Eyewitness accounts of the Great Famine (09/04/83)

Eyewitness accounts of the Great Famine

The eyewitness accounts below are reprinted from the two-volume "Black Deeds of the Kremlin: A White Book."

Peasants ate rawhide to live

In his account, L. Pylypenko recalls the desperate measures employed by starving peasants.

The population of Rohozov in the Kiev region, in an effort to save their lives, used the most unlikely substances as foodstuffs. Some went into the fields where dead horses were buried and cut chunks of meat from the carcasses. (The horses were dying to the same extent as the people at the time.) They cooked the meat and ate it without bread or potatoes.

Others had dried calves' hides from former days; these were scalded with hot water, scraped free of hair, chopped in little pieces and boiled in water.

Still others went on hunger-swollen legs to the threshing grounds in the fields where the collective farm's threshing machine had worked the previous year. There, they winnowed the chaff in sieves, hunting for stray kernels of grain and weed seed. They pulverized these in a mortar and baked "baladony" of the flour.

When the spring sun became stronger and the drift ice began to break up in the ponds, the waves began to throw up dead fish along the shores; the people gathered this fish, cooked and ate it.

Later, when it became really warm and the white acacia trees began to bloom, the people picked these blossoms, dired them in ovens, crushed them in mortars and devised all sorts of culinary delicacies for a meal. The children swarmed like bees over the acacia trees, feasting on the sweet white blossoms.

Hog feed saves collective workers

Pavlo Bozhko recalled the following episode.

Once, in the Sakhnovshansk district of the Poltava region there were rich farms inhabited by well-to-do Ukrainian farmers. When collectivization started these farms were all dekurkulized and obliterated, on their sites several hog radhosps (Soviet state farms) were set up. I worked at one of these, called the "Paris Commune," during 1932-33.

At that time, famine was raging everywhere. The Soviet state farm workers lived wretchedly. They did not receive any wages for their work although, to be sure their need for bread was greater than their need for money, since the starvation rations they received were indeed miserable. Still, none of us workers died, nor were we unduly famished at the time.

No famine was intended for the hogs of the state farm. These received regularly, according to plan, a variety of concentrated feed such as rye, corn millet and barley of fairly good quality. Bread was baked for us from the hog feed, each worker receiving 800 grams daily and each non-worker receiving 400 grams per day.

There was an extra ration of soup and meat from the kitchen besides, that was not bad at all. Every day it was necessary to slaughter one or another of the several thousand hogs because it had been injured or had some non-contagious disease. All this was used by our kitchen.

Paying no heed to the strict control of the political department, we all stole pocketfuls of hog feed to bolster the surrounding population, but it was not enough.

In the villages all around us, such as Mazharka, Tarasiva, Kopanky and Kotivka, a most fearful famine was raging. There was no one to dig graves and bury the dead.

The starving from all the villages around dragged themselves to these state farms and begged for work, but the farms could not take them all. Whoever was taken on, however, was saved by the hog feed from death by starvation.

Agents thrive as others starve

The following eyewitness account was provided by V. Skorenko.

In the spring of 1933, I was employed as a technician in the communal branch of the Poltava city administration. We were conducting an inventory of all the buildings, which made it necessary to make detailed measurements of every square foot. I had the task of detailing all the buildings on October Street (formerly Kurakin Street) and the avenue beside it where there was a building which housed the NKVD (secret police) and its personnel. Some of the buildings on this avenue were out of bounds for us technicians, consequently we were not allowed to enter, were all luxuriously appointed, with expensive rugs and fine furniture. The food pantries were filled with all kinds of good things to eat, that made our mouths water because we worked on semi-starvations rations.

At another building further down the street I encountered a dead man lying in bed. I was scared and ran out of the place. After two weeks I ventured again into the same building. This time I saw the naked body of a dead old woman. I fled again.

After a few weeks I went once more to the building. This time I met a living woman. Questioning her about the mystery of the dead people, she replied that of her family of six, only she and her small daughter remained alive. All the rest had died of starvation.

Mob beats boy for stealing fish

N. Liutarevych recalled the beating of a boy caught stealing food.

In 1933, the market days in Chornoukhy were Mondays and Fridays, as had always been the custom. But that year the markets were exceedingly wretched. The sort of commodities the people brought to sell were often of questionable quality.

Some woman from the village of Postavnyky once brought a large earthenware pot of baked fish. She sat watching her wares diligently lest some hungry person snatch a fish away from her, but her attention wandered and she did not have time to prevent one of her fish from being seized by a hungry boy who began to run away with it. A wild clamour arose in the market place: "Catch him!" "Hold him!" "Beat him!"

I came up to the crowd surrounding the captured thief, whom I recognized to be the son of Ivan Mikhailovych Aleksandrov, formerly a fairly well-to-do peasant from the town of Chornoukhy. It was little Volodia, 7 or 8 years old, tattered and dirty, with hunger-swollen arms and legs.

He stood in the midst of this brute mob of market women, sobbing and trembling. He had time to bolt down the snatched fish, bones and all, on the run, but now he understood all too well that the time of reckoning was at hand.

Now the wronged market-woman approached Volodia, shrieking, "Blast your liver, what did you do with the fish?"

"Why, he ate it," someone spoke up from the crowd in despairing tones.

"Who is he?" asked someone in the crowd.

"As if you didn't know! It's that kulak Hnatenko's boy." (Aleksandrov was nicknamed Hnatenko.)

"Beat him!" shouted one of the market women.

Flailing arms filled the air. Volodia could be heard screaming and wailing.

When, later, the mob of market women dispersed at the approach of a guardian of "revolutionary law and order," the militiaman Kononov, I could see Volodia, with one eye knocked out, lying unconscious upon the ground.

Hunger claims man's family

O. Osadchenko told this tragic account of the death of his entire family.

I come from the village of Barashi, of the same district in the Zhytomyr region. Since my uncle was a district official during the tsarist regime, we were not permitted to join the collective farm and had to live "as God wills." Enormous taxes were levied upon us which we were quite unable to meet.

In the fall of 1932 I was unable to pay my taxes, therefore, the village activists, augmented by officials of the district authorities, seized all my belongings, even stripping my wife of the clothes she wore.

In the spring of 1933, my daughters, Vira and Maria, died of starvation, followed by my father and my wife's entire family.

One day in spring I went to the fields to look for some food. I was very swollen. As I proceeded slowly, I noticed the ravens flying around and alighting at a certain spot. I came closer and saw a woman lying down. She was still alive and begged me to help her to get up. But neither she nor I possessed sufficient strength.

I met the chairman of the village soviet, Suprunenko and the secretary, Puman, on the way and told them about the dying woman; whereupon Suprunenko retorted: "You, too, will soon perish. Perish, you kurkuls, that is the way out for you if you do not want to make a living by decent work."

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