nitsky) there was no first-year class for the 1940-41 school year because the birth rate in 1933 bad been near zero. In 1953-54 the Soviet navy also experienced shortages of healthy servicemen because of the low birthrate in 1933 in Ukraina The require¬ments for the service in the navy were reduced because otherwise it was impossible to recruit the necessary number of sailors. I received this information from a navy officer who had served a ten year term in Mordovia. In 1970 my wife and I met a woman in the village of Tarussa (Kaluga region) who spoke with a strong Ukrainian accent. She told us that she was born near Kiev. In 1933 she had fled from her native village be¬cause of the famine and had found shelter in Tarussa where she later married and set¬tled down, thereby escaping death while her entire family died of starvation.

Since the revolution the majority of the Ukrainian population has experienced hos¬tility toward the Soviet occupation. The artificial famine deepened the hostility. It is believed that half of the entire prison population in the Gulag were Ukrainians. The memory of the famine was especially vivid for the Ukrainian dissidents of the 1960s and 70s. The founder of the Ukrainian Helsinki monitoring group, Mykola Rudenko, wrote a poem about the famine entitled The Cross. References to the famine are present in the works of Vasyl Stus, Oles Berdnyk, and others.

Congressman HERTEL: Thank you very much for your testimony, and all of your work for freedom.
Mr. MARCHISHIN: I have a question, and I don’t think it was asked before. What kind of resistance did the Ukrainian peasantry put up to the confiscation of foodstuffs?
The famine occurred, the Soviet Union carried it out, and I was wondering what kind of resistance the population actually put up towards this policy.
Mr. KARAVANSKY: According to the Soviet press, some so-called kulaks, or kurkuls, killed the Soviet administrators. But tf it happened, it was very rare, because this famine was the result of three years compelling repression—from 1929, it was begun.

The so-called class struggle was directed by Party members from Moscow to hound the poor peasants or so-called rich peasants-he has one horse, and he was rich, he was kulak. And this situation was prepared so long that the entire economic policy was planned ahead to start to collectivize peasants. Because after Lenin and Trotsky, the Communist Mafia, should help-they couldn’t help this rural population after the Revolution.

And they announced this and people brought away their weapons, and started to work and started to farm. In five years, according to this time, the Soviet Party tried to establish their agents among the peasants, this so-called committee of poor peasants. And these were agents inside the peasants and it was 10 years—this famine is the culmination, this policy was started in 1922, and its end was the collectivization.

And all of this time the most independent, the most smart, the most productive peasants were arrested and sent to the prison for different pretexts. So, the popula¬tion was terrorized. Some rare cases happened, but the whole situation was so that the peasantry was terrorized and Soviets held power over them.
Congressman HERTEL: So, during this period there was so much resistance, even outbursts of armed rebellion of the sickles, and so few guns could not stand up to the Soviet army. But it went on for so long because there were so many people resisting