˝I saw the ravages of the famine of 1932-33 in the Ukraine: hordes of families in rags begging at the railway stations, the women lifting up to the compartment window their starving brats which - with drumstick limbs, big cadaverous heads, puffed bellies - looked like embryos out of alcohol bottles; the old men with frostbitten toes sticking out of torn slippers. I was told that these were kulaks who had resisted the collectivization of the land.˝
(Arthur Koestler)

 

 

Shortage of grain in the Ukraine. The bulk of the crop is transported, or rather exported to Russia. The Ukrainian villages rise up against the Bolsheviks. The dictators´ response: artificial starvation. Confiscation of the peasants´ food reserves.

˝Now, and especially now, when there is cannibalism in the famine-stricken regions and hundreds - if not thousands - of corpses lie on the roads, are we able (and also duty-bound) to collect the Church´s assets in a most resolute and ruthless manner; what is more, in such a way that we do not baulk at breaking any resistance.
Lenin, March 19, 1922 to the OK(b)P KB. 

 

Stalin´s terrorist dictatorship condemned the Ukrainian people to death from starvation. He introduced this measure to break the backbone of the Ukrainian nation, to put an end to their dreams of independence and sovereignty. Stalin and his colleagues committed premeditated and deliberate genocide against the Ukrainian peasantry. He decreed: ˝The ethnic composition has to be altered˝. For the sake of this they committed a horrible crime. They brought about an artificial famine. They seized the corn from the Ukrainian peasants and exported it. Millions of innocent people had to pay with their lives for their program of agrarian collectivization and fanatical industrialization. The Ukrainian villages were occupied by Party workers brought in from outside in order to confiscate even the last scraps of food from the people. 352 thousand peasant farms were disposed of between 1928 and 1932. The hardest hit were the counties of Poltava, Sumi, Cherkassy, Kiev and Zhitomir. More than half of all the victims came from there. In the tragic year of 1932 the regions condemned to death by famine were surrounded by units of the army and the secret service. The people were hermetically sealed from the rest of the world. Only those with domestic passports were permitted to travel; that is how they bound the starving wretches to the soil. Meanwhile pigs were fed with Ukrainian carrots in neighbouring Poland, because they did not know what to do with their surplus. The Bolsheviks concealed the truth from the outside world. They did not ask, nor did they allow any foreign aid. They relied on fellow-travellers and hired pen-pushers to hoodwink Western public opinion.

The dictatorship confiscated the Ukrainian peasants´ grain according to a deliberate, precisely designed plan, and sold it abroad for foreign currency. On August 7, 1932, Stalin personally issued a law about ˝safeguarding socialist property˝. He decreed that no quarter be given in the collection of compulsory delivery quotas. He delivered the verdict that the death penalty be meted out without regard to age or gender, even for breaking a single stalk of corn. The discontented were exiled, and Russians and White Russians were settled in place of the millions who had perished in the famine. They changed the ethnic composition of the Ukraine. They wanted to break the Ukrainian people´s vigour. 25 thousand died each day.

In the spring of 1933 1000 died every hour.

17 men, women and children died every minute. From April 1932 to November 1933 5-8 million people perished.

Within 500 days, the number of victims equalled Hungary´s total population. ˝Famine spread along the streets. Not a single leaf remained on the bushes; the people had eaten them. Nor was there a single dog. They were all eaten.˝ ˝And the cart kept on moving along the streets to collect the bodies.

The neighbours ate my cousin´s three children. They ate them.˝ 

The third plague
1946-47

Drought and the burden of further unendurable forced delivery obligations afflicted the inhabitants of the Ukraine. Once again famine decimated the Ukrainian peasant villages. ˝First we had to fulfil our delivery obligations, only then could we think about ourselves. The quotas were not set according to what we were able to produce, but on the basis of what they wanted to extort from us. The prescribed figures aimed at eviscerating us. I knew that a catastrophe was inevitable. I received floods of letters. The head of one of the co-operatives, for instance, wrote the following: Comrade Khrushchev. We have delivered what the state had prescribed. We gave everything we possessed. Nothing was left for us. We are certain that the country and the Party won´t forget us. They will help.˝

As I had foreseen, a famine erupted. I received reports about people dying of hunger. Then cannibalism became rife. I was told that a human head and pieces of a human leg were found near the Vasziliko Bridge outside Kiev. The body had already been eaten. There were many similar cases. Kirichenko, the county secretary of Odessa described that he had inspected a co-operative to ascertain how they could get through the winter. ˝I witnessed a horrific scene. I saw a woman cutting up her dead child´s body on a table. ˝We have already eaten Manyechka. Now we´ll pickle Vanechka. It´ll do us for a while.˝  Can you imagine this? That woman lost her mind from hunger and butchered her own children.˝

(From the Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev) All the while the USSR exported corn to Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Poland. In 1946  282 thousand,
In 1947 520 thousand died of hunger.