| |
by Stephen Weatherbe
Alberta REPORT--Cover Story
Canada's Independent Newsmagazine
Oct. 31, 1983
FIRST comes the gnawing, twisting pain in the stomach. Then hallucinations
which drive some mad. Then apathy, emaciation, swelling of the hands, feet
and stomach. Then death. Starvation is grisly, and all the more so when it
is en masse, the death from hunger of one-quarter of a nation. It is small
wonder that few of the 100 or so survivors of the Ukrainian famine of 1932
and 1933 who live in Alberta today are willing to talk about the demise of
almost seven million of their countrymen, their relatives and friends who
died. "Survivor syndrome," says a sympathetic Bohdan Krawchenko, a
University of Alberta professor who has been tracking down those who lived
through the period, for this week's 50th anniversary famine commemoration.
Survivors feel guilty that they lived while others didn't, and ashamed at
the degradation of it all. Many fear reprisals against relatives still in
the Ukraine. The Soviet Union has steadfastly denied the famine for 50
years, Ukrainian Canadians claim, for the simple reason that the Soviets
themselves caused the atrocity by stealing the harvest and exporting it to
Europe to pay for new industrial machinery.
It is painful for Yar Slavutych to remember too. He lost his grandparents
and his five-month-old baby sister. But the 65-year-old retired University
of Alberta professor made an oath to his grandfather as he lay dying in
Yar's arms to "tell the world how Moscow destroys the Ukrainian nation."
Since then Yar Slavutych has written articles and books, in Ukrainian and
English, about the horrors of his youth, along with others who escaped to
Canada and the United States after the Second World War. It has taken the
children of these post-war immigrants to learn the language and the ropes of
their new culture well enough, not only to draw maximum media attention to
their anniversary monument unveilings, but also to insure that the story
makes its way into the hard history of textbooks and so into human memory.
Now a handful of Ukrainian-Canadian and -American researchers, centred in
Edmonton, Toronto and Harvard University in Massachusetts, are combing
non-classified and highly suspect Soviet statistics, British Foreign Office
and U.S. State Department records, and interviewing aging diplomats and
survivors, to amass the annotated, footnoted, and bibliographized essays and
books which impress historians. In the process, the Ukrainian famine is
emerging as a man-made holocaust on par with the Nazi extermination of
Europe's Jewry a decade later. What is also emerging is that the leaders of
the "Free World," whom Yar Slavutych's grandfather trusted would intervene
once they knew, were fully aware of the mass starvation in Ukraine, but
preferred to keep silent.
Even now there are those, even outside the Soviet Union, who would prefer
the famine remain buried in undocumented obscurity. A left-wing faction of
Ukrainian Albertans sees the matter as a propaganda ploy to discredit the
Soviet Union and intensify the Cold War. Ukrainian communities across Canada
have found the federal Liberal government loath to participate in their
commemorative activities. An editorial in Edmonton's Ukrainian News,
commenting on federal cabinet minister Roy MacLaren's ill-chosen remarks in
Winnipeg last week at the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, asked "why the
silence from the federal government? It appears to be part of a
lay-off-the-Soviets mood the prime minister has gotten into lately."
The story of the great Ukrainian famine (smaller ones occurred in 1921 and
'46) is the story of the stolen harvest of 1932. But it is also the story of
the progress of Communism in Russia and Ukraine. And finally, it is the
story of Yar Slavutych, born in 1918 in the southern Ukrainian village of
Blahodatne, near the city of Kryvyj Rih. There an ancestor had once wielded
vast power as governor or the region, in the last days of the Kozak (or
Cossack) State, in the 17th century. It was then that the Ukraine, nestled
on the fertile steppes north of the Black Sea, ended its 850-year history as
an independent principality buffeted and dismembered by Tartars from the
east, Poles from the north and finally, in 1775, by Tsarist Russia. The
Slavutyches continued as landlords around Blahodatne, with thousands of
acres in what was known as the breadbasket of Europe, right up to the First
World War. As Tsarist Russia reeled from the double blows of total war with
Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and insurrection at home, Ukrainian
nationalists and socialists seized their chance. In 1917 they declared the
Ukraine an independent republic Farmland was redistributed, with the number
of family members being the sole determinant of acreage.
