11

Starvation: Spring and Summer, 1933

How could we resist when we had no strength to go outside?

Mariia Dziuba, Poltava province, 19331

Not one of them was guilty of anything; but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything.

Ilya Ehrenburg, 1934²

The starvation of a human body, once it begins, always follows the same course. In the first phase, the body consumes its stores of glucose. Feelings of extreme hunger set in, along with constant thoughts of food. In the second phase, which can last for several weeks, the body begins to consume its own fats, and the organism weakens drastically. In the third phase, the body devours its own proteins, cannibalizing tissues and muscles. Eventually, the skin becomes thin, the eyes become distended, the legs and belly swollen as extreme imbalances lead the body to retain water. Small amounts of effort lead to exhaustion. Along the way, different kinds of diseases can hasten death: scurvy, kwashiorkor, marasmus, pneumonia, typhus, diphtheria, and a wide range of infections and skin diseases caused, directly or indirectly, by lack of food.

The rural Ukrainians deprived of food in the autumn and winter of 1932 began to experience all these stages of hunger in the spring of 1933 – if they had not already done so earlier. Years later some of those who survived sought to describe these terrible months, in written accounts and thousands of interviews. For others who managed to live through this period, the experience was so awful that they were later unable to recall anything about it all. One survivor, a child of eleven at the time, could remember things that caused sadness or disappointment before the famine, even trivial things such as a lost earring. But she had no emotional memory of the famine itself, no horror and no sorrow: ‘Probably, my feelings were atrophied by hunger.’ She and others have wondered whether famine wasn’t somehow deadening, an experience that suppressed emotions and even memory later in life. To some it seemed as if the famine had ‘mutilated the immature souls of children’.3

Some searched for metaphors to describe what had happened. Tetiana Pavlychka, who lived in Kyiv province, remembered that her sister Tamara ‘had a large, swollen stomach, and her neck was long and thin like a bird’s neck. People didn’t look like people – they were more like starving ghosts.’⁴ Another survivor remembered that his mother ‘looked like a glass jar, filled with clear spring water. All her body that could be seen … was see-through and filled with water, like a plastic bag.’⁵ A third remembered his brother lying down, ‘alive but completely swollen, his body shining as if it were made of glass’.⁶ We felt ‘giddy’, another recalled: ‘everything was as if in a fog. There was a horrible pain in our legs, as if someone were pulling the tendons out of them.’⁷ Yet another could not rid himself of the memory of a child sitting, rocking its body ‘back and forth, back and forth’, reciting one endless ‘song’ in a half voice: ‘eat, eat, eat’.⁸

An activist from Russia, one of those sent to Ukraine to help execute the confiscation policy, remembered children too:

All alike: their heads like heavy kernels, their necks skinny as a stork’s, every bone movement visible beneath the skin on the arms and legs, the skin itself like yellow gauze stretched over their skeletons. And the faces of those children were old, exhausted, as if they had already lived on the earth for seventy years. And their eyes, Lord!⁹

Some survivors specifically recalled the many diseases of starvation and their different physical side effects. Scurvy caused people to feel pain in their joints, to lose their teeth. It also led to night-blindness: people could not see in the dark, and so feared to leave their homes at night.¹⁰ Dropsy – oedema – caused the legs of victims to swell and made their skin very thin, even transparent. Nadia Malyshko, from a village in Dnipropetrovsk province, remembered that her mother ‘swelled up, became weak and looked old, though she was only 37. Her legs were shining, and the skin had burst.’11 Hlafyra Ivanova from Proskuriv province remembered that people turned yellow and black: ‘the skin of swollen people grew chapped, and liquid oozed out of their wounds’.¹²

People with swollen legs, covered in sores, could not sit: ‘When such a person sat down, the skin broke, liquid began to run down their legs, the smell was awful and they felt unbearable pain.’¹³ Children developed swollen bellies, and heads that seemed too heavy for their necks.¹⁴ One woman remembered a girl who was so emaciated that ‘one could see how her heart was beating beneath the skin’.¹⁵ M. Mishchenko described the final stages: ‘General weakness increases, and the sufferer cannot sit up in bed or move at all. He falls into a drowsy state which may last for a week, until his heart stops beating from exhaustion.’¹⁶

An emaciated person can die very quickly, unexpectedly, and many did. Volodymyr Slipchenko’s sister worked in a school, where she witnessed children dying during lessons – ‘a child is sitting at a school desk, then collapses, falls down’ – or while playing in the grass outside.¹⁷ Many people died while walking, trying to flee. Another survivor remembered that the roads leading to Donbas were lined with corpses: ‘Dead villagers lay on the roads, along the road and paths. There were more bodies than people to move them.’¹⁸

Those deprived of food were also liable to die suddenly in the act of eating, if they managed to get hold of something to eat. In the spring of 1933, Hryhorii Simia remembered that a terrible stench arose from wheatfields close to the road: hungry people had crawled into the grain stalks to cut off ears of wheat, eaten them and then died: their empty stomachs could no longer digest anything.¹⁹ The same thing happened in the bread lines in the cities. ‘There were cases when a person bought bread, ate it and died on the spot, being too exhausted with hunger.’²⁰ One survivor was tormented by the memory of finding some beets, which he brought to his grandmother. She ate two of them raw and cooked the rest. Within hours she was dead, as her body could not cope with digestion.²¹

