Chapter 1

winter of 1933-34. Each day in the Leningrad and Moscow train stations officers of the NKVD (secret police—JM) transport section gathered up the children who had arrived from the collective farms of Ukraine and the Central Agricultural Region in order to send them, obviously, to children’s homes and orphanages where they were left to starve to death. The frightful picture drawn by V. Kravchenko in his widely acclaimed book I Chose Freedom is only a small illustration of the misery inflicted upon Russia’s rural population in 1933 and 1934.” 29

Thus, the Famine was misplaced temporally by a year and geographically to the Central Agricultural Region of Russia but, interestingly, not the Volga Basin. The tragedy was seen as a Russian tragedy, even though the majority of its victims were clearly recognized to have been Ukrainians. Still, Mertsalov gave a very sympathetic portrayal of the tremendous human suffering that took place.

Also in 1947, Semen Pidhainy published in Ukrainian his Ukrainian Intelligentsia in the Solovky. A sort of brief predecessor to Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, Pidhainy’s work deserves special mention among the memoirs of the period for the light it shed on the fate of formerly prominent figures in Soviet Ukrainian affairs who had vanished. Pidhainy mentioned the Famine as an integral part of the history of the Solovky:

“The third period in the history of the Solovetsky camps must begin from that time when, having liquidated those in the village who had initiative and national consciousness, Stalin decided to settle accounts with the rest of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and have done with all the “unspontaneous” elements in the CP(b)U.
Precisely then Stalin set about liquidating all the miserable attributes of the appearance of the UkSSR’s individuality. It began with the liquidation of the Ukrainian Military Region and its replacement by the Kharkiv and Kiev Regions. Later, like mushrooms after a rain, up sprang the Union Grain Trust instead of the Ukrainian Grain Trust, Union Coal instead of Ukrainian Coal, Union Salt instead of Ukrainian Salt, Union Sugar instead of Ukrainian Sugar, etc Immediately, by decision of the All-Union Central Committee, a telegraphed order of December 15, 1932 directed the immediate Russification of all Ukrainian institutions in the USSR outside the UkSSR. P. Postyshev arrived in Ukraine with a special mandate from Stalin. A second wave of terror began against the background of the terrible famine of 1933. All the prisons and cellars overflowed with prisoners. Among those arrested we have, in addition to peasants, not a small sprinkling of industrial workers and those members of the intelligentsia who had only recently been loyal to the Soviet regime. In the casemates of the NKVD sat many communists accused of nationalism or Trotskyism.
Postyshev came with full powers to utterly destroy nationalism, which was no longer represented by Hrushevsky, Yefremov, and Nikovsky (leading noncommunist Ukrainian national cultural and political leaders—JM), but by Skrypnyk, Shumsky, Poloz, Prykhodko, Mykhailyk, and Khvylyovy- members of the CP(b)U, Ukrainian communists, some of whom in the years of NEP (i.e., the 1920s—JM) with all their strength had combatted any manifestation of Ukrainian autonomy and others of whom had fought for an independent socialist Ukraine. And for the Ukrainian communists, it turned out that the time came that had been predicted by the Ukrainian communist Ellan-Blakytny, who, dying, told his comrades, “Watch out, boys, because they’ll soon start going after the khakhol (derogatory name for a Ukrainian—JM)! (Sterezhit’sia, khloptsi, bo skoro khakhla khvatat’ budut’!)”31

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29 V. S. Mertsalov, Tragediia rossiiskogo krest’anstva (Tragedy of the Russian Peasantry) (Munich,
Posev, n.d), p. 77.
30 Most of this work later appeared in English in The Black Deeds of the Kremlin, cited below.
31 Semen Pidhainy, Ukrains’ka inteligentsiia na Solovkakh (Ukrainian Intelligentsia in the Solovky)
(n.p., Prometei, 1947), pp. 22-23.