WE LOOKED toward the approaching winter of 1932–1933 with great trepidation, as if awaiting the arrival of the Judgment Day. It came with nature’s crushing wrath. The particularly severe winter conspired with the Communists against the farmers.
In our region, winter begins at the end of November when the heavy rains stop and the first frost sets in. The puddles freeze and the mud hardens. Heavy grayish white snow clouds chase each other across the sky.
This change of weather is accompanied by an icy east wind which blows along the valley and forces people to retreat into their shelters. It is the time when our villagers hurriedly finish their work in the fields and retire to their deserved winter rest. In the past, when the field work ended, our villagers were not forced to go out in bad weather. They would set aside enough food and firewood so that the cold days and nights indoors meant little hardship.
But the winter of 1932–1933 was different from any of the previous ones. Although nature followed her usual pattern with the exception of unusual cold, the life of the villagers did not take its normal course, for in step with the winter, a great famine approached.
The scarcity of food alarmed us as early as November while we were still working in the fields of the collective farm. The small advance received from the kolhosp had already been consumed. We had been told that we would receive more food as soon as the field work was completed. But we never did.
Then came the taxes. Taxes in the form of eggs and milk were obligatory only to those who owned fowl and cows. But each household had to meet a quota of meat, approximately 250 pounds annually, regardless of livestock holdings. Farmers without livestock were forced to pay this obligation to the state with money. Thus the annual earnings of a collective farmer from his work on the collective farm were insufficient to meet his obligations to the state, let alone for his subsistence.
However, even if the villagers had had money, it would have been impossible for them to purchase food. For, in fact, the trade in foodstuffs and other consumer commodities was officially prohibited. On November 6, 1932, the Council of People’s Commissars and the Central Committee of the Communist Party jointly issued the following resolution:
Because of the shameless breakdown of the grain collection campaign in various counties of Ukraine, the Council of People’s Commissars and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine order the local Party and administration authorities to eradicate sabotage of grain, which has been organized by counterrevolutionary and kurkul elements. The opposition of a number of Communists, leaders of this sabotage, must also be stamped out, and the passive and indifferent attitude towards this sabotage on the part of some Party organizations must be liquidated. The Council of People’s Commissars and the Central Committee have decided to blacklist all those localities which conduct criminal sabotage and to apply against them the following reprisals:
- To suspend the flow of all merchandise and all state and cooperative trade in these localities; to close all state and cooperative stores; and to remove all supplies of merchandise.
- To prohibit trade in essential foodstuffs, which trade heretofore had been conducted by collective farms and individual homesteads.
- To suspend all credits destined for those localities and to withdraw at once all credits already given to them.
- To overhaul the personnel of the administrative and economic organizations and to remove all enemy elements therefrom.
- To do the same on collective farms by removal therefrom of all enemy elements engaged in sabotage.
This resolution obviously deprived the farmers not only of the foodstuffs grown locally, but also of commodities such as matches, salt, kerosene, fish products, sugar products, canned food, etc., as I mentioned before. The trade in foodstuffs and consumer goods was prohibited throughout Ukraine, for there wasn’t a single village that had fulfilled the grain delivery quota.
Anxiety turned to panic when the first disquieting news came that the kolhosp storehouses were empty, that the grain had been taken away from the village, and that none had been left for the local populace.
The long winter had just begun. It would be six months from December before we could gather vegetables in our gardens again; it would be eight months before we could get bread from the new crop of grain. Already, some of us were on the verge of collapse from starvation. We clung, nevertheless, to the hope that the government would help us, but as time went by, that hope faded.
Meanwhile, the cold became more intense and the snow fell slowly, continuously, threatening to block the road from the village to the county seat and other neighboring towns. Yet the members of the Bread Procurement Commission continued in their task, relentlessly tramping from house to house, confiscating everything edible they could find in their attempt to meet the state quotas. Even the smallest amounts of grain and meat were forcibly seized from the villagers.
We had to do something. No one wanted to lie down passively and starve to death. One of the first steps undertaken by the villagers was a mass exodus to the neighboring cities where they hoped to find jobs and food. All—young and old—tried to reach the cities as they had tried before during the last spring famine. Many did not make it, and their frozen bodies became roadmarkers for others on the snowed-in route to the county towns. Those who were strong enough to reach the cities failed to find a paradise of plenty, even though the food rationing there slowed down the onslaught of famine somewhat. The food rations were so small that the city dwellers could not help the starving farmers.
