She and others like her believed they had no choice, or were afraid that refusal would mean arrest or even death. The majority of the thousands of long prison sentences handed out to Ukrainian communists at that time were for people who had failed, sometimes deliberately, to put pressure on their neighbours to give up all their food. By the time of the grain collections, Balytsky’s purge of the Ukrainian Communist Party had begun, and leaders at every level knew that they were at risk of arrest and execution.
