Miron Dolot - Execution by Hunger

It was a large village, with some eight hundred households comprising a population of nearly four thousand people. In the center stood the communal buildings—the church, school, store, local government building, post office, and the house where the doctor lived and worked. A square in the center served as the playground, meeting place, and market.

As was customary in all Ukrainian villages, the farmers’ houses were grouped together. The unpaved streets were nameless, although each house was numbered. Through the village ran a road, also unpaved, connecting us with the outside world.

Our houses were of simple design and construction. They were rudely beamed, plastered with clay, and usually thatched with straw. A tin roof was considered a sign of prosperity, and I recall few such roofs in the village. Most of the houses had only one room which was used for all purposes, including cooking and sleeping. Wooden floors were also rare; like the walls, the floors were made of clay. But no matter how plainly they were constructed, and how primitive our living conditions, the houses were clean and neat.

Each home had its plot for flowers and a few fruit trees, and chickens, geese, and ducks were kept in the backyards. Barns housed a horse, one or two cows, and a few pigs. A dog would usually be lounging on the porch or at the gate.

In our poor and overpopulated village only a few farmers owned more than fifty acres of land. But though destitute, the villagers were neither hopeless nor forlorn. After a hard day’s work in the spring and summer, the young people gathered in neighborhoods at the crossroads and danced, sang, and played long into the night. Families visited relatives and friends, or enjoyed plays, dances, parties, and other kinds of entertainment, all accompanied by much eating and drinking. Though it was prohibited, the villagers usually found a way to distill their own brandy.

Our village was a close-knit community. It was customary for neighbors to help one another with their labors or in emergencies, and after the work was done they would join in a party. An accordion player and a fiddler, hired for the occasion, provided music for dancing, and food and drinks were always served. Such a party would often last until dawn.

We were completely free in our movements. We took pleasure trips and traveled freely looking for jobs. We went to big cities and neighboring towns to attend weddings, church bazaars, and funerals. No one asked us for documents or questioned us about our destinations. We were free individuals.

Hospitality was a matter of honor. Anyone who happened to visit us was welcomed into our homes. We might not have had enough to eat ourselves, but we always offered our visitors the best we could.

Even though we were in continual want for various necessities of life, we were completely free from fear. We never locked our houses during the daytime. Old and young could come and go freely in and out of our village without fear of molestation.

The coming of winter was greeted with joy by us all, and it seemed to me the more severe the winter, the greater the excitement, especially among us young people. There was no end to ice-skating, skiing, and sledding. The cold heavy frost, deep snow, and blizzards made winter a time of leisure for the farmers, provided there had been a good harvest. Throughout the short winter days and long nights, we spent most of the time in our homes. No one complained of the cold, for firewood was plentiful. After caring for the domestic animals and completing other daily chores, we were content in our homes—reading, writing, telling stories, playing, singing, and dancing.

In 1929, we began to hear rumors that the Communist Party and the Soviet government had decreed the collectivization of all farmers. Collectives in the form of a TSOZ (or SOZ), artil , commune, or radhosp (Russian, sovkhoz ) had, in fact, been in existence for a long time. Actually, except for the radhosp and commune, these collectives or the agricultural cooperatives, as they were known, were not communist innovations, for they existed in prerevolutionary times. They were organized as a free cooperation of farmers. Security of the market, state credits, and mutual help with farming implements and seeds, were the main incentives for their organization. In Ukraine two types of such agricultural cooperatives were known: the TSOZ and artil. TSOZ stood for the Association for the Joint Cultivation of Land. Only labor and land, or part of them, and heavy agricultural implements were collectivized. Livestock, dwellings, and even some land could be owned and operated privately. This was a rather loosely organized association, and the membership could easily be dissolved.

Artil ( artel in Russian) meant “team,” or a group of people belonging to the same kind of vocation, organized in a production cooperative. Agricultural artils were associations of farmers who pooled together all their land and other means of production, as well as their labor and draft animals. They were paid for their labor in kind and money according to the amount of work put in. Members of an artil could keep their main dwelling, a cow, and such animals as sheep, goats, swine, as well as poultry. During the total collectivization in the Soviet Union, the artil was accepted as the basic form for what is known today as the collective farm.

Agricultural communes which, according to Communist theory, were supposed to be the highest form of rural organizational life and labor, were established during the period of War Communism (the Civil War of 1918–1921). Usually they were set up on estates of former local landlords. Agricultural communes were based not only on collective farming, but also on communal living in communal houses, with communal kitchens, nurseries, and so forth. The members of such communes were deprived of private possessions, except for their personal belongings. These communes received great support from the Communist Party and its government, but nevertheless, they proved to be a failure, and consequently were either dissolved or, in most cases, turned into state farms.

Radhosp is the Ukrainian term for sovkhoz , an acronym for Soviet farm. In reality, it was a state-run agricultural enterprise with hired farm laborers who were paid regular wages. The agricultural laborers working on such farms were not farmers at all, in the full meaning of the word; they had no voice in distribution of the profits, nor in management.

All these collectives were organized on a voluntary basis and thus seemed to present no threat to independent farming. Moreover, the farmers had often witnessed the collapse of these types of collective farms, and therefore laughed at the rumors of collectivization. Why would any government wish to repeat its mistakes? But they laughed too soon.

Sometime toward the end of December 1929, when the rumors of compulsory collectivization were becoming a reality, strangers came to our village. Soon we learned that they were the official representatives of the Communist Party and the Soviet government. They had been assigned to the village to organize a collective farm.

The head of the group of about ten men was known as the “Twenty-Five Thousander.” His collaborators were called propagandists. Such titles were strange to our ears, but it did not take long for us to learn their meanings.

To carry out compulsory collectivization, the Central Committee of the Communist Party had mobilized twenty-five thousand of its most active and loyal Party members throughout the country. Consequently, the members of this elite group of Communists became known as the Twenty-Five Thousanders. We called them simply Thousanders. After a brief period of instructions in the methods of collectivization, these Thousanders were sent to various localities. To make their mission more effective, they were given practically unlimited power. They were responsible directly to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine.