FACES AND PLACES: A gripping tale of terror (08/06/00)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

A gripping tale of terror

Since I don't read Russian, my exposure to Soviet fiction has been limited to translations: "Doctor Zhivago" by Boris Pasternak, "Quiet Flows the Don" by Mikhail Sholokhov, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, "How the Steel Was Tempered" by Nikolai Ostrovsky. If I recall, none of them devoted much ink to Ukraine's famine.

At the same time, I have read and heard numerous accounts of Stalin's forced famine in Ukraine, especially when I served as a public member of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine. These chronicles and narratives broadened my knowledge of the horrors visited on Ukraine by Stalin's great terror, but not my comprehension. How could people have been so incredibly cruel and heartless?

Then I read "Forever Flowing," a tale of Soviet life under Stalin, and I began to understand. Written by Vasily Grossman, the novel recounts the story of Ivan Grigoryevich, a man freed after 30 years in the gulag. It's a compelling narrative of human betrayal, torment and survival.

Soon after his release, Ivan visits his mindless bureaucrat of a cousin who had never denounced him but hadn't written to Ivan in the camps either. It was a cordial but tense meeting as the relative, who lived rather well by Soviet standards, attempted to acquit himself. He felt quilty and found it necessary "to rid himself of, to repress in himself, that ancient worm of the intellectual, his bad conscience, his sense of illegitimacy of the miraculous thing that had happened to him. He didn't want to confess and repent. He wanted to justify and brag." Put off, Ivan left his cousin as quickly as he could.

Later, in Leningrad, Ivan runs into Pinegin, a prosperous old friend, who, unbeknownst to Ivan, had actually denounced him. The meeting is brief and both go on their way, but Pinegin is later angry with himself. "He hadn't the slightest desire to think about that sinister sensation which had slumbered inside him for decades on end and had now suddenly awakened. For him the heart of the matter was not the evil deed, but the idiotic luck of meeting a human being he had ruined. Had they not run into each other, the feeling asleep inside him would never have awakened." It is not until Pinegen enters an exclusive Intourist restaurant where the waiters fawn over him and he is served sirloin that his uneasiness begins to fade.

Ivan eventually settles in a provincial town and moves in with Anna Sergeyevna, a war widow who had once been chairman of a collective farm in Ukraine. It is through her eyes that he experiences the famine.

Anna explains the process. An inventory of all property was drawn up and families were informed that everything belonged to the state and they were merely put in charge of it for safekeeping. Based on their belongings, they were later identified as "kulaks." The provincial authorities determined how many "kulaks" were living in a district, and the districts then assigned proportionate shares of the total number to the individual village soviets (councils), and it was there that the lists of specific names were drawn up.

And who made up the lists? "A troika - three people," Anna declares. "Dim-witted, unenlightened people determined on their own who was to live and who was to die ... There were bribes. Accounts were settled because of jealousy over some woman or because of ancient feuds and quarrels.

Much of the dirty work was later accomplished by local activists mobilized by the GPU. "They were all people who knew one another well and know their victims, but in carrying out this task they became dazed, stupefied." Anna continues: "they would threaten people with guns, as if they were under a spell, calling small children 'kulak bastards,' screaming 'Bloodsucker!' " And those 'bloodsuckers' were so terrified they had hardly any blood of their own left in their veins."

Ivan wonders: How was it possible for the party activists to become so brutal towards friends and acquaintances, people they had known for years? Anna explains: They convinced themselves that the so-called kulaks "were pariahs, untouchables, vermin ... cattle, swine, loathsome, repulsive; they had no souls; they stank; they all had venereal diseases; they were enemies of the people and exploited the labor of others ..." The activists "would have killed their own fathers and mothers simply in order to carry out instructions."

Once collectivization was in place, the confiscation of all grain and other foodstuffs, an integral part of Stalin's genocidal plan, began, led mostly by local derelicts, district party officials, the Komsomol and, of course, the militia, the NKVD and sundry army units.

Anna goes on: "Everyone was in terror. Mothers looked at their children and began to scream in fear. They screamed as if a snake had crept into their house. And this snake was famine, starvation, death. What was to be done? The peasants had one thing on their minds - something to eat. They would suck, move their jaws and the saliva would flow and they would keep swallowing it down, but it wasn't food ... The children would cry from morning on, asking for bread."

Gradually, the children, among the first to die, stopped crying. "That is exactly how the Nazis put the Jewish children into the Nazi gas chambers, Anna told Ivan. " 'You are not allowed to live, you are all Jews!' And it was impossible to understand, grasp, comprehend. For these children were Soviet children, and those who were putting them to death were Soviet people."

Unlike the gas chambers where death came painfully but quickly, starvation was a prolonged and excruciating process, according to Anna. "In the beginning, starvation drives a person out of this house. In its first stage, he is tormented and driven as though by fire torn both in the guts and in the soul. And so he tries to escape his 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."

In the end, there was nothing. The people had died. The village was dead. And now it was as if no one had ever lived there. "Can it really be that no one will ever answer for everything that happened?" asks Anna. "That it will all be forgotten without even any words to commemorate it?"

"Forever Flowing" is available in paperback for $16.95 from Northwestern University Press, (847) 491-5313.

Myron Kuropas' e-mail address is: [email protected]

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