Chapter 4

Extermination

From 1929 to 1932, Stalin attempted to repeat a communist onslaught by curtailing the NEP and consolidating state ownership of the means of production. Modernization of industry at the expense of agriculture had precedents in history. Japan modernized successfully through taxation of agriculture.¹ Soviet leaders in their attempt to become competitive with the West (or East) could choose from a plethora of scientific methods. Seemingly, agricultural research institutes were created in Soviet Ukraine for this purpose to only see their staff executed, imprisoned, or exiled at the peak of the Holodomor.² Then, as now, it was evident that small farms could not compete with large farms in their output. After all, in the United States, contemporary supersized family farms with $1 million or more in annual sales are only 4 percent of total farms and produce two-thirds of the country’s agricultural output.³ Not all large farms are profitable; the key to their financial health is efficient management.⁴ What was the goal of Soviet managers in the 1930s when the Great Depression hit the world market? What was the goal of collectivizing agriculture at the cost of expropriating private property and forcing grain growers to surrender their entire crop while subsisting on grass? Decisions were made at a confluence of utopia and terror. Under the cover of the First Five-Year Plan, once the “brain” of the nation was blown out as a result of the SVU trial,⁵ the next prong of the coordinated attack targeted the body of the nation, its land tillers. The ultimate stage of genocide unfolded, the extermination by starvation of grain growers in Soviet Ukraine and areas inhabited by Ukrainian farmers in other parts of the Soviet Union in 1932–1933. Among the tactics used by Stalin and his henchmen were requisitions, blacklists, and blockades.⁶ The concurrent curtailment of Ukrainization spelled out death to carriers of national tradition, culture, and language—in Lemkin’s words the “soul” of the nation. To survive meant to accommodate or assimilate to the repressive regime.

REBELLIONS

Unlike Lenin, who retreated from an analogous situation, Stalin mobilized the entire repressive apparatus to realize communist doctrine to its fullest extent, no matter what the cost. Kul′chyts′kyi, a scholar of the Soviet agricultural policy, has argued that total collectivization of agriculture was not “total” because it left farmers with remnants of private ownership of the means of production on their own garden plots. The problem was that “the state’s attempt to replace free trade between town and country with barter failed.”⁷ The state did not generate sufficient industrial output to make exchange between town and country equitable. Consequently, contractual agreements between state and farmers turned into forced requisitioning. Predictably, “surplus appropriation” (in Russia prodrazverstka), in fact confiscations, from 1930 to 1932, brought the state to the brink of economic collapse.⁸

Soviet historiography maintains that, after fulfilling their quotas for delivering grain, farmers stopped working on collective farms to focus on their private garden plots as a means of survival. What is often neglected is the fact that a trudoden′, a blend of trud and den′ or a “workday” as a form of payment for workers on collective farms, was inadequate because farms often could not compensate for workdays. This form of payment was introduced in 1930 because the state had no functioning banking system for money circulation. By spring 1931, this system of payment was imposed on 84 percent of collective farms in Ukraine. Payments were disbursed twice a year, an advance payment in July or August, and the full payment by the decision of the farm administration at the end of the year. Payments for agricultural work were stratified into five categories, averaging one or two workdays, or 60 kopeks to 1 krb. 20 kopeks. There was no minimum payment; it was determined by a variety of factors: crop sizes, principles of distribution, and grain procurement plans. For instance, ploughing 6 hectares of farm land was equivalent to 1.5 workdays, whereas digging out 600 quintal of potatoes or a ton of sugar beets was equivalent to 1.75 workdays. Distribution of seed grain was forbidden until collective farms fulfilled imposed grain procurement quotas. In fall 1932, collective farmers were stripped of one-third of their earned workdays for not fulfilling grain procurement quotas, and in the blacklisted collective farms, workers were stripped of their grain seed advances. In 1933, 48 percent of collective farms in Ukraine did not pay workers for their earned workdays, leaving 4 million farmers and 14 million of their dependents without means to survive.⁹

By 1932, most farms in Soviet Ukraine had been already collectivized.¹⁰ Survivors and witnesses testify that two-thirds of victims were those who worked on collective farms.¹¹ There were no farms to collectivize because Ukraine was singled out to be the first republic to comply with the Soviet experiment.¹² In other words, collectivization was not the main cause of the high death toll during the genocidal famine in Soviet Ukraine but rather the confiscations of everything edible—to the last kernel of wheat or potato or a pot of borsch on the stove.

Soviet historians have argued that Stalin saved the collective farm system, as well as his own post of general secretary of the TsK VKP(b), through the use of organized terror. According to Kul′chyts′kyi, Stalin achieved this in two ways: first, by delaying Karl Marx’s requirement that trade be replaced with barter from the first phase (socialism in Marxist theory as) to the second utopian phase (communism), in which the distribution of material goods according to need would be established, and second, by masterminding a famine.¹³ Yet, the economic argument is insufficient to explain the intent of genocidal killing. The famine was organized on territories where non-Russian inhabitants predominated—all of Soviet Ukraine and ethnically Ukrainian regions in the North Caucasus, even as far as Central Asian republics—the territories under Moscow’s economic colonization.¹⁴ Russian writers, among them Sergei Maksimov, wrote that “while Ukrainians are dying from starvation, we are drinking tea with jam, white bread, butter, cheese, and buns.”¹⁵

The height of the drive to liquidate small farm proprietors came in February and March of 1930, concurrently with the trial of the nationally conscious Ukrainian intelligentsia. Thousands of Communist Party and Communist Youth League activists were mobilized for the grain procurement campaign.¹⁶ In his novel Forever Flowing, Vasily Grossman included a confession of a Communist Party plenipotentiary Anna Mikhailova, a war widow from southern Russia, who arrived in Soviet Ukraine to answer the party’s call for intensification of grain procurement.¹⁷ She finds a soul mate in the protagonist of the novel and confides in him that members of grain procurement brigades fell under the spell of propaganda:

True, they were under a spell—they had sold themselves on the idea that the so-called “kulaks” were pariahs, untouchables, vermin. They would not sit down at a “parasite’s” table; the “kulak” child was loathsome; the young “kulak” girl was lower than a louse. They looked on the so-called “kulaks” as cattle, loathsome, repulsive: they had no souls; they stank; they all had venereal diseases; they were enemies of the people and exploited the labor of others.¹⁸

Propaganda that instigated hatred against people marked for annihilation was incessant: slogans were repeated at meetings, special instructions were broadcast on the radio, and scenes of kulaks burning grain were shown at movie theaters. Stalin himself called them “parasites” and openly proclaimed they must be destroyed as a class. In the eyes of perpetrators, they were not human. Swayed by propaganda, Communist Party members, local activists, and especially outsiders (buksyry, or tugboat brigades dispatched to speed up procurement) showed no sympathy for the accursed, convinced that happy days would instantly ensue once they liquidated “enemies of the people.” Tugboat brigades were generally larger than local brigades, and sometimes reached 800 members from various organizations, including Komsomol, Communists and non-Communists, and Young Pioneers.¹⁹ “They would have killed their own fathers and mothers simply in order to carry out instructions.” Zealous fanatics, who settled their own accounts with their neighbors or family members, shouted the loudest about “political awareness” while stealing from others.²⁰

Bolshevik perpetrators denied the humanity of Ukrainian independent-minded farmers. Targeted members of the group were equated with vermin, insects, or diseases. Dehumanization overcame the normal human revulsion against murder. Hate propaganda in print and on the radio was used to vilify the victim group. Bolshevik leaders taught their followers to regard victims as alien to society. In Soviet Ukraine, farmers, labeled kurkuli, were portrayed as spiders, snakes, or vermin in Soviet propaganda posters. Figures 4.1 and 4.2 show propaganda cartoons from the January 1930 issue of the Chervonyi perets′ (Red Pepper) magazine.

Figure 4.1 Propaganda cartoon in the Chervonyi perets′ (Red Pepper) satirical biweekly magazine, 1930 (front, see over back). Source: From the National Library of Ukraine named after V. I. Vernads′kyi.

Figure 4.2 Propaganda cartoon in the Chervonyi perets′ (Red Pepper) satirical biweekly magazine, 1930 (back). Source: From the National Library of Ukraine named after V. I. Vernads′kyi.

This satirical biweekly magazine, printed in Kharkiv, put on its front cover a trio, who under the cover of night are attempting to sneak over the collective farm fence with a locked gate, casting long shadows. The headline reads: “From the front—‘holy men,’ but from the rear.” B. Fridkin, the cartoonist, prompts the reader: “Collective farmer! Before admitting these three citizens into your collective farm, go to page 4.” On the bottom of page 4, the punch line goes: “See?! With a shotgun, an ax, and a can of gasoline, the ‘kurkuli are growing into socialism.’” The top half of the front cover is yellow and the bottom half is blue. Yellow and blue colors were used in Soviet propaganda cartoons, hinting that “saboteurs” were Ukrainian nationalists as yellow and blue are national colors of Ukraine.²¹

In 1930, armed with sticks, pitchforks, axes, and occasionally sawed-off shotguns, Ukrainian farmers threatened the success of Stalin’s grain procurement plans. The OGPU recorded the explosion of violence against the Soviet regime. The largest number of mass uprisings (4,098 recorded by the OGPU) erupted in the Ukrainian SSR²² (see Figure 4.3). The success of Stalin’s project depended on Soviet Ukraine; therefore, there were significantly more disturbances in Soviet Ukraine than in three other grain-growing regions of the Central Black Earth (1,373), the North Caucasus (1,061), and the Lower Volga (1,003),²³ where significant numbers of ethnic Ukrainian farmers lived. Mass uprisings in Ukrainian villages in 1930 undermined the legitimacy of Soviet government authorities.²⁴

Figure 4.3 Mass uprisings in the Ukrainian SSR in 1930. Source: Created by the DNVP “Kartohrafiia,” 2019.

As shown on the map, two regions Volyn′ and Podillia sustained more insurgencies where rioters gained control of district centers. Groups of villagers, ranging from 300 to 500 people, took up handmade weapons to attack Soviet guards who returned fire with machine guns.²⁵ According to Vsevolod Balyts′kyi, head of the GPU in Ukraine, the Soviets lost control of most villages in the Shepetivs′ka border area.²⁶ In the Liubars′kyi district, twenty-nine village councils were liquidated and police units were forced out of the district center. In early March, the uprising spread from the town center to nearby villages, where insurgents harnessed horses from the kolhosp and, armed with pitchforks or knives, began to kill Communist Youth League and Communist Party members and Soviet plenipotentiaries.²⁷ By mid-March, sixteen districts in the Ukrainian western border zone were overrun by rioters. In Tul′chyns′kyi and two nearby districts, 340 village committees and 73 village soviets were taken over.²⁸ New administrations were elected in those villages liberated from Soviet control.

Stalin closely watched the situation in Tul′chyn. On March 19, 1930, Balyts′kyi wrote to Stanislav Kosior, the top Communist Party official in Soviet Ukraine: “Comrade Leplevs′kyi has just informed me that Stalin is proposing the adoption of more aggressive measures in the Tul′chyns′kyi district, and with regard to the repeated unrest there, emphasized that I stop making speeches but instead take decisive action.”²⁹ The uprisings were suppressed by force, with machine guns and in some places artillery.³⁰ At the same time, more uprisings broke out in the south in areas settled by German Mennonite agricultural colonists, and gradually advanced toward the then Soviet Ukrainian capital of Kharkiv.³¹ The peak of the riots occurred in March 1930, when the SVU trial was underway to deflect attention from the coordinated operation to subvert people’s struggle for freedom from colonial dependence. Despite the OGPU pronouncement that “peace had returned to practically all of Ukraine,” yet another large-scale uprising erupted in early April in Pavlohrad, Dnipropetrovs′k region. It resulted in the deaths of twenty Communist Party plenipotentiaries.³²

The retribution for uprisings resulted in entire families being deported from Soviet Ukraine to OGPU concentration camps. As many as 150,000 were deported³³ and 170,000 were sentenced for crimes against the state,³⁴ and their property was confiscated. The rebels used pitchforks and farm tools because hunting rifles or weapons that remained since the war for national liberation in Ukraine were confiscated by the OGPU, and civilians were forbidden to keep firearms of any kind.³⁵ At the same time Communists were permitted to bear arms; in fact, German semiautomatic Mauser C96 pistols became the status symbol of Soviet commissars.³⁶ By 1931, mass uprisings in Ukraine were put down, but hardened insurgents engaged in new tactics of small, isolated units.³⁷ The OGPU reported 288 such “gangs” operating in the republic.³⁸ The number of protesters drastically declined from over 1 million in 1930 to 75,000 in 1931.³⁹ During the second wave of repressions in 1931, over 130,000 insurgents were deported from Soviet Ukraine.⁴⁰ Nevertheless, by July 1932, the number of mass protests tripled from 319 the year before to 923, with more than 200,000 participants.⁴¹ Stalin, while vacationing in Crimea in August 1932, authorized arrests and executions under the law on “protection of socialist property” to put down resistance in Soviet Ukraine, which was spiraling out of control.