For those who remained alive, the physical symptoms were often just the beginning. The psychological changes could be equally dramatic. Some spoke later of a ‘psychosis of hunger’, though of course such a thing could not be defined or measured.22 ‘From hunger, people’s psyches were disturbed. Common sense left them, natural instincts faded,’ recalled Petro Boichuk.²³ Pitirim Sorokin, who experienced starvation in the 1921 famine, remembered that after only a week of food deprivation, ‘It was very difficult for me to concentrate for any length of time on anything but food. For short periods, by forcing myself, I was able to chase away the “thoughts of hunger” from my consciousness, but they invariably returned and took possession of it.’ Eventually, ideas about food ‘begin to multiply abundantly in the consciousness, and they acquire a diversity and unprecedented vivacity often reaching the stage of hallucinations’. Other kinds of thoughts ‘fade from the field of consciousness, become very vague and uninteresting’.²⁴

Over and over, survivors have written and spoken about how personalities were altered by hunger, and how normal behaviour ceased. The desire to eat simply overwhelmed everything else – and familial feelings above all. A woman who had always been kind and generous abruptly changed when food began to run short. She sent her own mother out of her house and told her to go and live with another relative: ‘You’ve lived with us for two weeks,’ she told her, ‘live with him and do not be a burden to my children.’²⁵

Another survivor remembered a young boy searching for extra grain in a field. His sister ran to him and told him to go home because their father had died. The boy replied: ‘To hell with him, I want to eat.’²⁶ A woman told a neighbour that her youngest daughter was dying, and so she had not given the little girl any bread. ‘I need to try to support myself, the children will die anyway.’²⁷ A five-year-old boy whose father had died stole into an uncle’s house to find something to eat. Furious, the uncle’s family locked him in a cellar where he died as well.²⁸

Faced with terrible choices, many made decisions of a kind they would not previously have been able to imagine. One woman told her village that while she would always be able to give birth to other children, she had only one husband, and she wanted him to survive. She duly confiscated the bread her children received at a local kindergarten, and all her children died.²⁹ A couple put their children in a deep hole and left them there, in order not to have to watch them die. Neighbours heard the children screaming, and they were rescued and survived.30 Another survivor remembered her mother leaving the house in order not to hear a younger sibling cry.³¹

Uliana Lytvyn, aged eighty at the time she was interviewed, remembered these emotional changes, and especially the disappearance of family feelings – maternal and paternal love – above all else: ‘Believe me, famine makes animals, entirely stupefied, of nice, honest people. Neither intellect nor consideration, neither sorrow nor conscience. This is what can be done to kind and honest peasant farmers. When sometimes I dream of that horror, I still cry through the dream.’³²

Distrust grew too, and indeed had been growing since the beginning of the collectivization and de-kulakization drives a few years earlier. ‘Neighbours had been made to spy on neighbours,’ wrote Miron Dolot: ‘friends had been forced to betray friends; children had been coached to denounce their parents; and even family members avoided meeting each other. The warm traditional hospitality of the villagers had disappeared, to be replaced by mistrust and suspicion. Fear became our constant companion: it was an awesome dread of standing helplessly and hopelessly alone before the monstrous power of the State.’³³

Iaryna Mytsyk remembered that families who had always left their houses open, even during the years of revolution and civil war, now locked their doors: ‘Centuries-old sincerity and generosity did not exist any more. It disappeared with hungry stomachs.’³⁴ Parents warned their children to beware of neighbours whom they had known all their lives: no one knew who might turn out to be a thief, a spy – or a cannibal. No one wanted others to learn how they had survived either. ‘Trust disappeared,’ wrote Mariia Doronenko: ‘Anyone who got hold of food, or who discovered a means of obtaining food, kept the secret to themselves, refusing to tell even the closest family members.’³⁵

Empathy disappeared as well, and not only among the hungriest. The desperation and hysteria of the starving inspired horror and fear, even among those who still had enough to eat. An anonymous letter that eventually found its way into the Vatican archives described the feeling of being around the starving:

In the evening and even in the daytime it is not possible to bring bread home uncovered. The hungry will stop and seize it out of your hands, and often bite your hands or wound them with a knife. I have never seen faces so thin and savage, and bodies so little covered with rags … It is necessary to live here to understand and believe the scope of the disaster. Even today, having been to the market, I saw two men dead of hunger whom soldiers threw on a cart on top of each other. How can we live?36

As during the Holocaust, the witnesses of intense suffering did not always feel – perhaps could not feel – pity. Instead, they turned their anger on the sufferer.³⁷ Propaganda encouraged this feeling: the Communist Party loudly and angrily blamed the Ukrainian peasants for their fate, and so did others too. An inhabitant of Mariupol remembered a particularly ugly scene:

