Drawing on communist secret services archives, this talk will reveal a previously unknown GPU mass operation that swept Soviet Ukraine during winter 1932-1933, predating the Great Terror by years. Using interdisciplinary methods, the analysis demonstrates an extraordinarily high correlation between GPU planned "liquidations" and regional mortality rates, establishing secret police violence as integral to genocidal policy. This lecture reconceptualizes what Soviet documents called "operational pressure" as a systematic mass operation initiated from Moscow and reperiodizes Stalinist terror, revealing the first peak of repressions during the Holodomor, before the 1937-1938 Terror, while offering new frameworks for comparative genocide studies and illuminating hidden mechanisms through which the Soviet regime implemented murder by famine.

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Dr. Andriy Kohut is Director of the Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine and Stuart Ramsey Tompkins Visiting Professor at the University of Alberta. He holds a Ph.D. in History from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and an M.A. from Ivan Franko Lviv National University. In 2022, he suspended his Fulbright Fellowship at Stanford University following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Dr. Kohut has published numerous scholarly articles and edited collections from declassified KGB archives. His research interests include Soviet deportations, the Holodomor, communist secret services, memory politics, and cultural diplomacy.