The GPU, militia, and army detachments conducted special operations in Soviet Ukraine to suppress uprisings and resistance to grain and food confiscations in the countryside.⁴² Annually between 1929 and 1932, the GPU recorded thousands of incidents of murder, attempted murder, and assault on Communist Party officials and local activists as well as arson and other forms of property damage and labeled them “terrorist acts.”⁴³ “Genocide is always organized, usually by the state, often using militias to provide deniability of state responsibility,” noted Gregory Stanton.⁴⁴ Often, resistance lasted for several days and nights, at times for weeks. Villages were burned, and participants—men, women, and children—were captured, executed, or exiled to labor camps. A schoolteacher, Volodymyr Benedyk, was one of the Solovky exiles portrayed by Semen Pidhainy in his memoir. Benedyk led the farmer’s insurrection, which spread from Kam’ianets′-Podil′s′kyi to Vinnytsia and then to Kyïv. The GPU sentenced him to labor camps with the stipulation to never return to Ukraine. Benedyk used to say: “There never was a nation that won its liberation without sacrifice.”⁴⁵

BLOCKADES

One of the repressive measures introduced to condemn individuals or collectives for the failure to fulfill grain-requisition target was blacklisting (chorni doshky, literally “black boards”). Names of proprietors and collective farms were listed on billboards as well as printed in newspapers for the public to see. One of the initial resolutions to blacklist collective farms was implemented on November 4, 1932, by Stalin’s appointee in the North Caucasus, Lazar Kaganovich.⁴⁶ As head of the extraordinary grain-procurement commission, Kaganovich went to Ukrainian Cossack farmsteads to convince them into “voluntarily” surrendering surplus grain. Wording in the resolution condemned farmers for “maliciously sabotaging” state grain procurements. Russian historian Nikolai Ivnitskii asserted that Stalin edited the resolution himself.⁴⁷

Blacklisting in Soviet Ukraine was initiated with the resolution adopted by the TsK KP(b)U on November 18, 1932, “On Measures to Strengthen Grain Procurement.”⁴⁸ According to Soviet historian Stanislav Kul′chyts′kyi, during Molotov’s second visit to Kharkiv, then the capital of Soviet Ukraine, he spent two days with Ukrainian communists discussing how to implement Stalin’s instructions, specifically the blacklisting piloted in the North Caucasus. Ukrainian historian Heorhii Papakin noted that the Ukrainian resolution was a word-for-word replica of the North Caucasus resolution in its description of blacklisting instructions, with minor variations. The list of repressive measures that created conditions for physical destruction of Ukrainian farmers, with the explicit purpose of “overcoming resistance,” included:

1. a) Immediate suspension of delivery of goods and of cooperative and state trade activities in these villages and the removal of all available goods from cooperative and state stores;

2. b) Full prohibition of kolhosp trade activities among collective farms and collective and private farmers;

3. c) Suspension of all crediting activities and a demand for preterm collection of credits and other financial obligations;

4. d) Investigation and purging of collective farms in these villages followed by the removal of counterrevolutionary elements and the organizers of grain-collection disruptions.⁴⁹

Regional executive committees were to carry out the instructions and report to the Communist Party’s Central Committee on collective farms being blacklisted. Independent farmers were forced to pay fines in the form of an additional meat procurement (fifteen months) and one-year potato quotas. If independent farmers delivered grain fully by established deadlines, then these fines could be canceled. However, fines could also be doubled in extraordinary circumstances. Moreover, all loans of seed grain issued to independent farmers had to be repaid and credited to collective farm’s grain procurement quotas. To enforce these measures, brigades of collective farm activists had to be organized. The November resolution specified that by the first day of December 1932, at least 1,100 of these collective farm brigades had to be dispatched throughout Soviet Ukraine, according to the following regions and numbers⁵⁰:

Kharkiv—350

Kyїv—300

Vinnytsia—200

Chernihiv—100

Odesa—50

Donbas—50

Dnipropetrovs´k—50

Mark Tauger of West Virginia University estimated that if each of these 1,100 brigades searched 100 households, and a household had 5 people, then they took food from 550,000 people, out of 20 million, or about 2 or 3 percent.⁵¹ The crucial point here is that these 3 percent of households produced around 20 percent of the grain.⁵² This illustrates that independent farmers were in the minority, but they were the ones squeezed most. This also illustrates, and something Tauger has failed to notice, the repressive nature of the policy.⁵³ For instance, in two districts in the Poltava region regular search brigades could procure 390,259 puds in 67 villages, whereas the tugboat brigade procured 449,000 puds in 25 villages.⁵⁴ Such tugboat brigades comprised on average from 50 to 200–800 outsiders, whose enforcement tactics contributed to the “impressive results.” Tauger belongs to a cohort of revisionist historians who attempt to discredit the view that Soviet totalitarianism was oppressive.⁵⁵ Revisionists depict the Soviet Union as not so different from societies in the West, “nothing to fear and even something to admire.”⁵⁶

The reasoning behind it was not new; it was a continuation of the Bolshevik policy of grain confiscations. To put down farmers’ rebellions, Stalin used methods promulgated by his predecessor, Lenin. The following translation of a letter, signed by Lenin, gives a glimpse into the dictator’s thinking in a response to reports from Penza of an uprising there during the first Bolshevik onslaught.⁵⁷ Wired via telegraph on August 11, 1918, the letter urged comrades to “mercilessly suppress” the uprising as an example to others. Lenin suggested four extraordinary measures:

1. Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers.

2. Publish their names.

3. Take from them all the grain.

4. Designate hostages—as per yesterday’s telegram.

Do it in such a way that for hundreds of versts around, the people will see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucker kulaks.

On December 6, 1932, TsK KP(b)U and the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR adopted a joint resolution “On Adding Villages that Maliciously Sabotage Grain Procurements to the Blacklist.” This resolution has been thoroughly analyzed by historians.⁵⁸ The resolution listed six villages in Dnipropetrovs′k, Odesa, and Kharkiv regions to be added to the All-Ukrainian blacklist. Heorhii Papakin noted that this resolution contradicted the previous one, issued on November 18, because the targets for blacklisting were not collective farms as units of socialist economy or village soviets as administrative units, but entire villages. In other words, all villagers, including farmers, entrepreneurs, workers of machine-tractor stations, and teachers were doomed. “This, beyond doubt, underscores that the goal of the Bolshevik policy was not the fulfillment of a grain procurement plan (it was an excuse), but the creation of conditions incompatible with life for all residents of the village,” Papakin concluded.⁵⁹ Eventually, as of January 1933, the Ukrainian SSR as a whole was secretly blacklisted.⁶⁰

What was not publicized, and remains the least investigated tactic, was blockading the area at night with military and GPU troops before searching by tugboat brigades (buksyrni bryhady) would commence.⁶¹ Official documents do not explicitly list instructions to blockade villages that were added to the blacklist. However, how could a ban on trade and travel of villagers from the zone of organized famine be accomplished without control of population movement? Witnesses provide first-hand accounts of how it felt to be blacklisted—with villages blockaded by troops. Survivors from the village Liutenka, which was blacklisted, recalled:

All roads and paths around Liutenka were blocked by GPU patrols that did not let anyone in or out of the village. All goods were taken away from stores and the delivery of salt, matches, oil, soap, and medicine seized. They closed schools, the mill, pharmacy, and post office. . . . Special brigades searched for grain in every house but found nothing. In December 1932, villagers died en masse. The blockade was not lifted until the beginning of spring [1933] sowing.⁶²

Another account of a blockade of blacklisted villages in the Dnipropetrovs′k region was narrated by a village teacher:

Residents (from Verbky and two neighboring villages Bohdanivka and Ternivka) were not allowed to travel to other villages and to the town of Pavlohrad to procure food. Villages were surrounded by army troops, but people tried to escape at night to the town of Pavlohrad, and sometimes they could at least buy some bread. Anyone caught was severely punished.⁶³

Mikhail Frenkin,⁶⁴ who taught at a robfak school in the Zhytomyr region, recalled how villages were blockaded by special GPU units and how teachers were ordered to assist in implementing this task:

I remember once all of the teachers who were Komsomol and [Communist] Party members were ordered to surround one of the villages to prevent anyone from escaping while Mobile Units of the GPU (mangruppy—in Russian, maneuverable groups) drove the arrested peasants out of the village to the railcars waiting at the train station to deport them. All this was done in secret. The village would be surrounded during the night to avoid any noise and commotion. That’s how it was done. And, the Party apparatus took part. Just let anyone raise their voice in protest and tomorrow that person would be arrested. All of it was part of the Terror . . . it was frightful.⁶⁵

To justify a special GPU operation and give it an aura of legitimacy, the press published a decree issued on November 26, 1932, by the Commissariat of Justice and Prosecutor General of Ukraine.⁶⁶ The decree declared that repressive measures were the most effective means to suppress “sabotage” and “class resistance against grain procurement” in 243 districts in Soviet Ukraine.⁶⁷ In 1932, the GPU arrested 21,197 “saboteurs,” including 1,491 in August; 2,526 in September; 2,850 in October; and 14,330 (or 67.7 percent) in November.⁶⁸ The exponential increase in repressions grew in November when Molotov arrived to maximally squeeze out grain from Soviet Ukraine. One-third of the arrested were charged under the new law on protection of socialist property, known as “five ears of wheat” law, adopted in August 1932. Another third were arrested for agitation against the grain-requisition campaign. The remaining third were arrested for speculation, refusal to transport grain, or criticism of authorities. Most of the arrested were independent proprietors; 16.8 percent were labeled kurkuli.⁶⁹

Repressions further intensified, when on December 5, 1932, Balyts′kyi issued “Operative Order of the GPU USRR No. 1” that spelled out the main task of the GPU in Soviet Ukraine: to defeat the “counterrevolutionary underground,” commonly portrayed as organized by the kurkuli and petliurivtsi who opposed Soviet policies in the countryside. A special operative group was established with Karl Karlson, deputy head of GPU in Soviet Ukraine, to carry out the order. By mid-December, the operation in the countryside led to arrests of 16,000 “enemies of the people”⁷⁰ and expropriation of 11,340 tons of grain.⁷¹ Balyts′kyi reported that the GPU apprehended “bandit formations,” organized by the Ukrainian National Republic’s government-in-exile, and arrested former members of parties liquidated by Bolsheviks, students and professors of Kyїv institutes, and saboteurs on collective farms, a total of 589 such groups that sabotaged grain procurement.⁷² Thus, “grain procurement” was a cover for the organized GPU operation that targeted Ukrainians associated with national aspirations for independence.

IMPLICATED SUBJECTS

Teachers were incrementally turned into accomplices with a carrot-and-stick policy. This phenomenon is not new; it has been observed in other cases of genocide. In his film, The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer documented that mayors and teachers were among killers in villages during the massacres of 1965–1966 in Indonesia.⁷³ In Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s, schoolteachers were willing and often unwilling members of the aktyv—active supporters of the Soviet system, upon whom authorities called to carry out officially sanctioned policies.⁷⁴ It is to an activist of this period that the well-known saying is attributed: “Moscow does not believe in tears.”⁷⁵ The most disturbing fact was that among the activists who helped the GPU in arrests and deportations of dispossessed farmers were teachers who knew their victims.

In her study of rank-and-file perpetrators of the Holodomor, Daria Mattingly of Cambridge University developed a typology based on motivational factors, proposed by Alette Smeulers.⁷⁶ Mattingly used the “neutral” Ukrainian term pryzvidtsi, which in her view is devoid of any moral or legal qualification, to characterize those whose actions (or inactions) led to starvation of millions of their fellow citizens. Mattingly has argued that the term “perpetrators” (auctor delicti) would be apt for Soviet leaders guilty of issuing legislative provisions, whereas the term “executors” (executor delicti) would be appropriate to characterize those responsible for deportations and executions of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, clergy, and farmers.⁷⁷ The distinction between victims and perpetrators is fluid. As Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski noted, application of totalitarian law hinged on arbitrary and changing decisions of executive authorities so that “everyone [was] at the same time an inmate of a concentration camp and a secret police agent.”⁷⁸ State-sanctioned violence unfolded gradually. Law-abiding citizens, including teachers, were coerced to comply to carry out violence. They joined what Ervin Staub called the “continuum of destruction” and served in institutions created to perpetuate violence, with a predictable reversal of morality.⁷⁹ Like the subjects in Stanley Milgram’s experiment on obedience, ordinary people subjected their victims to the highest electric shock after a progressive series of smaller shocks.⁸⁰ Over a decade, campaign after campaign, citizens in Soviet Ukraine became inured to mass violence perpetrated by the regime with impunity.⁸¹

Among activists were even family members of the victims. Testifying anonymously, a perpetrator admitted that despite the fact her father was imprisoned during collectivization, she joined grain-requisition campaigns. “Then people lived quietly, didn’t talk much about this . . . , but trymaly iazyk za zubamy” (in Ukrainian, “kept the tongue behind the teeth,” or kept silent).⁸² She noted that some activists tried to help victims. When activists recognized that a person was socially valuable, or had special skills, they tried to rescue such a person. However, “there were also those who would denounce, tell lies. Starvation is a terrible thing.”⁸³ Understandably, she did not see herself as guilty and, most probably, did not have an intent to harm victims, but she did nothing to stop abuses. She clearly pointed out that the means of coercion was starvation. This anonymous witness still harbored fear decades after the event and thousands of miles across the Atlantic away from the crime scene. Many teachers mobilized for the “third front” found themselves in a similar situation, tongue tied after years of reeducation, political literacy tests, and guaranteed food ration in exchange for compliance and silence. The alternative was repression, deportation, or worse.

Soviet authorities shaped teachers’ behavior with the use of propaganda in newspapers. In the run up to the SVU trial, when arrests of the alleged members of the SVU were underway, in October 1929, a Pravda editorial described two categories of teachers. The editorial praised “social enthusiasts” among teachers for giving more than 800 lectures and organizing nearly 2,000 supryahs but criticized teachers who had to be forced to fulfill their public duty for their lukewarm attitude to grain requisitions. The editorial reported an incident in a school in the village of Samoilivtsi, Blyznets′ district. School authorities ordered children to bring 35 pounds of grain per household (to be included in the school’s grain collection plan). One of the teachers in the school was censured for violating a “class approach” by assigning an equal amount to the children of kulaks, middle, and poor farmers. The editorial cited another case in the Meshev district, where a teacher received an anonymous letter: “Better give up work that does not concern you. Stick to teaching or you will be sorry.” The editorial stressed that kurkuli hate teachers who are “social enthusiasts.”⁸⁴

On the eve of the SVU trial, newspapers published a series of reports about murders of teachers by bandits in rural districts of Soviet Ukraine. Chief Prosecutor Lev Akhmatov also issued a statement to the press in November 1929. He announced that two teachers had been murdered for their active participation in collectivization and literacy campaigns. Akhmatov took these murders as evidence that “class struggle” in the village was intensifying. While investigation of “nefarious activities” of the old generation Ukrainian intelligentsia was in progress, Akhmatov emphasized that the majority of teachers were “on the same side of the barricade” with poor and hired laborers.⁸⁵ He promised to afford teachers legal protection to defend them against future attacks by their “mortal enemies”—kurkuli. The duplicity of the government that prosecuted teachers while simultaneously affording teachers “legal protection” to defend them against attacks by “enemies of the people” was mind boggling.

