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27 April 2010 18:00

Kateryna Yushchenko Presents Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror Second Edition

April 27, 2010, Head of the Supervisory Board of the Ukraine 3000 International Charitable Foundation Kateryna Yushchenko presented the second edition of Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties scholarly and documentary monograph.

The event took place at the National Museum of Ukrainian Literature. Among the participants were Susan Cleary, Cultural Affairs Officer with the Embassy of the United States to Ukraine, Yevhen Sverstiuk, public figure and human rights champion, Andriy Kryshtalsky, VAA Teren Director;
scholars, historians, writers, and public figures.

“Robert Conquest was the first to tell the world about what was going on in the Soviet Union,” Mrs. Yushchenko said, addressing the audience. “Today there is probably no Sovietologists in the world who would not use The Great Terror as his table-top book.” Mrs. Kateryna said that Conquest’s work was still topical today, and as many people as possible should get a chance to read it. That is why the Ukraine 3000 Foundation initiated its translation and publication. However, there was another reason why the Foundation decided to publish it: it had never been published in the former Soviet Union territory, with the exception of Latvian samizdat edition.

Kateryna Yushchenko recalled that the first edition of The Great Terror was carried out by Ukraine 3000 Foundation as part of its History Lessons program. It was presented October 25, 2009, within the framework of the national events commemorating the victims of the Holodomor Manmade Famine of 1932-1933. Virtually the entire pressrun was distributed free of charge among Kyiv and Ukraine’s libraries. “However, it became clear immediately after that presentation that the book had drawn great public interest and the number of those willing to familiarize themselves with it is very big,” Mrs. Kateryna said.

In this connection the Foundation gave Teren Volyn Art Agency permission for a second, commercial edition, so that everybody was able to buy the book. Mrs. Kateryna thanked Teren Agency for this initiative and the Embassy of the United States in Ukraine – for facilitating its implementation.

Among other speakers were Susan Cleary, Yevhen Sverstiuk, Andriy Kryshtalsky, renowned Ukrainian historians Yuri Shapoval and Vasyl Marochko.

In course of the event, the Ukraine 3000 Foundation donated to the National Museum of Ukrainian Literature a set of books, published on the Foundation’s initiative and with its support.

After the presentation Mrs. Yushchenko and Ukraine 3000 Foundation members were given a tour of the National Museum of Ukrainian Literature, accompanied by its workers and director Halyna Soroka.

Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror is the first edition of this work in the Ukrainian language. Ukraine was the first post-Soviet country to publish this unique book. Earlier in the Soviet Union territory it was published only in Latvia as samizdat. The Great Terror is an amazingly professional and well-grounded research of the Stalin repressions period in the 1930s. With the help of scholarly sources, written witness and victims’ accounts, the author covered one of the most hushed up periods of the USSR history.

The Great Terror introduces the reader to the prerequisites, duration, reasons, and consequences of the most mass repressions in the Soviet Union in 1937-1938. This period had got his name after the publication of Robert Conquest’s books in the United States in 1968.

Within the framework of the History Lessons program, the Ukraine 3000 International Charitable Foundation has carried out nine publishing projects in the last three years. In part, in 2007 the Foundation published in Ukrainian Robert Conquest’s monograph on Holodomor, The Harvest of Sorrow.