By the time the Red Army conquered the Ukraine in 1920, Soviet leadership
under Lenin had abandoned initial attempts to institute doctrinaire
communism. Attempts to nationalize commerce and collectivize agriculture had
collapsed in a predictable disaster which persuaded Lenin to bring in the
New Economic Policy. This restored free enterprise in many sectors of the
economy, and in agriculture the land was redistributed on the basis of the
number in each household. In addition, the nationalistic Communists in power
in the Ukraine encouraged a Renaissance in arts and letters. It was a kind
of golden age which drew many Ukrainians who had left under the Tsars back
again, from as far away as Canada, to help build a socialist Ukraine.
FOR Yar Slavutych it was a happy time, and if his father and grandfather
were resentful of their loss in wealth and stature, he was oblivious to it.
"Still we had some traditions," he says, as well as 30 acres of their old
estate, four or five horses, and four or five cows, a farmyard full of
chickens and geese, a fruit orchard and a vegetable garden; plenty to
support Yar's paternal grandparents, his parents and their six children.
But the Slavuytches were marked, along with a million other Ukrainian
peasants, as enemies or potential enemies of collectivization. Lenin had
died in 1924, before the Soviet economy could recover enough for another
dose of doctrinaire socialism. His successors vied for leadership for
another few years until Josef Stalin, a ruthless and cunning protege of
Lenin's, emerged as the new ruler in 1927.
Stalin's first Five-Year Plan, instituted in 1928, was intended to
industrialize the Soviet Union. Technicians and heavy machinery would be
imported from Western Europe and America, and paid for with exports of grain
purchased from the peasantry. But when the State set the purchase price
extortionately low, the farmers responded by boycotting the exchange,
particularly in the Ukraine, which customarily had the highest surpluses.
Collectivization was introduced to force the centralization of harvesting
and storage, and thus enable the State to extract the necessary grain for
export. Resistance was fierce, often violent. Stalin responded with
"dekulakization," or war against the rich peasants, whom he blamed for the
nearly 50% drop in grain deliveries to the State, though they accounted for
only 20% of production. In fact, says Bohdan Krawchenko, of the University
of Alberta's Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, dekulakization was
intended as a handy category in which to lump all opponents to
collectivization. Dr. Krawchenko estimates at least 200,000 Ukrainian
households, or about a million people, were "liquidated" in this war: slain,
deported to Northern Russia, imprisoned, or left to wander homeless and
starving.
Drought hit in 1931, and combined with the disorganization and disincentive
of gradual collectivization, caused grain production to fall by 20%, yet
Stalin demanded the same grain quota from the Ukraine, 7.7 million tons.
Troops, deportations, and hunts for hidden caches, produced just seven
million tons from the 1931 harvest. This, according to Dr. Krawchenko, left
the average Ukrainian peasant household of five to six "whose main staple
for centuries had been bread," with a mere 247 pounds of grain to live on
for the year.
Ukrainian party officials lobbied successfully for a lower quota, 6.2
million tons, for 1932, but this was still too much. Collective farms were
unable to pay their workers in produce. In August, to prevent pilfering from
the fields, the death penalty was introduced for "theft of socialist
property." In December villages which had not met their quotas were
prohibited from purchasing food from other villages. Ukrainians in border
areas were stopped from crossing into Russia to buy food and, as the famine
advanced, overtures of relief from abroad were rebuffed by Moscow, which
denied a problem existed.
But there was a problem. The 1932 quotas had left the average peasant family
with just 181 pounds of grain. "What is left," Yar Slavutych remembers his
father telling him, "is not enough for the winter." The quotas had also left
the family with but one cow and horse. But the State was not finished. One
night the farm was raided by Russian-led local Reds. Yar and his father were
arrested and the rest of the family turned out with what possessions they
could carry. The two prisoners were put aboard a train of cattle cars loaded
with others who had resisted collectivization, and shipped north to Russia.