In January 1930, Visti informed its readers that the People’s Commissariat of Education had decided to mobilize schools for political and economic assignments in the agricultural campaign. All schools were required to keep a record of their participation in “the social reconstruction of the countryside and the realization of the program mapped by the party and the government.”⁸⁶ Mikhail Frenkin, who came from Baku, Azerbaijan, to teach in a robfak school in the Pulinsky district in Soviet Ukraine, recalled how teachers were taken into villages as plenipotentiaries:

These were teachers who were [Communist] Party members, Komsomol members. I myself was neither a Komsomol nor Party member. So the teachers would be sent to help with grain requisitioning for a period of two or three weeks, a month or two or three months. One of my colleagues, a man by the name of Vakhnovsky, was a Communist. They would take him, and he would be absent from school for months at a time. He’d spend the whole of that time in the village seeing to the grain requisitions. They continually changed everyone around, so that the entire Party apparatus would take part to one degree or another, although they wouldn’t be forced to shoot or kill anyone. They couldn’t refuse to take part.⁸⁷

Frenkin noted that schools and institutes in Soviet Ukraine did not function. “The institute where I was working . . . was totally shut down at one point for two months. The teachers and students had been mobilized to take part in all these activities. And then the arrests began.”⁸⁸

Teachers who worked in rural schools and depended on the support of local farmers had mixed attitudes toward grain requisitions: some were skeptical, others passive, or “duplicitous” in their attitude toward the policy that would result in death of millions. Realizing that teachers were leaders in the task of building socialism, the state through its press provided a model of normative behavior for teachers to follow: either being honored for their revolutionary activism or risk being vilified for their “bourgeois nationalism.” Teachers, who were critical of the Communist Party policy, resisted mobilization, or declined to participate in grain requisitions as assigned, were reprimanded or purged from party ranks.⁸⁹ In Dymers′kyi district, a teacher, who was in charge of a requisition brigade and decided to distribute grain to the starving, was arrested for “squandering grain” and prosecuted.⁹⁰ As many as 48 teachers in the Chernihiv region were arrested by the GPU for hiding the requisitioned grain and purged from the union.⁹¹

A vivid account of teachers’ quandary was narrated by Oleksander Merkelo, who worked as an accountant on state farms in the village of Kolodiazhna, Dvorichna district, Kharkiv region. As a teenager, he witnessed the famine and was deeply hurt seeing the destruction of hardworking farmers, including his own family. Merkelo befriended teacher Oransky, who was required to participate in all campaigns initiated by Bolsheviks in Soviet Ukraine. The teacher frankly admitted to his friend:

You are a happy man, after sitting with your abacus for eight hours you go home, and you are not required to join any campaigns. But I have to lie to farmers and lie to their children that they have a happy childhood in the Soviet Union.

Merkelo ended the story by saying: “That spring he committed suicide.”⁹² Merkelo explained:

Teachers were forced, especially young teachers. But let me tell one thing . . . that work, as I told you about Oransky, tormented them. He could not say “no” because that meant being subjected to repression, being arrested. So he had no other choice but to blow his brain. He went to work with great tension in his mind. Obviously, he could not tell the truth to schoolchildren about happy childhood in the Soviet Union advertised in every newspaper and on the radio, when everywhere he saw dead bodies and starving, swollen children.⁹³

Unlike commissars, who carried guns, teachers usually did not have access to guns, unless they were subject to conscription. Statistics on suicides are unavailable,⁹⁴ so Oransky’s story is anecdotal evidence of a mind tormented and ultimately destroyed by the regime.

The mobilization of schoolteachers to take part in the campaign to seize food from households or deport villagers was an extremely traumatizing experience. Mr. Kononenko, who taught in school in the village of Komians′ke in the Dnipropetrovs′k region, felt that teachers were “the most tragic of all figures in the village at that time.” In his testimony before members of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine, Mr. Kononenko stated,

First of all, one obviously does not become a school teacher out of desire to exert power, or get rich, or to be socially mobile. It is a job that one takes because one wants to teach, one has a real desire to serve those, who particularly children, who want to learn.

The teacher recalled how he was sent out into the fields in the spring of 1933 and forced to read Soviet newspapers, Visti VUTsVK or Komunist, to villagers during lunch while they were eating:

It was meant to educate them and the topic was always political. How wonderful was the Soviet political system, how lucky we are to have a leader like Joseph Stalin. And I read them. I know it is the wrong thing to do.

They hated me because they thought I belonged to that corrupt political system. I tell you honestly, I was hungry because I walked two or three kilometers to that place. I see them eating their beans. I like to eat, but they never asked me, “Maybe you need it.” You understand? I was hungry and reading that Soviet official propaganda to convince them of that tragic life.⁹⁵

Another eyewitness Antin Lak, who taught Ukrainian language and literature during the famine in Soviet Ukraine and received 300 grams of bread daily, recalled:

When I was in Kremenchuk, I walked daily along the streets of the city either to go to the store or to visit my friends, and I saw villagers that flocked to the city to find something to eat. These dressed in rags, emaciated creatures were no longer able to beg for food from people passing by. They stood as if they were on a leash next to the door of special kitchens, designated for the [Communist] Party elite, in hope to get something. Of course, rarely could they get a thing because the aktyv did not get much to eat either. Everything was in short supply. And helping the starving was anti-Soviet activity in the eyes of authorities.⁹⁶

The narrator never mentioned whether he had shared his bread with anyone. Making the moral choice to help the starving was equivalent to an “anti-Soviet activity” and punishable. But the narrator went even further, he excused perpetrators by saying that the aktyv also starved. The Soviet elite, Communist Party bosses, and GPU officers, as well as their family members, received sufficient food rations. In fact, a teacher was paid about half of what an equivalently senior GPU officer received: but the latter’s special ration card for consumer goods at low prices in special shops made his real income twelve times the former’s.⁹⁷

Although considered militant atheists, Bolsheviks borrowed a third of their moral code from the Bible. Paraphrasing Apostle Paul, the Constitution of 1918, which governed the Russian Soviet Republic, proclaimed: “those who do not work, do not eat.”⁹⁸ The bitter irony is that under War Communism and Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture, fruits of farmers’ labor belonged to the state, so land tillers periodically starved, while the new Soviet elite regularly received their food rations from special stores. By 1931, after the destruction of private trade, the state had assumed responsibility for supplying bread and other foodstuff to the population in cities by creating a centralized hierarchical system of distribution based on the state’s perception of each citizen’s contribution to the “building of socialism.” The four categories included:

1. City categories. The “special and first-category list” included Moscow, Leningrad, the republics’ capitals, and the main industrial cities and industrial sites of strategically important economic regions, such as the Donbas, the Urals, Western Siberia.

2. Occupational categories. Industrial and railroad workers were better treated than other employees, white-collar workers, or members of the intelligentsia. . . . [S]elf-employed individuals . . . stood at the bottom of this category, while secret-police staff and high- and middle-ranking [Communist] Party members stood at the very top, on a special list.

3. Status in the family unit. Employed persons were entitled to higher rations than their dependent children and elderly relatives.

4. The type of workplace in relation to the “global project of industrialization of the country.” Miners and workers in heavy metallurgical plants and steel mills received higher rations than people working in textile, food, or light-industry factories. Teachers in industrial schools and institutes were better fed than . . . school teachers in rural areas. . . . In addition, enterprises were allowed to set up private plots or “kitchen gardens” for their workers and employees.⁹⁹

In this stratification, which, according to Nicolas Werth, reflected “a new, crude, and cynical relationship between the state and its subjects,” two categories languished at the very bottom: (1) the “special resettlers” (spetspereselentsy), a majority of whom were stripped of their property and deported to inhospitable areas at the Far North, the Urals, the Narym region in Western Siberia in Soviet Russia, and Kazakhstan; and (2) the forced-labor camp inmates.¹⁰⁰

In the new food distribution pyramid, teachers were ranked below Communist Party bosses, OGPU apparatchiks, and urban proletariat. Teachers in urban schools and institutes of higher education fared better; teachers in rural districts had to rely on collective farms or private “kitchen gardens” to survive. This put nearly 100,000 teachers in Soviet Ukraine at risk of starving, along with their children and the elderly.¹⁰¹ Their “kitchen gardens” were insufficient to sustain families, so they often suffered from malnutrition and exhaustion.

COLLAPSE OF SCHOOLS

One of the most moving accounts of the Holodomor was written by Oleksandra Radchenko, a schoolteacher in the Kharkiv region of Soviet Ukraine. In her diary, the thirty-six-year-old teacher of the Russian language recorded not only what she saw around her but also what she thought about the tragedy unfolding before her eyes. On February 19, 1932, Radchenko, who had three young daughters, confided in her diary, “I am so afraid of hunger; I’m afraid for the children.” As a deeply religious person, she appealed to higher powers in the face of injustice: “May God protect us and have mercy on us. It would not be so offensive if it were due to a bad harvest, but they have taken away the grain and created an artificial famine.”¹⁰²

As a teacher, Radchenko received food rations (paiki) that ensured her family’s survival, yet she could not be shielded from the horror that was unfolding in her village. Radchenko had to face her pupils in school, and she could not but notice that their numbers dwindled. She risked the wellbeing of her own daughters, but kept writing her observations in her secret diary. On April 5, 1932, four months before harvest, she noted that children were emaciated and infested with parasitic worms because they had nothing left to eat but beet roots. With anger, she reacted to the news printed in Pravda the following day about the completion of the dam over the Dnipro. She questioned the wisdom of the fast tempo of this socialist construction project at the expense of children swollen from hunger. On November 20, 1932, Radchenko described how authorities “swept clean” her seventy-year-old neighbor’s home of all the stored grain and vegetables which were to last until February. After being dispossessed a couple of years earlier, the old man worked on the farm raising rabbits, but overnight he was turned into a pauper, unable to provide for his sixty-five-year-old wife and crippled daughter.¹⁰³

In a January 9, 1933, entry, Radchenko told a horror story about kidnappings of children, cannibalism, and human meat sold in sausages on the market.¹⁰⁴ On March 23, 1933, on the verge of a nervous breakdown from seeing a dying man on the road to the village and a boy resembling the walking dead wandering in search of food, Oleksanda Radchenko wrote,

Perhaps, this kind of expression in the eyes is only typical of people who realize that they are going to die but do not want to. But it was a child! . . . Why? Why children? I cried quietly so that my companion would not notice. A thought that I cannot do anything, that millions of children are dying of hunger, that all this is a calamity brought me to the brink of despair.¹⁰⁵

That spring she was regularly reporting deaths from starvation. “People are dying,” wrote Radchenko in a May 16, 1933, entry, “they say that whole villages have died in southern Ukraine.”¹⁰⁶

After World War II, Radchenko was arrested and, following a six-month interrogation, charged with having written “anti-Soviet propaganda.”¹⁰⁷ During her trial she told the judges, “I wrote because after 20 years the children won’t believe what violent methods were used to build socialism.” Radchenko returned to Soviet Ukraine after spending a decade in corrective-labor camps.¹⁰⁸ In 1991, she was posthumously rehabilitated. Her family would have to wait another decade to get access to her diaries in the Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine to learn the truth.¹⁰⁹

To win teachers to their side, authorities rewarded loyalists well for their cooperation with the regime. Between 1928 and 1932, salaries of primary schoolteachers doubled, not counting periodic bonuses, housing, social security, and pensions.¹¹⁰ During the famine, teachers loyal to the Soviet regime were on a list to receive food rations for themselves and their dependents. Although they were at the bottom of the food distribution hierarchy, teachers in rural schools received flour, grain, and oil.¹¹¹

At the same time, archival documents reveal that in spring of 1932, teachers in rural areas experienced food shortages. In his May 1932 letter, Mayorov, secretary of the Odesa regional bureau of the KP(b)U, reported about the shortage of food in the region and warned authorities that this “negatively affects political sentiments among teachers and leads to cases of teachers abandoning their job.” He continued,

“There is a real danger that if supplies remain at the current level, certain districts in the region will start a new school year with a significant shortage of teachers. It is necessary to note that mostly young teachers leave their posts, even members of Komsomol.”

Writing in Russian, he complained that in his region only 500 teachers had received food rations, whereas “the Kiev region received 9,200, the Vinnitsa region—7,600, and the Kharkov region—2,400.” He requested food supply for 80 percent of teachers in rural schools in the Odesa region (9,600 teachers and 9,600 of their dependents) for two months (June and July) to help them survive until a new harvest was gathered: 480 tons of flour, 38.4 tons of grain cereal, and 40.9 tons of sugar.¹¹²

On March 17, 1932, the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee newspaper Visti shifted the blame for the “irregularities” in supplying teachers and delays in paying teachers’ salaries for one or two months on the kurkuli and “their agents who have often tried to hamper cultural-educational work.”¹¹³ The Executive Committee resolved that the Commissariat of Supply, the Ukrainian Co-operative Association, and the Ukrainian Collective Farm Center “within ten days arrange for supplies from collective farms to be sent to teachers.” The Committee also directed the Ukrainian Collective Farm Center, as well as regional and district executive committees, to investigate the payment of teachers’ salaries by village soviets. Ten days were too short for three bureaucratic agencies to comply with the directive but too long for teachers to go without bread or salary to buy it.

Cuts in the centralized food supply forced teachers to find salvation elsewhere. In his testimony before the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine, Mikhail Frenkin stated that at the age of twenty-one he was sent to Dovbush, a small town in the Zhytomyr region, to teach in a robfak school for adults where he witnessed the famine. He remembered that in 1931, teachers were receiving several puds of raw oats so they could share with others in need. In 1932, when he saw corpses in abandoned houses, he ran away from the countryside. He was helped by a friend who arranged a job for him as a lecturer at an institute in the city. He said, “I ran to Kiev because for two weeks I had not a crumb of bread to eat. They stopped giving us paiki.”¹¹⁴ On the first day of school in 1933, the shortage of teachers reached 98 percent.¹¹⁵ That year, many schools in rural districts of Soviet Ukraine were without students and teachers.

To survive, teachers taught their pupils how to subsist on food surrogates. Vasyl′ Bashtanenko from the Dnipropetrovs′k region remembered how his swollen from starvation teacher, Olena Mykytivna, took her swollen from starvation students outside school into the steppe to dig out gophers’ holes in search of food the animals stored for winter. The teacher also took her pupils into a soy field. The teacher distributed beans collected in the field equally among all so that they could carry a handful home to cook. In winter, the teacher took her class to a clay dene where the children could dig some clay and munch on it. The children vandalized sparrows’ nests under thatched roofs and hunted all sorts of birds and small animals to stay alive.¹¹⁶ Bashtanenko portrayed his teacher as a hero. It took courage to avoid patrols in the fields. Children often walked to school in straw sandals or more often barefoot. Only children of village activists or GPU officers could afford to wear chrome boots.

