12

Survival: Spring and Summer, 1933

I would go to the church up the hill and tear the bark off the linden tree. At home we had buckwheat husks. Mother would sift them, add ground-up linden leaves and bark, and bake biscuits. That’s how we ate.

Hryhorii Mazurenko, Kyiv province, 19331

As the gooseberries got bigger, we picked them, even though they weren’t ripe. We ate wild geraniums. The acacia tree bloomed. We shook the blossoms off and ate them.

Vira Tyshchenko, Kyiv province, 1933²

We grazed on grass and pigweed, like cattle.

Todos Hodun, Cherkasy province, 1933³

Even in the face of these physical and psychological changes, even despite hunger, thirst, exhaustion and emaciation, people did their utmost to survive. To do so sometimes required an enormous capacity for evil – many survived in the activist brigades – or an ability to break some of the most fundamental human taboos. But others discovered huge reserves of talent and willpower – or else had the astonishing good luck to be saved by someone who possessed those qualities.

A ten-year-old girl from the Poltava region, observing the disintegration of the adults around her, had the extraordinary idea of abandoning her family. She wrote to her uncle in Kharkiv province:

Dear Uncle! We do not have bread and anything to eat. My parents are exhausted by hunger, they have lain down and do not get up. My mother is blind from hunger and cannot see, I have carried her outside. I want bread very much. Take me, uncle, to Kharkiv to you, because I will die of hunger. Take me, I am small and want to live, and here I will die, because everybody dies …4

She did not survive. But the same will to live saved others.

To survive, people ate anything. They ate whatever rotten food or scraps that the brigades had overlooked. They ate horses, dogs, cats, rats, ants, turtles. They boiled frogs and toads. They ate squirrels. They cooked hedgehogs over fires, and fried birds’ eggs.⁵ They ate the bark of oak trees. They ate moss and acorns.⁶ They ate leaves and dandelions, as well as marigolds and orach, a kind of wild spinach. They killed crows, pigeons and sparrows.⁷ Nadiia Lutsyshyna remembered that ‘frogs didn’t last long. People caught them all. All the cats were eaten, the pigeons, the frogs; people ate everything. I imagined the scent of delicious food as we ate weeds and beets.’⁸

Women made soup from nettles, and baked pigweed into bread. They pounded acorns, made ersatz flour, and then used the flour to make pancakes.⁹ They cooked the buds from linden trees: ‘They were good, soft, not bitter,’ recalled one survivor.¹⁰ They ate snowdrops, a weed whose roots took the form of an onion and ‘seemed sweeter than sugar’.¹¹ People also made pancakes from leaves and grass.¹² Others mixed acacia leaves and rotten potatoes – often overlooked by the collection brigades – and baked them together to make ersatz perepichky, a traditional form of sausage wrapped in bread.¹³ The starch inside rotten potatoes could also be scooped out and fried.¹⁴ Nadiia Ovcharuk’s aunt made biscuits out of the leaves of linden trees: ‘she dried the leaves in the oven, pulled out the veins, and baked biscuits’.¹⁵

Children ate hemp seeds.¹⁶ People ate the bottom part of river reeds, ‘which when young, and close to the root, was sweet like cucumber’, though they were denied even those when the authorities trampled and burned the reeds down.¹⁷ In one village people ate the waste products from a slaughterhouse, until those running it poured carbolic acid over the bones and skin. Oksana Zhyhadno and her mother both ate some of the offal anyway, and became ill. Although her mother died, Oksana survived.18 Many peasants remembered pouring water into the burrows made by field mice in order to wash out the grain stored by the rodents. Others boiled belts and shoes so as to eat the leather.

Just as they knew about the cases of cannibalism, the authorities were also well aware of the extraordinary things that people were trying to eat. A secret police report from March 1933 declared, in a matter-of-fact way, that starving families were eating ‘corn cobs and stalks, millet pods, dried straw, herbs, rotten watermelons and beetroots, potato peelings and acacia pods’, as well as cats, dogs and horses.¹⁹ Much of this food made sick people even sicker.

Some survived with less extraordinary types of food consumption, especially if they happened to reside near lakes or rivers. Kateryna Butko, who lived in a village near a river, reckoned that ‘without fish, nobody would have survived’.²⁰ Those who could also used nets to find periwinkles. They boiled them and took the tiny bits of meat out of their shells.²¹ Peasants who lived near forests could forage for mushrooms and berries, or trap birds and small animals.

