great Turn.” The specificity of the Ukrainian famine, its abnormally high death rates compared to those in other part of the USSR, its extreme time-frame and geographical concentration, as well as its connection with radical anti-Ukrainian policies in Soviet education, culture, and state-building will be assessed against the background of the evolution of Stalin’s ideas on the national question.

Andrea Graziosi is a professor (on leave) at the Università di Napoli Federico II, an associate of the Centre d’études des mondes russe, caucasien et centre-européen (Paris) and a fellow of Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute and Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. The author of books on Soviet, Eastern European and Italian history, and the co-editor of the series Dokumenty sovetskoi istorii, Professor Graziosi sits in the editorial boards of numerous academic journals, and has taught and lectured in several European and American universities.