Olga Bertelsen

Olga Bertelsen is a postdoctoral scholar at Columbia University. She will research human behavior during the 1932-33 Famine in Soviet Ukraine, the Holodomor. Using archival documents and ethnographic findings, her study will analyze how people were transformed under extreme starvation and the threat of state violence, transformations that included psychological and psychiatric changes, on both individual and collective levels. Her study will illuminate emotions and attitudes toward Soviet power and will reconstruct a conflicted portrait of the Ukrainian peasant.