Triptych "Genocide 1933" by the Honcharenkо brothers – a program work on the topic of the Holodomor in the late soviet Ukraine

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17721/1728-2640.2026.162.11

Abstract

Background. The Holodomor was an act of genocide that caused colossal demographic losses and deep psychological trauma to the Ukrainian people. The last more than 60-year-old policy of the USSR authorities to deny the crime committed in 1932-1933 by the communist regime centered in Moscow against Ukrainians was preserved and deepened the trauma, persecution for publicly mentioning the terrible famine. The opportunity to publicly use works of art in the Ukrainian SSR to reflect the theme of genocide and overcome the collective trauma caused by it appeared only in the late 1980s in the conditions of the liberalization of the communist regime. The identification and analysis of the first works of artists who addressed the issue of the tragedy of Ukrainians in 1932–1933 is relevant, including the triptych "Genocide 1933" by Ukrainian artists Taras and Yury Goncharenko.

Methods. During the study of the work, methods of historical-genetic, stylistic and semiotic analysis were used.

Results. The article analyzes for the first time the reasons and circumstances of the creation of the Goncharenko brothers' triptych "Genocide 1933" in 1988-1989, its place among works of fine art on the theme of the Holodomor and the genocide of the Ukrainian nation. The artists, relying on family memories of the Holodomor, in the conditions of limited liberalization of social and political life in the USSR, were the first among the artists of the late Soviet Ukraine to create an original large-scale work of easel painting on a previously forbidden issue. In the triptych, the artists offered the audience through artistic images a deep historiosophical understanding of the tragedy of Ukraine and the grave crime of the communist regime in Moscow - the genocide of the Ukrainian nation. To create these three paintings in the style of neo-symbolism, the artists used an extremely rare technique of combining painting and mosaic, which gave the works additional artistic value and expressiveness.

Conclusions. From the 1930s to the end In the 1980s, some artists in Ukraine and in the countries where the Ukrainian diaspora settled created painting on the theme of the Holodomor, however, due to the repressive and restrictive policy of the USSR of "forced amnesia", they were unknown to a wide range of viewers in the Ukrainian SSR and the Kuban. The triptych of T. and Y. Goncharenko probably became the first pictorial work from this issue, which managed to be publicly demonstrated in late Soviet Ukraine in 1989 at the Republican Art Exhibition "Man and the World". This event can be considered as one of the important initial milestones in overcoming the post-genocide state of Ukrainian society.