In Western Ukraine at this time, there was still active resistance to Soviet rule. At the time of renewed occupation, it was easy to create issues around the new famine and new deportations. The retribution against the farmers in Ukraine had barely been completed when the Stalinist regime pronounced an end to the rationing. This was the end of 1947. In the first days after rationing was liquidated, bread was sold in cities everyday. Even bread lines disappeared, causing people to wonder where the state had acquired the bread since there was a drought in grain growing regions. Both the state and the people remained silent because they had been taught to remain silent.

In 1947, I received my certification as a doctor and was prepared to serve my country in any capacity I could. The party administration and organizations respon¬sible for health maintenance began to explain scientifically the reasons for the epidemics of 1946. The explanations were as follows.

In 1946, the grain had been lost because of drought and could not be harvested. The grain piled in the fields caused an increase in the rodent population which in turn became infected with a disease called tularemia. The cats who ate the mice also fell ill and died of this illness and when the feline population diminished and the rodents increased, the disease began to spread among the people. And so, the young doctors were invited to take part in the liquidation of the tularemia epidemic.

To this day, I don’t know whether the mice in Ukraine fell ill because they had too much food and because the cats who would have killed the mice had died. This ver¬sion of the grain-mice-cat cycle, even at that time, seemed improbable to me because field mice and not the domestic variety eat grain in the fields. The cats came into con¬tact with domestic mice and not the other.

Whatever the case may be, people were dying as a result of the illness, of the dis¬ease and they needed help. Through direct contact with the population, I discovered that following the famine in the area around Odessa, only 300 families out of 800 remained and that in the little town of Velkovo, fishermen who never before had been affected by famine had experienced hunger. Soviet guards along the border forbade fishermen to catch fish in streams where the fish were most plentiful.

Regardless of the typhus epidemic or the success of the harvest, the deportations continued until Stalin’s death. Individuals capable of active resistance were deported from the western regions of Ukraine, while from the subdued, collectivized eastern Ukraine, they removed farmers who lacked the strength to meet norms irrationally set.

In 1964, the stores of Odessa and other towns in Ukraine were again bare. No rationing cards were issued at that time. The most essential foodstuffs could be ob¬tained only at the place of work once or twice a month. Residents who lived in Odes¬sa got their friends to undertake brief missions to Moscow. These were people who ex¬pected their friends in Moscow to pass them some foodstuffs via the train network. People asked one another, “Where was the bread going? Was there going to be another year of famine like 1933?” Only such questions asked in a whisper are per¬mitted in Soviet reality.

In Novocherkassk, while people were worrying about this issue, certain events came to pass in 1964, the end of Khrushchev’s rule. The following day, there was more bread, barley and even buckwheat and rice for sale in the stores of Odessa. Where did the representatives of the regional committees come from who went from store to store checking to see if there was a guaranteed selection of foodstuffs in the stores?