Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

by Anna Reid

In the spring of 1928, eighteen months before the first batch of Ukrainian intelligentsia were put on trial in Kharkiv, requisitioning brigades started appearing in the villages, the first time this had happened since the end of ‘War Communism’ seven years earlier.

A group of activists, some local, some from nearby towns, would arrive, call a meeting, and demand ‘voluntary’ surrender of a certain quantity of grain or meat. The villagers, naturally, usually voted against. Thereupon the activists denounced the village spokesmen as counter-revolutionary kulaks, and put them under arrest or confiscated their property.

The meeting was kept in session until the remainder changed their minds. The confiscations provoked widespread resistance – riots, looting and the murder...

The next stage, announced by Stalin in December 1929, was the ‘liquidation of the kulaks as a class’.11 In practice, this meant the arrest and deportation of anybody who resisted collectivisation – that is to say, of any peasant who refused to give up his land, tools and livestock in favour of b...

Singled out were richer peasants, priests, and those who could write or read – in other words, all the villages’ natural leaders. Like the purges, de...

Provincial OGPU offices came up with a total of ‘kulaks’ to be ‘eliminated’, and distributed it among local troikas made up of a soviet member, a Party official and...

Denunciations were encouraged, giving ample scope for malice. ‘It was so easy to do a man in,’ wrote Grossman. ‘You wrote a denunciation; you did not even have to sign it. All you had to say was that he had paid people to wo...

In some places, dekulakisation was only applied to heads of households, in others to entire families. Protests – very common – from local officials that there were...

Rumours of incredible cruelty in the villages in connection with the liquidation of the kulaks were passed from mouth to mouth. We saw long trains of cattle cars filled with peasants passing through Kharkov, presumably on their way to the tundras of the North, as part of their ‘liquidation’. Communist officials were being murdered in the villages and recalcitrant peasants were being executed en masse. Rumors also circulated about the slaughter of livestock by peasants in their ‘scorched earth’ resistance to forced collectivisation. A Moscow decree making the unauthorised killing of livestock a capital crime confirmed the worst of these reports.

The railroad stations of the city were jammed with ragged, hungry peasants fleeing their homes. ‘Bezprizorni’, homeless children, who had been so much in evidence in the civil war and famine years were again everywhere. Beggars, mostly country people but also some city people, again appeared on the streets.

The press told glorious tales of accomplishment. The Turkestan–Siberian railway completed. New industrial combinats opened in the Urals, in Siberia, everywhere. Collectivization 100 per cent completed in one province after another. Open letters of ‘thanks’ to Stalin for new factories, new housing projects . . . Which was the reality, which the illusion? Th...

We lived in Pokrovnaya. My father didn’t want to join the kolkhoz. All kinds of people argued with him and took him away and beat him but still he wouldn’t go in. They shouted he was a kulak agent . . . We had a horse, a cow, a heifer, five sheep, some pigs and a barn. That was all. Every night the constable would come and take papa to the village soviet. They asked him for grain and didn’t believe that he had no more . . . For a whole week they wouldn’t let father sleep and they beat him with sticks and revolvers till he was black and blue and swollen all over . . .

Then one morning . . . strangers came to the house. One of them was from the GPU and the chairman of our soviet was with him too. Another man wrote in a book everything that was in the house, even the furniture and our clothes and pots and pans. Then wagons arrived and everything was taken away . . .

Mamochka, my dear little mother, she cried and prayed and fell on her knees and even father and big brother Valya cried and sister Shura. But it did no good. We were told to get dressed and take along some bread and salt pork, onio...

They put us all in the old church. There were many other parents and children from our village, all with bundles and all weeping. There we spent the whole night, in the dark, praying and crying, praying and crying. In the morning about thirty families were marched down the road surrounded by militiamen. Peopl...

At the station there were many other people like us, from other villages. It seemed like thousands. We were all crushed into a stone barn but they wouldn’t let my dog Volchok come in though he’d followed us all the way down ...

After a while we were let out and driven into cattle cars, long rows of them, but I didn’t see Volchok anywhere and the guard kicked me when I asked. As soon as our car was filled up so that there was no room for more, even standing up, it was locked from the outside. We all shrieked and prayed to the Holy Virgin. Then the train started. No one knew where...

Near Kharkov my sister Shura and I were allowed out to get some water. Mama gave us some money and a bottle and said to try and buy some milk for our baby brother who was very sick. We begged the guard so long that he let us go out which he said was against his rules. Not far away...

When we told these people who we were they began to cry. They gave us something to eat right away, then filled the bottle with milk and wouldn’t take the money. Then we ran back to the station. But we...