While his father would end up in a forestry work camp near Archangel on the
Arctic Ocean, Yar escaped as soon as the train crossed into Russia, and
after a month riding the rails and walking, found his family living near
their former home.
The situation was desperate. The vegetables had run out by November. By
December, he recalls, people were dying. The oldest and youngest went first;
his baby sister, and then his grandmother, who refused to eat the meagre
soup of vegetable scraps. His mother went to Kryvyj Rih to work for food
rations for herself and her younger children. Yar went to work at a State
dairy farm. He too was paid in rations, a slice of black bread and two bowls
of soup a day. He saved some of it for his grandfather, who was camped in a
dugout back at their old farm, as well as milk from the cows. But these
weekly trips to the old man proved insufficient, and dangerous. He became
accustomed to seeing corpses on the roadside, but on one trip a ragged shape
he took to be another dead man rose and chased him "for my food, or for
myself," says Mr. Slavutych. But the man collapsed, and, as he died, the boy
saw recognition light his eyes. It was one of his closest neighbours.
In May his grandfather was dying. "His legs were swollen four times larger
than normal, but he was still conscious and he greeted me." The old man took
Yar's offering, a piece of bread, put it to his lips in a kiss, and returned
it to the boy. "You must eat it," he said, "to survive and tell the world
about Moscow's destruction of the Ukrainian nation." He made his grandson
swear an oath, and in half an hour he died. The boy buried him in a shallow
grave on his ancestral land. "He didn't want to be buried in one of those
mass graves."
Mass graves found plenty of customers all the same. Many were in the cities,
where the starving would beg small morsels, which would still be too much
for their malnourished state.
BUT worse things happened in the countryside. The cities, after all, were
still allowed food rations, because it was the independent peasantry, not
the industrial worker, who was the target of the famine. Yar Slavutych talks
of people walking, wraithlike, through the ditches for weeds, peeling bark
off the trees, and roots from the fields. Dogs and cats went early.
Cannibalism came later. Fresh corpses were dug up and boiled for stew. In a
farm near their own, before the famine, lived a young girl Yar had
accompanied to school in happier times. For this her mother had rewarded him
with candies and apples, and there was joking talk of marriage. In January
of 1933, Yar learned, the mother had lost her mind, looked out into the
farmyard and seen a huge turkey. She rushed out, slew it with a knife, and
put it in the cooking pot. After eating her fill of the resulting stew, she
looked for her daughter to share what was left. "But all she could find was
her daughter's cap, all bloody." Returning to her senses, she realized she
had killed her daughter. "She ran to the village in despair, cursing the
Soviets, was arrested, and shot."
Yet, even as whole villages wasted away, the Soviets were unable to
transport the huge volume of grain they had extracted. It lay rotting in
huge piles by railway depots. One such near Kryvyj Rih proved tempting
enough that Yar and a band of young men, with the aid of one of the guards,
attacked one night, killing a second guard and chasing off a third. The
raiders dragged away a wagonload of grain. Yar's 100-pound share was quickly
divvied up among relatives. When the army came to search, all the food had
been eaten.
Before the spring of 1933 brought some relief in new growth, the peasants
died at a rate of 25,000 a day, according to some estimates. Bodies were
piled high in country roads and city streets, to be collected for mass
burial.
The planting in the spring of 1933 proceeded at gunpoint to prevent theft of
seed grain, which had to be imported from Russia. By the summer the
peasantry had either been deported, moved to the cities, or to state or
collective farms, where they could get government rations as they worked on
the next harvest, or they were dead.
How many in all no one knows. Soviet census data puts the Ukrainian
population in 1926 at 31,195,000 and in 1939 at 28,111,000, a decrease of
three million. However, the growth rate in the Ukraine up to the time of the
famine, argues Bohdan Krawchenko, was such that the population should have
stood at 37,374,000. The difference of 9,263,000 can be partially explained
by assimilation into the Russian population, and partially by children never
born to potential parents prematurely dead. But most, at least six million
and probably many more, says Dr. Krawchenko, died in the famine itself. Yet
the Soviet Union exported l 1/2 million tons of grain in 1932, which a
German agricultural official estimated at the time to be enough to save five
million.
