Borderland (20 page)
Authors: Anna Reid
A few weeks later Kravchenko found himself collectivising in person. Eighty young activists were summoned to a pep talk by the local Party committee. Dnipropetrovsk region had fallen behind schedule, they were told. Kulaks were sabotaging livestock; the grain plan had not been fulfilled. What the local soviets needed was ‘an injection of Bolshevik iron’. This was no time for ‘squeamishness or rotten sentimentality’; they were to go forth and ‘act like Bolsheviks worthy of Comrade Stalin’.
15
Kravchenko was despatched to Podgorodnoye, a large village not far from Dnipropetrovsk. Collectivisation had already reduced it to a shambles. Crops stood unharvested in the fields; farm machinery lay scattered about in the open, rusting and broken. Emaciated cattle wandered the farmyards, unfed and caked in manure. Kravchenko spent the next weeks persuading the peasants to bring in what remained of the harvest while his colleagues went about the business of grain requisitioning and further dekulakisation. He claims – not wholly convincingly – to have been profoundly surprised and shocked when he saw at firsthand just what their methods were:
Evening was falling when I drove into the village, with several companions. Immediately we realised that something was happening. Agitated groups stood around. Women were weeping. I hurried to the Soviet building.
‘What’s happening?’ I asked the constable.
‘Another round-up of kulaks,’ he replied. ‘Seems the dirty business will never end. The GPU and District Committee people came this morning.’
A large crowd was gathered outside the building. Policemen tried to scatter them, but they came back. Some were cursing. A number of women and their children were weeping hysterically and calling the names of their husbands and fathers. It was all like a scene out of a nightmare.
Inside the Soviet building, Arshinov was talking to a GPU official. Both of them were smiling, apparently exchanging pleasantries of some sort. In the back yard, guarded by GPU soldiers with drawn revolvers, stood about twenty peasants, young and old, with bundles on their backs. A few of them were weeping. The others stood there sullen, resigned, hopeless . . .
For some reason, on this occasion, most of the families were being left behind. Their outcries filled the air. As I came out of the Soviet house again, I saw two militiamen leading a middle-aged peasant. It was obvious that he had been manhandled – his face was black and blue and his gait was painful; his clothes were ripped in a way indicating a struggle.
As I stood there, distressed, ashamed, helpless, I heard a woman shouting in an unearthly voice. Everyone looked in the direction of her cry and a couple of GPU men started running towards her. The woman, her hair streaming, held a flaming sheaf of grain in her hands. Before anyone could reach her, she had tossed the burning sheaf on to the thatched roof of the house, which burst into flame instantaneously.
‘Infidels! murderers!’ the distraught woman was shrieking. ‘We worked all our lives for our house! You won’t have it. The flames will have it!’ Her cries turned suddenly into crazy laughter.
Peasants rushed into the burning house and began to drag out furniture. There was something macabre, unreal, about the whole scene – the fire, the wailing, the demented woman, the peasants being dragged through the mud and herded together for deportation. The most unearthly touch, for me, was the sight of Arshinov and the GPU officer looking on calmly, as if this were all routine, as if the burning hut were a bonfire for their amusement.
16
The fate of the dekulakised peasants was similar to that of the purge victims. Herded into cattle-cars, they were transported across Russia to labour camps in Siberia, Central Asia and the far north. Deprived of food, heat or water, up to 20 per cent of deportees, especially old people and children, died on the way. One of the main transit points was Vologda, where the corpses were unloaded and the survivors crammed into empty churches. ‘In a little park by the station,’ an eyewitness wrote of another transit town,’ ‘dekulakised peasants from the Ukraine lay down and died. You got used to seeing corpses there in the morning; a wagon would pull up and the hospital stable-hand, Abram, would pile in the bodies. Not all died; many wandered through the dusty mean little streets, dragging bloodless blue legs, swollen from dropsy, feeling out each passer-by with doglike begging eyes . . .’