Eighty young activists were summoned to a pep talk by the local Party committee. Dnipropetrovsk region had fallen behind schedule, they were told. Kulaks were sabotaging livestock; the grain plan had not been fulfilled. What the local soviets needed was ‘an injection of Bolshevik iron’. This was no time for ‘squeamishness or rotten sentimentality’; they were to go forth and ‘act like Bolsheviks worthy of Comrade Stalin’.15

Kravchenko was despatched to Podgorodnoye, a large village not far from Dnipropetrovsk. Collectivisation had already reduced it to a shambles. Crops stood unharvested in the fields; farm machinery lay scattered about in the open, rusting and broken. Emaciated cattle wandered the farmyards, unfed and caked in manure. Kravchenko spent the next weeks persuading the peasants to bring in what remained of the harvest while his colleagues went about the business of grain requisitioning and further dekulakisation. He claims – not wholly convincingly – to have been profoundly surprised and shocked when he saw at firsthand just what their methods were:

Evening was falling when I drove into the village, with several companions. Immediately we realised that something was happening. Agitated groups stood around. Women were weeping. I hurried to the Soviet building. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked the constable. ‘Another round-up of kulaks,’ he replied. ‘Seems the dirty business will never end. The GPU and District Committee people came this morning.’ A large crowd was gathered outside the building. Policemen tried to scatter them, but they came back. Some were cursing. A number of women an...

Inside the Soviet building, Arshinov was talking to a GPU official. Both of them were smiling, apparently exchanging pleasantries of some sort. In the back yard, guarded by GPU soldiers with drawn revolvers, stood about twenty peasants, young and old, with bundles on their backs. A few o...

For some reason, on this occasion, most of the families were being left behind. Their outcries filled the air. As I came out of the Soviet house again, I saw two militiamen leading a middle-aged peasant. It was obvious that he had been manhandled – his face was black and blue and hi...

As I stood there, distressed, ashamed, helpless, I heard a woman shouting in an unearthly voice. Everyone looked in the direction of her cry and a couple of GPU men started running towards her. The woman, her hair streaming, held a flaming sheaf of grain in her hands. Before anyone could reach her, she had tossed the burnin...

‘Infidels! murderers!’ the distraught woman was shrieking. ‘We worked all our lives for our house! You won’t have it. The flames will have it!’ Her cries turned suddenly into crazy laughter. Peasants rushed into the burning house and began to drag out furniture. There was something macabre, unreal, about the whole scene – the fire, the wailing, the demented woman, the peasants being dragged through the mud and herded together for deportation. The most unearthly touch, for me, was the sight of Arsh...

The fate of the dekulakised peasants was similar to that of the purge victims. Herded into cattle-cars, they were transported across Russia to labour camps in Siberia, Central Asia and the far north.

Deprived of food, heat or water, up to 20 per cent of deportees, especially old people and children, died on the way. One of the main transit points was Vologda, where the corpses were unloaded and the survivors crammed into empty churches. ‘In a little park by the station,’ an eyewitness wrote of another transit town,’ ‘dekulakised peasants from the Ukraine lay down and died.

You got used to seeing corpses there in the morning; a wagon would pull up and the hospital stable-hand, Abram, would pile in the bodies. Not all died; many wandered through the dusty mean little streets, dragging bloodless blue legs, swollen from dr...

From the railheads, the peasants marched or rode in wagons to their final destinations deep in the forest or taiga. Husbands and wives were often split up with promises that they would be reunited later, never to see each other again. Some were put to work in mines and logging camps; ...

A German communist described how in Kazakhstan, kulaks from Ukraine were simply abandoned in empty wilderness: ‘There were just some pegs stuck in the ground with little notices on them saying: Settlement No. 5, No. 6, and so on. The peasants were brought here and told that now they had...

Many deportees, especially young men, escaped. Others managed to establish viable settlements, only to find themselves dekulakised all over again. But for most, deportation was equivalent to a death sentence.

Conquest estimates that between 10 and 12 million peasants were dekulakised up to the spring of 1933, when mass deportation (though not that of individual families) was brought to an end, and that within two years about a third of them had died. ‘In hardly four months,’ wrote a survivor of a camp on the river Dvina, ‘it was necessary to construct several cemeteries . . . cemeteries so large that it would have taken a big European city several years to have as many.’

When winter struck the arctic Magadan peninsula whole camps perished, down to the last guard and guard-dog. Dekulakisation left the villages in ruins. For every group of deportees, at least half as many people again fled the countryside of their own accord. Though starvation had already set in ...

