It is extremely important to recall that when the individuals who lived through the
famine left the Soviet Union, a hostage system was legally embodied in the Soviet
penal code, whereby a relative of a ‘traitor’-and flight abroad was considered treason
under Soviet law under Stalin-the relative of a traitor could be punished with up to
ten years imprisonment if they knew about it, up to five years imprisonment, even if
they didn’t have foreknowledge of it.

So, I think its quite understandable why a number of people have been reluctant to share their names with us. Sixteen of the 46 witnesses that we heard before today, not 28 witnesses, did so under pseudonyms.

Witnesses which we’ve heard were divided almost equally between town dwellers— primarily Kharkiv, Kiev, Odessa, and Poltava-and villagers who usually lived within 30 to 60 kilometers of these cities. Most were aged between seven and 15 years old, but occasionally we had witnesses who deviated drastically from that norm.

The Petrenko family, who testified before the Commission in Phoenix, to take an ex¬ample, included a daughter who was only three at the time of the famine and who remembered being rocked to sleep by a sister who later starved to death, and was ac¬companied by her 93 year-old father, who survived not only the great famine of 1932/33, but also that of 1921, and remembered events going back into the late 19th century.

Witnesses who lived in the village during the famine generally cited a three-fold se¬quence of events as a prelude to the famine itself: dekulakization, that is the exile of so-called class enemies and the progressive application of the term “class enemies” to more and more strata of the village, the exile of these people to Siberia or their flight to other parts of the Soviet Union in order to evade being sent to Siberia; forcible col¬lectivization of the farms that were left, and the seizure of foodstuffs, and by procure¬ment brigades.

Those who survived these events were then struck by the catastrophe of the famine itself in the winter and spring of 1932/1933. They mentioned their various survival strategies, cleaning frozen vegetables, picking weeds, eating bark and other marginally edible plants, frogs, as well as neighbors who had turned to cannibalism.

It is important to recall at this point that according to the law of August 7, 1932, gleaning was punishable by either death or ten years imprisonment. It was considered theft of Socialist property under the law of that date on the inviolability of Socialist property and, therefore, it was considered pilfering Socialist property. So, going out into a field and picking up a few kernels that lay on the ground could bring the death sentence. It often brought an extended number of years sentence in Siberia.

Very often our witnesses have talked about the village activists, those who lived in the villages and who worked with those who had been brought from outside. Par¬ticularly, there has been a lot of discussion of the so-called committees of non-wealthy or committees of unwealthy peasants, the komnezams.

Maria N. of Warren talked in some detail about her experiences as a village school teacher who had been forcibly recruited into a procurement brigade in order to collect grain, as she put it, to the last pound, to the last kernel of grain.

And, indeed, some of the accounts we’ve heard in the past, as well as those that have been published, indicate that in some cases the leaders of these procurement brigades would even enunciate slogans like “plot do pechenogo’, meaning even if you