What was the world doing while all this was going on? Marco Carynnyk, 39, is
a Toronto-based freelance writer and translator who five years ago embarked
on single-handed research to document the holocaust. His work has revealed
two reasons why the free world did not act: a press cover-up and government
hard-heartedness.
For the most part, says Mr. Carynnyk, the Moscow press corps consisted of
western journalists sympathetic to the cause of the Russian Revolution,
inclined to believe what the Soviets told them. When word began leaking into
Moscow from foreign engineers and technicians returning from the Ukraine,
their reports were discounted by most. There was a prohibition on travel,
for: another thing. For a third, in the spring of 1933 a group of British
engineers working in Moscow had been put on trial for espionage. The story
was top priority for the press corps, and the Soviets told them if they
wrote about the famine they would not be allowed to cover the trial.
Some got the story in spite of all this. Malcolm Muggeridge had gone to
Moscow for the Manchester Guardian as a Communist sympathizer, and indeed,
was fully expecting to live the rest of his life in the U.S.S.R. Scion of a
Fabian Socialist family though he was, he was soon disillusioned by the
atmosphere of fear he found and the stratification of society more severe
even than Imperial India, with many privileges preserved for the Communist
Party elite. When he heard of the famine, the embittered Mr. Muggeridge
simply eluded the security net and hopped on a train to the Ukraine. He saw
for himself and sent his stories back to Britain by diplomatic pouch to
avoid the censor. The Guardian, a pro-Soviet liberal paper, printed them in
a much mutilated form, and Mr. Muggeridge returned home to find himself in
great disfavour with the socialist elite, and unable to get a job.
On the other hand, another Moscow correspondent, the New York Times' Walter
Duranty sent home slavishly pro-Soviet articles throughout a long career and
even won a Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Muggeridge calls him "the greatest liar of
any journalist that I have met in 50 years." He printed a series denying the
famine which served as valuable ammunition for communist sympathizers when
the Roosevelt administration considered re-opening diplomatic relations with
the Soviet Union. Western European governments knew too. The British
government had word from nationals working in the countryside on heavy
industrial sites, and from Ukrainians who had emigrated to Canada before the
First World War and then returned to the Ukraine during the previous decade.
The Germans had three consulates in the Ukraine, and the various embassies
exchanged information freely.
But when Ukrainian immigrants to Canada and the United States lobbied their
governments for a protest, none was forthcoming. Mr. Carynnyk reasons that
Stalin's Soviet Union was a new power in Europe no one wanted to offend. Her
industrialization made her Europe's only new and unclaimed market and both
Germany and Britain wanted it. With Hitler's rise to power in 1933, however,
both France and Britain wanted the Soviets as allies just as much as Germany
sought to prevent economic encirclement. Thus, a famine in the Ukraine was
an internal problem for the Soviet Union, not a matter for international
relations. Without official recognition, with scanty press coverage and
Soviet secrecy, the story of the famine temporarily died. It re-emerged only
because of the vast dislocations of population caused by the Second World
War.
Yar Slavutych spent the war in the Ukrainian underground army. His partisan
band attacked westbound German trains carrying Ukrainian grain and young men
and women as slave labour. As the Red Army advanced in 1944, he made his way
in the confusion to Berlin, which was the best place to hide because
millions of foreign workers were living there. Then he got forged papers
which entitled him to rations, and with other Ukrainians went to Bavaria to
wait for the Americans. In a post-war displaced persons camp he met his wife
Elwira, and moved with her to the U.S., where he went to university and
taught Ukrainian in an army language school. In 1960, he learned that the
University of Alberta was looking for its first Ukrainian language
instructor, and got the job. "It was a discovery that there were so many
Ukrainians here," he recalls with a smile. "The country, especially to the
south of Calgary, is very much like the Ukraine."
Through all these years, Professor Slavutych kept up a steady stream of
polemical literature. And it was just part of a river of such oddly typeset,
poorly translated tracts which the Ukrainian and other eastern European
expatriates to America churned out in hot profusion and which native
Canadians and Americans generally ignored unless they needed Cold War
ammunition.
