She Survived Manmade Famine
One can occasionally hear the term, rozsrilianne vidrozhennia, literally, the renaissance that was placed before the firing squad and shot. This was our own, Ukrainian, renaissance. What is in question is perhaps the part of the twentieth century before the Ukrainian People’s Republic was established and the decade that followed. We clearly see the outline of those times’ events, also thanks to Den/The Day’s publications. But what do we know about the people who gave birth to and were born by that epoch? Very little, I think, although that was a generation of romantic-minded young people who lived in and were ready to sacrifice themselves for Ukraine, and mostly remained behind in their time, for their descendants were forced to scorn them.
I do not know about others, but I have happened throughout my life to come across people of that type and of that time — or if not exactly them, then their heirs who seemed to be carrying some of that fire of Prometheus. This essay is about a woman of that sort.
Nadiya Malyshko was born into an educated rural family as Ukraine struggled to gain independence in 1917-1921, and lived almost all her life in Vasylkivka, Dnipropetrovsk oblast. We never saw each other, but our epistolary romance has lasted for ten years.
As the mass media announced the “lexical fair,” i.e., collecting the vocabulary and phraseologies to beef up Ukrainian language dictionaries, Ms. Malyshko responded, timidly at first, and began sending manila envelopes with pearls of our language. She would send reference materials along with letters. She finally emerged as a true and indisputable leader of the fair because she was making a generous contribution to what may be called this country’s chronicle, describing the descendants of Cossacks, their customs, language, external influences and circumstances.
She once wrote about her teachers, the people who introduced her to the temple of national culture and molded her as a Ukrainian. They instilled in her, among other things, love for the language that she still teaches and defends from bald-faced ignoramuses.
Khytryk. How dearly he loved Ukraine, school and teachers! He taught history, and his lectures were far from what the manuals offered. A school principal, he would organize and conduct various thematic soirees. A true expert, he was relentlessly maligned in the press. He said before being arrested, “All you can blame me for is that I love Ukraine boundlessly.” He was executed by firing squad.
Ihor Kostiv, the school’s deputy principle. Nobody else could match him in knowledge and intelligence. Noble, handsome and cultured, he graduated from Krakow University and knew perhaps ten languages. He was acquainted with many pre-Revolutionary writers. His literature classes were actual mirror of life. And how he recited the works of art! I still picture Mr. Kostiv, a spitting image of Vsevolod the Bison. Executed by firing squad.
Taranenko. A young, 27-year old, energetic, handsome, educated organizer of various nonstandard novelties for the young. Schoolboys would run after him in droves, while all schoolgirls were in love with him. He had made all physics-room implements with his own hands, as the boys looked on. Executed by firing squad.
Tkalyk, the school principal after Khytryk. Executed by firing squad.
Zimmer. Executed by firing squad.
Mykhailov. Died in prison after interrogations.
These are the victims from our secondary school alone! But when you tell this the young, they say (in Russian), “So? It was necessary.”
To whom?
How sad it is that a nationwide tragedy taught nothing either the elderly or the young. The elderly were so much brainwashed that they still repeat like parrots, “There were hardships in ‘33, but no famine.” My mother and brother died of starvation, I myself gulped (when possible) a frozen-beet-root swill and sold my last shirt... And “no famine?”
Thus we lost the thin stratum of intellectuals who managed to survive after all kinds of Muraviovs (tsarist general who first occupied Kyiv for the Bolsheviks in 1918 and had anyone overheard speaking Ukrainian in the streets shot — Ed.). The elite was wiped out by various trials of so-called enemies of the people, while small towns and villages knew nothing about it. This is the way our society was de-intellectualized, as George Sheveliov put it.
Here is a recent letter from Ms. Malyshko,
“Two years ago I got into a trouble: I fell and broke my leg, ...now I can only move around with a cane (still staggering) or in a wheelchair. What a pity! For information is now being collected about the 1933 famine.
“I remember very well the terrible ‘33 because I was thirteen at the time. I wish I could walk about Vasylkivka and talk to many old people. I know almost all of them. But I cannot do so. So I have made a mental tour of the streets I know and recorded those I knew very well, spoke to, lived next door to, and went to school with — they also fell victim to the manmade famine.
“I continued to collect names even after the ‘tour.’ I phoned some people, confirmed some details, and recorded new facts. It came to a total hundred names. I handed the list over to our museum so they enter the names into The Book of Manmade Famine Victims.
“However, the museum curator went to the local ZAGS (civil registration office — Ed.) and asked them to show her the books for 1932-1933. Almost nobody was in those books. Even when somebody was there, it was written he or she died of dropsy, heart attack, influenza, pneumonia, sclerosis, etc. Nobody died of starvation!
“How naive, how stupid!
“The word famine was strictly prohibited at the time. Whoever pronounced it was persecuted and tortured, sometimes to death. So if a ZAGS clerk had recorded that somebody died of famine, he would have immediately faced the firing squad. Moreover, I have a lingering doubt that the respected museum curator never saw and read the 1932-1933 records.
“My husband Semen and I registered our marriage in a ZAGS after the war. We lived together for about forty years. When he died, I had to reregister the house in my name. I brought our marriage certificate to the notary public, but he just looked it up and said, ‘Your certificate is invalid, for it bears no signature of the ZAGS chief.’
“I went to the ZAGS, but said, ‘The Vasylkivka archives keep documents for ten years and then forward them to the oblast center to be kept at a special storage place.’
“That’s that. Yet, Natalia Oleksiyivna was immediately given the prewar documents. Then she came to my place to take a photo of Semen for the museum (Moscow transferred him to the Polish Army, where he served until 1947). She said she was first denied the books but then was told, ‘Well, we know you, you are a respected person. All right, take the books.’
“Why were so many missing from the death books? Because nobody wanted to record, for example, the kulaks’ orphan children who lived next to us. Their parents, Vasyl and Odarka, had died a few days before, leaving behind three hungry girls in a cold house. The eldest, Klava, was about ten, and the other two were very young. The house was sold. The new mistress threw the kids out on the street to suffer the frost, cold, and darkness. They ran away to hide in vegetable gardens, snow drifts, weeds, and brambles. They froze to death there. Only in the spring were their corpses buried in haste. So who would record them?”
Or take those who would fall and die on the roads, at railway stations, under bridges, and in the street puddles unknown, alien, without documents. There was no such thing in the cities.
I do not think it was the idea of village council clerks to doctor the facts. In all probability, they obeyed some instructions from the district Communist Party committee which in turn fulfilled the will of higher bodies (in fact, it was forbidden at the time to report deaths from starvation or its companion disease, typhus, which Ukraine was full of at the time — Consultant). The latter, quite aware of their crimes, tried hard to cover the tracks.
This further proves that the famine was not the result of a crop failure or “temporary difficulties,” as today’s Communists parrot, short of adding that, as one supposedly font of wisdom happened to say about Russian soldiers in Chechnya, “they died with a smile on their lips.” Did our peasants also die with joy, singing praises of the party of Lenin and Stalin?
Further reflecting on the letters of Nadiya Malyshko, I concluded that, if information was doctored or facts were not recorded at all, we will never know a more or less precise number or the names of victims. All we can do is make a rough estimate on the basis of demographic variables.
And, lastly, the impression is our provinces are still being ruled by some non-Ukrainian authorities, They ignore, overtly and covertly, and revile the struggle for Ukraine by UPA insurgents as well as desecrate the memory of our nation’s best farmers.
Let us bow our heads to the mounds that hide the remains of our nameless, unwept and unhallowed compatriots and relatives.
