CHRONOLOGY OF THE FAMINE YEARS
This year marks the 50th anniversary of one of history's most horrifying cases of genocide - the Soviet-made Great Famine of 1932-33, in which some 7 million Ukrainians perished.
Relying on news from Svoboda and, later, The Ukrainian Weekly (which began publication in October 1933), this column hopes to remind and inform Americans and Canadians of this terrible crime against humanity.
By bringing other events worldwide into the picture as well, the column hopes to give a perspective on the state of the world in the years of Ukraine's Great Famine.
PART XVIII
April 1-15, 1933
On April 1, Svoboda headlines read: "Bolshevik Sympathizer Does Not Deny Existence of Famine in Ukraine." The news item referred to Walter Duranty, correspondent for The New York Times, who upon reading Gareth Jones' reports in The Manchester Guardian, stated that these conditions were not characteristic of those throughout the Soviet Union. Mr. Duranty reported that conditions in Ukraine were bad. However, people were not dying from hunger; they were dying from diseases caused by malnutrition, he stated.
On April 4, Svoboda ran news from the Moscow newspaper, Krasnaya Gazeta, which reported that the Ukrainian peasants had not received any grain for planting. The Ukrainian Commissariat of Agriculture reported that only 1.3 percent of the grain for Ukraine had been received by the end of March. Southern Ukraine and the Odessa and Katerynoslav oblasts suffered the most during the spring planting, the newspaper reported.
Svoboda reported that many of the machines used in agricultural production were supposed to run on electrical power, however, the regime had sent out a statement urging conservation of energy and limiting the use of the machines. In Ukraine, the main problem seemed to be with the tractors, which constantly needed all kinds of repairs. Svoboda reported that every time the tractors were ready to go out into the fields, they would break down again.
On April 7, Svoboda once again ran an item by Mr. Duranty. He wrote that in Ukraine, there was not enough grain to plant and people went hungry. On the brighter side, he added, industry in the Soviet Union had picked up after its catastrophic decline around Christmastime.
On April 10, Svoboda headlines revealed that Moscow's Pravda newspaper had called upon the Soviets to take measures against the Ukrainian. Communists. According to reports in Pravda, the Ukrainian Communists were blamed for the failure of the spring planting and accused of sabotage. The Pravda newspaper stated that the Ukrainian Communists were opportunists and negligent in their agricultural work and that the Ukrainian Communist leaders refused to look for grain to plant, expecting the government to grant them seeds from their state supply. They also did nothing to repair the broken tractors, Pravda said.
Pravda also reported that "The Ukrainian Communists have been deliberately evasive in performing the government's plans for the spring planting." They have also stopped their struggle with elements Pravda called "kulaks, rogues-swindlers, who ruin collective farming." Thus, the newspaper called upon the regime to strike out against the opportunists within the Ukrainian Communist Party.
That same day, Svoboda reported that a call for disbanding the "Poor Peasant Committees" had come from Kharkiv. These committees were no longer necessary, according to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, because the poor peasants were members of collective farms, they no longer had any farms of their own.
Svoboda headlines on April 12 read: "The Ruin of Soviet Industry." A correspondent for The Chicago Daily News reported that Soviet factories were behind schedule in their production. For example, a cast-iron plant was supposed to produce 2.5 million tons yearly, while it had produced only 100,000 tons during the year. Another example of the decline of industry was the tractor plant in Kharkiv, which was scheduled to release 144 tractors daily. The correspondent reported that only 70 tractors were produced daily.
The Dniprelstan, an electrical power plant on the Dnipro River stood unused, reported the correspondent, because there were no factories that used electricity nearby. According to the newspaper, many factories and mills were scheduled to be built around the area, but no one seemed to know when construction would begin.
On April 14, Svoboda published a letter from Ukraine, describing conditions in the country. Titled, "A Desperate Cry from the Other Side of the Dam," the letter had gotten into the hands of a correspondent of the Volyn newspaper, "Novyi Chas." Written by a Kiev-region farmer to his family in Volyn, it said: "We are still alive, but don't ask about our health. We are suffering from hunger and the cold - it looks like we and the children are going to die of hunger. Please reply to our letter. Could you send us poor, hungry and cold people help? Our family is big - four children and the two of us - we cannot live. Please advise us how to continue living. We don't have any bread, or potatoes - we have nothing. How are you? Are you alive? Please answer and send us advice, for it looks like we're dying a famine death. Here, one pood of flour costs 300 rubles; a pood of potatoes costs 100 rubles, but we can't get it anywhere. Dearest mother, father, brothers and sisters, save us, anyone who believes in God, and has a soul! Write to us. Do people there also suffer from hunger? Here people swell from hunger."