Uncounted numbers of people were saved due to a far more pedestrian reason: they managed to hold on to the family cow. Even in good times cows were important for peasant families, which often had four or more children. But during the famine, possession of a cow, either by individual farmers who had avoided collectivization and confiscation, or by collective farmers who were allowed, as some were, to keep one for private use, was literally a matter of life or death. In hundreds of oral testimonies peasants explain their survival with a single sentence: ‘We were saved by our cow.’ Most lived off the milk; many, like one family in Kyiv province, used their cow’s milk as a form of barter, exchanging it for grain or bread.²²

Emotions about the cow ran high. Petro Mostovyi in Poltava province remembered that the family cow was so precious that his father and older brother guarded it with a gun and pitchforks.²³ After a thief stole a cow from another peasant in Cherkasy province, the owner learned that it had been slaughtered and that the meat had been stored by one of her neighbours. She marched over to the storehouse and ‘put out the eyes of her exhausted enemy with a rake’.²⁴ To feed their cow, Mariia Pata’s family had to take the roof thatch off their house, rip it into small pieces, and soften it with boiling water so that the animal could eat.25

Those who did not have a cow often had to rely on others. Random acts of kindness saved some people, as did ties of love and kinship that persisted despite the hunger. In Poltava province Sofiia Zalyvcha and two of her siblings hired themselves out to a collective farm as day labourers. As payment, they received thin soup and 200 grams of bread per day. They ate the soup and saved the bread. Every weekend one of them went home to the family – they had seven additional siblings – and shared the stale bread with their brothers and sisters. Three of the ten children died during the famine, but thanks to the bread or soup the rest survived.²⁶

Other children lived because they were adopted by neighbours or relatives. ‘My parents’ cousin and her husband were leaving for Kharkiv, and they took me and my little sister along … because of this we survived,’ one girl remembered. ‘Even today I remember my aunt Marfa with gratitude and warmth as she saved my life in those years of famine,’ said another.²⁷

Relatives outside Ukraine could help too. Anatolii Bakai’s sister, who had moved to the Urals, sent home five kilograms of flour. In an accompanying letter she wrote that there was no famine in the Urals, and that not everybody there even believed there was famine in Ukraine. The flour was not enough to save Anatolii’s mother, but it helped keep him alive.²⁸

There is anecdotal evidence that some Ukrainian peasants had help from their Jewish neighbours: again, most Jews were not farmers and were therefore not subjected to the deadly requisitions, unless they lived in a blacklisted village. Mariia Havrysh in Vinnytsia province remembered being visited by a Jewish neighbour – ‘they were spared because they had no land’ – at a time when she was ill, swollen and expecting to die. The woman came over, prepared a meal and fed the whole family, leaving them with some bread and vodka as well, ‘thus saving the whole family’.29 At a time when hatred and suspicion of all kinds were rising, the gesture was a powerful one.

Despite the bans on travel and trade, Ukrainian peasants, as noted, tried both. They crept through cordons and crawled under fences to get into the cities to beg for food. They tried to enter factory towns and industrial worksites. They slipped into the mining towns in Donbas where workers were needed and the foreman might turn a blind eye. They searched near factories for waste that might be edible, for example the debris tossed out by distilleries or packaging plants. They also picked up whatever scraps they could find and tried to sell them. Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian-German writer who was at that time a faithful communist, has left a memorable portrait of a market he saw in Kharkiv in 1933:

Those who had something to sell squatted in the dust with their goods spread out before them on a handkerchief or scarf. The goods ranged from a handful of rusty nails to a tattered quilt or a pot of sour milk sold by the spoon, flies included. You could see an old woman sitting for hours with one painted Easter egg or one small piece of dried-up goat’s cheese before her. Or an old man, his bare feet covered with sores, trying to barter his torn boots for a kilo of black bread and a packet of makhorka tobacco. Hemp slippers, and even soles and heels torn off from boots and replaced by a bandage of rags, were frequent items for barter. Some old men had nothing to sell; they sang Ukrainian ballads and were rewarded by an occasional kopeck. Some of the women had babies lying beside them on the pavement or in their laps; the fly-ridden infant’s lips were fastened to the leathery udder from which it seemed to suck bile instead of milk.³⁰

