Read Execution by Hunger Online
Authors: Miron Dolot
The idea of foraging in the river and on its banks seemed absurd after what we had just experienced, so we suddenly lost all interest in our hunting and fishing expedition, and headed back home.
When we told mother what we had seen in Prokop's house, she at first reacted to it, as always, very calmly. But she could not completely suppress her emotions for long. After asking us a few more questions, she suddenly turned away from us and gave way to her tears.
We spent the rest of that day preparing our hedgehogs for supper. Mykola expertly dressed them, as if he had been doing it all his young life. The roasted hedgehog meat with potatoes tasted heavenly.
After we had gone to bed, I could not fall asleep for a long time. My aunt's head staring at me from the floor with her glassy, frightened eyes was still in my mind.
Mother woke us up the next morning before sunrise to go to the house at the river to bury our dead relatives. By the time we arrived there, it was already broad daylight. It had to be a burial without coffins for we had no wood, nails, nor strength to fashion them, neither could we dig a grave. Instead, we used an abandoned potato pit for their remains. We wrapped them in their own hand-woven blankets, and slid them gently into the makeshift grave. After filling it with dirt, Mother said a little prayer, and I placed a wooden cross which I had made by tying together two sticks into the earth above them.
We could no longer cry. We had lived through so much sorrow, and had suffered so many tragic losses that we were left numb.
“Why did they have to die?” Mykola suddenly asked, interrupting the dead silence.
“I wish I knew,” Mother answered.
On the way home I was thinking about our own burial, and who would be left to bury us. I could think of no one.
B
Y THE beginning of May, our village had become a desolate place, horror lurking in every house and in every backyard. We felt forsaken by the entire world. The main road which had been the artery of traffic and the center of village life was empty and overgrown with weeds and grass. Humans and animals were rarely seen on it. Many houses stood dilapidated and empty, their windows and doorways gaping. The owners were dead, deported to the north, or gone from the village in search of food. Once these houses were surrounded by barns, stables, cattle enclosures, pigpens, and fences. Now only the remnants of these structures could be seen. They had been ripped apart and used as firewood.
Not even the trees were saved from the destruction. The willows, a common sight in Ukrainian villages, stood stark, stripped of branches. It had been too much for the starving villagers to cut down their heavy trunks, and so now they stood alongside the roads, monuments to the battle between the cold winter and the dying people. The fruit trees met the same fate. Half of the famous Ukrainian orchards had been destroyed and consumed as fuel. The remnants were in bloom: one could still see cherry blossoms, apricot blossoms, and blossoms of other trees. But the blooming this spring was different.
In the front yards, backyards, gardens, and all around the villagers' homes, the ground was pitted with open holes, reminders of the Bread Procurement Commissions' searches for “hidden foodstuffs.”
The village looked like a ghost town. It was as if the Black Death had passed through, silencing the voices of the villagers, the sounds of the animals and birds. The deathly quiet lay like a pall. The few domestic animals that miraculously survived the famine were looked upon as exotic specimens.
At the end of May 1933 the starvation abated. The mass hunger ceased. Vegetables and fruits were plentiful for everyone who was able to go out and look for them. Also, the authorities needed farm workers, and they had no choice but to supply the working kolhosp members with sufficient food rations to sustain their existence. Thus, the villagers who still managed to standânumb, oppressed, exhausted by starvation as they wereâtried their best to reach the kolhosp and earn their food rations, a piece of bread and a scoop or two of some buckwheat or millet gruel. Those who were not able to work were left at the mercy of their relatives or friends, provided any survived.
I was lucky. In spite of my wretchedness and exhaustion from starvation, my dream to attain higher education never left me. And because of this drive for further education I managed to escape from the village for good.
Thus, starved as I was, living in absolute poverty amidst corpses of farmers and their families, I nevertheless had been doing my utmost to complete my secondary education.
At that time, our village had a nine-year school which was a combined four-year elementary and five-year secondary school. Such a school prepared the students for higher education.
In 1933 I was a senior and our graduation was supposed to take place in June. But many of the members of our graduating class never saw their diplomas. With the famine's onslaught, our number decreased precipitously. Some died of starvation. Others left the school and went foraging for food. Still others managed to migrate to other parts of the Soviet Union, mainly to Russia, where there was no famine. Many were deported together with their families to faraway places, into exile. Consequently, early in March, our school was closed and those few of us who still held on had to fend for ourselves. But, in spite of all the odds, I wouldn't give up my dreams, and my persistence was crowned with success: I was accepted at the secondary school of a neighboring village and I graduated at the end of June. This was a turning point in my life. I decided then to escape. I cannot remember the date exactly, but it remains the most important day in my life.
One night, with a piece of bread in a bag and five
karbovantsi
, or rubles (less than one dollar), in my pocket, dressed in a patched pair of pants and an oversized shirt, and barefoot, I stole out of the village toward the county seat. There, I had heard, college preparatory courses were opened for those with secondary diplomas. Luck was with me: with the help of some good people, I was admitted to the courses, and after completing them, I eventually enrolled at the Teachers' College. I was graduated from it in four years and started my career as a secondary school teacher. Then World War II broke out and I became a soldier and, eventually, I was taken prisoner of war by the Germans and interned in
STALAG
3 in Germany.
After the war was over, knowing that all Soviet prisoners of war were declared deserters and traitors by Stalin's order and faced the firing squad, and because of my desire to live in the free world, I decided to stay in West Germany as a displaced person, and later on I emigrated to the United States where I found my new home.
