“It was, of course, impossible to fulfill the plan. The area under cultivation was down, and so were yields. Where was it then—this ocean of collective-farm grain? It must have been hidden away! Idlers, parasites, kulaks who had not yet been liquidated! The kulaks had been deported, but their spirit endured. The Ukrainian peasant was in thrall to private property.
“Who signed the decree? Who ordered the mass murder? Was it really Stalin? I often ask myself. Never, I believe, in all Russian history, has there been such a decree. No tsar, nor even the Tatars or German Fascists, ever signed such a decree. The decree meant the death by famine of the peasants of the Ukraine, the Don, and the Kuban. It meant the death of them and their children. Even their entire seed fund was to be confiscated. The authorities searched for that grain as if they were searching for bombs and machine guns. They stabbed the earth with bayonets and ramrods; they smashed floors and dug underneath them; they dug up vegetable gardens. Sometimes they requisitioned the grain inside people’s huts, the grain people had put in pots and tubs. One woman had some bread requisitioned, loaves that had already been baked. It too was loaded onto the cart and taken off to the district center.
“Day and night the carts creaked along, clouds of dust hung over the earth—but there were no silos to keep all this grain in. The grain was simply dumped on the ground, with sentries standing guard all around it. By the beginning of winter the grain was soaking and beginning to rot. The Soviet authorities did not have enough tarpaulins to protect the peasants’ grain.
“And while they were still transporting the grain, there was dust wherever you went. It was like clouds of smoke—over the village, over the fields, over the face of the moon at night. I remember one man going out of his mind. ‘We’re on fire!’ he kept screaming. ‘The sky is burning! The earth is burning!’ No, it was not the sky—it was life itself that was burning.
“That was when I understood: what mattered to the Soviet authorities was the plan. Fulfill the plan! Deliver your assigned quota of grain. The State comes first, and people are just one big zero.
“Mothers and fathers wanted to save their children, to put just a little grain to one side. They were told, ‘You hate the motherland of socialism with a ferocious hatred. You want to sabotage the plan. You’re nothing but vermin, you subkulak parasites.’ But they didn’t want to sabotage the plan—they wanted to save their children, to save themselves. Everyone, after all, needs to eat.
“I can tell you the story, but a story is only words—and this was a matter of life and death, of torment, of people dying from starvation. When the grain was requisitioned, by the way, the Party activists were told that the peasants would be fed by the State. That was a lie. Not a single grain was given to the hungry.
“Who confiscated the grain? For the main part, it was local people: from the district executive committee and from the district Party committee; young lads from the Komsomol, locals all of them; the police, of course; and the OGPU. In a few places they even used army units. I only saw one man from Moscow. He’d been mobilized to the Ukraine by the Party, but he didn’t seem very eager. He kept trying to go back home...Once again, though, the same as during collectivization, people became dazed, crazed, like wild beasts.
“Grisha Saenko was a policeman. He was married to a local girl, and on holidays he used to come to the village and go to parties. He was someone bright and lively. He could dance the tango and the waltz, and he knew all the songs from the Ukrainian villages. One day an old man, a real graybeard, went up to him and said, ‘Grisha, you’re ruining all of us. What you’re doing is worse than murder. Why does a Workers’ and Peasants’ State treat the peasantry worse than the tsars did?’ Grisha pushed his hand in the old man’s face and then went off to the well to wash, saying, ‘How can I pick up a spoon with a hand that’s just touched the filthy mug of that parasite?’
“And the dust. Day and night, while they were taking the grain, there was dust. And at night the moon hung there like a stone, taking up half the sky. And everything beneath that moon seemed strange and wild. And it was so hot at night—like under a sheepskin. And fields that had been trampled, trampled, and trampled again...Just to look at them was like reading a death sentence.
“People began to lose their minds. The cattle kept lowing plaintively—they were becoming timid, frightened of people. The dogs were howling all night. And the earth began to crack from the heat.
“Then came autumn, and autumn rains. And then a snowy winter. And there was no bread.
“There was no bread for sale in the district center—it was only for those who had ration cards. Nor could you buy it at a railway-station kiosk—there were armed guards who didn’t let you anywhere near the station without special permission. You couldn’t buy bread anywhere, at any price.
“During the autumn people took to living on potatoes—but without bread, it doesn’t take long to get through potatoes. Toward Christmas they began slaughtering their cattle—but the cattle were nothing, just skin and bones. They slaughtered the chickens, of course. Soon they’d got through all their meat. And there wasn’t so much as a drop of milk to be found in the village. Nor was there a single egg. And worst of all, there was no grain, no bread. Every last kernel had been requisitioned. Come spring, there would be no spring wheat to sow, the entire seed fund had gone. People’s only hope was the winter wheat, but that was still under the snow. There was no sign of spring, and the village was already beginning to starve. They’d eaten all the meat. They’d eaten what millet they had. They were getting to the end of their stock of potatoes—the larger families already had none left at all.
“People began begging for loans of grain. From the village soviet, from the district committee. They didn’t get a word in answer. And it was nineteen kilometers to the district center, and there were no horses.