The fact that a bazaar – even the barest bazaar – was allowed to exist in urban Ukraine meant that there was, for some people, a lifeline. But the real reason why the cities were less desperate was rationing: workers and bureaucrats received food coupons. These were not available to everybody. According to a 1931 law, all Soviet citizens who worked for the state sector received ration cards. That left out peasants; it also omitted others without formal jobs. In addition, the size of rations was based not only on the importance of the worker, but also of his workplace. Priority went to key industrial regions, and the only one in Ukraine was Donbas. In practice, some 40 per cent of the Ukrainian population therefore received about 80 per cent of the food supplies.31

For those not ranked high on the list, rations could be paltry. Visiting Kyiv in 1932, Andrew Cairns, a Canadian agricultural expert, saw two women picking grass in a city park to make soup. They told him that they had rations, but not enough: ‘I pointed to the river and remarked that it was very beautiful; they agreed but said they were hungry.’ In fact, the women were ‘third category’ workers who received 125 rubles per month, plus 200 grams of bread a day – about four slices.³²

The manager of a cooperative store in Kyiv, another ‘third category’ worker, also told Cairns that he received 200 grams of bread per day and 200 grams for his son, as well as 100 rubles every month. A ‘second category’ worker got 525 grams of bread each day, and 180 rubles per month. None of that went very far in the municipal bazaars, which sold very little beyond bread, tomatoes and sometimes chicken or dairy products, and all of those at very high prices. Bread could cost five or six rubles a kilo, an egg could cost half a ruble or more, milk two rubles a litre.³³ Peter Egides, a student in Kyiv at the time, received a stipend that was less than the price of a single loaf of bread: ‘the situation reached the point where at the age of seventeen I was walking with a cane because I didn’t even have the strength to walk’. Egides’ grandmother eventually did die of starvation, though she lived in Kyiv as well.³⁴

Theoretically, state-run shops should have sold food at lower, more accessible prices. But those shops were empty. Heorhii Sambros, a teacher and state official who kept a diary in those years, has left a memorable description of the shops of Kharkiv. In all of them ‘great spaces’, once filled from floor to ceiling with products, were either totally empty or filled with nothing but pure alcohol (‘bottles of vodka, as if a rainfall, came down to flood the entire city’). Very occasionally they sold food, but it was almost too revolting to contemplate:

Only in some stores, and on the counter, were [there] the usual ‘products’, five or six trays or platters of hurriedly prepared dishes. Cold salad, looking like silage, from a rotten, disgusting sauerkraut; a paté from fish remains with soaked cabbage and salty, cut pickles; rarely, pieces of frozen meat with a sauce that looked like shoe paste, soaked green tomatoes with the smell of a rotten barrel; frozen, sour, filled baked tomatoes with overly peppered, so as not to stink, meat filling, prepared from the remains of some uncertain meat; finally, rarely, such delicacies as boiled eggs or some small fruits, etc. All those dishes (I remember them vividly!) would be put on the counter and were immediately bought out by the buyers.35

Andrew Cairns also managed to get into a queue at a shop where he saw ‘heavy, warm, soggy bread being sold for 10 rubles per loaf, and a little pork fat at 12 rubles per pound’.³⁶

Better-quality food was available in the government canteens attached to every workplace: soups, kasha, occasionally meat. But special certification – a party card or a trade union card – was needed to use them. Sambros, who had neither of these things, befriended a secretary at the educational institute where he worked, and she gave him meal coupons without asking for his membership card: ‘at the time I lived, breathed and ate meals “as an outlaw”, illegally’. When food shortages grew worse and the institute began to verify who could get meal coupons, he went through an acquaintance to get access to the Ukrainian Writers’ House:

I was aware of the risks: they could have come up to my table, asked for the writer’s membership card and shamed me by pulling me out from the table. But there was no other way, I had to take the risk, and thus started frequenting the writers’ canteen. I was lucky: I ate there for about 1 1/2 to 2 months and no one asked who I was, not once …³⁷

Sambros later wangled his way into the Agricultural Academy canteen, and ate there for a few weeks too. As a result, he stayed alive. But he spent most of his waking hours thinking about food: his ‘entire salary, almost without exception, went to food’.³⁸ And he, of course, was far better off than so many others.