One day, as I waited in a queue in front of the store to buy bread, I saw a farm girl of about 15 years of age, in rags, and with starvation looking out of her eyes. She stretched her hand out to everyone who bought bread, asking for a few crumbs. At last she reached the storekeeper. This man must have been some newly arrived stranger who either could not, or would not, speak Ukrainian. He began to berate her, said she was too lazy to work on the farm, and hit her outstretched hand with the blunt edge of a knife blade. The girl fell down and lost a crumb of bread she was holding in the other hand. Then the storekeeper stepped closer, kicked the girl and roared: ‘Get up! Go home and get to work!’ The girl groaned, stretched out and died. Some in the queue began to weep. The communist storekeeper noticed it and threatened: ‘Some are getting too sentimental here. It is easy to spot enemies of the people.’³⁸

Hunger also heightened suspicion of strangers and outsiders, even children. The residents of cities became particularly hostile towards any peasants who managed to get through police blockades and enter urban areas in order to beg, or indeed any city-dwellers who could not find anything to eat either. Anastasiia Kh., a child in Kharkiv during the famine, was taken by her father several times to stand outside a cafeteria to receive uneaten scraps of food – until a ‘well-dressed man’ eventually screamed at them and told them to go away.39 But she also had the reverse experience. Once, having managed to buy a loaf of bread, she was hurrying home with it. She was stopped by a peasant woman, carrying a baby, who begged her to share it. Thinking of her family, she hurried away: ‘No sooner had I walked away than the unfortunate woman keeled over and died. Fear gripped my heart, for it seemed that her wide open eyes were accusing me of denying her bread. They came and took her baby away, which in death she continued to hold in a tight grip. The vision of this dead woman haunted me for a long time afterwards. I was unable to sleep at night, because I kept seeing her before me.’⁴⁰

In these circumstances the rules of ordinary morality no longer made sense. Theft from neighbours, cousins, the collective farm, workplaces became widespread. Among those who suffered, stealing was widely condoned. Neighbours stole chickens from other neighbours, and then defended themselves however they could.⁴¹ People locked their homes from the outside in the daytime and from the inside at night, one anonymous letter-writer complained to the Dnipropetrovsk province committee: ‘There is no guarantee that someone won’t break in, take your last food and kill you, too. Where to seek help? The militia men are hungry and scared.’⁴²

Anybody who worked in a state institution – a collective farm, a school, an office – also stole whatever he or she could. People put grain in their pockets, shoved grain into their shoes, before walking out of public buildings. Others dug secret holes into wooden work implements and hid grain inside them.⁴³ People stole horses – even from militia headquarters – cows, sheep and pigs, slaughtered them and ate them. In a single district of Dnipropetrovsk province, thirty horses were stolen from collective farms in April and May 1933; in another district thieves stole fifty cows. In some places, peasants were reportedly keeping their cows, if they had them, inside their houses at night.⁴⁴

People also stole seed reserves, which had of course been confiscated from them and were now kept in storage facilities. Often the quantities were small – collective farm workers were regularly caught filling their pockets. But so widespread did this problem become that in March 1933 the Ukrainian authorities issued a special decree instructing the OGPU, militia and activist teams to protect the seeds and punish those caught under the harsh law of 7 August. Special mobile court sessions were set up to hasten prosecution.45

No one felt at all guilty anymore about stealing communal property. Of his thefts during the famine period, one man wrote, ‘At that time we did not think that this was a big sin, nor did we remember that we probably killed someone by depriving them of food.’⁴⁶ Ivan Brynza and his childhood friend, Volodia, stood outside a grain elevator and joined the mad scramble every time some kernels fell to the ground:

The sacks would rip apart, but the keen-eyed NKVD troops would immediately surround the spot and shout: ‘Don’t you dare touch socialist property!’ The spilled grain was put into new sacks, but a dozen or so grains would always be left behind in the dust. Hungry children would throw themselves onto the dust, trying to scrape up as much of it as possible. But in that ‘battle’ those children would be beaten and crushed. Weak from hunger, they never got up from the ground.⁴⁷

Sometimes the theft was on a much larger scale. In January 1933 an inspection of bread factories and bakeries in Ukraine revealed that workers all across the republic were hoarding bread and flour on a massive scale, either for personal use or to sell on the black market. As a result, virtually all of the bread available for sale in the official shops was ‘of bad quality’, containing excessive amounts of air and water, as well as fillers – sawdust, other grains – instead of wheat. In some cases the factories were controlled by ‘criminal organizations’ that bartered the bread in exchange for other kinds of food products. Account books were also massaged on a massive scale to hide these trades.⁴⁸

This transformation of honest people into thieves was only the beginning. As the weeks passed, the famine literally drove people crazy, provoking irrational anger and more extraordinary acts of aggression. ‘The famine was horrible, but that was not the only thing, people became so angry and wild, it was scary to go outside,’ recalled one survivor. A boy at the time, he remembered that a neighbour’s son teased other children with a loaf of bread and jam that his family had procured. The other children began throwing stones at him, eventually beating him to death. Another boy died in the ensuing battle for the loaf of bread.49 Adults were no better equipped to cope with the rage brought on by hunger: one survivor remembered that a neighbour became so angered by the sounds of his own children crying for food that he smothered his baby in its cradle, and killed two of his other children by slamming their heads against a wall. Only one of his sons managed to escape.⁵⁰

