Miron Dolot - Execution by Hunger

At the end of May 1933 the starvation abated. The mass hunger ceased. Vegetables and fruits were plentiful for everyone who was able to go out and look for them. Also, the authorities needed farm workers, and they had no choice but to supply the working kolhosp members with sufficient food rations to sustain their existence. Thus, the villagers who still managed to stand—numb, oppressed, exhausted by starvation as they were—tried their best to reach the kolhosp and earn their food rations, a piece of bread and a scoop or two of some buckwheat or millet gruel. Those who were not able to work were left at the mercy of their relatives or friends, provided any survived.

I was lucky. In spite of my wretchedness and exhaustion from starvation, my dream to attain higher education never left me. And because of this drive for further education I managed to escape from the village for good.

Thus, starved as I was, living in absolute poverty amidst corpses of farmers and their families, I nevertheless had been doing my utmost to complete my secondary education.

At that time, our village had a nine-year school which was a combined four-year elementary and five-year secondary school. Such a school prepared the students for higher education.

In 1933 I was a senior and our graduation was supposed to take place in June. But many of the members of our graduating class never saw their diplomas. With the famine’s onslaught, our number decreased precipitously. Some died of starvation. Others left the school and went foraging for food. Still others managed to migrate to other parts of the Soviet Union, mainly to Russia, where there was no famine. Many were deported together with their families to faraway places, into exile. Consequently, early in March, our school was closed and those few of us who still held on had to fend for ourselves. But, in spite of all the odds, I wouldn’t give up my dreams, and my persistence was crowned with success: I was accepted at the secondary school of a neighboring village and I graduated at the end of June. This was a turning point in my life. I decided then to escape. I cannot remember the date exactly, but it remains the most important day in my life.

One night, with a piece of bread in a bag and five karbovantsi , or rubles (less than one dollar), in my pocket, dressed in a patched pair of pants and an oversized shirt, and barefoot, I stole out of the village toward the county seat. There, I had heard, college preparatory courses were opened for those with secondary diplomas. Luck was with me: with the help of some good people, I was admitted to the courses, and after completing them, I eventually enrolled at the Teachers’ College. I was graduated from it in four years and started my career as a secondary school teacher. Then World War II broke out and I became a soldier and, eventually, I was taken prisoner of war by the Germans and interned in STALAG 3 in Germany.

After the war was over, knowing that all Soviet prisoners of war were declared deserters and traitors by Stalin’s order and faced the firing squad, and because of my desire to live in the free world, I decided to stay in West Germany as a displaced person, and later on I emigrated to the United States where I found my new home.

My mother and my brother, who suffered with me, who shared with me the last morsel of food, and to whom I owe my survival, remained in the village. They had no other choice but to continue working on the collective farm. World War II separated us and what happened to them afterwards I don’t know.

Copyright © 1985 by Miron Dolot

All rights reserved.

The text of this book is composed in Times Roman, with display type set in Bauer Topic Medium. Composition by The Haddon Craftsmen, Inc.

First published as a Norton paperback 1987

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Dolot, Miron.

Execution by hunger.

1. Ukraine—Famines, 1932–1933—Personal narratives. 2. Collectivization of agriculture—Ukraine. 3. Soviet Union—Economic policy—1928-1932. I. Title.

HC337.U5D59 1985 363.8’0947’71 84—16568

ISBN: 978-0-393-30416-9

W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

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W.W. Norton & Company, Ltd.

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Though the Soviet authorities sought to conceal the tragedy for which their policies had been responsible, even the official statistics bear witness to the extent of the holocaust. Four million Kazakhs were listed in the USSR census of 1926, three million in that of 1939, a figure at least 1.5 million short of what the population should have been at the latter date, given normal growth. The bulk of starvation in Kazakhstan occurred during the first wave of collectivization, 1929–31.

A Chekist was a member of the original Soviet secret police, the Cheka, which is an acronym for Extraordinary Commission, or more precisely, All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Fighting Counterrevolution and Sabotage (1917–1922). It was succeeded by the GPU. The old title, Chekist, is still in use. Even today’s members of KGB are often referred to as Chekists. Communist propaganda eulogizes them as national heroes.

“Cut your own throat” is an expression I use here to describe the new village administration, established at the onset of collectivization in which the farmers were forced to take active part and which eventually destroyed them. In other words, the farmers were put in a situation where they destroyed themselves through their own actions, i.e., they cut their own throats.

Propagandist was the official Communist title of a person whose duty it was to spread and disseminate Communist ideas and ideology. During the collectivization of farmers, the propagandists served as the eyes and ears of the Communist Party. They were the ones who introduced the Party’s policy of collectivization to the population at “grassroots” level. They were usually appointed from among the Party and Komsomol members.

Agitators differed from propagandists in that they were supposed to stir up and mobilize the people for support of a certain course of action. But, in reality, there was not such a difference between them. Anyone with a mouth tuned to the Party line was qualified to be appointed an agitator. Even children were given this title and sent from house to house with propaganda materials in their hands and prefabricated phrases in their mouths.

The Ukrainian word kurkul (Russian kulak) was the official definition of a village usurer in the Soviet Union. Any farmer who employed hired labor, who possessed heavy machinery, or hired out such machinery, or contracted to work on other farms, who leased land for commercial purposes, etc., was branded kurkul. This definition found ready recognition in the West, and consequently we hear here that kurkul means a rich or well-to-do farmer. Such translation or interpretation of this epithet can be misleading because the Communists applied this label indiscriminately to all farmers, even to genuine paupers.

During the collectivization this label was widely used, and it became an epithet of abuse for all those farmers who refused to join the collective farm. The policy of “liquidation of kurkuls as a social class,” introduced by the Communist Party in 1929, resulted in the disappearance of millions of farmers labeled as kurkuls. Many of them were simply murdered; others were starved to death during the famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine; and still others were deported to the “corrective labor camps” or to the concentration camps. The label kurkul was attached to anyone, even to nonfarmers, who showed the slightest sign of disagreement with or opposition to Communist agricultural policy during that time. The possession of a one-room house, a cow, and a few chickens, or the possession of a house with a tin roof or board floor was enough to be labeled as a kurkul.