Roman Serbyn’s Fight against Modern Falsifications of the History of Holodomor

Abstract

It is found out that Roman Serbyn proved himself as a consistent researcher problem of the Holodomor, whichshowed a qualified methodological approach and objective scientific position. The scientist was first among scholars who refutedfabrications of history of the famine 1932-1933 on Ukraine, which appeared in the West in the 80s of the twentieth century andcontemporary Russia. The historian hypothesized the systematic application communist regime of the tool famine in 1921-1923and 1932-1933 for suppress of the resistance "unreliable" Ukrainians layers. R. Serbyn interpretated the events of 30 years of XXcentury aggordingly to of the Convention on genocide as a series of criminal actions of the Stalin's regime. Consectvently, thesoviet rule combined the famine in Ukraine with other elements of the communist genocide, its destruction of the Church,intellectuals and the ruling elite, the estrangement of children and so on. The scientiest concentrated his attention on the Ukrainiangenocide and mainly comment on John-Paul Himka's evasive methodology in debating that subject. R. Serbyn remembered aboutopinion by Rafael Lemkin, who was author of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. Lemkin examined the Ukrainian catastrophewithin the framework of the UN Convention and defined the genocide in Soviet Ukraine as a four-pronged attack on the ethnicUkrainian nation, of which the deliberate starvation of the farming population was the most lethal part. The others were thecrippling of the Ukrainian nation by the decimation of its intellectual elites, the destruction of its church life, and the forced ethnicmixing of Ukraine's population. The study tested all the way of Serbyn’s life - an example of coherent and courageous struggle ofthe individual for the truth about the famine, an example of tireless research and educational work on the revival of the historicalmemory of the Ukrainian people and the strengthening of Ukraine in the world. It is ascertained that the total R. Serbyn’scontribution to the development history of the Holodomor and substantiation evidence genocidal nature of this tragedy is the mostimportant among Ukrainian researchers abroad. He lectures, speaking at conferences, giving interviews, trying bring up to theworld terrible and instructive truth about one of the greatest tragedies in the history of the Ukrainian people.

Keywords: historiography, Ukrainian diaspora, Roman Serbyn, Holodomor, genocide.