Registration REQUIRED by 12pm on April 10, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program and the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Natalya Naumenko. Moderated by Andrey Shlyakhter.
Professor Natalya Naumenko (Department of Economics, George Mason University), will be giving a guest seminar (talk followed by Q&A) based on her team’s recent prize-winning article: Andrei Markevich, Natalya Naumenko, Nancy Qian, “The Causes of Ukrainian Famine Mortality, 1932-33,” The Review of Economic Studies, 92:5 (October 2025): 3276–3305
In this article, Markevich, Naumenko, and Qian construct a novel panel dataset for interwar Soviet Union to study the causes of Ukrainian famine mortality (Holodomor) during 1932–3 and document several facts: (1) Ukraine produced enough food in 1932 to avoid famine in Ukraine; (2) 1933 mortality in the Soviet Union was increasing in the pre-famine ethnic Ukrainian population share and (3) was unrelated to food productivity across regions; (4) this pattern exists even outside of Ukraine; (5) migration restrictions exacerbated mortality; (6) actual and planned grain procurement were increasing and actual and planned grain retention (production minus procurement) were decreasing in the ethnic Ukrainian population share across regions. The results imply that anti-Ukrainian bias in Soviet policy contributed to high Ukrainian famine mortality, and that this bias systematically targeted ethnic Ukrainians across the Soviet Union.
This article was the winner of the 2025 Conquest Prize for Contribution to Holodomor Studies
Popular summary: https://voxdev.org/topic/institutions-political-economy/stalins-famine
Natalya Naumenko is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at George Mason University. Her research concentrates on economic history and political economy, with a particular focus on Russia and the former Soviet Union. She received her PhD in Economics from Northwestern University in 2018, and has held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Political Theory Project at Brown University.
