July 24, 1983

CHRONOLOGY OF THE FAMINE YEARS. PART XXIII

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July 16-31

On July 17, Svoboda reported a news item carried by the Communist newspaper Pravda. The reports stated that Pavlo Postyshev, newly appointed second secretary of the Communist Party in Ukraine and first secretary of the Metropolitan Kharkiv Party Provincial Committee, has recently made a speech about the “mistakes” Mykola Skrypnyk had made as commissar of education in Ukraine.

According to Postyshev’s report, Skrypnyk had been too lenient in his dealings with Ukrainians, allowing them too much freedom. Three days after this report (July 7) Skrypnyk committed suicide. The news speculated that Skrypnyk felt “threatened after he learned that his fate was going to be similar to those who spread the bourgeois culture of Dontsov, Yefremov and Hrushevsky in Ukraine.”

That same day, Svoboda printed news from Izvestia, which stated that the workers in the Donbas were fleeing the region. In the first four months of 1933, 133,000 workers left the area and 140,000 new ones were hired. According to Izvestia reports, many fled because of the lack of food, housing and the generally poor economic conditions. The runaways were also leaving because they claimed they never saw the wages they earned; they said the Communist regime would often rob them of their money.

On July 18, a front page story in Svoboda reported that the famine in Ukraine grew worse day by day. The article stated: “In Kiev you can’t buy bread for any amount of money; and only at, astronomically high prices can potato skins be obtained.”

On July 21, the headline in Svoboda read: “The Population of Ukraine Escapes from Hunger.” The news came from Berlin, where eyewitnesses reported that the masses were fleeing north in order to escape famine. According to the eyewitnesses, only those who escaped by foot, or in wagons were able to get away, because the trains going north were overcrowded and guards on the border kept the peasants from coming into Russia. The Soviet regime feared the influx of millions of hungry people and homeless children from Ukraine into Russia. Eyewitnesses stated that all of Ukraine lived in railway stations. Even the smallest stations had between 1,000 and 2,000 people who left their land in search of food. The working people did not have it much easier, the eyewitnesses reported, and the Communist regime did not concern itself with their fate either.

On July 22, Svoboda carried news datelined Moscow, with the headline: “Duranty Once Again Praises the Harvest in Russia.” New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty stated that the harvest was good in the raions that had been unproductive in previous years. However, he added that a few days of bad weather just might ruin that harvest as well.

That same day, the news from Moscow was that the Central Communist Committee had ousted five vice-commissars of transportation because they neglected their responsibilities and contributed to the disorganization of the system.

On July 22, Svoboda reported on a letter received from the Ukrainian Women’s Association in Prague, which reported that “Ukraine is Dying of Hunger.” “Thirty million Ukrainians are looking for help, but the entire world is deaf to their dying moans,” the article stated.

“We Ukrainians scattered throughout the world cannot forget their suffering and the deaths of people because of Soviet occupation,” the article said. Thus, the Ukrainian Association in Prague turned to all women’s organizations and institutions in all countries as well as in Western Ukraine with a plea to help the hungry. It asked that committees be formed anywhere there were Ukrainians.

On July 24, the Svoboda headline read: “Moscow Sees ‘Petliurivshchyna’ Even Among the Ukrainian Communists.” A purge of the Communist Party in Ukraine showed that ‘Petliurists’ were in the party. The report, received from Moscow stated that among the leaders in the Ukrainian Communist Party there were many activists of the Ukrainian national movement and participants of what they called Ukrainian “insurgent” bands.

That same day Svoboda printed a news item from runaways who had arrived in Germany. According to them, the German regime had established a camp for them. Many of the refugees were of German descent. The reports staled that the camp had 357 runaways from Ukraine and the Volga region; they were on the verge of death when they escaped.

The runaway peasants reported the situation in Ukraine to German newspaper correspondents. They showed the reporters letters they had received from relatives still in Ukraine. One letter told the story of a mother who had gone crazy from hunger. She killed her children and ate them. Other peasants would dig up recently buried corpses and eat them.

The “terror of Moscow” continued in Ukraine, another July 24 headline in Svoboda said. According to the news, 60 Ukrainians, officials of the “Bolshevik collective farm system” had been sentenced to death, or hard labor for their “political and agricultural sabotage.”

On July 26, a commentary signed only with the initials, K.P., and titled “National Bolshevism in Ukraine,” appeared in Svoboda. It stated that Stalin had picked an excellent time to purge his party, a time when Ukraine was dying from hunger and Communist Party members were doing everything they could to hang on.

According to the commentary, someone had to be purged from the party, so in Moscow it was the Trotsky loyalists who were being thrown out, and in Ukraine it was the National Bolsheviks who were being eliminated. The author stated that there were two types of National Bolsheviks, the Russian and the Ukrainian. He went on to say that the goal of the Russian Bolsheviks was to eliminate all non-Russians from the Soviet Union. So, he wrote, they are the “Red Fascists, although they won’t admit that they are nationalists and chauvinists.”

The Ukrainian Bolsheviks, on the other hand, are accused of being nationalists and are purged out of the party because of this.

According to the news in Svoboda on July 28, mass arrests were taking place in Ukraine following the suicide of Skrypnyk. Over 100 Communist officials were arrested for nationalism.

On the next day, Svoboda printed a news item datelined Moscow which stated that the regime had acknowledged that famine existed in the Soviet Union and demanded more wheat from its people in order to stop the hunger and bring about a brighter future. According to a new decree signed by Molotov and Stalin, the Central Communist Committee announced that the state quota for grain would go up by six percent to 22 percent, in order for the state to feed the masses. The news item observed that in 1920-21 during the famine the towns and cities suffered. This time, it was the peasantry suffering, yet Moscow demanded wheat for its industrial areas and towns while neglecting the peasants.

In an article titled “They Forgot about Ukraine,” Dr. Ewald Ammende issued a statement in Vienna asking the International Red Cross to help the hungry in the Donetske oblast and the Volga region, where the people were suffering from hunger as they did in 1921.

On the last day in July, the headline in Svoboda read: “Ukraine is Dying of Hunger.” The news came from Lviv; according to the western Ukrainian press, horrible deaths were described by relatives who had sent letters to their families in western Ukraine. The news story said: “those who read them [the letters] got chills down their backs.”

Also that day, Svoboda reported news from Moscow that coal production in the Don area had fallen, due to the great turnover of the work force in the area. Many fled to escape hunger.

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Around the world:

Wiley Post continued his second flight around the world, this time alone. He had won international fame in 1931 when he and Harold Gatty had flown around the world in record time.

A terrible flood inundated the Hutsul region and Galicia in western Ukraine. The rain had come down constantly for two months; and hailstorms struck, too. The rivers overflowed and flooded the area, destroying crops and homes.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced new laws, including the following: children under age 14 could not work, children between the ages of 14 and 16 could work only three hours a day and only during daylight hours; a work week in factories could not exceed 35 hours; a work week in offices would be 40 hours; store owners would have to keep their businesses open at least 54 hours a week; office workers’ wages were established at between $12 and $15 a week minimum, depending on the size of the city they lived in.

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