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Democracy Dies in Darkness

Retropolis

Cut off from food, Ukrainians recall

famine under Stalin, which killed 4
million of them
The Soviet dictator covered up the starvation and cannibalism that stalked Ukraine in the
early 1930s
Listen to article 7 min

By Michael E. Ruane
March 12, 2022 at 7:00 a.m. EST

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The body of a young woman is seen near Poltava during the famine in Ukraine, Soviet Union,
in the spring of 1934. (Getty Images)

During the worst of the starvation, when Petro Mostovyi was

a child, he was afraid to venture to a nearby hamlet because
all the residents there were dead. They were still in their
houses and barns. But for weeks, no one had been able to
bury them.

Houses filled with the dead were common in Ukraine in 1932

and 1933. Those who collected the corpses knew where to
stop if they saw ravens nearby. And sometimes the
emaciated living were carted away with the deceased.

Desperate, starving people, deprived of their livelihood by

ruthless edicts of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, were forced
to eat grass, tree bark, flowers, rats, dogs and, in the end,
their children, historians have recorded.

People died in the streets, on sidewalks, in train stations, in

farm fields and on country roads. About 4 million of them
perished in the great famine, known as the Holodomor, or
death by hunger. MOST READ LOCAL

Today, as Ukraine battles Russian invaders and the dead

again lie in the streets of places, including Mariupol, that
have been cut off from supplies, memory of the famine and
its links to the Kremlin remain strong.

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“The famine is one of the things in the back of the heads of
the Ukrainians who are fighting on the ground,” said Anne
Applebaum, a former Washington Post columnist and the 5 Julian Assange moves
closer to extradition as
U.K.’s top court refuses
author of the 2017 book “Red Famine: Stalin’s War on to hear appeal
Ukraine,” which recounts memories like those of Mostovyi.
“It’s a piece of history, and it’s remembered by Ukrainians as
an attempt to eradicate” them, she said. “The awareness that
they might be eradicated” again is “part of why they’re
fighting now.”

Historian Robert Conquest told Congress in 1986, “The

Soviet assault on the peasantry, and on the Ukrainian
nation,” during the early 1930s “was one of the largest and
most devastating events in modern history.”

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stalls]

Thirteen percent of the Ukrainian population perished,

Applebaum wrote, as Stalin enforced “collectivization”
through the seizure of private property, livestock and
equipment by the state, and brutally punished peasants for
failure to meet quotas by taking the last of their food. Fearful
of simmering Ukrainian nationalism, Stalin applied
economic “sanctions” to regions that could not fulfill
government requisitions.

Just as now, people jammed into trains to try to leave the

country. “The stations were lined with begging peasants with
swollen hands and feet, the women holding up to the
carriage windows horrible infants with enormous wobbling
heads, stick-like limbs and swollen pointed bellies,” wrote
the Hungarian journalist Arthur Koestler, according to
Conquest.

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Two boys are seen with a bag of potatoes they found during the famine in Ukraine in 1934.
(Getty Images)

A Communist Party official from Vinnytsia, 160 miles

southwest of Kyiv, wrote to Stalin in 1932: “All the peasants
are moving and leaving … to save themselves from
starvation. In the villages, ten to twenty families die from
hunger every day, the children run away to wherever they
can, all of the train stations are full of peasants trying to get
out.”

Corpses appeared in the Kharkiv rail station and on the

streets of Kyiv. Around 400 bodies were removed from the
streets of the capital in January 1933. The next month, more Advertisement

than 500 were collected, according to Applebaum.

Stalin decided to close the Ukrainian border and make it

difficult for people to escape or go from village to village
inside Ukraine. He sent in special requisition brigades to
scour the homes of the starving for hidden goods. They used
long iron poles to probe the earth where people might have
secreted food. They searched chimneys.

Hanna Iakivna Onoda remembered that a neighbor had

hidden flour under her baby’s cradle, Applebaum reported.
But the brigade found it. “She was crying and begging them
to leave it because the baby would die of hunger, but they
took it all the same,” Onoda remembered. “Crucifiers,” she
called them.
The result was a catastrophe. “The horror, the exhaustion,
the inhuman indifference to life and constant exposure to the
language of hatred left their mark,” Applebaum wrote.
“Combined with the complete absence of food they also
produced, in the Ukrainian countryside, a very rare form of
madness.”

“Many survivors witnessed either cannibalism or, far more

often, necrophagy, the consumption of corpses of people who
had died of starvation,” she wrote. MOST READ

[Putin gets history wrong in his rationale for Ukraine

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One Ukrainian, Mykola Moskalenko, told of his village’s

concern about a neighbor’s missing children: “We entered
her house and asked her where her children were. She said
that they died and she had buried them in the field. We went
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In Sumy province, about 200 miles east of Kyiv, a deranged why the ‘End of History’
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man was arrested for eating his daughter and son, according
to Applebaum. A neighbor noticed that he had seemed less 3 Ginni Thomas, wife of
Supreme Court justice,
swollen from hunger than others and asked why. “I have says she attended Jan. 6
‘Stop the Steal’ rally
eaten my children,” he replied, “and if you talk too much, I before Capitol attack

will eat you.”

