Yet, this assumption has unfortunately been proven accurate by reviews of Bitter Harvest, including one in the Washington Post in which the writer casts doubt on whether the holodmor actually happened. The filmmakers assume the audience have never heard of the Holodomor and are unfamiliar with the basics of Soviet and Ukrainian history, leading to almost comical moments of exposition. This context is significant when watching Bitter Harvest and the landscape it must confront as a historical drama. Compared to other episodes of mass murder in the 20 th century, the Holodomor is not even the most prominent among Soviet episodes state-sponsored violence, discussed much less frequently than the 1937 purges. While well-known to historians of Ukraine and the Soviet Union, as well as among Ukrainians and the Ukrainian diaspora, the holodomor remains unfamiliar to those outside these circles, despite the fact that United States government declared it a genocide in the 1980s. The Holodomor (meaning death by hunger) was a man-made famine, orchestrated by Soviet authorities, that intentionally created food shortages in rural Ukraine that led to the starvation of millions of local peasants. The Canadian film Bitter Harvest (written and directed by Ukrainian-Canadian George Mendeluk) takes as it subject the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, known as the Holodomor. Kathryn David is a doctoral student in the History Department at New York University.

Bitter harvest meaning