Mariia Panchenko from the Poltava region recalled that in spring time, the kolhosp (collective farm) fed those who worked in the fields but gave nothing to children, who began to eat various grasses. When ice melted, children supplemented their diets with fish and little turtles caught in rivers by baking or frying them. The narrator and her brother also went to a nearby forest to gather tree buds, mushrooms, and various weeds. The school was closed in winter, but a teacher was sent in the spring of 1933. All children who were still alive were required to go to school. The narrator recalled how a fellow classmate shared slivers of horse meat. The child’s father worked at salotopka (fat churning factory), where all dead or dying horses were brought, and took some of the leftovers to school. When lots of people died, authorities sent school children to weed sugar beets. “And how could we weed when we could hardly stand on our feet? But they fed us according to how well we weeded.”¹¹⁷

If teachers could afford it, they nourished their schoolchildren with a dish called zatirka. Vasyl′ Mirutenko from the Chopovichne district, Zhytomyr region, recalled a recipe: a little flour was thoroughly stirred into some water, salted, and boiled. As soon as this zatirka was taken off the stove, 200–300 grams of it was ladled to each child. When spring came, a little sorrel was added to the zatirka, and some potatoes from a new crop, then it could be called borsch.¹¹⁸ Another survivor L. Pylypenko recalled that salt was hard to get because all trade was deliberately suspended in villages. There was neither animal fat nor oil in this borsch because they were not obtainable anywhere at any price. His colleague Petrushevs′kyi shot sparrows in order to survive. But the gourmandizing did not last long; his hunting rifle was confiscated and he was forbidden to keep firearms of any kind. Teachers in his school began to receive a supplement to borsch in the form of “a spoonful of beans cooked in water.” The schoolchildren, too, received a spoonful of beans, except children of the “enemies of the people.”¹¹⁹

In 1932–1933, rural schools began to offer “hot breakfasts.”¹²⁰ A photo of chubby schoolchildren from the village of Rakovychi, Radomysl′ district, Kyïv region, was taken in 1934, a year after the genocidal famine reached its peak (Figure 4.4). They were the survivors from the district that lost one-third of its population between 1932 and 1933. In the first half of 1932, out of 3.5 million children in rural schools in Soviet Ukraine, only 73,000 received such a “hot breakfast” which consisted of 100 grams of bread surrogate and a cup of tea a day.¹²¹ In rural schools, 15–20 percent of schoolchildren and 40 percent of teachers were nourished with “hot breakfasts,” typically those who exhibited signs of physical exhaustion or anemia.¹²² Two-thirds of children were too malnourished to walk to school. At the time, nearly 10 percent of children in Soviet Ukraine suffered from anemia and 5 percent suffered from tuberculosis.¹²³ Even if 15–20 percent of 4.4 million schoolchildren in the republic received this free treat,¹²⁴ was this all the Soviet government could do to save the children, proclaimed to be “our happiness”?

Figure 4.4 Schoolchildren from the village of Rakovychi, Radomysl′ district, Kyïv region (hot breakfast), 1934. Source: From TsDKFFAU, od. obl. 2-3348.

Two years after millions of children were killed by the genocidal famine, Bolsheviks continued to cover up their crime. The slogan, “Children—our happiness,” appeared on the front page of newspaper, Za bil′shovyts′kyi nastup (For the Bolshevik Offensive), published by the Markhlevs′kyi district committee of the KP(b)U on September 10, 1935, greeting students and teachers at the beginning of the school year. Portraits of Lenin and “beloved teacher” Stalin adorned the front page as well as a quote from Moscow’s emissary in Soviet Ukraine Postyshev, “Work with children—Bolsheviks’ pride.”¹²⁵

A vivid eyewitness account of the situation with “hot breakfasts” was written by Ivan Koziar, a teacher in the town of Illintsi, Vinnytsia region. Late in 1932, primary school attendance in his town schools dropped by 15 percent, and by early 1933, it declined further by 35 percent. At the peak of the famine, only a third of schoolchildren were able to sit at the desks. Communist Party and local authorities monitored the situation from weekly reports, supplied by school principals. When the attendance dropped precipitously, central authorities cabled a directive from Moscow to all schools in Soviet Ukraine, with the following instructions:

Considering that the school attendance has declined catastrophically, school principals are required to implement the following measures:

1. Organize horse drawn wagons to transport children to school every morning and back home in the evening.

2. Organize breakfasts for those children who need them the most.

Those who fail to carry out the directive will be prosecuted in courts.¹²⁶

When school principals and teachers were informed about this directive, they thought the Communist Party mercifully meant to save starving children because their parents and teachers could no longer watch their young die on a mass scale. The day after receiving the directive, all school principals walked to Illintsi. They hoped district authorities would allow the sale of produce from state stockpiles to feed the hungry children because trade had seized, leaving all stores empty. The principals were met by communist Mel′nykov, his wife, head of the local education department Kochubei (also a communist), and secretary of the district Communist Party committee Tarashchenko. The principals told authorities they came because, according to the directive, they were obligated to provide breakfasts for starving children in schools. Therefore, they requested that the authorities allow certain amounts of produce to be sold from state stockpiles in order to save the children. The authorities, as if caught by surprise, replied:

We, too, have received the directive as you did, but nowhere does it say that food has to be sold to schools. Thus, we warn you that there will be no sale or distribution of food from state stockpiles; there will be no produce for children and schools, no sale, no trade! You, school principals, have to arrange local food supply or requisition anything edible with the assistance of authorities, if you know where to find it, to provide breakfasts for schoolchildren.¹²⁷

The school principals tried to reason, saying, “You, the local authorities, know full well that the trade is forbidden, no food can be purchased in stores, and even the black market has been closed. Everywhere people are swollen and die because of the famine.” The district Communist Party secretary Tarashchenko cut the principals short, shouting, “Shut up!!! Not a single word about the famine. There is no ‘famine’; there are ‘food shortages’!” The meeting ended, and the school principals left.¹²⁸

When a new school year started in 1933, a teacher walked into his classroom and noticed there were very few children. The teacher started a roll call. Going down the list, he called Vitkovs′kyi (the third letter from the top based on the Cyrillic alphabet). Several hesitant voices answered, “Absent.” The teacher asked, “Where is he?” A brave voice answered, “He died.” The teacher marked the name with a cross. “Voitko Ol′ha,” called the teacher. Several girls answered in a chorus, “She is absent.” The teacher asked, “Why?” A girl, in tears, answered, “She died.” The teacher lowered his head and marked her name with a cross. Based on the previous year’s roster, the teacher expected to see thirty-eight schoolchildren, but after marking names with crosses, he came down to only fourteen still alive. After 1931, lessons in all Soviet schools had to be concluded with a ritual: all children standing at their desks and saying in unison, “Thanks to comrade Stalin for our happy childhood!” The teacher, choking on tears, stood up before the children were required to perform the ritual and rushed out of the classroom.¹²⁹

Not all school principals felt powerless. Vasyl′ Ivchuk, a school principal in the village of Dudarkiv, Boryspil′ district, Kyïv region, organized meals for children in all grades (see Figure 4.5). To provide additional nutrition, Ivchuk arranged a practicum for his schoolchildren at a local meat processing plant, so that after lessons they could work in exchange for a cup of soup. In this ingenious way, the principal saved all school-age children in his village from starvation. The Soviet government did not forget about his heroic deeds; he was arrested and executed five years after the genocidal famine.¹³⁰ The individual moral choice of the school principal to save the starving children ran against Marxist-Leninist “humanist” internationalism.

Figure 4.5 Vasyl′ Ivchuk, school principal in the village Dudarkiv, Boryspil′ district (second row, second on the left) with his colleagues and fifth-grade students, 1937. Source: From the Museum of the History of Education of Kyïv Region, od. obl. 3191.

Primary school children suffered the most when food supplies were cut. Students at colleges and institutes were better off because they could “procure” food illegally from farms and fields where they worked or practiced. Even with that loophole, the situation was becoming so dire so that on June 18, 1932, Hryhorii Tkachenko, a Komsomol member from a technical college, wrote a letter to Stanislav Kosior, the first secretary of the TsK KP(b)U. Questioning the wisdom of the Communist Party’s agricultural policy, Tkachenko expressed concern that the younger generation “will become sick, infirm and weak, and its numbers will shrink by 50 percent.”¹³¹ He was so sure he would receive an answer that he included his home address.

In June 1933, realizing that many classrooms would be empty on the first day of school, Volodymyr Zatons′kyi submitted a proposal to the TsK VKP(b) to lower the age of children admitted to the first grade from eight to seven years. He proposed to introduce this policy at the start of the 1933–1934 school year, using budget allocations for pre-school groups. By doing this schools could boost their enrollment by hundreds of thousands of children. Despite utilizing all available “reserves” and enrolling pre-school children younger than eight years in the first grades, the roll call was catastrophic. On September 9, 1933, in the Vinnytsia region alone, only 45 percent of the expected schoolchildren showed up in the Novoushyts′kyi district, 56 percent in the Ianushpilʹskyi, 50 percent in the Horodots′kyi, and 66 percent in the Koziatyns′kyi districts.¹³² The high mortality rate among children and teachers led to the closing of twenty-eight schools in the Kharkiv region on September 1, 1933.¹³³ That year, in the Krasnohrad district alone, 62 percent of children in primary grades (1 through 4) and 58 percent in secondary grades (5 through 7) did not show up on the first day of school.¹³⁴ Over 90 percent of teachers did not show up either, especially in Varvins′kyi, Bereznians′kyi, and Malo Divyts′kyi districts.¹³⁵

Vasyl′ Bashtanenko remembered that children—swollen due to prolonged starvation—were required to go to school, but they hardly learned anything. Out of his twenty-five classmates, 70 percent were swollen.¹³⁶ Oles′ Derhachov, who in 1933 taught history at a school in the village of Pshenychne, Solonians′kyi district, Dnipropetrovs′k region, recalled that children died in school. A child would recite homework, lose consciousness, and collapse at the desk. Emaciated schoolchildren, who sought medical help in the nearby village of Novopokrovka, died at the doorsteps of the clinic.¹³⁷ Others died on the streets. A photo of starving and neglected children was taken by Alexander Wienerberger,¹³⁸ an Austrian engineer, who had worked in the then capital of Soviet Ukraine, Kharkiv (see Figure 4.6).

Figure 4.6 “Hungernde und verwahrloste Kinder, die sogenannten ‘Besprisornyje’” (Starving and neglected children, the so-called bezprytul′ni) by Alexander Wienerberger, 1933. From Muss Russland hungern? Menschen- und Völkerschicksale in der Sowjetunion by Ewald Ammende and Alexander Wienerberger (Wien: W. Braumüller Universitäts-Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1935), Abb. 7. Source: Courtesy of TsDKFFAU, od. obl. 0-249172.

In May 1933, in the village of Rudky, Tsarychans′kyi district, Ivan Brovko, seventeen-year-old teacher, witnessed how ten-year-old Mariika Hailo sighed, put her head on the desk, propping it up with her swollen hands, and succumbed to eternal sleep.¹³⁹ The class sat silent, struck by what they had just witnessed. Only Lenin smiled from a portrait hanging over the blackboard on the wall. Amid the dead silence in the classroom one could hear a loudspeaker in the school yard, broadcasting a cheerful song: “Our life is joyful today, and will be happier tomorrow!” No one came to take her body and give it a burial: neither her mother who was slowly dying from starvation, nor her sister who had died the prior month, nor her father who had died the day before and whose body was taken to a mass grave. The daughter followed her father, war veteran and amputee, to that same anonymous grave.

“Life in the village ground to a halt: one could no longer hear songs, dogs barking, hens clucking, and weddings stopped,” recalled Oleksander Merkelo.¹⁴⁰ Schools became vacant, children emaciated, some were swollen and could no longer go to school. Children even created a new rhyme: “We already have booze, father will bring us more, but it is sad that there is no bread.” The survivor added: “I have to say that there was no shortage of moonshine and cigarettes in the so-called USSR. And the moonshine was made, as you know, from grain.”¹⁴¹ Another survivor, V. Savur, from the Kyïv region, remembered that in village cooperative stores moonshine was available in unlimited quantities, for it was a government monopoly in the USSR which brought in exceptional revenues. “That is why, even in those years of famine when masses of people were dying, the distilleries were working at full capacity turning grain into liquor.”¹⁴² Scholars argue that Stalin had justified the increase in the production and sale of vodka to find funds for industrialization.¹⁴³ Vodka represented up to 40 percent of total rural store sales and provided about 20 percent of state revenues.¹⁴⁴ This fueled the growing addiction rates that occurred during and after the genocidal famine. Many would continue to drink, if only to escape the horrifying reality of their situation.

Regardless of ethnicity, schoolchildren suffered from extreme starvation, most of them in rural areas of Soviet Ukraine. At the beginning of the 1934–1935 school year, all ethnic groups showed similar decreasing enrollment trends, except one. Primary school enrollments of Russian children increased from 8.6 to 11 percent,¹⁴⁵ driven by the resettlement of Red Army veterans and loyalists from Russia into villages depopulated by the genocidal famine. Tugboat brigades that were previously assigned to carry out grain requisitions were dispatched to welcome new settlers. Often local population resented the newcomers, muddied their water wells, and burned their homes (typically new settlers moved into homes left vacant by the famished and diseased Ukrainian farmers).¹⁴⁶

THE END OF UKRAINIZATION

On August 14, 1931, in his article published on the eve of the first anniversary of introducing compulsory education in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Kalinin boasted that 98 percent of children ages from 8 to 10 in the Ukrainian SSR were enrolled in primary schools compared to 76 percent the year before; graduates of primary schools went on to grades 5–7 in larger numbers (76 percent as opposed 55 percent the year before).¹⁴⁷ More than 15,500 new teachers were recruited, including 3,600 members of Komsomol mobilized to teach in schools.

By 1935, reality had drastically changed. Oleksandr Asatkin, head of the Department of Economic Accounting in Soviet Ukraine, reported an alarming trend. Based on estimates by his statisticians, the number of primary schools, teachers, and students in the Ukrainian SSR dipped below the prerevolution level (see Table 4.1). In 1924–1925, the number dipped as a result of the famine of 1921–1923 in Soviet Ukraine, which affected 3.8 million.¹⁴⁸ A decade later, in 1934–1935, the number dipped further as a result of the genocidal famine of 1932–1933, which claimed 7.1 million.¹⁴⁹ The trend in school statistics has yet to be analyzed by demographers.

