Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust

CHAPTER 1

I GREW UP in a typical Ukrainian village, in the county of Cherkasy, some hundred miles south of Kiev, the capital city of Ukraine. My village stood on the north bank of the Tiasmyn River, one of the many tributaries of the Dnipro (Dnieper) River, and it was beautiful. Green hills rose in the south behind the river, and the rich tar-black soil of the plains stretched to the north. The plains were divided into strips of fields. Every spring and summer these strips would disappear beneath miles of wheat. Waves of rich grain, green in spring and golden in summer, gently rolled in the summer breeze. After the harvest, the fields again bared their soil as if in mourning for their lost beauty. Near the end of the year, the new cycle of color—winter’s white—blended with the horizon of the plains into the gray-blue frosty sky.

It was a large village, with some eight hundred households comprising a population of nearly four thousand people. In the center stood the communal buildings—the church, school, store, local government building, post office, and the house where the doctor lived and worked. A square in the center served as the playground, meeting place, and market.

As was customary in all Ukrainian villages, the farmers’ houses were grouped together. The unpaved streets were nameless, although each house was numbered. Through the village ran a road, also unpaved, connecting us with the outside world.

Our houses were of simple design and construction. They were rudely beamed, plastered with clay, and usually thatched with straw. A tin roof was considered a sign of prosperity, and I recall few such roofs in the village. Most of the houses had only one room which was used for all purposes, including cooking and sleeping. Wooden floors were also rare; like the walls, the floors were made of clay. But no matter how plainly they were constructed, and how primitive our living conditions, the houses were clean and neat.

Each home had its plot for flowers and a few fruit trees, and chickens, geese, and ducks were kept in the backyards. Barns housed a horse, one or two cows, and a few pigs. A dog would usually be lounging on the porch or at the gate.

In our poor and overpopulated village only a few farmers owned more than fifty acres of land. But though destitute, the villagers were neither hopeless nor forlorn. After a hard day’s work in the spring and summer, the young people gathered in neighborhoods at the crossroads and danced, sang, and played long into the night. Families visited relatives and friends, or enjoyed plays, dances, parties, and other kinds of entertainment, all accompanied by much eating and drinking. Though it was prohibited, the villagers usually found a way to distill their own brandy.

Our village was a close-knit community. It was customary for neighbors to help one another with their labors or in emergencies, and after the work was done they would join in a party. An accordion player and a fiddler, hired for the occasion, provided music for dancing, and food and drinks were always served. Such a party would often last until dawn.

We were completely free in our movements. We took pleasure trips and traveled freely looking for jobs. We went to big cities and neighboring towns to attend weddings, church bazaars, and funerals. No one asked us for documents or questioned us about our destinations. We were free individuals.

Hospitality was a matter of honor. Anyone who happened to visit us was welcomed into our homes. We might not have had enough to eat ourselves, but we always offered our visitors the best we could.

Even though we were in continual want for various necessities of life, we were completely free from fear. We never locked our houses during the daytime. Old and young could come and go freely in and out of our village without fear of molestation.

The coming of winter was greeted with joy by us all, and it seemed to me the more severe the winter, the greater the excitement, especially among us young people. There was no end to ice-skating, skiing, and sledding. The cold heavy frost, deep snow, and blizzards made winter a time of leisure for the farmers, provided there had been a good harvest. Throughout the short winter days and long nights, we spent most of the time in our homes. No one complained of the cold, for firewood was plentiful. After caring for the domestic animals and completing other daily chores, we were content in our homes—reading, writing, telling stories, playing, singing, and dancing.

In 1929, we began to hear rumors that the Communist Party and the Soviet government had decreed the collectivization of all farmers. Collectives in the form of a TSOZ (or SOZ), artil, commune, or radhosp (Russian, sovkhoz) had, in fact, been in existence for a long time. Actually, except for the radhosp and commune, these collectives or the agricultural cooperatives, as they were known, were not communist innovations, for they existed in prerevolutionary times. They were organized as a free cooperation of farmers. Security of the market, state credits, and mutual help with farming implements and seeds, were the main incentives for their organization. In Ukraine two types of such agricultural cooperatives were known: the TSOZ and artil. TSOZ stood for the Association for the Joint Cultivation of Land. Only labor and land, or part of them, and heavy agricultural implements were collectivized. Livestock, dwellings, and even some land could be owned and operated privately. This was a rather loosely organized association, and the membership could easily be dissolved.

Artil (artel in Russian) meant “team,” or a group of people belonging to the same kind of vocation, organized in a production cooperative. Agricultural artils were associations of farmers who pooled together all their land and other means of production, as well as their labor and draft animals. They were paid for their labor in kind and money according to the amount of work put in. Members of an artil could keep their main dwelling, a cow, and such animals as sheep, goats, swine, as well as poultry. During the total collectivization in the Soviet Union, the artil was accepted as the basic form for what is known today as the collective farm.

Agricultural communes which, according to Communist theory, were supposed to be the highest form of rural organizational life and labor, were established during the period of War Communism (the Civil War of 1918–1921). Usually they were set up on estates of former local landlords. Agricultural communes were based not only on collective farming, but also on communal living in communal houses, with communal kitchens, nurseries, and so forth. The members of such communes were deprived of private possessions, except for their personal belongings. These communes received great support from the Communist Party and its government, but nevertheless, they proved to be a failure, and consequently were either dissolved or, in most cases, turned into state farms.

