Fear even affected correspondence between officials. In March the secretary of the local government in Dnipropetrovsk wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, complaining that numerous cases of starvation, swelling and deaths from hunger had received no official attention because lower-level officials had failed to report them: “It was considered to be anti-party, reprehensible even to react to them.” In one case a village party secretary who was himself swollen from hunger had failed to report anything, so afraid was he of censure.