Although he was not a peasant, Sambros’s experience was in a certain sense typical: paradoxically, the most important source of help for the starving came from Soviet bureaucrats and Soviet bureaucracies. The historian Timothy Snyder has described how state institutions in Nazi-occupied Europe, when they were still functioning, could rescue Jews from the Holocaust, and a parallel story can be told about Stalin’s Soviet Union.39 While the Bolsheviks had systematically destroyed independent institutions, including churches, charities and private companies, state institutions remained – schools, hospitals, orphanages – and some of them were in a position to help. Some of them, theoretically, even had a mandate to do so.

Those best able to help the starving were relatives, parents or children who had jobs inside the system. Petro Shelest, who much later became First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, wrote a memoir of those years – it began as a diary – which was finally published by his family in 2004. The tragedy of 1933 was clear to him at the time: ‘Entire families, even entire villages were starving to death. There were numerous cases of cannibalism … It was obviously a crime committed by our government, yet this fact is kept shamefully secret.’ In that period Shelest was studying and working as an engineer at an armaments factory. But he was also a Communist Party member in good standing, and that enabled him to send food to his mother. His aid rescued her from starvation in Kharkiv province.⁴⁰

Contacts and friends helped too: one young girl in Poltava province survived the famine because her father had studied on an agricultural course with a man who wound up working in the local government. Surreptitiously, this friend arranged for her family to receive a replacement for their confiscated cow – and thus they lived.⁴¹ Another girl was fortunate enough to have an aunt married to the collective farm chairman: ‘I came to her because she had bread, lard and milk. She gave them to me by stealth so that nobody knew.’⁴² Often a single person with a job inside the system could save an entire family. Nadiia Malyshko’s mother got a job as a cleaner in a school in Dnipropetrovsk province, where the director helped her get a food ration: a quarter-litre of oil and eight kilograms of corn flour every month.⁴³ Four of seven children in Varvara Horban’s family, also in Dnipropetrovsk province, survived because she went to work at a grain elevator and received a small loaf of bread every day.⁴⁴

Those who could not find employment with the state sometimes tried to save their children by turning them over to the state. One mother took her four children to the head office of the local collective farm, declared she could not feed them, renounced responsibility and told the farm chairmen they were now in charge.45 Halyna Tymoshchuk’s mother in Vinnytsia province made the same decision:

My mother went to the head of the collective … and said, ‘At least take my two girls. And we’ll die, if that’s how it has to be.’ He was kind and I know he liked mother. And so he said, ‘Bring your two children.’ And he took us in. His wife was in charge of the nursery, and my sister became her helper. Later, my mother worked at the nursery canteen as a dishwasher. I was still young at the time, only eight. The head of the collective took me into his home. So we survived while others died, all of them, it seems – many, many.⁴⁶

Orphanages were a more common destination. During a three-week period in February 1933, some 105 children were left at the doors of orphanages in the province of Vinnytsia alone.⁴⁷ Sometimes it worked: one boy lived through the famine because his mother brought him secretly to an orphanage in the village of Dryzhyna. She told him not to tell anybody that she was alive, as he might not be given food if he wasn’t a ‘real’ orphan. A woman at the orphanage, understanding the situation, also told him not to mention his mother. She protected him, helped him survive the famine and eventually he was reunited with his family.⁴⁸ A woman from Poltava province also remained grateful to the end of her life because a teacher in the village school risked her own status and quietly fed her and her siblings, although they were ‘children of kulaks’. It wasn’t much – broth with no bread, and tiny buckwheat dumplings ‘the size of a kidney bean’ – but it was enough to keep them all alive.⁴⁹

Across the republic, the sight of starving children wandering the streets did spur the employees of some Soviet institutions into more systematic action. Those who were truly motivated were sometimes able to help, and especially to assist children. Proof that it was possible, at least at a local level, to advocate on behalf of starving orphans comes from a series of letters sent from the party committee boss in Pavlohrad to his superiors in Dnipropetrovsk. In the first, dated 30 March, he described, among other things, the impact of the famine on children:

Masses of homeless children appeared in our village who have been abandoned by their parents or left behind after their deaths. According to approximate numbers, there are at least 800 such children. There is a need for two to three special orphanages that will require funds that we do not have in our budget. In the meantime, we are beginning to organize special food supplies for them. For this we need extra stocks of food. I would ask you to please take this into account and direct us according to the correct Soviet policy.50