Table 4.1 Primary schools, teachers, and students (grades 1 through 4) in Ukraine, 1914–1934
Years	Schools	Teachers	Students
1914–1915	18,386	33,646	1,424,701
1924–1925	14,411	26,849	1,264,341
1925–1926	16,155	32,636	1,463,099
1926–1927	16,720	34,294	1,453,144
1927–1928	17,108	36,665	1,530,026
1928–1929	17,488	39,488	1,585,814
1929–1930	17,944	42,966	1,776,155
1930–1931	17,493	46,655	2,003,371
1931–1932	15,475	43,017	1,795,478
1932–1933	13,354	32,686	1,329,258
1933–1934	12,949	32,146	1,162,354
1934–1935	12,132	29,431	1,074,312

Source: Adapted from Narodne hospodarstvo USRR (statystychnyi dovidnyk), ed. Oleksandr Asatkin (Kyїv: Narodne hospodarstvo ta oblik, 1935), Table 1, 546–47.

In her study of social mobility in Soviet schools, Sheila Fitzpatrick, an American historian of Australian ancestry, argued that achievements during the “cultural revolution” were remarkable.¹⁵⁰ She lauded an increase in the number of Soviet schools, teachers and students, and attributed this achievement to social mobility spurred by the October Socialist Revolution of 1917, while admitting that it plateaued in the late 1930s. Did Fitzpatrick, who had access to archives in Smolensk and Moscow, miss the reverse trend in Soviet Ukraine intentionally or unintentionally? If statistical data for primary schools, mandatory in the Ukrainian SSR at the time, were missing, this indicates an attempt to cover up the crime.

Fitzpatrick also neglected the liquidation of Ukrainization that started outside Soviet Ukraine. On December 15, 1932, Stalin and Molotov signed a resolution to “immediately discontinue Ukrainization” in the North Caucasus, the Central Black Earth, the Far East Region, Kazakhstan, Central Asia, and other areas and “prepare the introduction of Russian language school instruction” in all ethnically Ukrainian areas throughout the Soviet Union.¹⁵¹ In the North Caucasus region of Kuban′, an area settled predominantly by Ukrainian Cossacks in the eighteenth century and Ukrainian farmers from Poltava and Chernihiv regions in the nineteenth century, the large community of stanytsia (a Ukrainian Cossack settlement) Poltavs′ka was surrounded by OGPU detachments, and all 30,000 inhabitants were herded together with only few personal belongings and deported to Siberia.¹⁵² The following day the Krasnodar regional paper announced that the “Ukrainian-nationalist-Petliura nest” in Kuban′ had been liquidated. The settlement was renamed Krasnoarmeiskaia after the Red Army regiment. Ukrainian language was abolished in schools of Kuban′ and teachers were deported.¹⁵³

A Russian witness, Vadim Denisov, an officer of the regional OGPU, recorded how the “Kuban′ operation of 1932–1933” was planned and executed in two stages. First, during the preparatory stage, lists of people for liquidation and deportation were drawn in four categories:

1. Category A: active resisters to be executed;

2. Category 1: passive resisters to be sentenced to a 10-year or longer exile in labor camps;

3. Category 2: disloyal to be sentenced to five years of exile and hard labor in concentration camps with subsequent permanent settlement near the Arctic Circle or, if physically fit for labor, into administrative exile in forced settlements in Siberia; and

4. Category 3: loyalists and supporters of the regime to be spared.¹⁵⁴

Drawing the lists was arbitrary, completed without investigation. A neighbor could denounce a neighbor to a Communist Party plenipotentiary. Second, once lists were drawn for liquidation in four categories by OGPU operatives, a crackdown operation would commence and additional troops called in. The OGPU and local militias were in charge of the operation. Roads were blocked by patrols. Executions of those listed in Category A were conducted in the fields outside villages, with victims forced to dig their own graves. Reports about these executions with lists of victims were filed by OGPU expeditionary forces. Executions were also carried out in prisons in Rostov and Krasnodar. Those in Category 1 were hoarded to a local train station and transported like cattle to transit camps for subsequent confinement in OGPU-run forced labor camps established for various industrial projects throughout Russia. Children older than sixteen were registered separately from their parents and sentenced to shorter terms. Children younger than ten were left under the guardianship of their close relatives who were not subject to deportation, later placed in orphanages in other cities throughout the Soviet Union. All these crimes were never documented and left no traces in archives. Only lists of people sentenced to be executed, together with reports following the executions, were kept by OGPU field offices. The documentation about people transported by trains to places of forced settlement or exile included instructions and a transport registry; no case files with names, birthdates, length of sentence or reasons for sentencing were ever compiled. Overall, in the Kuban′ operation, 2 million people were arrested, as many as 500,000 executed, and the remaining 1.5 million transported to the Russian Arctic Circle and Siberia to mostly perish.¹⁵⁵ The number of executed in the Kuban′ operation may seem beyond the realm of possibility as the source quoted by Dmytro Solovey might be pure guesswork of the OGPU operative Denisov. Yet, in a retrospect, Robert Conquest attributed as many as 1 million out of 7 million Ukrainian losses in 1932–1933 to the North Caucasus Territory.¹⁵⁶

The stanytsia Poltavs′ka was given most publicity as an example and served as a prototype for subsequent operations.¹⁵⁷ Soon a pedagogical college in stanytsia Umans′ka (a Ukrainian Cossack settlement soon to be renamed Leningradskaia after the cavalry regiment that was stationed there) became the target. Ivan Polezhaiev recorded in his diary entry of February 18, 1933, that upon his arrival as the new college director, he met three instructors and eleven third-year students scheduled to graduate that spring out of fifty that were still alive. Two days later Polezhaiev was summoned by the local OGPU and was ordered to remove all textbooks in Ukrainian and take them to the security police headquarters. Gradually, he realized his mission: to curtail Ukrainization of the college. The task felt “uneasy” and “unpleasant.”¹⁵⁸

Following the SVU trial of 1930, repressions touched all educational institutions in the Ukrainian SSR. According to the 1935 Soviet statistical handbook, in the Ukrainian SSR approximately 46,655 teachers were in primary school classrooms on the first day of September 1930–1931. In 1934–1935, only 29,431 teachers remained in classrooms (see Table 4.1). Within five years of the SVU trial, 17,224 (one-third) of the teachers had been eliminated.¹⁵⁹ Their destiny was never explained by compilers of the statistical handbook. Vasyl′ Marochko and Götz Hillig came to a similar conclusion: between 1929 and 1934, from the period of “great purges” of educators in Ukraine that coincided with the launching of the First Five-Year Plan, up to the end of the Holodomor, over 30 percent of teachers perished as a result of repressions and executions.¹⁶⁰ After the SVU trial, the new school year of 1931–1932 started with fewer teachers (3,638 less based on the Soviet statistical source). At the beginning of the next school year, 1932–1933, as many as 10,331 teachers were missing, mostly due to continued arrests, as well as deaths from starvation. That same year, only 5,517 new graduates from 66 teacher training colleges (2,256) and 39 pedagogical institutes (3,261) took over half of vacant jobs.¹⁶¹

To relieve chronic shortages of teachers, students were being sent to villages to help with the harvest and to teach in schools. Iryna Medvid′ was a third-year student at Kharkiv University when in 1932 she and her classmates were assigned to the Vovchans′k district, in the Kharkiv region, to practice teaching. The situation was a result of teacher arrests in Ukraine. This young student-teacher left a vivid account of her Russian-language lesson for hungry children in Ukraine, which first appeared in the second volume of The Black Deeds of the Kremlin in 1955:

The District Department of Education then sent me to “practice” in a school at the village Tsiurupa, which was located on the old estate of General Brusilov.

Even though the children’s school was maintained by the government the children were always hungry. The daily ration consisted of two thin slices of soggy bread, a colored liquid in the morning which represented tea, a thin liquid (soup) or a thicker liquid (cereal) for lunch, and again a thin liquid for supper. The children were listless, apathetic, drowsy. They paid no attention and displayed little reaction to anything. The small children suffered most of all because anything they had was stolen from them by the older ones. It was impossible to accomplish anything in such difficult conditions, and finally all our youthful fervor waned amid starvation and hopelessness.

One day, during the Russian language lesson, I had gone through the whole program: checked the pupils’ homework, explained the new assignment in the difficult foreign language, and asked some questions. The monosyllabic answers took very little time. The classroom was shrouded in an oppressive stillness. The children sat motionless waiting for the bell, never laughing, talking or asking questions. I racked my brains wondering how to dispel the gloom and awaken some spark of interest in the children.

Then my eyes fell on a new April issue of the “Teacher’s Magazine.” I leafed nervously through the pages until an article caught my attention, and I began to read. The children sat quietly for some time, then they began to perk up their heads and open their eyes in amazement as they came up and surrounded my desk. I continued to read: “The children finished their lesson and the bell rang. Laughing and playing they skipped downstairs to the dining room where lunch awaited them, among other things, cocoa, white bread and butter. The servant had extra work sweeping up bread crumbs which the boisterous children carelessly scattered.”

The children around me, famished and just barely existing, suddenly spoke out. “Where, where was there such food?”

Choking back the tears I answered, “In Moscow.”¹⁶²

What moral choice could this young student-teacher make, except crying helplessly? Just like Iryna, many new cadres were young, loyal to the ideals of socialism, but inexperienced. More importantly, the cultural transmission of knowledge was interrupted because the old prerevolution intelligentsia were “hounded” from their posts, and the young “red” cadres were educated under a totalitarian system demanding strict obedience to political dogmas rather than critical thinking.¹⁶³ The choices were clear: class consciousness and communist morality were prioritized over national consciousness and humanistic morality.

Varvara Dibert, who taught in Kyїv during the 1930s, despite official sanctions against taking in lodgers, brought two children of one of her colleagues into her own home (the colleague’s wife suffered a mental breakdown after his arrest). She recalled that all teachers received porridge at school. “I never dipped a spoon into my portion. I brought it with me back home and divided it between the four children. I treated them for all practical purposes as if they were my own, and we never discriminated against them.”¹⁶⁴ Her family kept the two children for one year until their father returned from prison. Perhaps, Dibert was much more mature and could exercise her freedom of choice to help the victims. As a priest’s¹⁶⁵ daughter and wife of a school principal who fought on Petliura’s side, Dibert was of suspect social origins and had no choice but to flee abroad. She was the oldest witness to testify before the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine about Soviet schools in the 1920s and 1930s.

Social solidarity helped with survival. Bolsheviks, however, discouraged social solidarity. Famine survivor, V. Hrechko, recalled how a teacher was sanctioned for helping the starving “class enemy” in Ukraine in 1932:

A teacher from an incomplete secondary school in Dobrianka, Chernihiv region, P. S-n met a woman with two little children near his house. The woman was begging for food. The teacher, who had his own children, took the beggars to his house and cooked a meal for them. During a table conversation, he found out that the woman was from a neighboring district and her husband, the kulak, was arrested and exiled. S-n tried to help and arrange for the woman to work as a night guard in his school. She, of course, agreed and thanked him. However, when the teacher came to see the school principal, and the chief of the party committee was already in the principal’s office, he unexpectedly encountered not only rejection but also a strong reprimand: “Can’t you understand that you’ve made a big political mistake,” said the party secretary, “you have demonstrated before your students, – and they have already seen how you were feeding the woman, – your protest against the government and the party.” The school principal added: “Had I listened to you, our schoolchildren would have encountered the kulak’s offspring and shown sympathy toward them. Is this permissible from the point of view of Communist upbringing?” That was it; a note was added to the teacher’s personnel file about his “conciliatory attitude toward hostile elements.” And when after celebrating twenty-five years of his teaching career, he was nominated for the position as a school principal, the education committee rejected his candidacy because of the “ties with socially alien elements.”¹⁶⁶

The teacher who made a moral choice to extend humanitarian help to the mother and her children was sanctioned for showing “anti-government” and “anti-party attitudes.” Under the slogan of proletarian solidarity, moral foundations of Ukrainian society were shattered.¹⁶⁷

Another teacher whose diary was repressed, Iurii Sambros, witnessed how an elderly woman was dying, literally illustrating an epitome of one’s bitter fate of facing the end of life homeless, forsaken by kin. Sambros, who lost his mother in 1933, recalled how she, in moments of discord or a quarrel with his father, would sentimentally prophesy to her sons through tears that she might end up homeless dying on the street like an old hag. So the agony of a starving woman, whose life was coming to a sorrowful end, struck the diarist’s imagination:

as I was going to the train station every morning, for half a month, day after day, I watched a slow death of an old woman under the fence. . . . With legs swollen from starvation, without any strength left, she was lying near the fence on the path parallel to the railroad tracks.

Surrounded by weeds, heavily covered by dust from the road, with a wooden bowl, placed closer to her head by a charitable soul, for the purpose of collecting alms, all skin-and-bones, translucent, jaundiced, with puffy blue legs and moon-like face, with darkened spots of glassy, empty eyes, she was lying there like a ghost.