Myrna Kostash, the third-generation offspring of turn-of-the-century
Ukrainian immigrants to Alberta, and an author of a book dealing with her
parents' generation, All of Baba's Children, remembers the post-war
immigrants as "odd people who spoke with heavy accents and felt passionately
about things which didn't matter to us." Most of the new Ukrainians were
from Eastern Poland. They were "urbanized, nationalist, educated, and
appalled at the level of culture." For many Alberta Ukrainians, it was an
experience in politicization.
But others had already been politicized, says Miss Kostash. During the
Depression, when the mainline political parties offered no remedy, Albertans
turned to Social Credit, the CCF, and, in the case of many Ukrainian
immigrants, to the Communist Party of Canada, which spoke their language.
This splinter group persists in Alberta today, with its own cultural
associations opposing those of the Ukrainian Canadian Committees and
churches in each city, and its pro-Soviet sentiments remain intact from the
'30s. These old-left Ukrainians had no sympathy for the post-war refugees
and today they deny the famine. "It was no worse than here in Alberta,"
declared one oldster from Calgary's Ukrainian Cultural Centre last week.
"And I know because I was in the hunger marches and got my head cracked by
police."
But even mainsteam Ukrainian Canadians, says Miss Kostash, those who like
her own parents had remained staunch eastern Orthodox churchmen, were
nonplussed by the stories of the postwar immigrants. "I thought it was just
more propaganda." Even now, she notes, the old-left types claim that the
famine commemoration will simply be used as anti-Soviet ammunition. But Miss
Kostash thinks that the whole 50th anniversary affair has been handled with
restraint. And she is grateful that the story has at last been told. Agrees
Bohdan Krawchenko: "We didn't want this to become a political football game.
Let the facts speak for themselves."
The facts are starting to do just that because of the efforts of the second
generation of post-war immigrants, now in their 20s and 30s, who are
Canadian-born, and English-speaking, professionals and academics. No effort
has been more crucial than that of Marco Carynnyk, born in 1944 in a Berlin
air-raid shelter to parents on the run from the advancing Red Army. The
family moved to Canada in 1950 and Mr. Carynnyk, after university, became a
translator and author. Five years ago he was approached to translate a book
by a Ukrainian American on the famine, and though he found the book a
typically bad piece of writing he soon found the topic compelling.
The famine's victims had been commemorated by the Ukrainian communities in
Canada and the U.S. on the 20th, 30th and 40th anniversaries, but with the
50th approaching, Mr. Carynnyk thought it was time to get the word out to
the rest of the world. That meant doing real research and putting it in good
English. Two years previously Edmonton's Ukrainian Professional and
Businessmen's Association had successfully lobbied the U of A to establish
the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. Mr. Carynnyk lobbied it, won a
grant and sparked the institute's interest. Now the centre also supports a
newly arrived Russian émigré mathematician who has since adopted the
pseudonym Maksudov, and who has embarked on an exploration of Soviet"
statistics to pin down a figure on the famine fatality count.
Harvard University also has a Ukrainian research centre and is working on a
famine project. But so far Mr. Carynnyk has done the lion's share,
interviewing over 100 witnesses: some survivors, some observers like Malcolm
Muggeridge, and German diplomats. He has assembled over 4,000 separate
documents relating to the famine, and plans to produce at least two books
from his efforts. Now, he says, historians will have to notice.
So will the public. In Canada in particular, where Ukrainians have not been
assimilated as in the U.S., but have concentrated in large enough numbers to
survive culturally, the 50th anniversary is being masterfully handled.
Newspaper articles, almost all depending on Mr. Carynnyk's researches, have
appeared across the country. A videotape is being made to distribute in
schools. A picture and text display produced by the Ukrainian Studies
Institute and Edmonton Ukrainian Youth Association is touring Canada, and
copies are being sent to Ukrainian population centres in the U.S. and
Australia. In Edmonton, with its 63,000 Ukrainian Canadians, there have been
church services, a ceremony at the Ukrainian Village, and, last weekend, a
famine meal and the unveiling of a statue in front of city hall. Local
newspapers have done features and Yar Slavutych has been interviewed often
about his own experiences. And though he cannot sleep after such an
interview he is happy. "At least now I have fulfilled my promise to my
grandfather."