My mother and my brother, who suffered with me, who shared with me the last morsel of food, and to whom I owe my survival, remained in the village. They had no other choice but to continue working on the collective farm. World War II separated us and what happened to them afterwards I don't know.
*
Though the Soviet authorities sought to conceal the tragedy for which their policies had been responsible, even the official statistics bear witness to the extent of the holocaust. Four million Kazakhs were listed in the USSR census of 1926, three million in that of 1939, a figure at least 1.5 million short of what the population should have been at the latter date, given normal growth. The bulk of starvation in Kazakhstan occurred during the first wave of collectivization, 1929â31.
2
A Chekist was a member of the original Soviet secret police, the Cheka, which is an acronym for Extraordinary Commission, or more precisely, All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Fighting Counterrevolution and Sabotage (1917â1922). It was succeeded by the GPU. The old title, Chekist, is still in use. Even today's members of KGB are often referred to as Chekists. Communist propaganda eulogizes them as national heroes.
3
“Cut your own throat” is an expression I use here to describe the new village administration, established at the onset of collectivization in which the farmers were forced to take active part and which eventually destroyed them. In other words, the farmers were put in a situation where they destroyed themselves through their own actions, i.e., they cut their own throats.
4
Propagandist was the official Communist title of a person whose duty it was to spread and disseminate Communist ideas and ideology. During the collectivization of farmers, the propagandists served as the eyes and ears of the Communist Party. They were the ones who introduced the Party's policy of collectivization to the population at “grassroots” level. They were usually appointed from among the Party and Komsomol members.
5
Agitators differed from propagandists in that they were supposed to stir up and mobilize the people for support of a certain course of action. But, in reality, there was not such a difference between them. Anyone with a mouth tuned to the Party line was qualified to be appointed an agitator. Even children were given this title and sent from house to house with propaganda materials in their hands and prefabricated phrases in their mouths.
6
The Ukrainian word kurkul (Russian kulak) was the official definition of a village usurer in the Soviet Union. Any farmer who employed hired labor, who possessed heavy machinery, or hired out such machinery, or contracted to work on other farms, who leased land for commercial purposes, etc., was branded kurkul. This definition found ready recognition in the West, and consequently we hear here that kurkul means a rich or well-to-do farmer. Such translation or interpretation of this epithet can be misleading because the Communists applied this label indiscriminately to all farmers, even to genuine paupers.
During the collectivization this label was widely used, and it became an epithet of abuse for all those farmers who refused to join the collective farm. The policy of “liquidation of kurkuls as a social class,” introduced by the Communist Party in 1929, resulted in the disappearance of millions of farmers labeled as kurkuls. Many of them were simply murdered; others were starved to death during the famine of 1932â1933 in Ukraine; and still others were deported to the “corrective labor camps” or to the concentration camps. The label kurkul was attached to anyone, even to nonfarmers, who showed the slightest sign of disagreement with or opposition to Communist agricultural policy during that time. The possession of a one-room house, a cow, and a few chickens, or the possession of a house with a tin roof or board floor was enough to be labeled as a kurkul.
7
Kolhosp is the Ukrainian acronym for collective economy or collective farm (
kolkhoz
in Russian). According to the statutes, a kolhosp was supposed to be a voluntary cooperative undertaking of a group of farmers who collectivized their land and agricultural implements and were paid in kind and money according to their labor days. But in reality, the kilhosp was forcibly imposed upon the farmers and came under complete control of the Communist Party and the government. It became nothing less than a state agricultural enterprise. The members of the kolhosp had no say in farm policy or in the distribution of income.
8
GPU is the abbreviation for Gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie, or State Political Administration. It is the name of the Soviet secret police which replaced the Cheka in February 1922. See also Chekist (note 2). In 1923, the GPU was renamed OGPU, which meant United State Political Administration. But the acronym GPU continued to be used popularly even after 1923. OGPU remained a separate institution until 1934 when it was absorbed into the NKVD, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs. In 1941, the People's Commissariat for State Security (in Russian, Narodnyi kommissariat gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti) was created, known under the acronym NKGB. Thus state security was divorced from the NKVD, but not for long. With the beginning of the war with Germany in June 1941, state security was returned to the NKVD until 1943. It existed as a separate agency until 1946. When the people's commissariats were redesignated as ministries, the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs became the Ministry of Internal Affairs (Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, or MVD as its abbreviation). The People's Commissariat for State Security became the Ministry of State Security (Ministerstvo gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, or MGB). Thus the NKVD and NKGB became the MVD and MGB. During the power struggle that followed Stalin's death, the MVD absorbed the MGB, but then the security service was once more divorced from the MVD. In March 1954, the state security agency emerged as the KGB, which is an acronym for Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, meaning the Committee for State Security.
9
Commissariat was the name given to central government departments, corresponding to ministries, during 1917â1946. In 1946, these People's Commissariats were renamed ministries.
10
A Party representative was the one who represented the Communist Party. But this designation does not express the true meaning of this title. It should be understood as “Party Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Representative,” one with unlimited and arbitrary power to command, control, and demand.
11
Commissar was the designation for high-ranking government officials in the USSR. The most important of these were the people's commissars, who in 1946 were renamed ministers. The title “commissar” was also widely used by high-ranking county officials.
12
MTS
is an abbreviation for Machine and Tractor Stations, a state enterprise which, until 1958, supplied all machine works for collective farms. For their services,
MTS
received payments in kind. Since January 1933, when the political sections were established,
MTS
became the main force behind the expropriation of agricultural products from farmers.