A month later, on 30 April, the Pavlohrad party committee secretary sent in another report. ‘By comparison to what I have written to you in previous reports, we have every day a larger and larger increase in homelessness.’ In the past two days alone, sixty-five children had been picked up on the streets of the town; local authorities, he explained, had now organized feeding stations in seven places for 710 children. But these measures were insufficient: the district needed extra resources, for all they had was the absolute minimum. Instead, they proposed the creation of orphanages for 1,500 children: ‘This matter has now become so urgent, right now, and for so many children, that the sooner we solve it the better results we will achieve towards the goal of liquidating the mass phenomenon of swelling among children, since to leave children in such condition for longer will result in their deaths.’⁵¹ The letter ended with a plea: ‘there has been no reaction until now, although this question is extremely serious and demands urgent settlement’.⁵² The town did do what it could, and perhaps some children were saved that way.

The situation was far worse in Kharkiv, one of the cities that the starving tried hard to enter. At least where children were concerned, the city authorities did in theory try to help – or at least they acknowledged the scale of the problem. On 30 May the Kharkiv health department reported to the Ukrainian republican authorities a ‘large, persistent, ongoing flow of orphans, homeless and starving children into Kharkiv and other large towns in Kharkiv province’. The 1933 budget had provided spaces for 10,000 children in orphanages; the real number was now more than double that, 24,475. A week later over 9,000 more children were picked up off the streets, 700 of them during one night, 27–28 May. Kharkiv province asked for 6.4 million rubles from the state to take care of them, as well as another 450,000 for starving adults.

In practice, these kinds of measures rarely succeeded. A special report filed by the head of the secret police in Vinnytsia, describing the conditions in one of the city’s orphanages in May 1933, makes for stark reading:

The home services picked up children on the street. It is meant to contain 40 children, but more than 100 are now there. The lack of beds and sheets means that two children now share each bed. There are only 67 sheets and 69 blankets. Some blankets are no longer usable. There is also a lack of spoons, plates and other implements. Infants are often left dirty, with crusted eyes and no fresh air. Sometimes children who arrive in satisfactory condition die within two or three months of arrival in the home. The level of mortality is increasing: In March, 32 children died (out of 115), in April, 38 died (out of 134), during the first half of May, 16 (out of 135). Sick children lie beside healthy children, spreading diseases. Employees steal food. The electricity has been cut off, and there is no running water.53

In the more distant provinces the situation could be even worse. In the town of Velyka Lepetykha conditions inside the orphanage were so bad that children escaped during the day and wandered into the market to beg and steal food.⁵⁴ In Kherson the city’s four orphanages were overwhelmed after the number of children nearly doubled in the first three weeks of March, from 480 to 750, mostly because of homeless children picked up off the streets.⁵⁵ In Kharkiv the petitions for food and aid meant they failed to come fast enough. The city health department reported in May that most children in the city’s overflowing orphanages were weak with hunger. Many had measles and other contagious diseases – and the mortality rate was 30 per cent.⁵⁶

There were also ‘orphanages’ that hardly deserved that name at all. In 1933, Liubov Drazhevska, at the time a geology student in Kharkiv, went in to her institute to discover that classes were cancelled. The following day she and about forty others were taken by streetcar to the railway station and shown railway carriages filled with children. ‘A man wearing a [secret police] uniform, I think, came up to us and said: “For the next few weeks you will be working with these children; you will supervise and feed them.” ’

Drazhevska entered one of the carriages. ‘Some children were in a normal state, more or less, but most of them were very pale and very thin, and many children were swollen from hunger.’ She and the others began to serve gruel to the children, though not too much as they were so famished that they could become ill from overeating. Most of them could not explain how they had arrived at the carriages: parents had dropped them off, they had been picked up off the street, they couldn’t remember. On the very first day several children died, Drazhevska remembered: ‘For the first time in my life I saw people dying, and, of course, this was very difficult.’ Others were unbalanced. One girl began screaming: ‘Don’t cut me up, don’t cut me up!’ She hallucinated as well, crying out that ‘My aunt is weeding beets over there!’ Eventually she had to be removed from the car so as not to upset the others.

