million tons of grain were now to be delivered. The figure was far beyond possibility. The Ukrainian Communist leaders protested, but were ordered to obey. As Vassily Grossman puts it, “the decree required that the peasants of the Ukraine, the Don and the Kuban be put to death by starvation, put to death along with their little children”.
By November 1, 41% of the delivery plan had been fulfilled, and there was nothing left in the villages. There were again protests from leading Ukrainian Communists, who told Stalin that famine was raging. They were rebuffed and ordered to find the grain. “Brigades” with crowbars searched the peasants’ houses and yards. A little hid¬den grain was sometimes found, the peasant then being shot or sent to labor camp, but in general the villages were now living on all sorts or marginal edibles-cats and dogs, buckwheat; chaff, nettles, worms, ground bark. The traditional children’s game of “babki”, played with cattle bones, died out when the bones were ground up and eaten.
The borders between the Ukraine and Russia were blocked by police posts which prevented bread being brought back. About a third of the Ukraine itself was officially blockaded so that not merely bread, but no supplies of any sort, could enter. In the Ukrainian cities a small ration was issued, but in the countryside nothing at all.
The cities were barred to the peasants by guard posts. Even so, when the last food had gone, many peasants managed to crawl to city centers. It was forbidden to feed them, or treat them medically, and they either died on the spot or were removed in twice weekly roundups.
Back in the countryside, while any strength remained, families would come to the railway lines in the hope of being thrown a crust. Arthur Koestler, who was then in Kharkiv, describes this: “the stations were lined with begging peasants with swollen hands and feet, the women holding up to the carriage windows horrible infants with enormous wobbling heads, stick-like limbs and swollen pointed bellies …”
They returned to die in the villages. It is not our purpose to harrow you any fur¬ther, but you need only envisage famine scenes as in the world today, with a single dif¬ference—that no aid or relief organizations were present trying to alleviate things. In¬deed, it was illegal-even in the villages!–to suggest that a famine was taking place.
Infants like those described by Koestler were particularly vulnerable and many died. Children of 7 or 8 often also died, either at home or rounded up into special centers and given some but inadequate food. But many, after their parents died, joined the wandering bands of the “Homeless Ones” and lived by petty pilfering. Others, in¬doctrinated in Party’s “Pioneers” organization, were used by the authorities to help harass the peasants: some became much publicized heroes by denouncing their own parents-in particular the famous Pavlik Morozov, who still figures as the Pioneers’ most famous role model.
One of the most moving descriptions of the famine is by the great Soviet Jewish novelist Vassily Grossman whom we have already quoted. His mother was killed at Auschwitz, and he himself wrote the first documentary description of the Nazi death camps, The Hell of Treblinka, and was joint editor of the Soviet section of The Black Book on Nazi Atrocities (never published in the Soviet Union). He gave us in his novel Forever Flowing, the most harrowing description and indictment of Stalin’s slaughter of the Ukrainian peasantry, and quite explicitly makes the parallel with Hit¬ler, adding that in the Stalinist case it was a matter of Soviet people killing Soviet children. And the death roll was indeed on the Hitlerite scale.