17
From the railheads, the peasants marched or rode in wagons to their final destinations deep in the forest or taiga. Husbands and wives were often split up with promises that they would be reunited later, never to see each other again. Some were put to work in mines and logging camps; others were dumped in the middle of nowhere and told to fend for themselves. A German communist described how in Kazakhstan, kulaks from Ukraine were simply abandoned in empty wilderness: There were just some pegs stuck in the ground with little notices on them saying: Settlement No. 5, No. 6, and so on. The peasants were brought here and told that now they had to look after themselves. So then they dug themselves holes in the ground.’
18
Many deportees, especially young men, escaped. Others managed to establish viable settlements, only to find themselves dekulakised all over again. But for most, deportation was equivalent to a death sentence. Conquest estimates that between 10 and 12 million peasants were dekulakised up to the spring of 1933, when mass deportation (though not that of individual families) was brought to an end, and that within two years about a third of them had died. ‘In hardly four months,’ wrote a survivor of a camp on the river Dvina, ‘it was necessary to construct several cemeteries . . . cemeteries so large that it would have taken a big European city several years to have as many.
19
When winter struck the arctic Magadan peninsula whole camps perished, down to the last guard and guard-dog.
Dekulakisation left the villages in ruins. For every group of deportees, at least half as many people again fled the countryside of their own accord. Though starvation had already set in by the spring of 1932, in July Stalin ordered that food requisitions continue:
They searched in the house, in the attic, shed, pantry and the cellar. Then they went outside and searched in the barn, pig pen, granary and the straw pile. They measured the oven and calculated if it was large enough to hold hidden grain behind the brickwork. They broke beams in the attic, pounded on the floor of the house, tramped the whole yard and garden. If they found a suspicious-looking spot, in went the crowbar.
20
In 1931 there had still been some grain to hide. By 1932 there was none. Under a decree defining all standing crops as state property, watchtowers were set up around the fields, manned by armed guards. Anyone spotted picking com was arrested and deported or summarily shot, as was anyone still hiding food. The alert eye of the GPU,’ ran a typical press announcement, ‘has uncovered and sent for trial the fascist saboteur who hid bread under a pile of clover.’ One thousand five hundred death sentences are reported from the Kharkiv court for one month alone. A woman was sentenced to ten years, writes Conquest, ‘for cutting a hundred ears of ripening corn, from her own plot, two weeks after her husband had died of starvation. A father of four got ten years for the same offence. Another woman was sentenced to ten years for picking ten onions from collective land.’
21
That autumn Kravchenko was again summoned to Party headquarters, and despatched with a friend to Petrovo, a village seventy-five miles west of Dnipropetrovsk. Their instructions were to organise the harvest. On arrival, they were struck by the ‘unearthly quiet’. All the village dogs, they were told, had been eaten. The next morning, they took a stroll:
Again we were oppressed by the unnatural silence. Soon we came to an open space which, no doubt, was once the market-place. Suddenly Yuri gripped my arm until it hurt: for sprawled on the ground were dead men, women and children, thinly covered with dingy straw. I counted seventeen. As we watched, a wagon drove up and two men loaded the corpses on the wagon like cordwood.
22
After a hearty meal with local Party officials, they did the rounds of the houses:
What I saw . . . was inexpressibly horrible. On a battlefield men die quickly, they fight back, they are sustained by fellowship and a sense of duty. Here I saw people dying in solitude by slow degrees, dying hideously, without the excuse of sacrifice for a cause. They had been trapped and left to starve, each in his home, by a political decision made in a far-off capital around conference and banquet tables . . .
The most terrifying sights were the little children with skeleton limbs dangling from balloon-like abdomens. Starvation had wiped every trace of youth from their faces, turning them into tortured gargoyles; only in their eyes lingered the remainder of childhood. Everywhere we found men and women lying prone, their faces and bellies bloated, their eyes utterly expressionless.