A similar story was recorded by the secret police in Vinnytsia province, where one farmer, unable to bear the thought of his children starving to death, ‘lit a fire in the stove and closed the chimney’ in order to kill them: ‘The children began to suffocate and cry for help because of the fumes, then he strangled them with his own hands, after which he went to the village council and confessed …’ The farmer said he had committed the murders because ‘there was nothing to eat’. During a subsequent search of his home, no food was found at all.⁵¹

Vigilantism became widespread. Armed guards would shoot gleaners on sight, and anyone who tried to steal from a warehouse met with the same fate. As the famine worsened, ordinary people also took vengeance on those who stole. Oleksii Lytvynskyi remembered seeing a collective farm boss pick up a boy who had stolen bread and slam his head against a tree – a murder for which he was never held responsible.⁵² Hanna Tsivka knew of a woman who killed her niece for stealing a loaf of bread.⁵³ Mykola Basha’s older brother was caught looking for spoiled potatoes in the kitchen garden of a neighbour, who then grabbed him and put him in a cellar filled with waist-high water.⁵⁴ Another survivor’s aunt was stabbed to death with a pitchfork for stealing scallions from a neighbour’s yard.⁵⁵

Sometimes the vigilantism took hold of a whole group. At the ‘New Union’ collective farm in Dnipropetrovsk province a mob – including the farm chairman, the local veterinarian and the accountant – beat a collective farmer to death for stealing a jug of milk and a few biscuits.⁵⁶ When peasants from a nearby village stole a sheep from the collective farm in Rashkova Sloboda, Chernihiv province, a hunt was organized. The farmers from Rashkova Sloboda found the four culprits, surrounded them – and shot them on the spot. Mykola Opanasenko was a witness to this attack as a child. Later, he had another reflection: ‘A bitter question arises: who imbued the peasants’ soul with so much animal ferocity that they dealt so mercilessly with people?’57

Sometimes the lynch mobs tortured their victims. In Vinnytsia province a mob kept a woman suspected of theft without food and water in a barn for two days before burying her alive. In another Vinnytsia district a twelve-year-old girl, Mariia Sokyrko, was murdered for stealing onions. In Kyiv province the head of a village council ‘arrested’ two teenage girls accused of theft and burned their arms with matches, stabbed them with needles, and beat them so badly that one died and the other was hospitalized.⁵⁸ So common was this kind of behaviour that in June 1933 the Ukrainian government ordered prosecutors to prevent ‘mob law’ by putting the perpetrators on public trial. Dozens of small-scale ‘show trials’ took place across Ukraine in June and July, but lynch mobs nevertheless continued to be reported across Ukraine in 1934 and even 1935.⁵⁹

‘Animal ferocity’ could evolve further. Real insanity of various kinds – hallucinations, psychosis, depression – soon resulted from hunger. A woman whose six children died over three days in May 1933 lost her mind, stopped wearing clothes, unbraided her hair, and told everyone that the ‘red broom’ had taken her family away.⁶⁰ One survivor recalled the horrific story of Varvara, a neighbour who was left alone with two children. At the beginning of 1933, Varvara took her remaining clothes and travelled to a nearby city in the hope of exchanging them for bread. She succeeded, and returned home with a whole loaf. But when she cut the bread, she began to scream: the bread was not a whole loaf, it was stuffed with a paper sack – which meant that once again there was nothing to eat. She took the knife, turned around, stuck it into her son’s back and began laughing hysterically; her daughter saw what was happening, and ran for her life.⁶¹

In time, all of these emotions subsided – to be replaced by complete indifference. Sooner or later, hunger made everyone listless, unable to move or think. People sat on benches in their farmyards, beside the roadside, in their houses – and didn’t move. Bustling villages grew quiet, recalled Mykola Proskovchenko, who survived the famine in Odessa province. ‘It was a strange silence everywhere. Nobody cried, moaned, complained … Indifference was everywhere: people were either swollen or completely exhausted … Even a kind of envy was felt toward the dead.’62 In the spring of 1933, Oleksandra Radchenko wrote in her diary in the middle of the night: ‘It is already three o’clock in the morning, meaning that today is 27 April. I am not sleeping. The last days have been filled with a terrible apathy …’⁶³

‘No one feels sorry for anyone,’ wrote another survivor, Halyna Budantseva: ‘nothing is wished, no one even wants to eat. You wander with no goal in the yard, on the street. After a while, you don’t want to walk, there is no strength for that. You lie and wait for death.’ She recovered because an uncle came to rescue her. But her sister Tania died on the way to the uncle’s village.⁶⁴

