The accountant was a friend of mine from our Komsomol days. He was sitting there alone. ‘Good day, Kolia!’ I said in greeting. He just sat there, staring at the table. Without even raising his head he said, as if we’d parted five minutes earlier, ‘Ah, Petro.’ He was completely apathetic. ‘So you’ve come for your father? Now, take him away. Maybe he’ll survive. We won’t.’65
Vasily Grossman described this stage of hunger in Forever Flowing:
In the beginning, starvation drives a person out of the house. In its first stage, he is tormented and driven as though by fire and torn both in the guts and in the soul. And so he tries to escape from this home. People dig up worms, collect grass, and even make the effort to break through and get to the city. Away from home, away from home! And then a day comes when the starving person crawls back into his house. And the meaning of this is that famine, starvation, has won. The human being cannot be saved. He lies down on his bed and stays there. Not just because he has no strength, but because he has no interest in life and no longer cares about living. He lies there quietly and does not want to be touched. And he does not even want to eat … all he wants is to be left alone and for things to be quiet …66
Public officials were also shocked by the general indifference. As early as August 1932 a police informer told his contacts that a colleague, a bank employee, had confided in him his ‘complete collapse of faith in a better future’. He explained: ‘Deep hopelessness can be felt by all urban and rural dwellers, both old and young, party members and non-members of the party. Both intellectuals and the representatives of physical work lose muscle strength and intellectual energy because they think only about how to stop the feeling of hunger in themselves and their children.’67
In an extensive report sent to Kaganovich and Kosior in June 1933, a party official working at a machine tractor station in Kamianskyi district reported that in his area people were dying of hunger in the thousands. He listed example after example of people dying in the fields during work, people dying on the way home, people unable even to leave their homes at all. But he too observed the growing indifference. ‘People have grown dull, they absolutely do not react,’ he wrote. ‘Not to mortality, not to cannibalism, not to anything.’68
Indifference soon spread to death itself. Traditional Ukrainian funerals had combined church and folk traditions, and included a choir, a meal, the singing of psalms, readings from the Bible, sometimes professional mourners. Now all such rites were banned.69 Nobody had the strength anymore to dig a grave, hold a ceremony, or play music. Religious practices disappeared along with churches and priests. For a culture that had valued its rituals highly, the impossibility of saying a proper farewell to the dead became another source of trauma: ‘There were no funerals,’ recalled Kateryna Marchenko. ‘There were no priests, requiems, tears. There was no strength to cry.’70
One woman remembered her grandfather being buried without a coffin. He was placed in a hole in the ground together with a neighbour and her two sons: ‘His children did not cry over him and did not sing, according to a Christian tradition, “Eternal remembrance”.’71 Another man recalled how his friends treated their dying father: ‘We children went to the fields in 1933 and looked for frozen potatoes. Those frozen potatoes we brought home and made ‘cookies’ from them … Once I called on my friends who were just waiting for their ‘cookies’ [to be ready]. Their father was lying on a bench swollen and unable to get up. He asked his children to give him only one piece and they refused. “Go and find potatoes for yourself,” they answered.’ The man died that evening.72
Another boy was simply rendered helpless:
Mother had gone away, I was sleeping atop of our stove, and woke before sunrise. ‘Dad, I want to eat, Dad!’ The house was cold. Dad was not answering. I started to shout. Dawn broke; my father had some foam under his nose. I touched his head – cold. Then a cart arrived, there were corpses in it, lying like sheaves. Two men entered the house, put father on a burlap sack, threw his body on a cart with a swing … After that I could not sleep in the house, I slept in stables and haystacks, I was swollen and ragged.73
