Mass violence and genocide in Ukraine

Historians, particularly those of the younger generation, presented their current research at a summer school in Lviv, Ukraine, during the last week of June 2026. The Mykola Haievoi Centre had primarily invited those preparing doctoral or master’s theses. Fifteen participants from Ukraine, the USA, Germany and three other EU countries had accepted the invitation. On the sweltering summer campus of the Ukrainian Catholic University, they spent four days in well-cooled lecture rooms in the basement. An excursion to the city’s citadel provided a change of scene and a vivid insight. Dating from the era of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the complex was turned in 1942 into one of the notorious internment camps where the German occupiers held Soviet prisoners of war and allowed thousands to starve to death.

The keynote speaker had travelled from Italy to Ukrainian Galicia: Andrea Graziosi, one of the world’s leading historians specialising in research into the Soviet Union, as well as tyranny and genocide. His lecture was entitled ‘Mass Violence and Genocide in the European Experience: Anti-Human Practices and Intellectual Developments, 1795 to 2025’. In this and another presentation, Graziosi looked back on his time as a young historian and the ‘painful reading’ of reports by Italian diplomats from the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. He said this had “radically altered” his view of 20th-century Europe, as it had exposed the regime’s deliberate brutality, particularly during the Holodomor – the artificially induced famine that struck Ukraine most severely. The opening of the Soviet archives around 1991 had provided further insights. Even as a “total anti-fascist”, he had had to learn that: “In the 1930s, Soviet mass terror, with its hundreds of thousands of executions, was unique in Europe.”

The professor emeritus at the University of Naples traced the long-running debates within the European Left on the future of nations and the ‘national question’, on peasantry and industrial society – debates which Stalin himself had also engaged in. The outcome was the stance taken by the Soviet Communists, who, according to Graziosi, openly declared: ‘We have no colonies. That is why we treat the peasants as our colony.’ Accordingly, they exploited them and factored in peasant revolts from the outset, even attempting to suppress them with preventive terror. The medium-term objective in this Soviet republic, he argued, had been to ultimately ‘remake Ukraine from the ground up’ through increasingly sweeping measures, including the decimation of the elites, and ‘to me, that is clearly genocide’. In this vein, a German diplomat on the ground had described the situation at the time as follows: “There is no longer a Ukrainian Ukraine.” Video link

The contributions from the younger participants covered a wide range of topics. For example, Mariia Prokopenko (Kyiv-Mohyla Academy) spoke about the Soviet artist Adolf Strakhov from Dnipro, and the significance of his Jewish heritage. Anika Olbrisch (University of Greifswald) outlined a project involving the Bundeswehr brigade recently stationed in Lithuania (“Historical Education in Post-Wehrmacht Armed Forces: Coming to Terms with the Past during Deployment”). Petro Dolhanov and Andrii Usach described how, in the area around Mizoch in Volhynia, which was under German occupation from 1941 to 1944, violence escalated, e.g. between the auxiliary police and Ukrainian partisans. The region ended up in horrific crimes, the victims of which were predominantly Polish civilians. The public debate on Volhynia is currently causing serious strains in relations between Poland and Ukraine. MHZ Director Martin Schulze Wessel has outlined the context in the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”.