Petro Hryhorenko, at that time a student at a military academy, witnessed this indifference when in December 1931 he received an odd letter from his stepmother, alluding to his father’s ill health. Alarmed, Petro returned to his village. There he discovered that his father, an enthusiastic proponent of collectivization, was now starving. Petro walked into the office of the local collective farm to inform the officials that he would take his parents away:

The accountant was a friend of mine from our Komsomol days. He was sitting there alone. ‘Good day, Kolia!’ I said in greeting. He just sat there, staring at the table. Without even raising his head he said, as if we’d parted five minutes earlier, ‘Ah, Petro.’ He was completely apathetic. ‘So you’ve come for your father? Now, take him away. Maybe he’ll survive. We won’t.’⁶⁵

Vasily Grossman described this stage of hunger in Forever Flowing:

In the beginning, starvation drives a person out of the house. In its first stage, he is tormented and driven as though by fire and torn both in the guts and in the soul. And so he tries to escape from this home. People dig up worms, collect grass, and even make the effort to break through and get to the city. Away from home, away from home! And then a day comes when the starving person crawls back into his house. And the meaning of this is that famine, starvation, has won. The human being cannot be saved. He lies down on his bed and stays there. Not just because he has no strength, but because he has no interest in life and no longer cares about living. He lies there quietly and does not want to be touched. And he does not even want to eat … all he wants is to be left alone and for things to be quiet …66

Public officials were also shocked by the general indifference. As early as August 1932 a police informer told his contacts that a colleague, a bank employee, had confided in him his ‘complete collapse of faith in a better future’. He explained: ‘Deep hopelessness can be felt by all urban and rural dwellers, both old and young, party members and non-members of the party. Both intellectuals and the representatives of physical work lose muscle strength and intellectual energy because they think only about how to stop the feeling of hunger in themselves and their children.’⁶⁷

In an extensive report sent to Kaganovich and Kosior in June 1933, a party official working at a machine tractor station in Kamianskyi district reported that in his area people were dying of hunger in the thousands. He listed example after example of people dying in the fields during work, people dying on the way home, people unable even to leave their homes at all. But he too observed the growing indifference. ‘People have grown dull, they absolutely do not react,’ he wrote. ‘Not to mortality, not to cannibalism, not to anything.’⁶⁸

Indifference soon spread to death itself. Traditional Ukrainian funerals had combined church and folk traditions, and included a choir, a meal, the singing of psalms, readings from the Bible, sometimes professional mourners. Now all such rites were banned.⁶⁹ Nobody had the strength anymore to dig a grave, hold a ceremony, or play music. Religious practices disappeared along with churches and priests. For a culture that had valued its rituals highly, the impossibility of saying a proper farewell to the dead became another source of trauma: ‘There were no funerals,’ recalled Kateryna Marchenko. ‘There were no priests, requiems, tears. There was no strength to cry.’⁷⁰

One woman remembered her grandfather being buried without a coffin. He was placed in a hole in the ground together with a neighbour and her two sons: ‘His children did not cry over him and did not sing, according to a Christian tradition, “Eternal remembrance”.’⁷¹ Another man recalled how his friends treated their dying father: ‘We children went to the fields in 1933 and looked for frozen potatoes. Those frozen potatoes we brought home and made ‘cookies’ from them … Once I called on my friends who were just waiting for their ‘cookies’ [to be ready]. Their father was lying on a bench swollen and unable to get up. He asked his children to give him only one piece and they refused. “Go and find potatoes for yourself,” they answered.’ The man died that evening.72

Another boy was simply rendered helpless:

Mother had gone away, I was sleeping atop of our stove, and woke before sunrise. ‘Dad, I want to eat, Dad!’ The house was cold. Dad was not answering. I started to shout. Dawn broke; my father had some foam under his nose. I touched his head – cold. Then a cart arrived, there were corpses in it, lying like sheaves. Two men entered the house, put father on a burlap sack, threw his body on a cart with a swing … After that I could not sleep in the house, I slept in stables and haystacks, I was swollen and ragged.⁷³

In many cases there were no family members either to care for the dying or to bury the dead at all. Public buildings were quickly turned into primitive mortuaries. In March 1933, Anna S. learned that her school was to be closed due to an ‘epidemic of dysentery and typhoid fever’. Desks were removed from the classrooms, hay was strewn on the floor, and the starving were brought in to die, parents and children lying alongside one another.⁷⁴ Individual homes sometimes served the same purpose. In Zhytomyr province local authorities broke into two houses when neighbours reported that there had been no smoke from the chimneys for several days. Inside they found the elderly, the adults, the children: ‘Dead bodies laid on a stove, on the bench beside, on the bed.’ All the corpses were thrown into a well, and dirt was poured in on top of them.⁷⁵ Bodies were sometimes not discovered right away. The winter of 1933 was bitter cold, and in many places it was only possible to bury the dead after the ground began to thaw. Dogs and wolves attacked the bodies.⁷⁶ That spring, ‘the air was filled with the ubiquitous odour of decomposing bodies. The wind carried this odour far and wide, all across Ukraine.’⁷⁷