In many cases there were no family members either to care for the dying or to bury the dead at all. Public buildings were quickly turned into primitive mortuaries. In March 1933, Anna S. learned that her school was to be closed due to an ‘epidemic of dysentery and typhoid fever’. Desks were removed from the classrooms, hay was strewn on the floor, and the starving were brought in to die, parents and children lying alongside one another.74 Individual homes sometimes served the same purpose. In Zhytomyr province local authorities broke into two houses when neighbours reported that there had been no smoke from the chimneys for several days. Inside they found the elderly, the adults, the children: ‘Dead bodies laid on a stove, on the bench beside, on the bed.’ All the corpses were thrown into a well, and dirt was poured in on top of them.75 Bodies were sometimes not discovered right away. The winter of 1933 was bitter cold, and in many places it was only possible to bury the dead after the ground began to thaw. Dogs and wolves attacked the bodies.76 That spring, ‘the air was filled with the ubiquitous odour of decomposing bodies. The wind carried this odour far and wide, all across Ukraine.’77
Train stations, railway tracks and roads also began to accumulate corpses. Peasants who had attempted to escape died where they sat or stood, and were then ‘collected as firewood and carried away’.78 One eyewitness travelled through a region laid waste by famine with her mother in March 1933 and remembered seeing corpses lying or sometimes sitting along the route. ‘The coachman tore a piece of burlap he had with him and covered the faces of these dead people.’79
Others did not even bother with that. One railway employee, Oleksandr Honcharenko, remembered ‘walking along the railroad tracks every morning on the way to work, I would come upon two or three corpses daily, but I would step over them and continue walking. The famine had robbed me of my conscience, human soul and feelings. Stepping over corpses I felt absolutely nothing, as if I were stepping over logs.’80 Petro Mostovyi remembered the beggars who came to his village seemed ‘like ghosts’, sat down beside roads or under fences – and died. ‘Nobody buried them, our own grief was enough.’ To add to the horror, wild cats and dogs gnawed their bodies. A child at the time, Mostovyi was afraid to go to a hamlet near his village because all of its inhabitants had died, and no one was left to bury them. They were left as they were, inside their houses and barns, for many weeks.81 The result was epidemics of typhus and other diseases.82
In the cities, where the authorities still wanted to conceal the horror occurring in the countryside, the men of the OGPU often collected bodies at night and buried them in secret. Between February and June 1933, for example, the OGPU in Kharkiv recorded that it had surreptitiously buried 2,785 corpses.83 A few years later, during the Great Terror of 1937–8, this secrecy was enforced even further. Mass graves of famine victims were covered up and hidden, and it became dangerous even to know where they were located. In 1938 all the staff of the Lukianivske cemetery in Kyiv were arrested, tried and shot as counter-revolutionary insurgents, probably to prevent them from revealing what they knew.84
In larger towns and villages local officials organized teams to collect corpses. Sometimes these teams consisted of Komsomol members.85 In the late spring of 1933 some were soldiers, sent from outside, who ordered local people to cooperate and keep silent about it.86 Others were simply able-bodied enough to dig mass graves, and willing to work in exchange for food. One survivor reckoned that she lived through the famine because she had been appointed as a gravedigger and thus received half a loaf of bread and one herring every day.87 Another recalled that these brigades received bread in exchange for corpses. ‘When 40 people died during the day, they received a good fee.’88 Often, especially in cities such as Kyiv and Kharkiv, the corpse collection teams worked at night, the better to conceal the scale of their task.89
Group burials, hastily arranged, occurred without any cer
emony at all. ‘People were buried without coffins, were simply thrown into the pits and pelted with earth,’ recalled one witness.90 Alternatively, the local burial team dug a grave on the spot where a corpse was lying without trying to identify the person or mark the spot. ‘The small hill quickly disappeared after a few heavy rains, overgrew with grass, and no traces were left.’91 One survivor’s grandmother drove a cattle cart from house to house. If she saw ravens, ‘that meant there were dead bodies’. When she found individuals not quite dead, she pulled them closer to the door ‘so that it would be easier to carry them out’ later on.92 The mass grave sites were often not marked. In some places younger generations, a few years later, could no longer locate them.93