“It was terrible. Mothers looked at their own children—and screamed in fear. It was as if they’d seen a snake in the house. And they had seen a snake; they had seen famine, starvation, death. What could they do? No one in the village could think of anything except food. People would suck and move their jaws up and down. The saliva would flow, and they’d swallow it down—but you need more than saliva to fill up your stomach. If you woke in the night, there wasn’t a sound to be heard. No one talking anywhere, no one playing an accordion. The silence of the grave. No footsteps but the footsteps of famine—famine never slept. First thing in the morning, the children were crying in every hut, asking for bread. And what were their mothers to give them? Snow? There was no help to be had from anyone. The Party officials just went on repeating, ‘You shouldn’t have lazed about like that. You should have worked harder.’ Sometimes they added, ‘Just look around you. There’s enough grain been buried here for the next three years!’
“Still, there was no real famine that winter. People became weak, of course. Their stomachs began to bulge from eating just scraps and peelings, but there was no real dropsy. They began digging up acorns from under the snow. They dried them; the miller set his stones farther apart—and he ground them up into flour. People began making bread—flatbreads, really—from acorns. Some people added bran, or ground-up potato peelings. But the acorns didn’t last long—it was only a small oak wood and three whole villages had descended on it at once. Meanwhile a Party official came from the city and said to us in the village soviet, ‘See what those parasites are like! Digging for acorns! Digging under the snow with their bare hands! Anything to get out of work!’
“The senior classes carried on going to school almost until it was spring, but the junior classes stopped during the winter. And in spring the school closed and the teacher went off to the city. The medical assistant left too; there was nothing for him to eat. And there are no medicines against hunger. The village was left to look after itself—with everyone starving in their huts, and nothing but desert on all sides. And all the various officials from the city stopped coming. There was nothing more to be taken from the starving peop
le—so why should anyone go to the village? There was nothing a teacher could teach them—and nothing a medical assistant could do. Once the State’s squeezed all it can out of you, then you’re no more use to it. No point in teaching or healing you.
“The villagers were left on their own; the State withdrew from them. People began wandering from house to house, begging from one another. Poor begged from poor; the starving from the starving. People with large families begged from people with small families, and from those who had no children at all. They still had something left at the beginning of spring, and sometimes they gave away a handful of bran or a couple of potatoes. But the Party members never gave anyone anything at all—not because they were especially greedy, or especially bad, but simply because they were frightened. And the State didn’t give the starving so much as one grain of wheat—even though the grain grown by the peasants was its very foundation. Did Stalin know all this? The old people talked about the famine at the time of the tsar. Then there had been help. They had been given loans. The peasants had gone to the cities; they’d begged for alms ‘in the name of Christ.’ Soup kitchens had been opened, and students had collected donations. But under a workers’ and peasants’ government no one had given them a single grain. And there were roadblocks—manned by soldiers, police, and OGPU—on every road. The starving had to stay in their villages—they were not to walk to the cities. There were guards around every railway station, even around the smallest halts. For those who fed the nation there was no bread. And in the cities the workers were receiving eight hundred grams of bread a day on their ration cards. Eight hundred grams! Good God, it was unimaginable. And not a gram for the peasant children in the villages. It was the same as the Nazis putting Jewish children in the gas chambers: ‘You’re Yids—you’ve no right to live.’ But what we did was beyond all understanding: it was the Soviet people against the Soviet people, Russians against Russians. It was a government of workers and peasants. Why all this killing?
“It was when the snow began to melt that the real hunger began.
“The children were crying. They no longer slept; they were asking for bread even at night. People’s faces were ashen; their eyes were clouded, as if drunk. They walked about as if half asleep, keeping one hand against the wall and moving one foot at a time, testing the ground with it. Hunger shakes people. People began to move about less and to spend more and more time lying down. And they kept imagining they could hear the sound of a cart: flour, sent by Stalin from the district center, to save their children.
“The women turned out to be stronger, more stubborn, than the men; they kept a tighter hold on life. But they also had more to endure—it’s their mothers, after all, whom children turn to for food. Some women tried to reason with their children. They would kiss them and say, ‘Don’t cry. Be patient. There just isn’t anything.’ Others went almost out of their minds. ‘Stop that whining,’ they’d shout, ‘or I’ll kill you!’ And they’d lay into their children with whatever was at hand—anything to stop their pleading. Some escaped from their houses and sat with their neighbors so as not to hear their children crying.
“By this time there were no dogs or cats left. They had all been slaughtered. Not that it had been easy to catch them. They were afraid of people by then, and they looked at them with wild eyes. People boiled the animals, but there was nothing except dry tendons. They made a kind of meat jelly out of their heads.
