TESTIMONY OF MR. OLEKSIY KEIS OF SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

I was born in 1912 on a farmstead (khutir) called Sad, located in the Donets River Basin, the Donbas. My parents were well-off peasants, and during the New Economic Policy (N.E.P.), my father had 50 hectares of land. He had a thresher, a tractor, hor-ses, cows, a sheaf-binder, a harvester, and other machinery. Father was mechanically inclined and did everything himself. In November 1929 he was dekulakhed and bis property expropriated. After this, my status as a so-called socially alien element prevented me from completing my education at the technical school where I was en¬rolled.

In 1929 my father was arrested and taken away to prison, leaving me, my younger brother, and three sisters. The only possessions we had left were some linens and towels. Mother was told that the day after father’s arrest we would all be sent to a con¬centration camp. That night I escaped with my cousin to seek work in the Donbas. Mother told the authorities that she had no idea where I was and that I had aban¬doned her with my younger brothers and sisters.

Had I not escaped, I would also have been sent to Siberia. My whole extended fami¬ly, including two uncles, were sent there. But my father was spared, because doctors told the authorities that he could not survive the trip and—even if he did—he would not be able to work. Father returned home, took my mother and the children, and left to look for work. By this time I had got work at a Factory Technical School, thanks to false documents. Father arrived and asked me to help him find work and lodgings. We all rented a shed and stayed in the industrial region of the Donbas throughout the famine.

In the spring of 1931 a directive was issued forbidding villagers to make personal use of seed given to them for planting. People survived that winter with great difficul¬ty and the following spring the famine began. In July of 1932 Kaganovich and Molotov (two of Stalin’s top henchmen) came to the Ukraine and ordered 225 million poods (one pood = 36 lbs.) of grain to be handed over unconditionally to the govern¬ment The authorities came out with the Law of August 7, 1932 which made the taking of a single ear of grain from a field the crime of pilfering socialist property. This so-called ‘crime’ was punishable by anywhere from a ten-year term of imprison¬ment to execution by a firing squad. The severity of the sentence depended on one’s social origins. Ordinary peasants and collective farm workers were given ten years, while the socially alien’ were shot This so-called ‘Law of the Ear of Grain’ (Zakon koloska) was responsible for sending people to Siberia who were guilty of nothing more than picking up a potato, a beet, or a carrot from a field.

After seizing the grain, Stalin sent into the Ukraine an army of activists who were called the Twenty-Five Thousanders’, and later, during the famine itself, another army of activists, this time, the “One Hundred Thousanders’. The activists were made up of local factory workers from the raion. Communists were mobilized to take grain from the villagers. They came to every single house. I was no longer living in the village, but they came to the homes of my uncles and sister. In their search for grain and foodstuffs they ripped open the pillows and mattresses with pikes. They looked inside every house and outside every house, poking the ground, every inch of it, with their pikes. Sometimes a villager would be betrayed by his neighbor who would say that so-