While being allowed to move around relatively unhindered, Abbe managed to secretly photograph many forbidden topics, such as food queues, the looting of churches, and even the funeral of Stalin’s second wife, who committed suicide.

During his seven-month stay, he first encountered the horrors of the Holodomor when he arrived at a railway station in Kharkiv in the summer of 1932 and was shocked to see the place inundated with hungry people who had fled the countryside in search of work and food. “And this was the Ukraine,” he later wrote of the experience. “The most fertile territory in the entire vast Soviet Union!”

Abbe ended up being arrested shortly afterward for photographing these starving peasants by the railroad tracks. It was not the first or last time he got into trouble with the local authorities, who took a dim view of his journalistic interest in sensitive topics.

The photographer’s ability to move among ordinary Soviet people while socializing easily with the communist elite meant he was also well-placed to record the stark contrasts that existed in what was being sold to the world as a progressive, classless society.

By day, in desolate mining towns, he would encounter throngs of hungry peasants looking for food who “preferred death to working on collective farms under the leadership of the Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Parties.”

By night he often dined lavishly at official functions where “it was impossible to sit down to a meal without facing a table groaning with caviar, roast turkey, chicken, cold fish of every description, pastries, even the rarest of all luxuries: tenderloin steak.”

Eventually, Abbe’s incessant interest in delicate subjects exhausted the Soviets’ patience, and he was ordered to pack his bags and leave after being caught taking unauthorized photos one time too many.

He managed to smuggle his forbidden pictures out of the country, however, by hiding the negatives in his youngest son’s pants.

These photographs later offered people a glimpse of what was really happening in the Soviet Union when Abbe published them in a book titled I Photograph Russia in 1934.

Despite the shocking nature of some of these images, however, they were only brief snapshots of events that did not convey the sheer scale of the tragedy. Abbe himself admitted that he never got the chance to photograph other dreadful sights, such as the mass deportations of peasants to labor camps or the dead bodies he encountered on city streets.

Whiting Williams (1878–1975)

As a journalist and labor relations specialist, it was perhaps inevitable that Whiting Williams’ work would take him to the Soviet Union.

After making a name for himself by pretending to be an ordinary worker and reporting undercover from mines and steel mills in the United States, it wasn’t long before he also traveled to the Donbas in Soviet Ukraine to observe labor conditions there at the start of the U.S.S.R’s first Five-Year Plan in 1928.

Although he was depressed by the bleak lives many Soviet workers were living, his disillusionment turned to outright horror in 1933 when he returned out of curiosity to find out how those he had met five years previously were faring.

“Everywhere, men and women were thinking of one thing, and that thing was bread,” he wrote of the starving people he encountered on the streets of cities or saw lying in ditches.

Despite the attentions of an officious chaperone, who he said “drives me crazy,” Whiting managed to covertly take snapshots of these distressing sights.

He was particularly struck by the hordes of homeless and hungry children he saw everywhere in Ukrainian cities, who he said, “live and die like wild animals.”

Thousands of these children were regularly rounded up by authorities, and Whiting managed to capture visual evidence of one of these raids in Kharkiv.

Writing in his diary later, he recalled how locals told him that they were sometimes not even taken to overcrowded, disease-ridden orphanages, but simply removed from the city and released back into the fields.

“And once, at least,” he wrote, “three wagons filled with youngsters were shunted into a siding and forgotten for three days. When, at the end of that time, someone found them, not one of the children remained alive.”

When he completed his two-week trip to Ukraine, Whiting was haunted by what he saw and felt it was essential to report on what was happening there.

After writing an article with photos intended for publication, he was stunned to find it was rejected by American magazines that had been happy to run his previous stories. At a time when Washington was considering establishing diplomatic relations with Moscow, one editor told him they didn’t want “overdo it” on “unfavorable” stories about the Soviet Union.

Thanks to help from his acquaintance James Abbe, who also encountered stiff resistance trying to get his photos published, Whiting eventually persuaded a British weekly to run his story. This article is now considered by researchers to have been the first photographic evidence of the Ukrainian famine to have been published in the international press.

It didn’t get the response he expected.

According to Babij, Whiting’s explosive report on conditions in Ukraine was “dismissed as sensationalist because so few corroborating accounts had made it into public circulation in the U.S.” At that time, she says, Walter Duranty, The New York Times’ influential correspondent in Moscow, was “echoing” Soviet propaganda — reporting on “the best crop in 50 years!” — while people lay dying on the streets.

Whiting’s contribution to shedding light on what happened in Ukraine has often been overlooked in subsequent decades, and the project researchers hope to rectify this with a detailed collection of his photographs and writings on his life and work.

Mykola Bokan (1881–1942)

While Wienerberger, Abbe, and Whiting are described by Daria Glazkova as “‘outsiders” in that they were “foreigners who observed [the] Holodomor without going through the hardships that the local population experienced,” Mykola Bokan was someone whose own family was severely affected by the famine.

Like many Ukrainians, Bokan and his seven children began going hungry when the situation became especially fraught in 1932.

With nobody able to pay him as a professional photographer, he had nothing to live on.

But he put the tools of his trade to good use by documenting things his family experienced.

One of his most poignant photographs shows them sitting down for a meager meal with the caption “300 days (three hundred!) Without a piece of bread until a miserable dinner.”