They searched in the house, in the attic, shed, pantry and the cellar. Then they went outside and searched in the barn, pig pen, granary and the straw pile. They measured the oven and calculated if it was large enough to hold hidden grain behind the brickwork. They broke beams in the attic, pounded on the floor of the house, tramped th...

In 1931 there had still been some grain to hide. By 1932 there was none. Under a decree defining all standing crops as state property, watchtowers were set up around the fields, manned by armed guards. Anyone spotted picking corn was arrested and deported or summarily shot, as was anyone still hiding food. ‘The alert eye of the GPU,’ ran a typical press announcemen...

One thousand five hundred death sentences are reported from the Kharkiv court for one month alone. A woman was sentenced to ten years, writes Conquest, ‘for cutting a hundred ears of ripening corn, from her own plot, two weeks after her husband had died of starvation. A father of four got ten years for the same offence. A...

Again we were oppressed by the unnatural silence. Soon we came to an open space which, no doubt, was once the market-place. Suddenly Yuri gripped my arm until it hurt: for sprawled on the ground were dead men, women and children, thinly covered with dingy straw. I counted seventeen. As we watched, a wagon drove up and two men loaded the corpses on the wagon like cord-wood.

After a hearty meal with local Party officials, they did the rounds of the houses:

What I saw . . . was inexpressibly horrible. On a battlefield men die quickly, they fight back, they are sustained by fellowship and a sense of duty. Here I saw people dying in solitude by slow degrees, dying hideously, without the excuse of sacrifice for a cause. They had been trapped and left to starve, each in his home, by a political decision made in a far-off capital around conference and banquet tables . . .

The most terrifying sights were the little children with skeleton limbs dangling from balloon-like abdomens. Starvation had wiped every trace of youth from their faces, turning them into tortured gargoyles; only in their eyes lingered the remainder of childhood. Everywhere we found men and women l...

We knocked at a door and received no reply. We knocked again. Fearfully, I pushed the door open and we entered through a narrow vestibule into the one-room hut. First my eyes went to an icon light above a broad bed, then to the body of a middle-aged woman stretched on the bed, her arms crossed on her breast over a clean embroidered Ukrainian blouse. At the foot of the bed stood an old woman, and ne...

The nightmarishness of the scene was not in the corpse on the bed, but in the condition of the living witnesses. The old woman’s legs were blown up to incredible size, the man and the chil...

Peasants tried to escape the famine by fleeing to the cities. Though checkpoints were set up at railway stations and on the main roads, thousands managed to evade them, only to die ignored on the city streets. ‘People hurried about on their affairs,’ wrote Grossman of Kiev, ‘some going to work, some to the movies, and the streetcars were running – and there were the starving children, old men, girls, crawling among them on all fours.’

Grain collections were officially halted in March 1933, by which time about a fifth of the entire rural population – 5 million people – lay dead. The size of the death-roll varied widely village by village. In some only one in ten families died; elsewhere whole communities perished. The euphemism used on death certificates – when they were issued at all – was ‘exhaustion’. Where the bodies were too numerous for burial, squads of Komsomol members put up black flags and ‘no entry’ signs. William Chamberlin, Moscow correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor, was one of the first foreign journalists to be allowed into the famine areas, in September 1933:

Quite by chance the last village we visited was at once the most terrible and the most dramatic. It is called Cherkass, and it lies about seven or eight miles to the south of Byelaya Tserkov, a Ukrainian town south-west of Kiev. Here the ‘normal’ mortality rate of 10 per cent had been far exceeded.

On the road to the village, former ikons with the face of Christ had been removed; but the crown of thorns had been allowed to remain – an appropriate symbol for what the village had experienced. Coming into the village, we found one deserted house after another, with window-panes fallen in, crops growing mixed with weeds in gardens with no one to harve...

‘There was Anton Samchenko, who died with his wife and sister; three children were left. With Nikita Samchenko’s family, the father and Mikola and two other children died; five children were left. Then Grigory Samchenko died with his son Petro; a wife and daughter are left. And Gerasim Samchenko died with four of his children; only the wife is still living. And Sidor Odnorog died with his wife and two ...

Chamberlin was appalled, conviced both that collectivisation failed to justify ‘organised famine’, and that the famine was intentional, ‘quite deliberately employed as an instrument of national policy’.

Killing more people than the First World War on all sides put together, the famine of 1932–3 was, and still is, one of the most under-reported atrocities of human history, a fact that contributes powerfully to Ukraine’s persistent sense of victimisation.