We knocked at a door and received no reply. We knocked again. Fearfully, I pushed the door open and we entered through a narrow vestibule into the one-room hut. First my eyes went to an icon light above a broad bed, then to the body of a middle-aged woman stretched on the bed, her arms crossed on her breast over a clean embroidered Ukrainian blouse. At the foot of the bed stood an old woman, and nearby were two children, a boy of about eleven and a girl of about ten. The children were weeping quietly . . .
The nightmarishness of the scene was not in the corpse on the bed, but in the condition of the living witnesses. The old woman’s legs were blown up to incredible size, the man and the children were clearly in the last stages of starvation.
23
By spring, people were eating anything they could find – grass, leaves, acorns, snails, ants and earthworms. They boiled up bones and leather, stripped the bark from the trees and fought over horse dung for undigested seeds. Suicide, murder and cannibalism were all common: ‘People cut up and cooked corpses,’ wrote Grossman; ‘they killed thfeir own children and ate them.’
24
Many poisoned themselves by digging up and eating diseased horse carcasses: one account has the perpetrators being shot by OGPU soldiers as they lay dying in bed.
25
Peasants tried to escape the famine by fleeing to the cities. Though checkpoints were set up at railway stations and on the main roads, thousands managed to evade them, only to die ignored on the city streets. ‘People hurried about on their affairs,’ wrote Grossman of Kiev, ‘some going to work, some to the movies, and the streetcars were running – and there were the starving children, old men, girls, crawling among them on all fours.’
26
Early each morning, carts collected the dead:
I saw one such flat-top cart with children lying on it. They were just as I have described them, thin elongated faces, like those of dead birds, with sharp beaks . . . Some of them were still muttering, their heads still turning. I asked the driver about them, and he just waved his hands and said: ‘By the time they get where they are being taken they will be silent too.’
27
Similar carts went the rounds in Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Odessa and Poltava.
Grain collections were officially halted in March 1933, by which time about a fifth of the entire rural population – 5 million people – lay dead. The size of the death-roll varied widely village by village. In some only one in ten families died; elsewhere whole communities perished. The euphemism used on death certificates – when they were issued at all – was ‘exhaustion’. Where the bodies were too numerous for burial, squads of Komsomol members put up black flags and ‘no entry’ signs. William Chamberlin, Moscow correspondent of the
Christian Science Monitor,
was one of the first foreign journalists to be allowed into the famine areas, in September 1933:
Quite by chance the last village we visited was at once the most terrible and the most dramatic. It is called Cherkass, and it lies about seven or eight miles to the south of Byelaya Tserkov, a Ukrainian town south-west of Kiev. Here the ‘normal’ mortality rate of 10 per cent had been far exceeded. On the road to the village, former ikons with the face of Christ had been removed; but the crown of thorns had been allowed to remain – an appropriate symbol for what the village had experienced. Coming into the village, we found one deserted house after another, with window-panes fallen in, crops growing mixed with weeds in gardens with no one to harvest them. A boy in the dusty village street called the death-roll among families he knew . . .
‘There was Anton Samchenko, who died with his wife and sister; three children were left. With Nikita Samchenko’s family, the father and Mikola and two other children died; five children were left. Then Grigory Samchenko died with his son Petro; a wife and daughter are left. And Gerasim Samchenko died with four of his children; only the wife is still living. And Sidor Odnorog died with his wife and two daughters; one girl is left. Gura Odnorog died with his wife and three children; one girl is still alive . . .’
28
Chamberlin was appalled, conviced both that collectivisation failed to justify ‘organised famine’, and that the famine was intentional, ‘quite deliberately employed as an instrument of national policy’.
29
Nor did he hesitate to say so, in a book published soon after he left the Soviet Union. But Chamberlin was an exception. Killing more people than the First World War on all sides put together, the famine of 1932–3 was, and still is, one of the most under-reported atrocities of human history, a fact that contributes powerfully to Ukraine’s persistent sense of victimisation.