Drazhevska found the experience unbearable: ‘On the whole, I was quite a self-controlled person, but after I came back home that day, I had a fit of hysterics. Before this I did not know what it meant to be a hysteric, but I experienced that then.’ Soon she became accustomed to the oddity of the situation, and to the children themselves. She was able to bring them books and paper. She tried to teach them to read. Every day some of them died – but others survived. Eventually, a place was found for them:

We went by streetcar to a district of Kharkiv, then we had to go very far on foot. It was already dark. The children were five or six years old. They were tired and kept asking me: ‘Aunt, where are we going?’ But I didn’t know. The only thing that I knew was that I was supposed to bring them to the barracks and leave them there. That’s all. I don’t know what happened to them.57

Even with all the deaths and suffering, Drazhevska’s story demonstrates a brutal truth: without policemen to organize ‘volunteers’, without the dirty, underfunded orphanages – even those with dishonest employees and appalling conditions – even more children would have died. The orphanages were terrible. But their very existence saved lives.

The same paradoxical point can be made about another less popular Soviet institution: the Torgsin hard currency shops. As we saw earlier, these shops, first opened in 1930, were originally meant for foreigners who could not legally own rubles. In 1931 they were opened to Soviet citizens, to enable them to exchange whatever foreign money or gold objects they might possess. During the famine years of 1932–3 they expanded in numbers, activity and significance, achieving record sales and creating what some remembered as ‘Torgsin gold fever’. In November 1932 the Soviet Politburo decreed that the shops could purchase silver as well as gold, a fact that seemed important enough for the Italian consul to mention in his January 1933 report: ‘Now it is said that soon jewellery will be accepted.’58 At their peak, in 1933, there were 1,500 Torgsin shops, often in prominent places: in Kyiv, there was one on Khreshchatyk street, the most important shopping area in the city.

The expansion was not accidental: the regime knew that famine would bring gold into the state coffers. Following the Torgsin’s high turnover in 1932 – in that year the shops brought in 21 tonnes of gold, one and a half times the amount mined by Soviet industry – the state greedily set the 1933 target at more than double that number.⁵⁹ The Torgsin income briefly became a crucial factor in Soviet international trade: during the years 1932–5 the gold and other valuable objects that the state obtained through the Torgsins would pay for a fifth of Soviet hard currency expenditure on machinery, raw materials and technology.⁶⁰

For hungry people, the Torgsin shops – often the only place in town where food was readily available – became the focus of dreams and obsession. They attracted stares, curious onlookers and beggars. In 1933 the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones visited one in Moscow. ‘Plenty of everything,’ he recorded in his notebook’.⁶¹ Malcolm Muggeridge wrote of the ‘wistful groups’ of people who hung around outside the same shop, staring at the ‘tempting pyramids of fruit’.⁶² In Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, two demons make a memorable appearance in front of the ‘glass doors of the Torgsin Store in Smolensk Market’, before entering rooms full of ‘hundreds of different bolts of richly coloured poplins’ where ‘racks full of shoes stretched into the distance’.⁶³

Away from the capital, most of the Torgsin shops were dark and dirty like other Soviet shops, and operated by rude and angry staff.⁶⁴ Still, many peasants, misled by their consumer goods and by the presence of hard currency, thought that the shops were ‘American’.65 Rumours of what the Torgsin might provide drew one man back from Rostov, in Russia, where he had fled to escape collectivization. Having heard that in Ukraine it was possible to exchange gold for bread, he decided, his son remembered, that it was worth the risk to come home just in order to take his tsarist-era gold coins out of their hiding place and trade them for several kilos of buckwheat and a few loaves of bread.⁶⁶

This long trip was not unusual. Although there were a few mobile Torgsin shops that toured the countryside, hoping to purchase gold, peasants without access to these made major expeditions to reach them in cities and towns. Nadiia Babenko’s father gathered the family wedding rings, baptismal crosses and earrings, and walked 200 kilometres from his village, Pylypovychi, to the Torgsin in Kyiv. But it was worth it: he received a pood of flour – 16 kilograms – a litre of oil and two kilograms of buckwheat, which along with frozen potatoes, sorrel, mushrooms, berries and acorns, helped the family survive for the next few weeks.⁶⁷