Some burial teams may have stretched indifference to the point of cruelty. Many survivors, from various parts of Ukraine, repeat stories of very ill people being buried alive. ‘There were cases when they buried half-living people: “Good people, leave me alone. I am not dead,” the “corpses” used to cry. “Go to hell! You want us to come tomorrow again?” was the reply.’94 Another team also took away still-living people, arguing that the next day they would be on another street, so they might as well take their body now, get the ‘payment’ for each ‘corpse’ and eat more themselves.95 Many felt that, once they had dug the mass graves, it didn’t matter how they were filled. ‘They didn’t even shoot, they economized on bullets and pulled living people into the hole.’96 Even families treated their dying members the same. One grandmother fell ill and lost consciousness. ‘When she fell into a sleep-like state, everyone at home thought she was dead. When they came to bury her, however, they noticed that she was still breathing, but they buried her anyway because they said she was going to die anyway. No one was sorry.’97
Some, however, managed to escape. One man, Denys Lebid, has described being thrown into a mass grave himself. He tried to get out, but discovered he was too weak. He sat there and waited for death, or for another corpse to fall on top of him. He was eventually rescued by a tractor driver who had come to bulldoze earth over the pit.98 His story was echoed by that of a woman who was rescued from a mass grave by another woman passing by who heard her screams.99 Similar stories originate from Cherkasy, Kyiv, Zhytomyr and Vinnytsia provinces, among others.100
Anyone who had ever witnessed such a thing – or, worse, experienced it – never forgot. ‘I was so frightened by what had happened that I could not talk for several days. I saw dead bodies in my dreams. And I screamed a lot …’101
The horror, the exhaustion, the inhuman indifference to life and constant exposure to the language of hatred left their mark. Combined with the complete absence of food they also produced, in the Ukrainian countryside, a very rare form of madness: by the late spring and summer, cannibalism was widespread. Even more extraordinarily, its existence was no secret, not in Kharkiv, Kyiv, or Moscow.102
Many survivors witnessed either cannibalism or, far more often, necrophagy, the consumption of corpses of people who had died of starvation. But although the phenomenon was widespread, it never became ‘normal’, and – despite the assertion by the machine tractor station official that people were unaffected by cannibalism – it was rarely treated with indifference. Memories of cannibalism often divide between those who heard stories of it having taking place in other distant villages and those who recall actual incidents. The former, distant in either time or space, do sometimes describe cannibalism as having become ‘ordinary’. Ten years after the famine, a traveller in Nazi-occupied Ukraine claimed to have met ‘men and women who were openly said to have eaten people … the population considers such cases the result of extreme need, without condemning them’.103 A report from the head of the OGPU in Kyiv province to his superiors in the Ukrainian OGPU also mentions cannibalism becoming a ‘habit’. In some villages, ‘the view that it is possible to consume human meat grows stronger every day. This opinion spreads especially among hungry and swollen children.’104
But those who did actually witness an incident of cannibalism almost always remembered it much differently. Both memoir and documents from the time confirm that cannibalism caused shock and horror, and sometimes led to the intervention of the police or village council.
Larysa Venzhyk, from Kyiv province, remembered that at first there were just rumours, stories ‘that children disappear somewhere, that degenerate parents eat their children. It turned out not to be rumours but horrible truth.’ On her street two girls, the daughters of neighbours, disappeared. Their brother Misha, aged six, ran away from home. He roamed the village, begging and stealing. When asked why he had left home he said he was afraid: ‘Father will cut me up.’ The police searched the house, found the evidence, and arrested the parents. As for their remaining son, ‘Misha was left to his fate.’105
Police also arrested a man in Mariia Davydenko’s village in Sumy province. After his wife died, he had gone mad from hunger and eaten first his daughter and then his son. A neighbour noticed that the father was less swollen from hunger than others, and asked him why. ‘I have eaten my children,’ he replied, ‘and if you talk too much, I will eat you.’ Backing away, shouting that he was a monster, the neighbour went to the police, who arrested and sentenced the father.106
In Vinnytsia province survivors also recalled the fate of Iaryna, who had butchered her own child. She told the story herself: ‘Something happened to me. I put the child in a small basin, and he asked: “What are you going to do, Mummy?” I replied: “Nothing, nothing.” ’ But a neighbour who was standing guard over his potatoes outside her window somehow saw what was happening and reported her to the village council. She served a three-year sentence but eventually returned home. Eventually she remarried – but when she told her husband what she had done during the famine, he turned against her.107 Even many years later, the stigma remained.