Jobs were as scarce as food. Some of the younger huskier men found jobs at the sugar plants, state road construction projects, or woodcutting. Others were hired to carry water from the community wells. But the elderly men and women and the children who desperately sought out the cities with the hope of earning their daily bread were less fortunate.
As the exodus of villagers to the cities increased, the government confounded the farmers with an ordinance prohibiting a villager from appearing in any city without a proper certificate. Any emigration out of Ukraine was also strictly prohibited.
It was precisely at this time, the end of December 1932, that the government introduced a single passport system for the entire country in order to prevent the starving farmers from leaving their villages for the cities. This meant that all Soviet citizens over sixteen years of age, permanently residing in the cities, had to be registered with the militia in order to get their Soviet passports.
No person lacking a passport was permitted to live in a given city or be employed and receive food rations. All but the farmers had to have passports. This meant that a farmer could not stay in a city longer than twenty-four hours without being registered with the militia. Thus, not having passports, the farmers could not be employed in a city, and most importantly, they could not have food rations.
The passportization was supposedly directed against the kurkuls, as Soviet propaganda proclaimed: “Passportization is a mortal blow against the kurkuls!” This murderous slogan revived the old question: “Who is a kurkul?” All villagers had been collectivized by this time. There was not a single independent farmer left in our village by the end of 1932. Could the members of a collective farm be kurkuls? It was difficult for us to understand such logic. But, at this point, such faulty reasoning didn’t matter to us anymore.
Now it began to dawn on everyone why there wasn’t any food left in the village; why there weren’t any prospects of getting any more; why our expectation that the government would surely help us to avert starvation was naive and futile; why the Bread Procurement Commission still searched for “hidden” grain; and why the government strictly forbade us to look for means of existence elsewhere. It finally became clear to us that there was a conspiracy against us; that somebody wanted to annihilate us, not only as farmers but as a people—as Ukrainians.
At this realization, our initial bewilderment was succeeded by panic. Nevertheless, our instinct for survival was stronger than any of the prohibitions. It dictated to those who were still physically able that they must do everything to save themselves and their families.
The desperate attempts to find some means of existence in the neighboring cities continued. Many of the more able-bodied villagers ventured beyond the borders to distant parts of the Soviet Union, mainly to Russia, where, as we had heard, there was plenty of food. Others went south, since we had also heard that there, in the coal mines and factories of the Donets Basin, one could find work with regular pay and food rations.
However, few of the brave adventurers who set out for these lands of plenty reached their destination. The roads to the large metropolitan centers were closed to them. The militia and the GPU men checked every passenger for identification and destination. These courageous men and women doing their utmost to stay alive, achieved quite the contrary. We can only guess what happened to them when they were arrested; it was either death or the concentration camps. If they managed to escape the verdict of death in the “people’s” courts, receiving the questionable reprieve of hard labor, they never began their sentences. The combination of hunger, cold, and neglect took their lives on the way to the camps, at the railroad stations, or in the open box cars rolling north and east, in which they froze to death.
The ones who escaped the roadblocks set up by the militia and GPU often became the victims of outlaws who terrorized the railroad lines and the open markets. The lucky ones who managed to return to their villages after these terrible experiences, and those who remained in the village, gradually lost their spirit and belief in salvation from their plight. Weakened by lack of food, freezing for lack of fuel, they simply had no more stamina left. The farmers sank deeper and deeper into resignation, apathy and despair. Some were convinced that starvation was a well-deserved punishment from God for believing in Communism and supporting the Communists during the Revolution.
We heard that a few of those who came back had somehow managed to acquire food—mainly flour—but few of them were able to bring their treasures home. Those provisions, obtained under great hardships, had been confiscated by the state agents, or stolen by outlaws.
All of these events convinced us that we had lost our battle for life. Our attempts to escape, or to secure food from other sources, were for the most part unsuccessful. We were imprisoned in our village, without food, and sentenced to die the slow, agonizing death of starvation.