An orphanage of death
by Marco Levytsky
MARIA puts raisin cake out with coffee at her comfortable west Edmonton
home. Fifty years ago she was happy to find a few stray seeds, feed intended
for pigs eaten long before. Dure the winter of 1932-33, Maria lost her
grandfather, a sister and a brother--half her family--to the man-made famine
initiated by Soviet authorities.
Maria recalls only vaguely life before the famine. She was six at the time.
The family had a 10-acre farm in west central Ukraine. She remembers well
the starvation's precursors: seizures by the state of grain, then clothes,
and finaly blankets, which left Maria's family helpless. "When winter
started we had all swollen from hunger. All the cats and dogs had been
eaten."
Her grandfather was the first to go. Then her father contracted typhoid and
was taken away "not to cure him, they just wanted to make sure it didn't
spread." With the father gone, Maria's mother deposited her and one sister
in an orphanage in the nearby village, then walked with the other sister, a
year-and-a-half old, to find work in the city of Kinnytsia. Her baby sister
was abandoned in the street. Maria presumes she is dead.
In the centre for orphans her other sister died, along with many others
deposited there. There was no heat and the rations, thin soup and the odd
candy, were too short to keep them alive. "They would go out around the city
and round up children. By day they would bring them and by night most of
them were dead. In the morning a wagon would come and cart away the dead.
The next day it would come again." Maria recalls another survivor telling
her she once saw the wagon carting away her family and ran after it to the
mass grave, weeping. One of the wagon drivers grabbed her and threw the
emaciated girl in among the corpses. "She's almost dead anyway. Why take a
second trip?" he reasoned. Only the other wagon man's intervention saved the
little girl, who now lives in Edmonton.
When spring came the starving children climbed out of the windows to eat
buds off trees. Despite all this, she says her part of Ukraine fared better
than many. "In some villages everybody died. They would just put a black
flag across the entrance to let people know everybody there was dead." The
family reunited after the famine. Maria fled west before the Red Army and
ended up in displaced persons camp in Western Europe. She and her husband
moved to Brazil, then to Edmonton in 1951.
Half the town, dead
by Marco Levytsky
"FROM all the people we knew, not one didn't lose at least one member of the
family to the famine," declares Ivan, an Edmonton survivor of the Ukrainian
famine. He lost his youngest brother and two of his grandparents.
Ivan was one of the lucky ones. His father had joined a "State farm,"
organized out of land confiscated from the largest landlords. State farm
employees, unlike collectivized independent peasants, received cash for
their work. Even more important they were allowed a pound of barley bread
per person per day and a small garden patch to grow vegetables. But death
was ever present in the nearby villages. "It was such that you couldn't walk
down the streets of the village because the stench of the corpses was so
bad. You'd walk into a house and see three or four corpses just lying
there."
After all the dogs and cats had been eaten, some people turned to
cannibalism. "It would happen that a child would die and the others would
eat their brother or sister if they were hungry enough. We heard that in
another village one family would grab children that weren't swollen yet.
They would slaughter them and sell the meat on the market."
Hoarding was forbidden, says Ivan. The police fashioned metal funnels which
they would poke into the clay floors of the houses. If a speck of grain came
up they would dig up the floor. Another tactic the Soviets used was to walk
around at night looking for smoke coming out of chimneys. "If they caught
you cooking, they asked you where you got your food. If you wouldn't tell
them they would haul you off to the police station and beat you till you
told them," he says.
His village, located in the Volyne district near the Soviet-Polish border,
had 3,000 people before the famine. By 1933 it was down to 1,200. About 900
people died of hunger, while an equal number were taken away by the police
for hoarding food, or criticizing the government. Those arrested were either
shot or sent to Siberia, he says. "Either way, we never heard from a single
one of them again."
Alberta REPORT, Canada's Independent Newsmagazine
http://report.ca/classics/10311983/p28i831031.html
For personal and academic use only
|
|
back
