Olya Samilenko, a writer and professor at Goucher College whose specialty is short prose and satire, has penned a novel depicting the fate of Ukrainian farmers during the Soviet era. She tells the story of 20th century Ukraine by focusing on the experiences of two Ukrainians and two Jews during the times of Joseph Stalin.
Part of the story in this work of historical fiction, told from the point of view of a Ukrainian peasant woman, is the Soviet gulag, the forced collectivization of Ukraine and the genocidal Holodomor that killed millions in Ukraine.
As the author explains in the introduction:
“Although ‘Snow Goose Chronicles’ is a work of fiction, it is based on a real-life event that happened to my family many years before I was born.
“In early January of 1929 my father, his two brothers and their parents were arrested at their farm in eastern Ukraine, which by then had become a Soviet republic, and deported to a labor camp in the Far North. My grandfather, Mathew Samijlenko, had been a prosperous farmer who operated a large gristmill, which had required the use of hired help. According to Soviet dictator Stalin that fact alone was enough to make him a kulak…”
Thus, Ms. Samilenko writes, the family was subjected to “dekulakization”: they were “packed off to a destination labor camp that had conveniently opened that year in the middle of the White Sea.” This “place of death,” a former monastery, was known as Solovky.
Interestingly, Ms. Samilenko (Dr. Olga Samilenko-Tsvetkov) is the author of a chapter in the report of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine. She was a staff assistant of the commission, working under its staff director, the late James E. Mace.
Ulana Mazurkevich, a public member of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine, said of “Snow Goose Chronicles”: “Immaculately researched and beautifully written, this book provides an important historical record of one of the darkest made-made tragedies of the 20th century by personalizing its victims’ struggles and bringing the period vividly to life.”
The book is available from the publisher at libertypublishinghouse.com.