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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| In Ukraine, Holodomor's Terrors Remain Fresh In The Minds Of Survivors |
| 2015-11-29 |
| KYIV, DNIPROPETROVSK, Ukraine -- Sitting up straight in a freshly pressed white shirt, Pavlo Rozhko beams with delight as he sings a Ukrainian folk song to the accompaniment of a traditional stringed instrument known as a bandura. Rozhko, who at 91 still participates in a choir, says he has loved singing ever since his childhood on a bustling family farm in the village of Piski in southeastern Ukraine. "My father and mother were cheerful people," he says. "They were sewing, spinning. We had our own sheep and lambs. We kept the lambs inside the house. There were a lot of us. We were dancing, singing, shouting. Nobody yelled at us about anything. Everyone was growing up healthy and happy, until the collectivization." Rozhko was 11 when a massive famine hit Soviet Ukraine, as Josef Stalin pushed forward with radical agricultural reforms that stripped millions of peasant families of their land and crops. By the time the 1932-33 famine ended, at least 3 million and as many as 10 million Ukrainians and Cossacks had died, and the Soviet Union's most fertile land had been overtaken by massive, Kremlin-run collective farms. The Holodomor, as the famine is now known, was never officially acknowledged by Soviet authorities, who said crop failure was to blame for any random accounts of starvation. But as Ukraine has been preparing to mark the 80th anniversary of the Holodomor on November 23, the few remaining survivors remember the famine as deliberate, sweeping, and filled with terror. Food Left To Rot Maria Simak grew up in Spaske, a prosperous Cossack farming village where nearly all the villagers owned land and a team of horses. But in 1932, Soviet officials entered the town, seizing livestock, vegetables, and grains that they went on to sell for profit abroad, or left to rot in silos. Simak credits her mother, a talented dressmaker, with keeping her and her brother alive by taking in orders from the local Communist Party elite. But even so, the family was forced to scavenge for edible plants in order to keep from starving. "I know that we would eat weeds and crushed straw," she says. "We would boil it and our mother would form them into patties that we called 'matorzhenyki.' There was no flour. We dried herbs and plants and pounded them in a mortar, and then Mama would make these matorzhenyki." People foraged in creek beds for mussels, boiled bark stripped from trees, and hunted snakes and ground squirrels. Mykola Mykolaenko, a 93-year-old Dnipropetrovsk poet and playwright who has written extensively about the Holodomor, said he would furtively collect discarded fish heads from a cafeteria for factory managers and smuggle them home to his mother to boil into a weak soup. Such nighttime outings terrified his mother as rumors of cannibalism spread. Mykolaenko, who grew up in the village of Maryanivka, never saw actual evidence of people killing each other for food. But his mother warned him of the danger every time he went out, and he said paranoia in the starving village was rampant. "It began even before 1933," he said. "One day, someone would go to a neighbor to ask for salt...and the next day they'd already be saying that someone in that family ate somebody else, that they killed a younger child in order to feed the older ones." More at the link |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #1 Well, Chmelnitzki is fresh it my memory. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2015-11-29 04:21 |