At first she was still able to move, to whisper, when someone stopped next to her, but with every other day, she gradually fell silent, lying quietly, only moving her eyes to the right . . . then to the left . . . or staring straight into the blue . . . indifferent sky. Finally, she died. Her corps was lying there for days and nights, engorged with interstitial fluids, then disappeared. Apparently, the police took the corpse away and buried.¹⁶⁸

Sambros, like other bystanders, reasoned that the woman’s agony lasted as long as it did because every passerby was trying to help, but no one could save her from death because everyone did not have enough to eat. Later, Sambros admitted on the pages of his diary that he survived because he bluffed in order to obtain access to a dining hall for Agricultural Academy union members. He befriended a secretary who gave him stamped coupons that he could use to eat in the dining hall for scientific personnel without presenting a membership card. This continued for months until the policy became stricter, and he could not enter the door without a card. Then Sambros cheated shamelessly and obtained access to a dining hall of the Writers’ Union with the help of a friend. He frequented the place as a guest of famous writers, but more often not-so-famous journalists. On several occasions he just walked in, assuming his face was familiar to the maître d'hôtel and thus no one would dare to ask if he had a pass. Crispy white tablecloths, napkins, restaurant tableware, polite servants, menus, buffet, vodka, and appetizers—all these were in stark contrast to the swollen starving begging on the streets.¹⁶⁹ Sambros survived; but he had to shed his Ukrainian identity after he moved to Russia to teach.¹⁷⁰

Summing up “the consequences of the arrested Ukrainization,” Valerii Smolii has argued that repressions against Ukrainian nationally conscious intelligentsia, in particular teachers, ultimately robbed the linguistic component of Ukrainization of its vigor and sent a signal to those who might have too enthusiastically taken up charge: “Now the Ukrainian language stopped being the basic means of modernization. Those who wanted to win respected social status and gain entry to new information, to contemporary scientific thought and knowledge, had to resort to the Russian language.”¹⁷¹ The KP(b)U’s identification in November 1933 of “local Ukrainian nationalism” as the preeminent danger to Soviet power is seen by some scholars to be the definitive marker of an end to Ukrainization.¹⁷²

By early 1933, when People’s Commissariat of Education administrators discussed the Ukrainization of schools, they increasingly talked about it in a negative sense, as a policy that had violated the rights of ethnic Russians and had led to a rise in Ukrainian nationalism.¹⁷³ In 1933–1934, when the Communist Party finally declared “local nationalism” the chief danger, Soviet authorities purged the People’s Commissariat of Education in the Ukrainian SSR almost entirely of its existing staff.¹⁷⁴ In 1930, none of forty-five members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia sentenced during the SVU trial were from the Commissariat of Education. However, after the show trial ended, all Skrypnyk’s deputies and other members of the Commissariat of Education in Soviet Ukraine were purged.¹⁷⁵ In 1933, Mykola Skrypnyk is reported as having defiantly attacked Postyshev before the Central Committee, accusing him of betraying the principles of internationalism. He repeated this at a meeting of the Ukrainian Politburo. Over June and July, Postyshev and other leaders attacked him, and on July 6, 1933, Skrypnyk again defended himself to the Politburo. They demanded his unconditional surrender. That afternoon, instead, he shot himself.¹⁷⁶ On July 10, 1933, Pravda, in announcing Skrypnyk’s death, blamed him for separatism: “Under the banner of a struggle for Ukrainian culture, the bourgeois nationalist Petliurist elements, well supplied with money by foreign secret service, worked for the separation of the Ukraine from the Soviet Union.”¹⁷⁷ Arrests lasted from 1933 to 1934.¹⁷⁸ As scholars noted, “Not only Skrypnyk was on trial, but the Ukrainian intelligentsia, inert, intimidated by terror, fearful of speaking the truth about the famine of 1932–1933.”¹⁷⁹

In the years that followed, the number of Ukrainian schools dropped, and Soviet authorities “no longer consistently compelled the systematic Ukrainization of higher education, opting instead to permit Russian-language predominance.”¹⁸⁰ In 1932–1933, nearly 42 percent of schools had Russian-language classrooms; in the following year, the number increased to 94 percent.¹⁸¹ Although some Ukrainian scholars emphasize that it was too early to speak of Russification as an “organized state policy” in 1933–1934, they cite instances of postsecondary instructors (especially in prestigious educational institutes, administered by all-Union authorities) exclusively using Russian in extracurricular activities.¹⁸²

In December 1934, four lists of banned authors were published, containing works by Ukrainian historians, sociologists, linguists, poets, writers, and anyone else who had been arrested. The authorities decreed that all their books must be removed from libraries, bookstores, and educational institutions. As scholars concluded, “the extermination of the intellectual class was accomplished by the extermination of their words and ideas.”¹⁸³

The genocidal famine in Soviet Ukraine turned into an instrument of the nationality policy. This radically distinguished the situation in Ukraine from that in Kazakhstan, where famine-related losses were also very high. On December 14, 1932, Stalin and Molotov signed a resolution of the TsK VKP(b) and the SNK of the USSR, which demanded “correct Ukrainization” in Soviet Ukraine and other regions densely populated by ethnic Ukrainians throughout the Soviet Union. The document also demanded a struggle against Petliurites and other “counterrevolutionary” elements, who this time were accused of organizing the famine.¹⁸⁴ This not only meant the end of the ambiguous policy of “Ukrainization,” but marked the decisive phase of the liquidation of the “Ukraine-centered” potential that was never supposed to revive. As scholars rightfully note, the greatest burden of the genocidal famine was placed on Ukrainian land tillers, who were politically most dangerous and resisted collectivization as much as they could. However, for purely organizational reasons, they could not launch an offensive on the city and become dangerous to the regime. The Stalinist regime used the famine and false stories about those who were responsible for it as a concrete pretext for mass-scale repressive campaigns, purges, and the like.¹⁸⁵ The policy of Russification was reversed only in October 1989, when the Ukrainian language was proclaimed the state language of the republic, to lay the foundation for the declaration of state sovereignty and eventual independence of Ukraine in 1991, a reinstatement of independence first proclaimed in 1918 by the Ukrainian National Republic.

NOTES

1. “Japan’s Capacity to Modernize,” in John K. Fairbank, Edwin O. Reischauer, and Albert M. Craig, East Asia: The Modern Transformation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), 188–91.

2. In spring 1933, to deflect attention from party’s responsibility for the man-made famine and to silence the truth, “counterrevolutionary” organizations were “uncovered” by the GPU in leading Ukrainian agricultural institutes. Leading specialists were executed. The ranks of the commissariat of land management in Ukraine down to local machine-tractor stations were purged. See Kas′ianov, “Ukraïns′ka intelihentsiia v 1933 r.,” 93–95.

3. Jacob Bunge, “Supersized Family Farms Transform U.S. Agriculture,” Wall Street Journal, October 24, 2017, A1.

4. Bunge, “Supersized Family Farms,” A10.

5. After the SVU trial, from 1930 to 1933, there was a cascade of fabricated cases against Ukrainian intelligentsia, including the Ukrainian National Center (Ukraïns′kyi natsional´nyi tsentr, or UNTs), the Ukrainian Military Organization (Ukraïns′ka viis′kova orhanizatsiia, or UVO), and the Association of Ukrainian Nationalists (Ob’iednannia ukraïns′kykh natsionalistiv, or OUN). See Shkandrij and Bertelsen, “The Soviet Regime’s National Operations in Ukraine, 1929–1934,” 417–47; Volodymyr Prystaiko and Iurii Shapoval, Mykhailo Hrushevs′kyi: Sprava “UNTs” i ostanni roky (1931–1934) (Kyïv: Krytyka, 1999); Iana Prymachenko, “Sprava ‘Ob’iednannia ukraïns′kykh natsionalistiv,’” Tsei den′ v istoriï, December 15, 2017, https://www.jnsm.com.ua/h/1215T/.

6. For a detailed account of famine in 1932–1933, see Applebaum, Red Famine, 159–204, 222–61; Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 217–82; and Snyder, Bloodlands, 40–47.

7. Kulchytsky, The Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, 141.

8. Ibid.

9. Marochko et al., Holodomor-henotsyd, 56–57.

10. By October 1931, 72 percent of the arable land in Soviet Ukraine had been collectivized. See Istoriia kolektyvizatsiï sil′s′koho hospodarstva Ukraïns′koï RSR, 1917–1937 rr., ed. Ivan Hanzha et al., vol. 2 (Kyїv: Naukova dumka, 1965), 554–55.

11. Solovey, Golgota Ukraïny, 175–76.

12. In his novel-memoir, Anatolii Dimarov described how collectivization was implemented in a typical Ukrainian village following Stalin’s article “The Year of the Great Breakthrough,” published on November 7, 1929, the anniversary of the October Socialist Revolution. It announced a radical change in the Soviet economic policy by reversing the NEP of 1921. In Soviet Ukraine, the total collectivization was to be completed in one to two years. See Anatolii Dimarov, “The Hungry Thirties (A Parable about Bread),” In Stalin’s Shadow, trans. Iurii Tkach (Melbourne: Bayda Books, 1989), 110–75, http://shron1.chtyvo.org.ua/Dimarov_Anatolii/In_Stalins_Shadow_anhl.pdf.

13. Kulchytsky, The Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, 141.

14. Solovey, Golgota Ukraïny, 177; see also Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 274–82, 306.

15. Sergei Maksimov put these words into the mouth of Russian patriot Beletsky, one of the main characters in his novel Denis Bushuev, published in 1948; quoted in Ro-i, “Chy odnakovo hnityt′ bol′shevyts′kyi rezhym usi narody SSSR?” Ukraïns′ki visti (Neu-Ulm), no. 6 (1949); quoted in Solovey, Golgota Ukraïny, 177.

16. According to Vasyl′ Marochko, in early 1930, nearly 8,451 Communist Party and Communist Youth League activists were recruited and 6,435 dispatched to rural areas in Soviet Ukraine to enforce collectivization; the remaining volunteers were dispatched to the North Caucasus, Lower Volga, and Kazakhstan. Most of them (80 percent) served in village soviets. Their task was accomplished by the end of 1931, when 85 percent of farms in Soviet Ukraine were collectivized. See V. I. Marochko, “Dvadtsiatyp’iatytysiachnyky,” Entsyklopediia istoriï Ukraïny, ed. V. A. Smolii et al., vol. 2 (Kyïv: Naukova dumka, 2004), 297, http://resource.history.org.ua/item/0001740. For a detailed analysis of backgrounds, motivations, and mentalities of the 25,000ers, see Lynne Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

17. Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).

18. Grossman, Forever Flowing, 141–42. Grossman’s daughter Ekaterina Korotkova confirmed to Daria Mattingly that the novel’s character Anna was based on Pelageia Semenova. Semenova was born in Likhoslavsk, Tver′ region, and after the famine, she returned to Russia. It is unknown how she reflected on being a perpetrator of the genocidal famine in Ukraine or how she explained her motivation. See Mattingly, “[Extra]ordinary Women,” in Women and the Holodomor-Genocide, ed. Malko, 69–70.

19. Mattingly, “[Extra]ordinary Women,” 81.

20. Grossman, Forever Flowing, 143.

21. The original issue of the magazine has been preserved in the National Library of Ukraine named after V. I. Vernads′kyi. The author is indebted to Yana Hryn′ko of the National Holodomor-Genocide Museum in Kyïv, Ukraine for her assistance in locating the source of the 1930 propaganda cartoon.

22. V. Danilov, R. Manning, and L. Viola, eds., Tragediia sovetskoi derevni. Kollektivizatsiia i raskulachivanie. Dokumenty i materialy, 1927–1939, 5 vols. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000), vol. 2, 791.

23. See The War Against the Peasantry, 1927–1930: The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside, eds. Lynne Viola, V. P. Danilov, N. A. Ivnitskii, and Denis Kozlov (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 320.

24. For more on the 1930 rebellion, see Applebaum, Red Famine, 139–58.

25. TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 20, spr. 3191, ark. 37.

26. TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 20, spr. 3184, ark. 95.

27. TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 20, spr. 3191, ark. 41.

28. TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 20, spr. 3154, ark. 11.

29. Ibid.

30. Valerii Vasyl′iev, “Persha hvylia sutsil′noї kolektyvizatsiї i ukraїns′ke selianstvo,” in Valerii Vasyl′iev and Linn Viola, Kolektyvizatsiia i selians′kyi opir na Ukraїni (lystopad 1929 – berezen′ 1930 rr.) (Vinnytsia: Logos, 1997), 233.

31. Bohdan Patryliak, “How Stalin Crushed the Euromaidan of 1930,” Euromaidan Press, December 1, 2014, http://euromaidanpress.com/2014/12/01/punishment-for-two-maidans-putincrimea-and-stalinholodomor/. For more information about uprisings and their leaders, see Volodymyr Tylishchak, 1930. U.S.R.R. Povstannia: Naukovo-populiarni narysy (Kyїv: Smoloskyp, 2016).

32. V. M. Danylenko, “Antyradians′ke povstannia selian v Ukraїni naperedodni holodomoru,” in Pavlohrads′ke povstannia 1930 r.: Dokumenty i materialy, ed. V. M. Danylenko (Kyïv: Ukraïns′kyi pys′mennyk, 2009), 13–27.

33. A. Berelovich and V. Danilov, eds., Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VChK–OGPU–NKVD, 1918–1939: Dokumenty i materialy, 4 vols. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2003), vol. 3, book 1, 546, 533.

34. TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 20, spr. 6390, ark. 135.

35. L. Pylypenko, “The Starving Schoolteachers’ ‘Borsch,’” in The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, ed. Pidhainy, vol. 2, 578–79.

36. In his memoir, Petro Grigorenko described how in spring 1920 the ChK (forerunner of the GPU) disarmed the Ukrainian countryside. The chekist troika read a list of hostages (usually most respected elderly men) and threatened to shoot them if all weapons were not surrendered by the noon of the following day. Overnight, hunting rifles, guns, revolvers, and daggers were thrown in front of the doors of village soviets. Hostages were killed if any sawed-off shotgun or other weapon was found in someone’s backyard. See Petro G. Grigorenko, Memoirs, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 17, 40. In 1926, 1928, and 1929, owners of hunting rifles were required to register their firearms. In August 1930, the GPU searched homes of registered owners and confiscated hunting rifles and ammunition.

37. For resistance tactics used by rebel units in Podillia, Chernihiv, and Poltava regions, see Solovey, Golgota Ukraïny, 137–39, 141.

38. HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 27 (1951 r.), spr. 4, ark. 8.

39. Patryliak, “How Stalin Crushed the Euromaidan of 1930.”

40. Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VChK–OGPU–NKVD, eds. Berelovich and Danilov, vol. 3, book 1, 708, 710, 711.

41. Patryliak, “How Stalin Crushed the Euromaidan of 1930.”

42. Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

43. The War Against the Peasantry, 1927–1930: The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside, eds. Lynne Viola, V. P. Danilov, N. A. Ivnitskii, and Denis Kozlov (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 321.

44. Stanton, “The Ten Stages of Genocide,” https://www.genocidewatch.com/ten-stages-of-genocide.

45. Pidhainy, “Portraits of Solowky Exiles,” 329.

46. Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, eds. Danilov, Manning, and Viola, vol. 3, Konets 1930–1933, 367.

47. N. Ivnitskii, “Golod 1932–1933: kto vinovat? (po dokumentam ‘Kremlevskogo arkhiva’),” in Holodomor 1932–1933 rr. v Ukraїni: prychyny i naslidky: Mizhnarodna naukova konferentsiia, Kyïv, 9–10 veresnia 1993, ed. S. Kul′chyts′kyi (Kyïv: Instytut istoriï Ukraïny NAN Ukraïny, 1995), 40.

48. TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 6, spr. 237, ark. 207–216; English translation in “Resolution of the CC CP(b)U Politburo On Measures to Strengthen Grain Procurement (Excerpt), 18 November 1932,” in Holodomor of 1932–33 in Ukraine: Documents and Materials, ed. Ruslan Pyrih, trans. Stephen Bandera (Kyïv: Kyïv Mohyla Academy Publishing House, 2008), 55–60.

49. Holodomor of 1932–33 in Ukraine, ed. Pyrih, 58.

50. Ibid., 59.

51. Mark Tauger, “Review of Anne Applebaum’s ‘Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine,’” History News Network (George Washington University’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences), July 1, 2018, http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/169438.

52. Moshe Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates: From Bukharin to the Modern Reformers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 176.

53. Mark B. Tauger, “The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933,” Slavic Review 50, no. 1 (1991): 70–84. In his article, Tauger pointed out that data from Soviet archives demonstrate that the 1932 harvest was considerably lower than official statistics indicate, aggravating the serious food shortage that had struck the country in 1931 and making “famine likely if not inevitable in 1933.” His calculations gave a total Soviet harvest of 50 million tons, nearly 30 percent below the official figure of 70 million tons. Tauger exclusively based his thesis that the famine was primarily the result of a genuine shortage on the statistical information from the Soviet publication Istoriia krest′ianstva SSSR, vol. 2, Sovetskoe krest′ianstvo v period sotsialisticheskoi rekonstruktsii narodnogo khoziaistva, 1927–1937 (Moscow: Nauka, 1986).

54. O. Bilous′ko et al., eds., Natsional′na knyha pam’iati zhertv Holodomoru 1932–1933 rokiv v Ukraїni: Poltavs′ka oblast′ (Poltava: Oriiana, 2008), 944; quoted in Mattingly, “[Extra]ordinary Women,” 82.

55. In his paper presented at the Second International Workshop on Lysenkoism on June 22–23, 2012 at the University of Vienna, Austria, Tauger insisted that the drought was the main cause of the famine in 1932–1933, denying rather aggressively Stalin’s responsibility for the crime. See “Retrospective for Yale Agrarian Studies,” September 2014, https://agrarianstudies.macmillan.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/papers/TaugerAgrarianStudies.pdf.

56. Haynes and Klehr, “Revising History,” In Denial, 11–57, esp. 17–18.

57. Document 24, “Letter to V. V. Kuraev, Ye. B. Bosh, A. E. Minkin, 11 August 1918,” in The Unknown Lenin, ed. Pipes, 50.

58. Kul′chyts′kyi, Holodomor 1932–1933 rokiv iak henotsyd, 277; V. Marochko and O. Movchan, Holodomor 1932–1933 rokiv v Ukraїni: Khronika (Kyïv: Vydavnychyi dim “Kyievo-Mohylians′ka akademiia,” 2008), 166.

59. Heorhii Papakin, “Chorna doshka”: antyselians′ki represiї (1932–1933) (Kyïv: Instytut istoriї Ukraїny NAN Ukraїny, 2013); Heorhii Papakin, “‘Chorna doshka’ Holodomoru i liuds′ki vtraty 1932–1933 rokiv,” in Holodomor 1932–1933 rokiv: Vtraty ukraїns′koї natsiї: Materialy mizhnarodnoї naukovo-praktychnoї konferentsiї, Kyїv, 4 zhovtnia 2016 roku, ed. Olesia Stasiuk et al. (Kyïv: Vyd. Oleh Filiuk, 2017), 160.

60. Kulchytsky, The Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, 149.

61. Papakin, “‘Chorna doshka’ Holodomoru,” 162.

62. Pam’iat′ narodu: henotsyd v Ukraїni holodom 1932–1933 rokiv, Svidchennya, vol. 1, ed. V. Smolii (Kyïv: Vyd. “Kalyta”, 2009), 200.

63. Pam’iat′ narodu: henotsyd v Ukraїni holodom 1932–1933 rokiv, Svidchennya, vol. 2, ed. V. Smolii (Kyïv: Vyd. “Kalyta”, 2009), 695.

64. “Case History LH57: Mikhail Frenkin, Baku,” in Oral History Project, vol. 2, 624; English version in the Report to Congress, 363.

65. Ibid., 364.

66. Iurii Shapoval, “Holodomor i ioho zv’iazok iz represiiamy v Ukraïni u 1932–1934 rokah,” in Holod v Ukraïni u pershii polovyni XX stolittia: prychyny ta naslidky (1921–1923, 1932–1933, 1946–1947): Materialy Mizhnarodnoï naukovoï konferentsiï, Kyïv, 20–21 lystopada 2013 r. (Kyïv, 2013), 154.

67. HDA SBU, f. 16, op. 25, spr. 3, ark. 73.

68. Volodymyr Nikol′s′kyi, “Represyvna diial′nist′ orhaniv GPU pid chas holodomoru v USRR (1932–1933 rr.),” Z arkhiviv VUChK-GPU-NKVD-KGB, no. 2 (2001): 484.

69. Nikol′s′kyi, “Represyvna diial′nist′ orhaniv GPU,” 480.

70. HDA SBU, f. 42, spr. 9, ark. 83–86.

71. Valerii Vasyl′iev, “Tsina holodnoho khliba,” in Komandyry velykoho holodu: Poïzdky V. Molotova i L. Kaganovycha v Ukraïnu ta na Pivnichnyi Kavkaz, 1932–1933 rr., eds. Valerii Vasyl′iev and Iu. Shapoval (Kyïv: Heneza, 2001), 54–55.

72. Vasyl′iev, “Tsina holodnoho khliba,” 55.

73. The Look of Silence, documentary by Joshua Oppenheimer, 2015; see trailer https://youtu.be/bp1xT302VcY.

74. “Case History LH01: Maria Senyszyn, b. 1925 in the village Mykhailivka, Korosten′ district, Zhytomyr region,” in Oral History Project, vol. 1, 1.

75. Pidhainy, The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, vol. 1, 468.

76. Smeulers and Haveman, eds., Supranational Criminology, 237. See also Alette Smeulers, “Female Perpetrators: Ordinary and Extra-ordinary Women,” International Criminal Law Review 15, no. 2 (2015): 207–53.

77. Mattingly, “[Extra]ordinary Women,” 57–59.

78. Kołakowski, “The Marxist Roots of Stalinism,” 164.

79. Ervin Staub, “The Roots of Evil: Social Conditions, Culture, Personality, and Basic Human Needs,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 3, no. 3 (1999): 183.

80. Stanley Milgram, “The Dilemma of Obedience,” The Phi Delta Kappan 55, no. 9 (1974): 604.

81. Kas′ianov, “Ukraïns′ka intelihentsiia v 1933 r.,” 98.

82. “Case History LH48: Anonymous female narrator, b. 1910, Kharkiv region,” in Oral History Project, vol. 1, 570. A proverbial wisdom, Їzh borsch z hrybamy, a iazyk trymai za zubamy (Eat borsch with mushrooms, but keep your tongue behind the teeth), appeared in Ukraine in the 1930s. See Dozhylasia Ukraїna . . . Narodna tvorchist′ chasiv holodomoru i kolektyvizatsiï na Ukraïni, comp. Ihor Buhaievych (Kyïv: Ukraïns′kyi pys′mennyk, 1993), 23.

83. “Case History LH48,” in Oral History Project, vol. 1, 567.

84. “A ‘Class’ Approach to Teachers and Students,” Pravda, October 27, 1929; quoted in Pidhainy, The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, vol. 2, 271–72.

85. “Na zakhyst uchyteliv-aktyvistiv,” Narodnyi uchytel′, November 13, 1929, 2; quoted in Pauly, Breaking the Tongue, 279.

86. “Mobilizing Schools to Help Collectivization,” Visti, January 15, 1930; quoted in Pidhainy, The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, vol. 2, 381.

87. “Case History LH57: Mikhail Frenkin, Baku,” in Oral History Project, vol. 2, 624; English version in the Report to Congress, 363.

88. Ibid., 364. Frenkin, ethnically Jewish, spent ten years in labor camps, followed by seven years of exile, for a total of seventeen years, serving on the trumped up charges for participating first in the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO) in 1931, then in the Polish Military Organization (POV) in 1933. For more about these GPU operations, see Shkandrij and Bertelsen, “The Soviet Regime’s National Operations in Ukraine,” 417–47.

89. Derzhavnyi arkhiv Poltavs′koï oblasti (DAPO), f. P-251, op. 1, spr. 4759, ark. 9zv., 21; DAPO, f. P-251, op. 1, spr. 4775, ark. 3; quoted in Luk’ianenko, “Nezhodni,” in “Naiblyzhchi druzi partiï,” 497–99.

90. TsDAVOU, f. 2717, op. 2, spr. 1673, ark. 20, 21; quoted in Kas′ianov, “Ukraïns′ka intelihentsiia v 1933 r.,” 94.

91. TsDAVOU, f. 2717, op. 3, spr. 1689, ark. 15; quoted in Ibid.

92. “Case History SW47: Oleksander Merkelo,” in Oral History Project, vol. 2, 1038.

93. Ibid., 1040.

94. In 1929, a newspaper correspondent reported about mass suicides as an indicator of passive resistance among teachers in rural areas of Soviet Ukraine. See D. Rozdaibida, “Samohubstva sered osvitian Ukraїny,” Narodnyi uchytel′ (People’s Teacher), September 25, 1929; quoted in Danylenko and Kuz′menko, “Naukovo-pedahohichna intelihentsiia v roku holodu,” 151. Teachers who “fled from their personal and professional problems by committing suicide” were mentioned in Holmes, The Kremlin and the Schoolhouse, 132–33. For a discussion of the vulnerability of women who taught in rural schools, see Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 161. For a discussion of suicides among women who worked as teachers in Soviet Russia in the 1930s, see E. Thomas Ewing, “Personal Acts with Public Meanings: Suicides by Soviet Women Teachers in the Early Stalin Era,” Gender & History 14, no. 1 (2002): 117–37.

95. “Mr. Kononenko’s Statement before the Commission on the Ukraine Famine Hearing and Meeting, April 30, 1987,” Ukraine Famine [Hearing 04/30/1987], box 16921, Gary Bauer Files, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum.

96. “Case History SW3: Antin Lak, b. 1910, Poltava region,” in Oral History Project, vol. 2, 731.

97. Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski, The Accused (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951), 189; quoted in Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 248.

98. The Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, commonly referred to as Second Thessalonians or 2 Thessalonians is a book from the New Testament of the Bible, traditionally attributed to Paul the Apostle. In its third (and last) chapter, “Warning against Loafers” verse 10 reads: “He who does not work, neither shall he eat” (2 Thess. 3:10). This truism was included into Article 18 of the 1918 Constitution. Although the Moral Code of the Constructors of Communism disappeared from the Communist Party program in 1986, the special system of stores and other privileges, such as vacations at health resorts and travel abroad, lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union. See Stanislav Kul′chyts′kyi, “Komunisty i moral′,” Ukraïns′kyi tyzhden′, no. 50 (630), December 12, 2019, https://tyzhden.ua/History/238597.

99. Elena Osokina, Za fasadom “Stalinskogo izobiliia”: Raspredelenie i rynok v snabzhenii naseleniia v gody industrializatsii, 1927–1941 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998), 114–36.

100. Nicolas Werth, “Food Shortages, Hunger, and Famines in the USSR, 1928–33,” East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies III, no. 2 (2016): 43–44.

101. TsDAVOU, f. 4134, op. 1, spr. 180, ark. 7. See also Vasyl′ Marochko, “Statystyka zhertv Holodomoru: antropolohichno-demohrafichnyi dyskurs,” Ukraïns′kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, no. 5 (2017): 118.

102. “Z shchodennyka vchytel′ky O. Radchenko,” in Holodomor 1932–1933 rokiv v Ukraïni, ed. Pyrih, 1011–26. The original published in P. Slobodianiuk and Iu. Teliachyi, “Chorna doshka” Ukraïny (podiï 1930-kh rokiv) (Khmel′nyts′kyi: Podillia, 2001), 38–60.

103. “Z shchodennyka vchytel′ky O. Radchenko,” 1011–26.

104. Ibid.

105. Ibid.

106. Ibid.

107. Seven of her thirteen notebooks were confiscated by Stalin’s security police during a search of Radchenko’s apartment on July 7, 1945, two months after the Soviet victory in World War II. The diary covered the period from 1926 through 1943. Four of the confiscated notebooks were destroyed, but the remaining three contained enough material to convict the author. In her January 8, 1932 entry, the diarist described the celebration of the Orthodox Christmas and grain requisitions, but toward the end of the month, she switched from Ukrainian to Russian. Typically, memoirists use the official language of the state rather than their native language to distance themselves emotionally from the events.

108. Radchenko’s eldest daughter Elida (b. 1926) was able to hide six of the notebooks under the pillow, but when she sat down with her father to read the diary, she was horrified by her mother’s revelations. The daughter burned the notebooks out of fear that she and other family members could be arrested. See Iryna Musatova, “Desiat′ rokiv taboriv za osobysti notatky pro holodomor,” Dzerkalo tyzhnia, November 25, 2006, no. 45 (624), 20; reprinted in Mytsyk, ed., Ukraïnskyi holokost, vol. 4, 373–76. See English version in Volodymyr V’iatrovych, “Oleksandra Radchenko: Persecuted for her Memory,” Stichting Totalitaire Regimes en hun Slachtoffers, project of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience; quoted in Applebaum, Red Famine, 329.

109. Volodymyr V’iatrovych, “Oleksandra Radchenko – represovana za pam’iat′,” Istorychna Pravda, November 11, 2013, http://www.istpravda.com.ua/articles/2013/11/22/139903.

110. Klitsakov, Pedahohichni kadry Ukraïny, 246.

111. Hanna Didenko (b. 1919), from the village of Naraïvka, Haisyns′kyi district, Vinnytsia region, in Mytsyk, ed., Ukraïns′kyi holokost, vol. 7, 15.

112. TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 20, spr. 5258, ark. 39, 36; quoted in Holodomor 1932–1933 rokiv v Ukraïni, 181–82.