Not all such journeys ended happily. Thieves hung around Torgsin shops, and robbed or even murdered people as they entered and left. Torgsin staff cheated or mistreated peasants too. Ivan Klymenko and his mother travelled from Krasna Slobidka, a village in Kyiv province, to Khreshchatyk street to sell his grandmother’s wedding ring for several scoops of flour. No one had bothered to weigh the ring, so they didn’t know if they received a fair deal; once they got home his mother discovered that the flour was mixed with lime. They ate it anyway.⁶⁸ Hryhorii Simia went to a Torgsin with his stepfather, who wanted to sell his army medal, a silver Georgian Cross. The seller wouldn’t accept it: this particular medal was, the clerk said, only given to ‘servants of the tsar’ with high positions in the officer corps. Simia’s stepfather protested in vain that he’d been an army doctor who treated the wounded regardless of rank. The seller replied: ‘So, you treated officers! Upper class! Enemies of the revolution! Yes? Get out of here or I call the police!’⁶⁹

As the famine deepened, some looked for gold wherever they could find it. For centuries Ukrainians had been buried along with their most prized possessions, including jewellery, weapons and crosses. Hunger removed any remaining feeling of respect, and more than one ancient cemetery was robbed, at first only at night but eventually during the daytime too. Since cemeteries were ‘Christian’, Soviet authorities did not always object to the looting – and in some places they organized it themselves.70

At the same time the Soviet regime also began to use the Torgsin shops as a way to encourage friends and relatives of Soviet citizens to contribute hard currency from abroad. In later years all such foreign contacts were forbidden and would be dangerous, even lethal, to maintain. But in 1932–3 the regime’s desire for hard currency was such that it allowed people outside the USSR to send ‘food transfers’ to starving relatives via the shops.⁷¹ Those lucky enough to receive something would have to give the state 25 per cent of the total, and sometimes as much as 50 per cent. But they would then receive coupons that allowed them to buy food at the Torgsin. Transfers arrived from Germany, Poland, Lithuania, France, the United Kingdom and above all the United States.⁷² The ethnic German community in Ukraine as well as the Volga region launched letter-writing campaigns aimed at their foreign brethren – Mennonite, Baptist and Catholic – begging for food. Tiny amounts of help could have an enormous impact. The diarist Oleksandra Radchenko, a teacher in the Kharkiv region, received a transfer of three dollars. With that, she obtained ‘6 kg of wheat flour, 2 kg of sugar, 3 or 4 of rice and 1 kilo of wheat groats at the Torgsin. What a great help to us.’⁷³

Although the Torgsin trade saved lives, it also created great bitterness. Many understood the shops in stark terms: they existed to rob starving peasants of what was left of their household wealth. In Odessa an informer told the OGPU he had heard two teachers speculating that peasant wealth might even be the purpose of the famine: ‘They have created hunger in order to get more gold and silver to the Torgsin.’⁷⁴ In Poltava peasants joked bleakly that the acronym TORGSIN really stood for Tovarishchi, Revoliutsiia Gibnet, Stalin Istrebliaet Narod! (‘Comrades, the Revolution is Dying, Stalin Exterminates the People!’).⁷⁵ There was no way to protest against the exploitation of the Torgsin system, except anonymously. The employees of one Torgsin arrived at work one morning to find a placard on the shop door: ‘Stalin is an executioner.’⁷⁶

Still, countless families survived thanks to what they were able to sell. ‘We sold gold to get corn,’ one survivor remembered.77 Pavlo Chornyi’s family sold a great-grandfather’s silver medals, earned during the Russian imperial war in the Caucasus in the 1830s.⁷⁸ Another woman remembered that her mother had ‘some golden things from pre-revolutionary times: She had my father’s golden watch, several rings, and so on. Thus, from time to time she went to the Torgsin .. … For silver and gold my mother received porridge, potatoes or flour. All those products she mixed with different grasses and gave us to eat once a day. In such a way we survived.’⁷⁹ Yet another recalled her mother exchanging earrings and her wedding ring for flour, skirts and blouses for beetroot and grain, as well as her dowry – ‘fabric, embroidered towels, linen’ – for bran or millet.⁸⁰

Those women survived – but they lost a part of themselves in the process. Objects they might have received from their mothers, things that would have connected them to their past, rings and jewellery they might have used or invested in another way – all of these were gone. History, culture, family and identity were destroyed by the famine too, sacrificed in the name of survival.