On that same day, Svoboda published an English-language column titled "Press Reports on Ukraine and Ukrainians," an (unnamed) observer, who had recently visited the North Caucasus and Ukraine in order to see how the collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union was affecting the lives of the peasants, wrote to The Manchester Guardian.
"Ukraine is more a separate country than the North Caucasus. It has a language of its own and a culture of its own, southern rather than eastern, with white, good houses and easygoing people. Even now you can see that it has been used to abundance. There is nothing pinchbeck about the place; only, as in the North Caucasus, the population is starving. 'Hunger' was the word I heard most. Peasants begged a lift on the train from one station to another, sometimes their bodies swollen up - a disagreeable sight - from lack of food. There were fewer signs of military terrorism than in the North Caucasus region, though I saw another party of, presumably, kulaks being marched away under armed guard at Dnipropetrovske; the little towns and villages seemed just numb and the people in too desperate a condition to even actively resent what had happened.
"Otherwise it was the same story - cattle and horses dead; fields neglected; meager harvests - despite moderately good climatic conditions; all the grain that was produced taken by the government; now no bread at all, no bread anywhere, nothing much else either; despair and bewilderment. Ukraine was before the Revolution one of the world's great wheat-producing areas and even Communists admit that its population, including the poor peasants, enjoyed a tolerably comfortable standard of life..."
Of his visit to a Ukrainian village, the observer wrote:
"In a village about 25 kilometers from Kiev, I visited a collective farm worker, or 'kolkhoznik.' His wife was in the outer room of the cottage sifting millet. There were also chickens in the outer room, and on the wall two icons, and a bouquet made of colored paper, and a wedding group, very gay."
The wife told the visitor things were very bad, only potatoes and millet to eat since August, no bread or meat, she said. Then the visitor spoke to her husband, who was holding one child, while another followed him. Both children were obviously undernourished, the observer reported.
The peasant spoke to the visitor about his situation: "I was a poor peasant with a hectare and a half of land. I thought things would be better for me on a collective farm." He laughed and continued, saying that things were much much worse than before the Revolution.
In answer to the visitor's question why there was no bread in Ukraine, he replied: "Bad organization. They send people from Moscow who know nothing; ordered us to grow vegetables instead of wheat. We didn't know how to grow vegetables and they could not show us. Then we were told that we must put our cows all together and there'd be plenty of milk for our children, but the expert who advised this forgot to provide a cowshed, so we had to put our cows in the sheds of the rich peasants, who, of course, let them starve."
In reference to the winter sowing, the peasant said that bad organization made the people lose heart and stop working. He hushed his voice adding: "There are enemies even on the council of the collective farm."
The peasant added that next year it would be better. "You'll have to pay a tax in kind - so much per hectare - and not deliver a quota for the whole district. When you've paid the tax in kind you'll have about two-thirds of the crop left for yourselves."
When the visitor got back to Moscow, he said he read Stalin's newest opinion at a recent conference. It said:
"By developing collective farming we succeeded in drawing this entire mass of poor peasants into collective farms, in giving them security and raising them to the level of middle peasants. This means that no less that 20 million peasants have been saved from ruin and poverty, from kulak slavery and converted, thanks to the collective farms, into people assured of a livelihood. This is a great achievement, comrades. It is such an achievement as the world had never known and such as not a single state in the world has never before secured."
* * *
Around the world:
In Germany, Hitler's government announced that all Jews had to be released from government jobs, thus initiating an organized program. The only Jews who could remain at government offices were ones that had held the jobs since before 1914, had served on the front during the war, or had a son or father killed in action.
In the United States, as of midnight on April 7, 3.2 percent beer was allowed in 19 states: these were the first steps toward the cancellation of prohibition. The Committee building the Ukrainian Pavilion at the World's Fair in Chicago announced that the booths would be ready by May 20; they would be erected on one of the most favorable locations at the exposition.
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, June 19, 1983, No. 25, Vol. LI
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