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A 6-year-old boy who had run away from home was asked to address U.S.
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why he had fled. “Father will cut me up,” he replied. Two of
his sisters had vanished. Such incidents were well known to
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authorities. In Kharkiv, nine cases of cannibalism or in South Carolina are
showcasing his
necrophagy were reported in March 1933. Nearly 60 were weakness
reported in April. In May, there were over 130, and by June,
more than 220. There is no evidence that Moscow did
anything to address the tragedy.

The famine peaked in the spring and summer of 1933. In

May, the Soviets approved significant aid for Ukraine, with
food originally seized from the peasants themselves,
Applebaum wrote. Grain quotas were reduced. Repression
was eased.

What followed was “the first truly big lie in the politics of the
Advertisement
20th century,” Yale scholar Timothy Snyder said in a 2019
lecture in Austria. Stalin denied the famine happened. It was
nothing but a “yarn,” he said, and the starving were not the
victims. “The starving are provocateurs,” Snyder said the
communists maintained. “Their bloated bellies are deliberate
provocations against the Soviet regime.”

Officials ordered death certificates falsified. Records were

destroyed. The results of the 1937 census in the Soviet Union
were kept from the public because the details were grim. The
population count was 8 million short of government
projections.

The head of the Census Bureau was arrested and executed by

firing squad, Applebaum wrote. His closest aides also were
executed. Stalin brought in a new census staff to come up
with the numbers. “Under the sun of the Great Socialist
Revolution an astonishingly rapid never-before-seen
increase in population is taking place,” he declared.

People light candles in Kyiv to honor the victims of the famine in the 1930s. (Genya
Savilov/Getty Images)

Most in the outside world knew no better, thanks in part to

one powerful reporter with the New York Times. British
journalist Walter Duranty had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932
for his stories on the supposed success of collectivization and
other Soviet policies. He cozied up to the Soviets, twice
interviewed Stalin, and then repeated the party’s lies about
the famine, according to Applebaum.

“I have made exhaustive inquiries about this alleged famine,”

Duranty wrote in the Times on March 31, 1933. “There is no
actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is
widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.”

“These conditions are bad but there is no famine,” he

claimed. Earlier that month, nearly 250 bodies had to be
removed from the streets of Kyiv.

And as Russian President Vladimir Putin lies to his people

today about the invasion of Ukraine, the lie Stalin told about
the famine lives on, too, Applebaum wrote.

In 2015, Sputnik News, a Kremlin propaganda website,

published an article in English called “Holodomor Hoax.”
The famine, it said, was “one of the 20th century’s most
famous myths and vitriolic pieces of anti-Soviet
propaganda.”

“The arguments had come full circle,” Applebaum wrote.

“The post-Soviet Russian state was once again in full denial:
the Holodomor did not happen.”

304 Comments Gift Article

MORE ON WORLD WAR II HAND CURATED

After World War II, tens Lost grave markers To liberate Auschwitz,
of thousands of U.S. surface from a distant David Dushman drove a
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By Michael Ruane
Michael E. Ruane is a general assignment reporter who also covers Washington
institutions and historical topics. He has been a general assignment reporter at
the Philadelphia Bulletin, an urban a]airs and state feature writer at the
Philadelphia Inquirer, and a Pentagon correspondent at Knight Ridder
newspapers. Twitter

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All Comments 304

Newest

 Ogilvie RA 5 hours ago

Stalin was more cunning than Putin. Edicts were always issued by the
politburo, or subordinate agencies. Even death sentences would have
three signatures, often Stalin would be one. If a relative of a politburo
member was sentenced, there were many, then that relative would
sign, or else… Reason why de-Stalinization was so diPcult,
responsibility for crimes apparently widespread.
NKVD (later KGB) ran a so called ‘conveyor belt’. Suspect in at one
end and within 24 hours self confessed, saboteur, spy, etc. whatever
the ‘Quotas’ required. Putin’s glory days.

  Reply  

 LionOnPatrol 13 hours ago

A horrible reminder of Ukraine's history with Russia.

 2  Reply  

 Jerimadeth 1 day ago

A penchant for war crimes and atrocities is evidently part of the

Kremlin's DNA. Putin is the new Stalin. And Donald Trump drools.

 2  Reply  

 Hrodland 1 day ago

Since even money for Putin's gas goes into his frozen bank accounts,
selling Russian grain may be the only way he can earn money to stay
in power.

Things are thus going to be pretty bleak in Russia this year. Indeed, if
Putin keeps acting as crazy as he has, we might see a Russian
Holodomor.

Quite a few trolls will then regret that not getting out in time.

 1  Reply  

 Ourdisplay 1 day ago

A reminder of the reality of Socialism

  Reply  

 Etumu Kutenyak 1 day ago

Socialism didn’t kill the Ukrainian farmers, mudak; Stalin did.

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