2021-11-27 22:12:20
«The famine which had already struck Ukraine in 1931 and 1932 was dramatically aggravated in 1933. It affected whole families, whose members died one after
another.
People would eat anything they could find to save themselves. Those who were lucky enough to live in wooded areas took to foraging; some ate moss growing on trees. In their search for food, people would even dig up dead animals. The fact of the famine was eventually acknowledged by Party members and representatives of the GPU. For example, at the end of February 1933, a GPU branch in the Kiev oblast reported to the GPU of the Ukrainian SSR that there were 93,636 adults and 112,199 children starving in the oblast. As many as 47,392 persons suffered from hunger oedema, and 12,801 persons had died.
Undoubtedly, the most terrible manner of obtaining food was by cannibalism. While some isolated cases of cannibalism were recorded in 1931, their incidence increased considerably in 1932. The terror of the famine led to situations where parents would sacrifice
one child in the hope of saving others.40 However, it is hard to offer any estimates as to how many such cases occurred during the Great Famine in Soviet Ukraine.
On 12 March 1933, the head of the Kiev oblast’s GPU reported 69 acts of cannibalism and 54 cases of corpse-eating between 9 January and 12 March 1933.
In other oblasts, e.g. Kharkiv, 9 acts of cannibalism were recorded by 1 March 1933, and the numbers grew as the months passed by. By 1 April 1933, the number of such cases had risen to 58, by 1 May 1933 to 132, and by 1 June 1933 to 221. In the
Vinnytsia oblast, 71 cases of cannibalism were reported by 7 May 1933.
Many peasants left their villages to save themselves and their families. They went to towns and cities, where it was easier to find a job or to buy food, for example in the so-called Torgsin stores in exchange for gold and other precious items, which were traded at much below their real value.
The Stalinist regime grew uneasy about the fact that peasants were fleeing the famine-struck regions. In June 1932, in a letter addressed to Kaganovich, Stalin manifested his discontent with the fact that “tens of thousands of Ukrainian kolkhoz peasants continue to scatter around the entire European territory, thus disintegrating the kolkhozes from within with their complaints and whining.
The Bolshevik authorities claimed that famine was non-existent in Ukraine,
even when in reality it was at its most severe. In the USSR, the official propaganda and the officially published statistical data avoided the use of the
very word “famine.” It was also ensured that no records of deaths from starvation were kept. Even though there is no written evidence for this, the concealment of the true causes of increased peasant mortality and instances of forging documentation were confirmed by some witnesses of the tragedy. The military surgeons working in the villages were forced to complete death certificates providing fictitious, often absurd, causes of death.
When mortality drastically surged in 1933, death certificates
ceased to be issued. One thing is certain; the victims of the terror famine imposed by the Communist authorities numbered in the millions.
The famine of 1932–1933, which comprised of two tragic stages, was entirely man-made and was closely connected to the collectivisation of agriculture. In the first half of 1932, the main driver of the famine was the grain collection policy imposed by the Bolshevik authorities, while on top of that, the peasants had all kinds of food confiscated in the latter half of that year and in 1933.
The Bolshevik leadership made sure that no news of the famine spread outside Ukraine. If any contact was made with foreigners, the real situation of the Ukrainian population was to be concealed at all costs. If some fragmentary information on the Ukrainian famine reached other countries and offers of aid were made, such reports were denied, and assistance for the rural population was
declined as unnecessary»...
350 views19:12
R
