Holodomor

CHRONOLOGY OF THE FAMINE YEARS. PART XIII

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January 1-15, 1933
Prosperity was not one of the gifts the New Year, 1933, brought the peasants and laborers in Ukraine. Instead it brought a worsening food crisis and harsher government measures against persons hiding grain or stealing food from the state stores. On January 3, Svoboda headlines read: “The Bolshevik Five-Year Plan Breeds Famine in the Soviet Union.” According to the news, the Soviets had formally ended their five-year plan and did not mention the establishment of a second one. During the first plan, 211,000 collective farms and 5,820 state farms had been set up; however, they were not a complete success as the government found it difficult to keep the workers at their jobs, the Soviet press reported.

Holodomor

CHRONOLOGY OF THE FAMINE YEARS. PART XII

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December 1932
On December 2, 1932, Svoboda printed a news item datelined Moscow which reported that the Soviet government was issuing exit visas to its citizens who requested permanent emigration. Workers could leave the country by paying the government $250, professionals would have to pay $500. Those who had money could buy themselves out of the “Soviet paradise,” Svoboda commented. On December 6, Svoboda reported that two Soviet newspapers, Izvestia and Pravda, had called for the shooting of all peasants who hid grain and foodstuffs from the authorities. The concealment of these products was “betrayal of the revolution,” and called for the most severe punishment, the Soviet newspapers said.

Holodomor

CHRONOLOGY OF THE FAMINE YEARS. PART XI

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November 1932
On November 5, Svoboda carried a news brief about the publication of a new book on Soviet agriculture which had recently appeared in Germany. It contained essays by 16 specialists, including journalists Malcolm Campbell and William H. Chamberlin, who had spent time in the USSR. Svoboda noted that the book attempted to explain the jumbled agricultural situation in the Soviet Union. On November 10, Svoboda headlines read “The Famine in Ukraine Intensifies.” Datelined Kiev, the story read: “From all parts of Ukraine, the richest breadbasket of Europe, comes news of the growing famine. From all parts of Ukraine, cries of ‘Bread, bread, bread’ are heard, but there is none to be found.”

Holodomor

CHRONOLOGY OF THE FAMINE YEARS. PART X

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October 1932
During the month of October in 1932, the pages of Svoboda carried only a few news items about the famine in Ukraine. On October 1, Svoboda received news of the official Soviet press reactions to the situation in the Soviet Union. “The Soviet press has noticed that there is an increasing amount of anti-Bolshevik activity in the villages,” Svoboda reported. According to stories from the newspaper Pravda, kulaks stole not only grain from the collective farms but also machinery parts that were necessary for the grain harvest. Izvestia stated that the peasants were leaving collective farms en masse as a result of kulak agitation.

Holodomor

CHRONOLOGY OF THE FAMINE YEARS. PART IX

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September 1932
On September 3, 1932, Svoboda received news from Moscow that the Soviet press had started a campaign against the peasants and workers who were not meeting their production quotas. Soviet papers reported that these were the people responsible for the economic and food crises. According to Svoboda, in addition to the collectivization of farms, the peasants also had to deal with huge taxes payable to the government, and, as a result, food and products necessary for everyday life became impossible for them to obtain. On September 6, the Soviet newspaper Pravda reported that worms had destroyed one-third of the sugar beet crop in the Soviet Union. That same day, Svoboda also carried news of an article written by Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty that had appeared in The New York Times.

Holodomor

CHRONOLOGY OF THE FAMINE YEARS. PART VIII

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August 16-31, 1932
The headlines in the August 16, 1932 Svoboda read: “Famine in Ukraine Drives People to Death.” Reports from Bucharest reached Svoboda telling of the peasants’ attempts to escape hunger. They fled to Rumania, but while trying to cross the Dnister River many were shot and killed by Soviet border guards. On August 17, news from Moscow revealed that 25,000 miners in the Donetske Oblast coal basin left their jobs. Moscow gave three reasons for the workers leaving their jobs: there was nothing for them to eat, they did not have all the working materials they needed, they received no money for their labor.

Holodomor

CHRONOLOGY OF THE FAMINE YEARS. PART VII

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August 1-15, 1932
On August 3, 1932, Svoboda received news from Rivne in the Volhynia region, then under Polish rule, that peasants in Soviet-occupied eastern Ukraine were dying of starvation. The news predicted that the number of deaths would increase in the fall. It reported that the Soviet government had even admitted that there would not be enough grain to feed the peasants because only half of the land had been sown. Besides this, the last harvest had been poor and in some villages people had not seen bread since January. The news said that, instead of bread, the peasants ate straw, dried weeds, potatoes and all kinds of chaff.

Holodomor

CHRONOLOGY OF THE FAMINE YEARS. PART VI

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July 1932
By July 1932, reports about the tragic situation in Soviet-occupied Ukraine were seen on the pages of Svoboda on a more frequent basis. On July 11, 1932, a person named I. Sulyma wrote an article about the “breadbasket of Europe,” titled “Famine in Soviet Ukraine.” The author wrote about the history of famines on Ukrainian lands. He included the famine of 1651-53 under Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the famine in western Ukraine in 1847. In the year 1932, he wrote, famine was first observed in the regions of the Carpathian Mountains.

Holodomor

CHRONOLOGY OF THE FAMINE YEARS. PART V

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June 1932
On June 2, 1932, Svoboda reported that, according to Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party, a large portion of the recently harvested crops had spoiled. Pravda said the reason for the spoilage was disorganization on Soviet grain farms due to lack of skilled laborers responsible for overseeing the delivery of crops. Half a million tons were wasted and a special commission had been appointed to look into the situation, Pravda reported. On June 6, Svoboda reported on news published in a British daily, The Manchester Guardian, which had sent its Moscow correspondent to investigate the food situation throughout the Soviet Union and in Ukraine. After traveling through various cities, towns and villages the correspondent confirmed his hunch that provisions were very low throughout the areas.

Holodomor

CHRONOLOGY OF THE FAMINE YEARS. PART IV

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May 1932
On May 25, 1932, Svoboda received a lengthy letter from Hnat Porokhivsky, a man in Bucharest who had made contact with many of the refugees who had escaped to Rumania from Ukraine. He also collected news items from the Rumanian press about the peasant refugees who made it over to Bessarabia. In his letter, Mr. Porokhivsky says he had the opportunity to travel to the border near the Dnister. He cites the reasons Ukrainian peasants escaped to Rumania, on the basis of his talks with them. He writes that, according to the Rumanian press, which dutifully covered any news about Ukrainian refugees in the period between January 1 and March 13, it was recorded that the following number of people made it from Soviet-occupied Ukraine to Rumania: 315 men, 234 women, 283 boys and 223 girls.