Train stations, railway tracks and roads also began to accumulate corpses. Peasants who had attempted to escape died where they sat or stood, and were then ‘collected as firewood and carried away’.78 One eyewitness travelled through a region laid waste by famine with her mother in March 1933 and remembered seeing corpses lying or sometimes sitting along the route. ‘The coachman tore a piece of burlap he had with him and covered the faces of these dead people.’⁷⁹

Others did not even bother with that. One railway employee, Oleksandr Honcharenko, remembered ‘walking along the railroad tracks every morning on the way to work, I would come upon two or three corpses daily, but I would step over them and continue walking. The famine had robbed me of my conscience, human soul and feelings. Stepping over corpses I felt absolutely nothing, as if I were stepping over logs.’⁸⁰ Petro Mostovyi remembered the beggars who came to his village seemed ‘like ghosts’, sat down beside roads or under fences – and died. ‘Nobody buried them, our own grief was enough.’ To add to the horror, wild cats and dogs gnawed their bodies. A child at the time, Mostovyi was afraid to go to a hamlet near his village because all of its inhabitants had died, and no one was left to bury them. They were left as they were, inside their houses and barns, for many weeks.⁸¹ The result was epidemics of typhus and other diseases.⁸²

In the cities, where the authorities still wanted to conceal the horror occurring in the countryside, the men of the OGPU often collected bodies at night and buried them in secret. Between February and June 1933, for example, the OGPU in Kharkiv recorded that it had surreptitiously buried 2,785 corpses.⁸³ A few years later, during the Great Terror of 1937–8, this secrecy was enforced even further. Mass graves of famine victims were covered up and hidden, and it became dangerous even to know where they were located. In 1938 all the staff of the Lukianivske cemetery in Kyiv were arrested, tried and shot as counter-revolutionary insurgents, probably to prevent them from revealing what they knew.⁸⁴

In larger towns and villages local officials organized teams to collect corpses. Sometimes these teams consisted of Komsomol members.⁸⁵ In the late spring of 1933 some were soldiers, sent from outside, who ordered local people to cooperate and keep silent about it.⁸⁶ Others were simply able-bodied enough to dig mass graves, and willing to work in exchange for food. One survivor reckoned that she lived through the famine because she had been appointed as a gravedigger and thus received half a loaf of bread and one herring every day.87 Another recalled that these brigades received bread in exchange for corpses. ‘When 40 people died during the day, they received a good fee.’⁸⁸ Often, especially in cities such as Kyiv and Kharkiv, the corpse collection teams worked at night, the better to conceal the scale of their task.⁸⁹

Group burials, hastily arranged, occurred without any ceremony at all. ‘People were buried without coffins, were simply thrown into the pits and pelted with earth,’ recalled one witness.⁹⁰ Alternatively, the local burial team dug a grave on the spot where a corpse was lying without trying to identify the person or mark the spot. ‘The small hill quickly disappeared after a few heavy rains, overgrew with grass, and no traces were left.’⁹¹ One survivor’s grandmother drove a cattle cart from house to house. If she saw ravens, ‘that meant there were dead bodies’. When she found individuals not quite dead, she pulled them closer to the door ‘so that it would be easier to carry them out’ later on.⁹² The mass grave sites were often not marked. In some places younger generations, a few years later, could no longer locate them.⁹³

Some burial teams may have stretched indifference to the point of cruelty. Many survivors, from various parts of Ukraine, repeat stories of very ill people being buried alive. ‘There were cases when they buried half-living people: “Good people, leave me alone. I am not dead,” the “corpses” used to cry. “Go to hell! You want us to come tomorrow again?” was the reply.’⁹⁴ Another team also took away still-living people, arguing that the next day they would be on another street, so they might as well take their body now, get the ‘payment’ for each ‘corpse’ and eat more themselves.⁹⁵ Many felt that, once they had dug the mass graves, it didn’t matter how they were filled. ‘They didn’t even shoot, they economized on bullets and pulled living people into the hole.’⁹⁶ Even families treated their dying members the same. One grandmother fell ill and lost consciousness. ‘When she fell into a sleep-like state, everyone at home thought she was dead. When they came to bury her, however, they noticed that she was still breathing, but they buried her anyway because they said she was going to die anyway. No one was sorry.’⁹⁷

Some, however, managed to escape. One man, Denys Lebid, has described being thrown into a mass grave himself. He tried to get out, but discovered he was too weak. He sat there and waited for death, or for another corpse to fall on top of him. He was eventually rescued by a tractor driver who had come to bulldoze earth over the pit.98 His story was echoed by that of a woman who was rescued from a mass grave by another woman passing by who heard her screams.⁹⁹ Similar stories originate from Cherkasy, Kyiv, Zhytomyr and Vinnytsia provinces, among others.¹⁰⁰

Anyone who had ever witnessed such a thing – or, worse, experienced it – never forgot. ‘I was so frightened by what had happened that I could not talk for several days. I saw dead bodies in my dreams. And I screamed a lot …’¹⁰¹

