More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
accordion, bandura, and sopilka flute
Twenty-Five Thousanders, a contingent of the approximately 25,000 Russian-speaking Soviet volunteer activists deployed across Ukraine, who would be collectivizing their village.
“Just make it through today, and hope tomorrow will be better.”
“But those who do not give in are branded kulaks,” Tomas said. “What is a kulak, anyway? Anyone who disagrees with Stalin. Anyone who gets in the way of his big plan. They don’t like you, then you are a kulak, and they can do whatever they want with you!”
‘Look to the future.’’’
death is not the end? It’s just another reality. In the old world, we knew that. We welcomed the dead into our homes. We set places for them at the table at Christmas. Held feasts in their honor.
Since they had joined the collective, life had only become harder for all of them. They worked tirelessly, but still never seemed to have much food at home. Their small vegetable garden had helped, but for the first time in their lives, they had issues with people stealing the vegetables right from the yard.
activist with him was more of a boy. Most likely, he was a member of the Komsomol, Stalin’s youth group.
“What do you think being a mother is? It’s a constant battle. It’s endless fear. It’s continuous worry. And it’s always work! But it’s worth it,
it wasn’t only her body splitting, but a piece of her heart breaking off. That’s what being a mother was—ripping out a piece of your heart and giving it to your child.
The voice sounded young. Perhaps not a guard, but one of the Young Pioneers? Katya still couldn’t believe how thorough the Communist Party was in its indoctrination efforts. Even the school children were drafted into the Young Pioneers program, and encouraged to report anyone with illegal goods, including family members. And they did. Katya had been appalled when the neighbors down the road had been turned in by their ten-year-old son for hiding grain.
“Dear God,” Katya whispered, even though she had long ago given up asking anything from God.
People weren’t allowed to chop down trees or gather wood from the forest anymore because the state owned the woods. If they picked up a stick or log or took anything from the forest, they were stealing from the state. With no other option for firewood, Kolya and Katya had already dismantled some of the outbuildings in the cover of night and hauled the wood back home to use.
They put you on cattle cars and send you to the gulags. It’s very cold. They don’t give you blankets.”
forced famine,
Her family was in western Ukraine, which, during the time between the World Wars, was occupied by Poland. They didn’t have to deal with Stalin till World War II.”
stories about whole villages in eastern and central Ukraine being wiped out. People were deported by cattle cars to Siberia, like we read about in your Bobby’s journal, or forced to starve in their own homes after Stalin exported all of the food. Children were left at train stations by their parents in hopes someone would take pity on them and bring them home and feed them, but they rarely did. People died in the streets waiting for a crust of bread.”
“The worst were the stories of cannibalism. People spoke of being so desperate they ate dead bodies, and in extreme cases, killed other people to eat them.”
the famine was covered up pretty much until the Soviet Union fell, and there are still people who insist it never happened,”
“Stalin put on a good show, made collectivization sound great, and the press and his allies either bought it or ignored it. Some even lied. Walter Duranty, from the New York Times, completely refuted that a famine was happening. Hell, he won a Pulitzer for his articles on it. Nobody wanted to believe the ‘breadbasket of Europe’ was being starved to death.”
“After I have done all I can here, I am going to try to sneak out of the country and go to America.”
the state had locked down their village and banned peasants from traveling to the cities,
I won’t do it. I won’t be that person.”
Stalin must be proud. The activists and his OGPU had done their jobs well.
The OGPU disbanded and became the NKVD. They continued to purge enemies of the state at an alarming rate, but they loosened the starvation noose that had once choked the villagers and allowed more food to trickle back into the countryside.
Look to the future. Life would move on with or without her, so she chose to fight. She chose to live.
“After the famine, things never went back to normal. Collective farming changed village life forever, and the Soviets continued to purge us, deporting people to gulags for the slightest reason.
‘When the Germans invaded during the war, we thought things might finally get better, but they were as bad as the Soviets. They destroyed our villages, killed people, and they took Ukrainians to use in their factories and on their farms in Germany. Lots of Ukrainians.”
“We traveled through Poland and ended up in the Allied occupied zone of Germany when the war ended. After that, we spent a few years in the Displaced Persons camps.
there were so many refugees. Millions of displaced people with no home, no country, no family. It was like searching for a needle in a haystack.
no one spoke of those things. Stalin denied the famine, and the world believed him because they needed his force to beat the Nazis. Speaking of it or sharing my journal would have only drawn attention to us, and people were arrested for such things and sent away to labor camps for decades.
“The Soviet reach was far. In the camps after the war, they were repatriating people like us back to the USSR every day, telling them they were going home but really sending them to gulags and labor camps for ‘collaborating with the enemy’. Even here, in America, we were afraid to say anything.”
“Life is a series of choices, each one pushing you towards the next. Maybe if I’d chosen differently in the very beginning, things would have been better.” “Or maybe they would have been worse,” Cassie said. Bobby shrugged one bony shoulder. “Maybe. But what’s done is done, and I can’t change it now.
Polish, Soviet, and German occupations,
Holodomor—or death by hunger—was devastatingly brutal and only one part of Joseph Stalin’s larger assault against the Ukrainian people.
1932 and 1933, one in every eight Ukrainians died in this manmade famine. And it was absolutely manmade. During this time, the USSR exported tons of apples and tomato paste, barrels of pickles, honey, milk, and almost two million tons of grain in 1932 alone. Stores of crops, rotting sometimes as they awaited exportation, sat at railway stations and on the sides of roads under guard while the people starved within sight of them. Grain procurement quotas were kept unreasonably high, even though the spring seed grain had already been seized and the farmers of Ukraine had nothing left to give.
Across the Soviet Union, food shortages resulting from the chaos of collectivization and dekulakization, and Stalin’s refusal to lower grain quotas in the wake of these issues, led to an estimated 8.7 million deaths. This included people...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
In August 1932, Stalin issued a statewide decree known as “The Law of Five Stalks of Grain,” calling for ten years’ imprisonment or death for anyone caught taking any state-owned property—which, to be clear, was everything—even a handful of grain, rotten potatoes from a field, or fish from a stream. Armed activists patrolled the countryside and sat in watchtowers, shooting, beating, and arresting men, woman, and children as they tried to avoi...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Stalin’s measures affected the entire region, but he targeted Ukraine with further brutal decrees in an attempt to subjugate the Ukrainian nationalism and culture he saw as a threat to Soviet ideology. Guards closed Ukraine’s borders and a new internal passport system effectively prohibited travel between villages and cities, locking Ukraine into one giant death camp. The state began ”blacklisting” communities that didn’t meet their grain quotas, leading to punishments such as the banning of trading or receiving any food or manufactured goods—including kerosene, salt, and matches—and new
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
3.9 million Ukrainians died in the Holodomor.
decimation of Ukrainian religious, cultural, and political leaders—the
Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine and Miron Dolot’s Execution by Hunger.
