July 10, 1983

Eyewitness accounts recall horror of famine

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(The Ukrainian Weekly, July 10, 1983, No. 28, Vol. LI)

The following eyewitness accounts were first published in the second volume of “The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: A White Book,” published in 1955 by the Democratic Organization of Ukrainians Formerly Persecuted by the Soviet Regime. The first volume appeared in 1953. The acronym NKVD used in many of the accounts refers to the Soviet secret police as it was known before it became the KGB.


Stepan Dubovyk recalled this story of trying to flee the famine.

On May 13, 1930, my father and I, after being dekurkulized, were confined in Kharkiv prison. All our possessions, our home, grain, horses, barns, orchards were given to the poor.

I escaped from prison and for a time hid with a Bulgarian in Kharkiv, at 36 Ivanytska St. After some time I secured work on the railroad in Balaklaya where I had a chance to see how, every night, hundreds of people were brought to the station, loaded into freight cars and shipped to the north. A little later I became a reserve train conductor, stationed at Osnova.

At the peak of the famine, 1933, I, as head of a train, had occasion to help people, which I did as much as possible. For instance, on May 15, I received an order from the personnel director, Petro Shapozhnik, to take passenger train No. 315-316 from Osnova to Balaklaya on the Kharkiv-Levada route. This was an order at a time when tickets were sold only to holders of official documents, which meant only those who were employed. This ruling barred farmers from travel.

Our train reached Balaklaya in the evening and remained there until 4 a.m. the following morning. Many people, their hands and feet swollen from starvation, were milling about the station trying to get on the train to seek bread in the cities and towns. They begged and pleaded, but were refused tickets for the journey. It was a pitiful, distressing scene. Finally I ordered the guards to take them on and they did.

From Balaklaya the train went to Kharkiv, and then returned to Osnova. The head guard, Onopko, and the head of the workers’ committee, Svinariov, started proceedings against me. I was accused of organizing the illegal transportation of passengers and was dismissed from work. My pay was withheld.

This ban on free travel by starving farmers was an added cause of the deaths of hundreds of people in the surrounding districts. For example, 400 people died of starvation in the village of Borshchivka, 350 in the village of Blahodyrivka, 300 in Virbiuka, an unaccounted number in Savyntsi, 1,000 in Balaklaya, 600 in Andriyivka, 700 in Henkvka, 1,200 in the collective farm “Red Star,” 1,800 in the small town of Boromlia, and so on in all the villages, hamlets and towns throughout Ukraine. All these figures are approximations.

Graves could not be dug fast enough to bury all the dead, so they were simply dumped in wells or any holes or pits that could be found, and covered with dirt when they were full.


The following was recalled by Panas Kovalyk.

Toward the end of April 1933, the starving of the village of Novo-Voznesenka in the district of Vorontsiv, of the region of Mikolayiv, made an attack on the grain stockpile at Maliy Hirla, where there was corn rotting in the open. The distance to the stockpile was 18 kilometers. Twenty-three persons fell dead along the way, but the rest managed to reach their destination.

Two NKVD men, Kuznetsov and Sablukov, met these hungry people with machine-gun fire. Yakiw Husynsky, a sailor from Simferopil, happened to come upon this scene. He stole up from the side, killed Kuznetsov and Sablukov with his pistol, pulled the machine guns down from the corn ricks, and trained one of them on the door to the office… Later he compelled them to take a count of the dead… There were 697. There were only a few wounded, because in this weakened condition many died even though only slightly wounded.


An unidentified source provided an account of cannibalism in one district.

At the settlement of Tokari in the Reshetyliv district a woman killed her husband with an ax and began to cook him. The husband was a brigade leader at the collective farm. When his absence was noticed, they started to look for him and in due course came to his own house. There they smelled the odor of cooking meat. They became suspicious ­ where at that time could a person get any meat? They dashed to the oven and pulled out a small earthenware pot, from which the fingers of a human hand protruded. The rest of the victim, hacked to pieces, lay under the bed.

In the village of Fedyivka, Motriya Cherewko used to entice in any children she found beside her fence under the pretext of hiring them to tend her cow while it pastured. She used that ruse to kill Pavlo Ivanovych Babych’s daughter, making her flesh into sausage which she sold at the Fediyivka market. Demid Hnatovych Fediy, the head of the cooperative, seized her with these sausages. She was arrested and sent to the district town, but she died before she arrived there.

Likewise in Fedyivka, Pavlo Atamanets used to seize children at the station, kill and eat them until Demid Hnatovych Fediy rescued a little girl from under his knife. In 1942 the girl, now a grown woman, visited Demid Hnatovych Fediy to thank him for saving her life. Atamanets, together with the rest of his family of five, later died of starvation.

Whenever a dead horse was taken to the animal burying ground, the entire village followed. Even though the veterinarian doused the animal with carbolic acid before throwing it into the pit, all the people fell upon it, hacking it wherever they happened to light on it. On one of these occasions Vasyl Lukych Fediy chopped off Nadezhda Borysivna Fediy’s fingers in the scramble, took them home, and ate them along with the horsemeat.

There was also the following occurrence. Panko Fedorovych Lytvyn received a small food parcel from his son in the city, who was a member of the NKVD. His neighbor, Oksana Honta, heard about it and wanted to kill him. She stuck a knife into his throat while he was sleeping but was not strong enough to cut it entirely. The neighbors took Panko to the hospital, but he was supposed to have run away from them. Later it was rumored that he had been thrown down a ravine.

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