Until 1926-27, the Church also had been functioning normally, but from that time on, the clergy was persecuted and anti-religious propaganda flourished.

Kulaks and ‘N.E.P.-men’ were stripped of their voting rights and the doors of educa¬tional institutions were dosed to their children.

As a sixteen-year-old boy, this attitude of the government toward the hard-working peasantry was incomprehensible and painful to me. More than once I had to go out to the fields, barefoot, to do the weeding and to clean up the fields after the harvest. It was all the more painful to me because at this time I was obliged to leave the agricul¬tural school, since my parents had been ruined and robbed for being ‘N.E.P.-men* and ‘kulaks’. During the N.E.P. period, my stepfather had a small store in the village of Kolodiazna, and twenty-two hectares of farmland on the estate of Druhyi Vosmernyk, for there were eleven of us in the family. In 1928 according to economic calculations, our farm was divided, and in 1929, the part that was left over was confiscated by the collective farm without any compensation.

My stepfather and his grown children left the village and went off to different areas looking for work. In this way, they escaped being sent to Siberia. He left me and my mother with half a house, one horse, and the parcel of land that was our due. Thus, I became the head of the household at the age of 16.

At this time, collectivization, dekulakization, and grain procurements were at their peak. In the bitter cold, usually at night, from the village and the surrounding area, the following families were taken to the railroad station of Dvorichna, loaded into freight cars, and shipped to Siberia: three families of Rohovy, two families of Poso-khovy, four families of Poltavtsi, and two families of Sokurky. Others never returned, either. The rest of the peasants who were branded as kulaks, had their property confis¬cated and given over to the collective farm without any compensation, and their families were driven out of their houses.

The same thing was done with former ‘N.E.P.-men’ who didn’t manage to leave the village in time—the families Shtanhei, Galkin, and Herkov. The Galkin family, who did not want to leave their house, were taken by force on a sled, without any outer clothing, to a field and thrown into the snow, where they all froze.

Thus was completed the ‘liquidation of the kulaks as a class’.

The middle peasants who did not register themselves with the collective farms, or who did not fulfill the grain quotas were called ’subkulaks’ and their fate was the same as that of the kulaks.

Those peasants who lived on the former estates were dealt with especially severely. In the ‘circular, estate settlements, all eight or ten families were driven right out of their homes just as they were, and all the buildings were converted into cattle bams. In case of resistance, a special division of the police was called in to help the village ac¬tivists. Such was the fate of the estates of Pershyi and Druhyi Vosmernyk and of many others.

Sometime in 1919 special agents, the so-called Twenty-Five Thousanders’ came to the village from Moscow. The Twenty-Five Thousanders were urban workers, who beginning in 1929, were recruited for permanent work in the countryside. The goal was to recruit 25,000 such individuals. A middle-aged man, who looked very well-fed and well-dressed, with his family (a wife and young son), rented the best house in the