Memoirs

In the early 1990s the Ukrainian press, and particularly informal newspa­pers, began to publish memoirs from those who had lived through the famine. Some of the stories are worth relating because they provide an indication of how the attempts to acquire knowledge about the Famine from official mate­rials and documents were supplemented by eyewitness accounts that often provide harrowing stories of suffering and hunger.

pressions, resurrecting a tragedy that had long been concealed, denied, and then distorted.

An early post-Soviet memoir was written by Dmytro Brylins'kyi, who had lost his parents at the age of three and was raised, together with his sister, by his grandmother. He recalled the grain collection campaign in 1932 and how the family sometimes managed to find some rotten potatoes in the garden, as well as eating grass and weeds. His arms and legs began to swell from lack of food. He also describes instances of cannibalism. Though he survived the Famine, his teacher N. S. Shurovs'kyi was arrested as an enemy of the people because his wife received a letter from some relatives in Poland.³² Another author related what he had heard from a retired teacher called Hryhorii Ko- novalenko, who was 18 years of age in 1932 and worked at an elementary school in the district of Reshetylivka.

The famine experience in the Cherkasy region was related by Yaryna Myt- syk, a famine survivor. The first collective farm appeared in her village of Vyshnopil in 1931, and some people joined voluntarily, whereas others joined because they had been robbed of all their possessions during the collectiviza­tion campaign. The 1931 harvest, she recalls, was so poor that her family had to switch to a diet of potatoes, along with borscht. In 1932 the harvest was worse, and potatoes were now in short supply, too. Frequently people had to roast beets and squash as well as some oil seeds. A type of cookie was manu­factured from fragmented buckwheat, but usually the food surrogates were barely edible, and many people began to suffer from acute stomachache after eating them. The kolkhoz provided a cart for the transport of corpses to the cemetery, and as many were in an advanced state of decomposition, men would use pitchforks to lift them onto the cart. Mytsyk also relates some sto­ries of cannibalism, particularly of a number of farmers who killed their chil­dren. In the spring, people ate whatever they could find, including a poison­ous variety of mushrooms, which caused them to lose their senses before dy­ing. The author cites the materials of a Famine Commission organized in 1983 by the Ukrainian Congress in Toronto, another indicator of the direct influence of events and pressure from outside Ukraine affecting the views of those within the country, including famine survivors themselves.³⁴

A description of the famine in the Kyiv region cites one incident in which the members of the grain requisition commission left a small sack of grain upon discovering that the mother of the house was pregnant. This same eye­witness recalls a cart traveling down the street with a human leg sticking out of it.

More recent memoirs appear to elaborate rather than provide fewer details as one might anticipate with the passage of time. Kateryna Marchenko bases her account on the memories of her parents and grandparents, as well as her own. She outlines the historical context, starting with collectivization, the de­portation of the kulaks, and finally grain requisitions. The scale of the latter, she stated, was exceptionally high. It was carried out by lazy residents and drunkards, including in the village Kyshentsi, Uman district of the Cherkasy region, by two brothers with the name of Marochko. She remembers the so- called “red caravans” (several carts that took away the grain and which bore red flags). In her recollection, the harvest of 1932 was a good one—a state­ment contradicted by several other accounts—and she blames the famine di­rectly on the subsequent requisitions.

This style of memoir may not be very convincing in terms of historical ac­curacy, but the detail of the description provides a counterweight to the depic­tion of a nation in chains. An even more detailed account from Tamara Ruchko reads like something out of a horror movie. It is worth recounting as an exceptionally emotive example of the Famine memoir genre. Ruchko's fa­ther had been a victim of the early purge in 1932, and when the famine oc­curred the family consisted of the mother and three children: Borys, Tamara, and Yurii. Tamara was taken to stay with an uncle and aunt because of the hardship at home. However, the uncle died shortly afterward. One day, she recalls, the aunt left her alone and forgot to lock the door. Suddenly the door opened and an emaciated man entered the house, with “glass eyes gleaming from inside their orbits.” Assuming no one was present he began to search the house, drinking a jug of soup that had been left on the stove before collapsing in a heap on the floor. The young girl screamed once she realized he was dead and ran outside to seek help. Along the way she tripped over a dead woman. Later Tamara's aunt contracted typhus. The girl tried to barter some clothes for food but was attacked and beaten by two men who took her bundle. Later she was housed with her aunt's father who treated her brutally. However, she does provide some examples of neighborly assistance. She also recounts some narratives from others, such as the story of how in the neighboring village of Baryshivka, stray dogs and cats would be used for soup as also sometimes were children.³⁸