The horror, the exhaustion, the inhuman indifference to life and constant exposure to the language of hatred left their mark. Combined with the complete absence of food they also produced, in the Ukrainian countryside, a very rare form of madness: by the late spring and summer, cannibalism was widespread. Even more extraordinarily, its existence was no secret, not in Kharkiv, Kyiv, or Moscow.¹⁰²

Many survivors witnessed either cannibalism or, far more often, necrophagy, the consumption of corpses of people who had died of starvation. But although the phenomenon was widespread, it never became ‘normal’, and – despite the assertion by the machine tractor station official that people were unaffected by cannibalism – it was rarely treated with indifference. Memories of cannibalism often divide between those who heard stories of it having taking place in other distant villages and those who recall actual incidents. The former, distant in either time or space, do sometimes describe cannibalism as having become ‘ordinary’. Ten years after the famine, a traveller in Nazi-occupied Ukraine claimed to have met ‘men and women who were openly said to have eaten people … the population considers such cases the result of extreme need, without condemning them’.¹⁰³ A report from the head of the OGPU in Kyiv province to his superiors in the Ukrainian OGPU also mentions cannibalism becoming a ‘habit’. In some villages, ‘the view that it is possible to consume human meat grows stronger every day. This opinion spreads especially among hungry and swollen children.’¹⁰⁴

But those who did actually witness an incident of cannibalism almost always remembered it much differently. Both memoir and documents from the time confirm that cannibalism caused shock and horror, and sometimes led to the intervention of the police or village council.

Larysa Venzhyk, from Kyiv province, remembered that at first there were just rumours, stories ‘that children disappear somewhere, that degenerate parents eat their children. It turned out not to be rumours but horrible truth.’ On her street two girls, the daughters of neighbours, disappeared. Their brother Misha, aged six, ran away from home. He roamed the village, begging and stealing. When asked why he had left home he said he was afraid: ‘Father will cut me up.’ The police searched the house, found the evidence, and arrested the parents. As for their remaining son, ‘Misha was left to his fate.’105

Police also arrested a man in Mariia Davydenko’s village in Sumy province. After his wife died, he had gone mad from hunger and eaten first his daughter and then his son. A neighbour noticed that the father was less swollen from hunger than others, and asked him why. ‘I have eaten my children,’ he replied, ‘and if you talk too much, I will eat you.’ Backing away, shouting that he was a monster, the neighbour went to the police, who arrested and sentenced the father.¹⁰⁶

In Vinnytsia province survivors also recalled the fate of Iaryna, who had butchered her own child. She told the story herself: ‘Something happened to me. I put the child in a small basin, and he asked: “What are you going to do, Mummy?” I replied: “Nothing, nothing.” ’ But a neighbour who was standing guard over his potatoes outside her window somehow saw what was happening and reported her to the village council. She served a three-year sentence but eventually returned home. Eventually she remarried – but when she told her husband what she had done during the famine, he turned against her.¹⁰⁷ Even many years later, the stigma remained.

Mykola Moskalenko also remembered the horror his own family felt when learning that the children of a neighbour had disappeared. He told his mother about it, and she told the local authorities. Together, a group of villagers gathered around the neighbour’s farm: ‘We entered her house and asked her where her children were. She said that they died and she had buried them in the field. We went to the field but found nothing. They started a search of her home: the children had been cut up … they asked why she had done this, and she answered that her children would not survive anyway, but this way she would.’ She was taken away, presumably sentenced.108

Stories such as that one spread rapidly and enhanced the atmosphere of threat. Even in the cities, people repeated stories of children being hunted down as food. Sergio Gradenigo, the Italian consul, reported that in Kharkiv parents all brought their children personally to school, and accompanied them at all times, out of fear that starving people were hunting them: ‘Children of party leaders and OGPU are especially targeted because they have better clothes than other children. Trade of human meat becomes more active.’¹⁰⁹

Ukrainian authorities knew about many of the incidents: police reports contained great detail. But Balytsky made special efforts to prevent the stories from spreading. Ukraine’s secret police boss warned his subordinates against putting too much information about the famine into writing: ‘provide information on the food problems solely to the First Secretaries of the Party Provincial Committees and only orally … This is to ensure that written notes on the subject do not circulate among the officials where they might cause rumours …’¹¹⁰

Nevertheless, the secret police, the ordinary criminal police and other local officials did keep records. One police report from Kyiv province in April 1933 began with ‘We have an extraordinary case of cannibalism in the Petrovskyi district’:

A kulak woman, aged fifty, from the Zelenky, Bohuslavskyi district, hiding in Kuban since 1932, returned to her home town with her (adult) daughter. Along the road from Horodyshchenska station to Korsun, she lured a passing twelve-year-old boy and slit his throat. The organs and other parts of the body she placed in a bag. In the village of Horodyshche, citizen Sherstiuk, an inhabitant of that place, allowed the woman to spend the night. In a dishonest manner, she pretended that the organs came from a calf, and gave it to the old man to boil and to roast the heart. It was used to feed his whole family, and he ate it too. In the night, intending to use some of the meat which was in the bag, the old man discovered the chopped-up parts of the boy’s body. The criminals have been arrested.¹¹¹

Alongside the moral horror, many of the reports also reflect police concern that the stories could spread and have a political impact. In Dnipropetrovsk province the OGPU reported the story of a collective farm member, Ivan Dudnyk, who killed his son with an axe. ‘The family is big, it is difficult to stay alive, so I murdered him,’ the killer declared. But the police report noted, with approval, that the collective farm members met and adopted a group decision to hold a public trial and ‘give Dudnyk capital punishment’.112 It also noted, with satisfaction, that the villagers had decided to double down on their sowing campaign and increase their output in light of the incident.