Radhosp is the Ukrainian term for sovkhoz, an acronym for Soviet farm. In reality, it was a state-run agricultural enterprise with hired farm laborers who were paid regular wages. The agricultural laborers working on such farms were not farmers at all, in the full meaning of the word; they had no voice in distribution of the profits, nor in management.

All these collectives were organized on a voluntary basis and thus seemed to present no threat to independent farming. Moreover, the farmers had often witnessed the collapse of these types of collective farms, and therefore laughed at the rumors of collectivization. Why would any government wish to repeat its mistakes? But they laughed too soon.

Sometime toward the end of December 1929, when the rumors of compulsory collectivization were becoming a reality, strangers came to our village. Soon we learned that they were the official representatives of the Communist Party and the Soviet government. They had been assigned to the village to organize a collective farm.

The head of the group of about ten men was known as the “Twenty-Five Thousander.” His collaborators were called propagandists. Such titles were strange to our ears, but it did not take long for us to learn their meanings.

To carry out compulsory collectivization, the Central Committee of the Communist Party had mobilized twenty-five thousand of its most active and loyal Party members throughout the country. Consequently, the members of this elite group of Communists became known as the Twenty-Five Thousanders. We called them simply Thousanders. After a brief period of instructions in the methods of collectivization, these Thousanders were sent to various localities. To make their mission more effective, they were given practically unlimited power. They were responsible directly to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine.

Each Thousander was accompanied by an entourage of propagandists. They were selected from among those in each county (raion) who were Communists or members of the Komsomol, the Young Communist League.

The Thousander and his propagandists were people who had always lived in cities—professors, teachers, and factory workers. When these strangers appeared in our village, some of them tried to make contact by attempting to strike up conversations with passers-by. Others simply walked around, curiously looking at everything and everybody, as if they had never seen anything like the countryside and country folk before.

Their personal appearance amused us. Their pale faces and their clothes were totally out of place in our village surroundings. Walking carefully to avoid getting snow on their polished shoes, they were an alien presence among us.

Although they exhibited curiosity and enthusiasm about their new environment, they could not hide their ignorance of country ways. The villagers laughed at their citified behavior, and within a few days the strangers had become the butt of many funny stories.

The name of our Thousander was Zeitlin—Comrade Zeitlin, to be exact. This was the only name by which we knew him, although he stayed in our village for a few months. Comrade Zeitlin was to us more the embodiment of the regime he represented than a person. We did learn that he had come from Kiev, and that he had been a member of the Communist Party even before the revolution. Although none of us knew his previous occupation, it was obvious that he knew little about country life. Nor could anyone determine his nationality. He spoke some Ukrainian, but he certainly was not a native.

Comrade Zeitlin was rather short with a huge head resting on his narrow shoulders. We never saw him smile; he always seemed to be preoccupied with some problem. He spoke rarely, and when he did, it was only about official matters in a language of Party slogans and trite phrases. Only occasionally would he greet a villager, and then in a disrespectful manner.

All Party and government representatives who came to our village wore some kind of weapon, usually carried discreetly. But Comrade Zeitlin was probably unsure of his popularity in our village because he always prominently displayed a revolver on his person. He assumed authority without delay. On the day of his arrival, he began going from house to house. Many stories originated from these visits. One anecdote about Zeitlin was especially popular: It was said that while he was visiting a farmer’s stable, a mare happened to twitch her tail in his face, depositing some dung on him.

“Woo,” he growled angrily, “that damn cow!” and he kicked the mare’s hoof. The mare responded in kind, and the farmer had to help the flustered Comrade Zeitlin to his feet.

The mare’s blow failed to deter him from his inspection. In the cattle pen, he reversed his error. Perhaps to convince the farmer that he still was not afraid of animals, he approached a calf.

“What a fine colt!” he exclaimed.

The farmer was a polite man, and hesitated to correct his visitor after the first mistake, but after the second, he gently remarked:

“This is not a colt. It is a calf; the offspring of a cow. The colt is the offspring of a mare.”

“Colt or calf,” Comrade Zeitlin retorted, “it does not matter. The world proletarian revolution won’t suffer because of that.”

The latter phrase was his favorite expression, although at that time we villagers did not understand its meaning. But we were amused by a representative of the Party and government not knowing the difference between horses and cows and their young.

Comrade Zeitlin did know his job, however. He also knew the Party’s instructions as to how it was to be done. While the villagers were entertaining and diverting themselves with stories about Comrade Zeitlin’s ignorance, the center of the village was alive with activity. Messengers called designated villagers to the center, thereby instilling both curiosity and fear in us. Other strangers, often high-ranking army officers, appeared in our village almost daily. Often we would see the Thousander with both village officials and strangers inspecting houses.

One day, a team of telephone workmen arrived and quickly laid a telephone line between our village and the county center. Only a few villagers knew what a telephone was, but even they probably could not have guessed the real reason for bringing the telephone into our village. The officials did not neglect to point to it as a symbol of the great progress the village was making under the Communist regime.