The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks by Igort

Although Russian influence kept the Holodomor from being labeled a genocide by the UN, evidence of mass graves and cannibalism tell a very different story. The first section recounts detailed eyewitness accounts of the Holodomor, a Stalin-sanctioned artificial famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s. Although the layouts and citations are occasionally muddled, this does not diminish the stark horrors depicted. Ĭelebrated Italian comic artist Igort (5 Is the Perfect Number) has produced an impressive work of investigative journalism spanning nearly a century of brutality in the former Soviet Union, little of it known in the West.With elegant brush strokes and a stark color palette, Igort has transcribed the words and emotions of his subjects, revealing their intelligence, humanity, and honesty-and exposing the secret world of the former USSR. Told through interviews with the people who lived through it, Igort paints a harrowing picture of hunger and cruelty under Soviet rule. Little known outside of the Ukraine, the Holodomor was a government-sanctioned famine, a peacetime atrocity during Stalin’s rule that killed anywhere from 1.8 to twelve million ethnic Ukrainians. In The Ukrainian Notebooks, Igort reaches further back in history and illustrates the events of the 1932 Holodomor. Igort follows in her tracks, detailing Anna’s assassination and the stories of abuse, murder, abduction, and torture that Russia was so desperate to censor. For her work, she was detained, poisoned, and ultimately murdered. Anna spoke out frequently against the Second Chechen War, criticizing Vladimir Putin.

In The Russian Notebooks, Igort investigates the murder of award-winning journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkoyskaya. Now he brings those stories to new life with in-depth reporting and deep compassion.

Written and illustrated by an award-winning artist and translated into English for the first time, Igort’s The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks is a collection of two harrowing works of graphic nonfiction about life under Russian foreign rule.Īfter spending two years in Ukraine and Russia, collecting the stories of the survivors and witnesses to Soviet rule, masterful Italian graphic novelist Igort was compelled to illuminate two shadowy moments in recent history: the Ukraine famine and the assassination of a Russian journalist.

The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks by Igort