Similarly, when a fourteen-year-old boy who murdered his sister for food in the village of Novooleksandrivka, in southeast Ukraine, the OGPU reported with satisfaction that the incident had sparked no ‘unhealthy chatter’. All the neighbours believed the boy to be mentally ill, and only feared that he would be returned to the village.¹¹³ In Dnipropetrovsk province a woman who murdered her daughter for food was, the OGPU noted, the wife of a man who had been arrested for refusing to give up his grain. Given that the woman showed signs of being a ‘social danger’, the police recommended execution.¹¹⁴

The real cause of this ‘mental illness’, or these sudden attacks of ‘socially dangerous’ emotions, was perfectly obvious to the police as well: people were starving. In Penkivka, the Vinnytsia OGPU reported, a collective farmer had killed two of his daughters and used their flesh for food: ‘K. blamed the murder of his children on a long period of starvation. No foodstuffs were found during the search.’ In the village of Dubyny another farmer killed both of his daughters too, and ‘blamed the famine for committing the murders’. There were, the policemen stated, ‘other analogous incidents’.¹¹⁵

Throughout the spring of 1933 the numbers of such cases grew. In Kharkiv province the OGPU reported multiple incidents where parents had eaten the flesh of children who had died from starvation, as well as cases where ‘starving family members had killed weaker ones, usually children, and used their flesh as food’. Nine such cases were reported in March, fifty-eight in April, 132 in May and 221 in June.¹¹⁶ In Donetsk province multiple incidents were also observed, again starting in March. ‘Iryna Khrypunova strangled her nine-year-old granddaughter and cooked her internal organs. Anton Khrypunov removed his dead eight-year-old sister’s internal organs and ate them.’ That report concluded almost politely: ‘By bringing this to your attention I request you provide appropriate instructions.’117

In March the OGPU in Kyiv province were receiving ten or more reports of cannibalism every day.¹¹⁸ In that month their counterparts in Vinnytsia province reported six incidents in the previous month of ‘cannibalism caused by famine, in which parents killed their children and used their flesh for food’. But these may have been serious underestimates. In one report the OGPU boss of Kyiv province wrote that there were sixty-nine cases of cannibalism between 9 January and 12 March. However, ‘these numbers are, obviously, not exact, because in reality there are many more such incidents’.¹¹⁹

Certainly, the authorities treated this as a crime, sometimes giving cannibals ‘enemy’ labels as well. Hanna Bilorus was convicted both of cannibalism and of spreading Polish propaganda, for example; she died in prison in 1933.¹²⁰ Secret police files contain multiple records of cannibals who were subsequently imprisoned, executed, or lynched. One very unusual Gulag memoirist has even described an encounter in 1935 with cannibals at the Solovetsky Island prison camp, in the White Sea. Olga Mane was a young Polish woman, arrested crossing the border into the Soviet Union in 1935 (she wanted to study medicine in Moscow) and sentenced for spying. After some time in the camp, she was sent to Muksalma, one of the islands in the Solovetsky archipelago. She resisted, because she had heard there were ‘Ukrainian cannibals’, some three hundred of them, on the island. But when she finally met them, she felt differently:

Shock and horror of the cannibals quickly passed; it was enough to see these unhappy, barefoot, half-naked Ukrainians. They were kept in old monastery buildings: many of them had stomachs swollen from hunger, and most of them were mentally ill. I took care of them, listened to their reminiscences and confidences. They described how their children died of hunger, and how they themselves, very close to starvation, cooked the corpses of their own children and ate them. This happened when they were in a state of shock caused by hunger. Later, when they came to understand what had happened, they lost their minds.

I felt sympathy for them, I tried to be kind, I found warm words for them when they were overcome by attacks of remorse. This helped for some time. They calmed down, started to cry and I cried along with them …121

Stories of cannibalism were known to the Ukrainian leadership, and to the Moscow leadership too. Kaganovich was, as noted, certainly informed; a Ukrainian Central Committee working group responsible for the spring sowing campaign in 1933 reported back to the party that their work was especially difficult in regions with ‘cannibalism’ and ‘homeless children’.¹²² The OGPU continued to report cases of cannibalism well into 1934.¹²³

But if either Kharkiv or Moscow ever provided instructions on how to deal with cannibalism, or ever reflected more deeply on its causes, they haven’t yet been uncovered. There is no evidence that any action was taken at all. The reports were made, the officials received them, and then they were filed away and forgotten.