“So the snow melted and people began to swell up. It was the dropsy of starvation. They had swollen faces and legs like pillows. Their stomachs were full of water and they were constantly peeing. They kept having to go outside. As for the children—did you see the newspaper photographs of children from the German camps? They looked just the same: heads heavy as cannonballs; thin little necks, like the necks of storks; and on their arms and legs you could see every little bone. Every single little bone moving under their skin, and the joints between them. And draped over their skeletons was a kind of yellow gauze. And the children’s faces looked old and tormented—it was as if they’d been on this earth for seventy years. By the spring they no longer had faces at all. Some had the heads of birds, with a little beak; some had the heads of frogs, with thin wide lips; some looked like little gudgeons, with wide-open mouths. Nonhuman faces. And their eyes! Dear God! Comrade Stalin, by God, did you see those eyes? Perhaps he truly did not know. It was he, after all, who wrote that article, the one about dizziness from success.
“There was nothing people didn’t eat. They caught mice; they caught rats, jackdaws, sparrows, and ants; they dug up earthworms. They ground up old bones to make flour. They cut up leather, the soles of shoes, stinking old animal hides to make something like noodles; then they boiled the noodles up to make a kind of gummy paste. When plants and grasses began to sprout, they started digging up roots and boiling leaves and buds. There was nothing they didn’t use: dandelions, burdock, bluebells, willow herb, goutweed, cow parsnip, nettles, stonecrop...They dried linden leaves and ground them into flour, but we only had a few lindens. The flatbreads made from linden leaves were green, worse than the ones made from acorns.
“And still no help. Not that anyone was asking for it any longer. Even now, when I start to think of it all, I feel I’m losing my mind. Did Stalin really turn his back on all these people? Did he really carry out such a massacre? Stalin had food; Stalin had bread. It seems that he chose to kill all these people, that he starved them deliberately. They didn’t even help the children. So was Stalin, then, worse than Herod? Did he really take away people’s last kernels of grain—and then starve them? ‘No,’ I say to myself, ‘how could he?’ But then I say to myself, ‘It happened, it happened.’ And then, immediately: ‘No, it couldn’t have!’
“While they still had a little strength, people used to walk through the fields to the railway. Not to the station—no, the guards didn’t let them anywhere near it—but just to the track itself. When the Kiev–Odessa express came by, they used to kneel down and shout, ‘Bread! Bread!’ Sometimes they held their children up in the air—their terrible children. And sometimes people would throw them pieces of bread or some scraps. The dust would settle, the rumble of the train would pass—and the whole village would be crawling along the track, searching for crusts. But then came new regulations; when trains were going through the famine provinces, the OGPU guards had to close the windows and lower the blinds. Passengers weren’t allowed to look out. And the peasants stopped going to the railway anyway. They no longer had the strength to go outside their huts, let alone as far as the railway.
“I remember how one old man showed the farm chairman a piece of newspaper he’d picked up by the railway. There was an item about some Frenchman, a famous minister, who’d come to the Soviet Union. He was taken to the Dnepropetrovsk Province, where the famine was at its most terrible, even worse than where we were. People were eating people there. He was taken to some village, to a collective-farm nursery school, and he asked the children what they’d had for lunch that day. ‘Chicken soup with pies and rice croquettes,’ came the answer. I saw those words with my own eyes, I can see that piece of newspaper even now. There’s never been anything like it. Killing millions of people on the quiet and then duping the whole world. Chicken soup! Rice croquettes! Where we were, every last worm had been eaten. And the old man went on, ‘Under Tsar Nicholas our newspapers told the whole world about the famine. “Help us, help us!” they wrote. “Our peasants are dying.” But you monsters, you Herods—you just turn it all into one big show!’
“From the village came a howl; it had seen its own death. The whole village was howling, without mind, without heart. It was a noise like leaves in the wind, or creaking straw. It made me angry. Why did they have to howl so pitifully? They had ceased to be human—so why were they crying so pitifully? You’d have to be made of stone to carry on eating your ration of bread to the sound of that howling. I used to go out into the fields with my bread ration; I’d stop—and I could still hear them howling
. I’d go a bit farther—and it would seem they’d gone silent. Then I’d go farther still—and I could hear it again. Only by then it was from the next village along. It would seem as if, along with the people, the whole earth had begun to howl. ‘Who’s going to hear them?’ I’d think. ‘There’s no God.’
“An OGPU officer once said to me, ‘You know what your villages are called by people at provincial headquarters? Cemeteries of the hard school!’ But at first I didn’t understand what he meant. And the weather was wonderful. We had quick, light showers early that summer, alternating with a hot sun. The wheat stood thick as a wall, taller than a man—as if you’d need an ax in order to cut it! I saw any numbers of rainbows that summer, and thunderstorms, and warm ‘gypsy’ rain, as they call it.
“All winter long everyone had been wondering about the harvest, searching for omens and questioning the old men. The winter wheat had been their only hope. And it proved everything they’d hoped for—but they were too weak to harvest it. I went into one hut. Everyone was lying down, barely breathing, or maybe not breathing at all, it was hard to tell. Some were on beds, some on the stove. The daughter—a girl I knew—was lying on the floor in a kind of madness, gnawing the leg of a stool. And what was worst of all is that she just growled when I came in. She didn’t look around when she heard me. She just growled, the way a dog growls if you go too close when he’s gnawing a bone.