113. “Supply of Teachers Was Interrupted,” Visti, March 17, 1932; quoted in Pidhainy, The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, vol. 2, 336–37.

114. “Case History LH57: Mikhail Frenkin, b. 1910, Baku,” in Oral History Project, vol. 2, 619.

115. Marochko and Hillig, Represovani pedahohy Ukraїny, 255.

116. Vasyl′ Bashtanenko, b. 1924 (interviewed in 1995 by Viktoriia Kul′ko, a philology student from Dnipropetrovs′k State University), in Mytsyk, ed., Ukraïns′kyi holokost, vol. 1, 137.

117. “Case History SW35: Mariia Panchenko, b. 1924 in the village of Kunivka, Kobeliaky district, Poltava region,” in Oral History Project, vol. 2, 927, 929.

118. Vasyl′ Mirutenko, “Hot Breakfast at School,” in Pidhainy, The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, vol. 2, 574.

119. L. Pylypenko, “The Starving Schoolteachers’ ‘Borsch,’” in Pidhainy, The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, vol. 2, 578–79.

120. Danylenko and Kuz′menko, “Naukovo-pedahohichna intelihentsiia v roky holodu,” 152.

121. TsDAHOU, f. 4134, op. 1, spr. 291, ark. 84.

122. Marochko, “Statystyka zhertv Holodomoru,” 118.

123. TsDAVOU, f. 4134, op. 1, spr. 820, ark. 14.

124. Vasyl′ Marochko, “Hariachi snidanky,” in Entsyklopediia Holodomoru 1932–1933 rokiv v Ukraïni, 85. For more about “hot breakfasts” in schools and orphanages, see Ïdlo 33-ho: Slovnyk Holodomoru (Odesa: Vyd-vo “Iurydychna literatura,” 2003), 31; see also 33-i holod, eds. Kovalenko and Maniak, 292.

125. See Volodymyr Serhiichuk, “Holodni, bosi i rozditi”: ukraïns′ki dity v 1932–1933 rokakh (Vyshgorod: PP Serhiichuk M. I., 2020), 58.

126. Ivan Koziar, Spohady (Kyïv: Vydavnychyi dim “Kyievo-Mohylians′ka akademiia,” 2010), 153–89; reprinted under the title “Zi spohadiv ukraïns′koho emihranta do Kanady Ivana Koziara (1904–1989 rr.)” in Mytsyk, ed., Ukraїns′kyi holokost, 535–37.

127. Koziar, Spohady, 536.

128. Ibid.

129. Ibid., 537.

130. See H. Okhrimenko, “Dyrektor shkoly riatuvav ditei vid holodnoї smerti,” Ukraїns′ke slovo, July 20–26, 2005; see also O. Rokyts′ka, “Ivchuk Vasyl′ Iakovych, Heroi Ukraїny: podvyh liudianosti v neliuds′kyi chas,” Narodna osvita 1, no. 10 (2010), https://www.narodnaosvita.kiev.ua/Narodna_osvita/vupysku/10/statti/rokicka.htm.

131. “Lyst komsomol′tsia H. Tkachenka do sekretaria TsK KP(b)U S. Kosiora pro ekonomichni trudnoshchi na seli ta politychnyi nastrii naselennia,” TsDAHOU, f. 1, op. 20, spr. 5406, ark. 8–11; reprinted in Holodomor 1932–1933 rokiv v Ukraïni, 210–12.

132. Volodymyr Serhiichuk, “Ushanuvaty vsikh nevynno ubiiennykh,” Golos Ukraïny, May 16, 2018, http://www.golos.com.ua/article/302970.

133. Vasyl′ Marochko, “Shkoly bez ditei ta vchyteliv,” in Holodomor 1932–1933 rr. (Kyiv, 2007), 50.

134. Marochko, “Shkoly bez ditei ta vchyteliv,” 50.

135. Ibid., 51.

136. Vasyl′ Bashtanenko, b. 1924 (interviewed in 1995 by Viktoriia Kul′ko, a philology student from Dnipropetrovs′k State University), in Ukraïns′kyi holokost, ed. Mytsyk, vol. 1, 137.

137. Oles′ Derhachov, b. 1902 (interviewed in 1993 by B. Bondarenko, a history student from Dnipropetrovs′k State University), in Ukraïns′kyi holokost, ed. Mytsyk, vol. 1, 130–31.

138. An Austrian engineer, Alexander Wienerberger worked at a factory in Kharkiv in 1933 and captured authentic images of the Holodomor for his Red Album titled “The Workers’ Paradise. U.S.S.R.” The album is in the private collection of Samara Pearce, the photographer’s great-granddaughter. See a collection of the original photos in “Holodomor in Kharkiv through the lens of Austrian engineer: photo gallery,” Euromaidan Press, January 10, 2021,

139.

140. http://euromaidanpress.com/2021/01/10/1933-holodomor-in-kharkiv-through-the-lens-of-austrian-engineer-photo-gallery/. The photo document is archived in the HREC Collection “Alexander Wienerberger: Beyond the Innitzer Album,” PD106, http://vitacollections.ca/HREC-holodomorphotodirectory/3636214/data.

141. Ivan Brovko (b. 1916), Tsarychans′kyi district; quoted in Ukraïns′kyi holokost, ed. Mytsyk, vol. 1, 144–45.

142. “Case History SW47: Oleksander Merkelo,” in Oral History Project, vol. 2, 1037.

143. Ibid., 1038.

144. V. Savur, “Saved by Whiskey,” in Pidhainy, The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, vol. 2, 577.

145. Andrea Graziosi, “The Impact of Holodomor Studies on the Understanding of the USSR,” in Contextualizing the Holodomor: The Impact of Thirty Years of Ukrainian Famine Studies, eds. Andrij Makuch and Frank E. Sysyn (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2015), 53.

146. Graziosi, “The Impact of Holodomor Studies,” 54.

147. Narodne hospodarstvo USRR (statystychnyi dovidnyk), ed. Asatkin, Table 7, 553.

148. Volodymyr Petrovs′kyi, “Rozhevi okuliary i tverda diisnist′,” Svoboda, no. 119, May 10, 1952; quoted in Solovey, Golgota Ukraïny, 198.

149. “Raporty Ukrainy i RSFSR o vypolnenii plana vseobucha TsK VKP(b) – tov. Staliny, TsK KP(b)U – tov. Kosioru,” Kommunisticheskoe prosveshchenie 15 (1931): 36–40.

150. Holod 1921–1923 rokiv v Ukraїni, ed. Kul′chyts′kyi, 5.

151. V. I. Marochko, “О. М. Asatkin – vyhadanyi ‘fal′syfikator’ perepysu naselennia 1937 r.,” Ukraïns′kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, no. 4 (2017): 147, 149. Asatkin was purged for allegedly undermining the Soviet regime by “falsifying” the 1937 population census that demonstrated catastrophic demographic losses in Soviet Ukraine.

152. Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union.

153. Resolution of the CC AUCP(b) and USSR SNK “On ukrainization in DVK (Far-East Region), Kazakhstan, Central Asia, TsChO (Central Black Earth) and other areas of the USSR” of December 15, 1932; GARF, f. 5446, op. 18, d. 466, l. 177; quoted in Holodomor of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, ed. Pyrih, 68–69. See also Applebaum, Red Famine, 205–7.

154. For an account of the liquidation of stanytsia Poltavs′ka, see Fedir Rogiles, “Z nahody 17-richchia znyshchennia stanytsi Poltavs′koï,” Vil′na Kuban′, no. 2, December 1949; quoted in Solovey, Golgota Ukraïny, 165–66.

155. Kolasky, Education in Soviet Ukraine, 20–21. For a special study of the destruction of Ukrainian schools and settlements in the North Caucasus in 1932–1933, see Oleksiy Kurinnyi, “Holodomor 1932–1933 rr. na Pivnichnomu Kavkazi iak henotsyd ukraïntsiv,” Materialy Mizhnarodnoï naukovo-praktychnoï konferentsiï “Holodomor 1932–1933 rokiv: vtraty ukraïns′koï natsiï” (Kyїv, 4 zhovtnia 2016 r.) (Kyїv: Vyd. Oleh Filiuk, 2017), 73–85.

156. Vadim Denisov, “Massovye aktsii KRU i SPU NKVD,” Narodnaia Pravda, no. 9–10 (September 1950), 29–30; quoted in Solovey, Golgota Ukraïny, 167–68.

157. Denisov, “Massovye aktsii KRU i SPU NKVD,” 29–30; quoted in Solovey, Golgota Ukraïny, 168–70.

158. Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 306.

159. Ibid., 277–78.

160. “Dnevniki Ivana Lazarevicha Polezhaeva (30-e gody, stanitsa Umanskaia),” Rodnaia Kuban′, no. 3 (2002): 51–60; reprinted in Ukraïns′kyi holokost, ed. Mytsyk, vol. 4, 258.

161. Narodne hospodarstvo USRR (statystychnyi dovidnyk), ed. Asatkin, Table 1, 546–47. Thanks to Nataliia Levchuk of the Ptoukha Institute of Demography and Social Studies at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine for providing a copy of the statistical handbook.

162. Marochko and Hillig, Represovani pedahohy Ukraїny, 255.

163. Narodne hospodarstvo USRR (statystychnyi dovidnyk), Table 37, 578–79; Table 38, 581–82. Soviet Ukraine had two types of postsecondary teacher training institutions: three- to four-year technical colleges (tekhnikum) and four- to five-year institutes, which replaced universities. By 1930, thirty-five out of forty-three (81 percent) of these colleges and six out of thirteen (46 percent) institutes in the republic conducted coursework exclusively in Ukrainian. From Stepan Siropolko, Narodnia osvita na soviets′kii Ukraїni (Warsaw: Pratsi Ukraïns′koho naukovoho instytutu, 1934), 205.

164. Iryna Medvid′, “Lecture on the Russian Language,” in Pidhainy, The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, vol. 2, 584–85.

165. In a recent study, O. V. Luk’ianenko called teachers “closest allies of the party” to highlight their ideological leaning; however, he listed instances of resistance among students in teacher training institutes and colleges, indicating that most of these isolated cases of resistance ended with the students being dismissed or purged from the Communist Youth League or Communist Party ranks. See Luk’ianenko, “Naiblyzhchi druzi partiï.”

166. “Case History SW1: Varvara Dibert,” in Oral History Project, vol. 2, 710, 718; English version in the Report to Congress, 376–78.

167. Priests and clerics were declared, under article 65 of the 1918 Constitution, to be “servants of the bourgeoisie” and disfranchised. This involved their receiving no food ration cards; their children were barred from school beyond the elementary grade. See Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 201.

168. V. Grechko, Kommunisticheskoe vospitanie v SSSR (Munich: Institute for the Study of the History and Culture of the USSR, 1951), 25.

169. For a study of the deformation of national culture in Ukrainian villages during the Holodomor, see Olesia Stasiuk, “Deformatsiia narodnoï kul′tury v roky henotsydu,” Problemy istoriï Ukraïny: fakty, sudzhennia, poshuky, no. 18 (2008): 349–61; Olesia Stasiuk, Henotsyd ukraïnstiv: deformatsiia narodnoï kul′tury (Kyїv: Stylos, 2008).

170. From part no. 24 of the diary of Iurii Sambros, HDA SBU, f. 6, spr. 68805-FP, zoshyt 6, ark. 1015–16; reprinted in Represovani shchodennyky, 287–88.

171. Ibid., 291–92.

172. Iurii Sambros, Shchabli: mii shliakh do komunizmu (Stages of Life: My Journey Toward Communism) (New York: Suchasnist′, 1988).

173. Valerii Smolii, “Ukraïnizatsiia” 1920–30-kh rokiv: peredumovy, zdobutky, uroky (Kyїv: Instytut istoriï Ukraïny NAN Ukraïny, 2003), 183; quoted in Pauly, Breaking the Tongue, 344.

174. Pauly, Breaking the Tongue, 37.

175. Ibid., 344.

176. In 1928, the People’s Commissariat of Education had 202 staff members. During the mass persecution of intelligentsia, 200 of its staff were purged as was reported in their publication Na fronti kul′tury (Kyїv: Radians′ka shkola, 1935), 15; quoted in Marochko and Hillig, Represovani pedahohy Ukraїny, 7, 10.

177. For studies of the People’s Commissariat of Education under Skrypnyk’s leadership, see V. M. Danylenko and M. M. Kuz′menko, Sotsial′nyi typ ta intelektual′no-osvitnii riven′ nomenklatury skrypnykivs′koho narkomosu: Biohrafichni narysy (Sevastopol′ and Donets′k: Veber, 2003) and M. Iu. Vyhovs′kyi, Nomenklatura systemy osvity v USRR 1920–1930-kh rokiv: sotsial′ne pokhodzhennia, personal′nyi sklad ta funktsiї (Kyїv: Heneza, 2005).

178. Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 267–68.

179. “William Strang (Moscow) to Sir Simon on the Suicide of Mykola Skrypnyk, 10 July 1933,” in Marco Carynnyk, Lubomyr Y. Luciuk, and Bohdan S. Kordan, eds., The Foreign Office and the Famine: British Documents on Ukraine and the Great Famine of 1932–1933 (Kingston: Limestone Press, 1988), 253–54.

180. On trials of “nationalists” and Galician teachers, brought by Skrypnyk from Western Ukraine to implement Ukrainization, see Shkandrij and Bertelsen, “The Soviet Regime’s National Operations in Ukraine,” 423.

181. Marochko and Hillig, Represovani pedahohy Ukraїny, 9.

182. Pauly, Breaking the Tongue, 344.

183. Marochko and Hillig, Represovani pedahohy Ukraїny, 251.

184. Hennadii Iefimenko, Natsional′na polityka kerivnytstva VKP(b) v Ukraïni 1932–1938 rr. (osvita ta nauka) (Kyїv: Instytut istoriï Ukraïny, 2000), 36–50; see also Pauly, Breaking the Tongue, 410.

185. Bilokin′, Masovyi teror iak zasib derzhavnoho upravlinnia v SRSR, vol. 2, 519–22; quoted in Applebaum, Red Famine, 220.

186. Iurii Shapoval, “Letters from Kharkiv: The Truth about the Holodomor through the Eyes of Italian Diplomats,” Den′, November 20, 2007; https://day.kyiv.ua/en/article/close/letters-kharkiv.

187. Shapoval, “Letters from Kharkiv.”