Mykola Moskalenko also remembered the horror his own family felt when learning that the children of a neighbour had disappeared. He told his mother about it, and she told the local authorities. Together, a group of villagers gathered around the neighbour’s farm: ‘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 to the field but found nothing. They started a search of her home: the children had been cut up … they asked why she had done this, and she answered that her children would not survive anyway, but this way she would.’ She was taken away, presumably sentenced.108
Stories such as that one spread rapidly and enhanced the atmosphere of threat. Even in the cities, people repeated stories of children being hunted down as food. Sergio Gradenigo, the Italian consul, reported that in Kharkiv parents all brought their children personally to school, and accompanied them at all times, out of fear that starving people were hunting them: ‘Children of party leaders and OGPU are especially targeted because they have better clothes than other children. Trade of human meat becomes more active.’109
Ukrainian authorities knew about many of the incidents: police reports contained great detail. But Balytsky made special efforts to prevent the stories from spreading. Ukraine’s secret police boss warned his subordinates against putting too much information about the famine into writing: ‘provide information on the food problems solely to the First Secretaries of the Party Provincial Committees and only orally … This is to ensure that written notes on the subject do not circulate among the officials where they might cause rumours …’110
Nevertheless, the secret police, the ordinary criminal police and other local officials did keep records. One police report from Kyiv province in April 1933 began with ‘We have an extraordinary case of cannibalism in the Petrovskyi district’:
A kulak woman, aged fifty, from the Zelenky, Bohuslavskyi district, hiding in Kuban since 1932, returned to her home town with her (adult) daughter. Along the road from Horodyshchenska station to Korsun, she lured a passing twelve-year-old boy and slit his throat. The organs and other parts of the body she placed in a bag. In the village of Horodyshc
he, citizen Sherstiuk, an inhabitant of that place, allowed the woman to spend the night. In a dishonest manner, she pretended that the organs came from a calf, and gave it to the old man to boil and to roast the heart. It was used to feed his whole family, and he ate it too. In the night, intending to use some of the meat which was in the bag, the old man discovered the chopped-up parts of the boy’s body. The criminals have been arrested.111
Alongside the moral horror, many of the reports also reflect police concern that the stories could spread and have a political impact. In Dnipropetrovsk province the OGPU reported the story of a collective farm member, Ivan Dudnyk, who killed his son with an axe. ‘The family is big, it is difficult to stay alive, so I murdered him,’ the killer declared. But the police report noted, with approval, that the collective farm members met and adopted a group decision to hold a public trial and ‘give Dudnyk capital punishment’.112 It also noted, with satisfaction, that the villagers had decided to double down on their sowing campaign and increase their output in light of the incident.
Similarly, when a fourteen-year-old boy who murdered his sister for food in the village of Novooleksandrivka, in southeast Ukraine, the OGPU reported with satisfaction that the incident had sparked no ‘unhealthy chatter’. All the neighbours believed the boy to be mentally ill, and only feared that he would be returned to the village.113 In Dnipropetrovsk province a woman who murdered her daughter for food was, the OGPU noted, the wife of a man who had been arrested for refusing to give up his grain. Given that the woman showed signs of being a ‘social danger’, the police recommended execution.114
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