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Paper short abstract

Drawing on family narratives of the Holodomor, this paper explores silence as a form of care and moral navigation, showing how private knowledge of famine shaped everyday food practices and fostered critical distance from Soviet narratives across generations.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines fragmentary accounts of the Holodomor shared in intimate, private family conversations and explores how knowledge of extreme state violence was preserved within the private sphere while remaining publicly unspeakable—even in families whose adult members were institutionally embedded in the Soviet system and held positions of authority. Family silence is approached as a form of care and moral navigation in the aftermath of famine. The analysis draws on a reflexive auto-/para-ethnographic engagement with intergenerational memory in a Soviet Ukrainian family that later lived in an monolingual Russian-speaking environment.

Silence is treated as a socially productive form of silent knowledge shaping everyday practices of care, particularly around food. Practices such as hyper-care in feeding, the moralization of bread, compulsory eating, and habits of storage and conservation are analysed as embodied infrastructures through which famine memory was transmitted across generations, articulating moral contradictions between public loyalty to the state and private knowledge of its violence.

The paper traces how critical epistemic and political distance from official Soviet narratives emerged within the third generation in the late Soviet period, when long-silenced family knowledge of the Holodomor became available for reflection.

By examining everyday practices of care around food in relation to regimes of family silence and the structural embeddedness of family members within Soviet institutional and ideological contexts, the paper contributes to anthropological discussions of family secrets and silences as strategies of survival in polarized historical conditions.