village. He received packages regularly from Moscow, with food, salmon cakes, and
all be needed to live a comfortable life.

He set up a local activist group, comprised of semi-literate and sometimes criminal elements. If there weren’t enough of them, he mobilized other collective farmers, local teachers, and the like, and faithfully fulfilled his tacitly understood plan.

Incidentally, this agent lived next door to us.

From the harvest of 1930, we were still unable to fulfill the excessive grain quotas, and the grain procurement brigade came and confiscated all the grain they could find. We survived the winter of 1930-31 with great hardship.

The village seemed dead. You could hear neither the barking of dogs, nor the cock’s crow, nor singing or dancing. As for the dekulakized peasants, some died, and the stronger ones abandoned the village and moved to the industrial centers and new developments where labor was needed.

We did not join the collective farm, but continuing to farm was unthinkable. In the spring of 1931, I got a job as an accountant on the state farm ‘Nikolskoi’, a former model estate in tsarist times. I was paid with a ration of food for my family, and that was the source of our sustenance.

From time to time, I went to the village to visit my family, and I always heard bad news. My dekulakhed uncle Anton and my grandfather Mykhailo died. Friends and relatives died. Someone found a job at the state farm, but it wasn’t enough to help. Occasionally, the grain procurement brigades harassed my family and took the ration I brought them. This made it necessary for me to make a special trip from work with proof that this was a legal ration. The activists were starving, too, and stole for them¬selves if they found something.

I have to emphasize here that the situation on the state farms was not as terrible as it was in the villages. Laborers and other service employees received a salary and a ra¬tion, if only a poor one. In the cooperative stores you could buy something, and the at¬mosphere was not as oppressive.

By the spring of 1932, all agriculture had been collectivized, and a few peasants went to work in the neighboring state farms.

Horses, as the only fundamental source of energy for plowing—at this time, only a minority of Ukrainian farmland was tilled by machinery, provided by state-owned Machine Tractor Stations—were exhausted, feeble, and unable to work. They tried to use individual cows to plough the fields, from which you could get neither milk nor a day’s work. And what’s more, the collective farmers had nothing to feed these cows, but they still have to fulfill the government milk quotas.

On the collective farms, the harvest of 1933 was snatched out from under the thresh¬ing machines and removed to the grain collection sites. Sometimes it was left in a pile out under the open sky, where it got wet and rotted. (This happened at the Topolia and Dvorichna depots.)

The collective farmers were forced to work from sunup to sundown, for a pittance. At work they were given some sort of lunch, and sometimes they got a little grain for a certain amount of “workdays’, but this was in no way enough to sustain a family. There was nowhere to buy clothing or shoes-and besides, there was nothing with which to pay for them.