Who has been destroying Ukrainian villages?
There is a village by the name of Medvyn in Bohuslav raion, Kyiv oblast. It was there that, during Russian civil war, 12,000 residents decided to defend the village, barring entry to the White Guard and Red forces. In August, 1920, the Bolsheviks decided to do away with the rebels. They dispatched a division of Budyonny’s army. The local residents lacked weapons and ammunition, and many were armed with pitchforks and scythes. They took up position in the trenches dug around the village and held the Reds back for almost two weeks.
On August 27, 1920, several Red cavalry regiments advanced on the villages from all sides. Entering homes at the end of the village, they set fire to the buildings. Several hours later the village was ablaze. The battle lasted until late in the evening. A total of 600 homes with outbuildings were razed to the ground.
On August 29, fully in control of the village, the Reds robbed the surviving buildings, raped the girls and young women. On August 30, they herded the residents to the center of Medvyn, picked 80 young men from the crowd and cut them down with sabers. Only one survived, wounded and covered with dead bodies. (Roman Koval, Medvyn in the Flames of History, Prosvita Publ., Kyiv, 2000.)
After dekulakization, the Holodomor, and mass repressions some 6,000 residents remained.
Over 300 Ukrainian freedom fighters died at Melnyky, in the vicinity of the famous Kholodny Yar Forest in Cherkasy oblast. The Bolsheviks burned hundreds of village homes. Similar atrocities took place all over Ukraine as the first wave of destruction of Ukrainian villages swept through the country. The second wave came in 1929, with the start of the dekulakization campaign aimed at the annihilation of the most hard-working, educated, and cultured peasants. Stalin considered that well-to-do peasants, independent of local party functionaries, were the worst enemies of Soviet power, so they had to be destroyed as a class. Kulaks and their families were exiled to Russia’s deadly north to be welcomed by polar bears and watch the northern lights. They were made to settle in localities where man was practically unable to survive, but that was the government’s plan.
EXPLOITER CLASS
The sage leader Stalin echoed Lenin referring to well-to-do peasants as the cruelest and most radical exploiters, vampires, bloodsuckers, spiders, and criminals. The destruction of kulaks as a class and forceful collectivization marked the beginning of a crisis in agriculture and food supplies. In fact, this crisis would last until the USSR’s final collapse.
The third wave of destruction and depopulation of Ukrainian villages was caused by forceful collectivization and the Holodomor man-made famine of 1932-33. Demographers and historians estimate its death toll at between 7.5 and 10 million. Villagers started dying of hunger in the early spring of 1932, but the full-scale famine began in 1933. All who could fled to cities, but no one could leave Ukraine as the rural residents were forbidden to buy rail tickets, nor could they be employed as urban factory workers because they had no passports.
Works by certain poets were glaringly cynical at the time. In 1933, with thousands of peasants dying of hunger on a daily basis, Pavlo Tychyna wrote in his poem “The Party is Leading Us”: “Let them do as they please, /Let them go crazy and die, /We have our job to do /Burying all landlords, /All bourgeoisie in the same pit, /We will keep destroying them!”
Since all landlords, kulaks, and bourgeoisie had been destroyed before 1933, and there was no way for them to go abroad, the Holodomor and repressions were aimed to kill Soviet peasants, the only remaining “exploiter class.”
Pavlo Zahrebelny, a noted Ukrainian writer, correctly noted that the above lines from Tychyna ought to be paraphrased: “Let’s bury all people, all paupers in the same pit, let’s keep killing them.”
Ukraine’s political leadership and Stalin in Moscow kept receiving a great many letters from starving peasants in which they informed about their tragic condition and asked what had they done to deserve such a fate, considering that there was no drought or flood, no war in 1932, so who wanted the tiller to die of hunger? They cried that they wanted to live but were dying of hunger, and begged for bread.
In 1932-33, Russian peasants were resettled in the deserted villages in the south of Ukraine. Thus, 2,120 families, 1,345 cows, 2,062 horses were transferred from Gorky oblast to Odesa oblast; respectively, 2,250, 1,619, and 3,498 moved from Ivanov to Donetsk oblast; 4,800, 2,329, and 3,472 went from the Central Chernozem Region to Kharkiv oblast; 6,679, 5,719, and 7,571 respectively travelled from western Siberia to Dnipropetrovsk. In other words, the Holodomor in Ukraine was a means of changing the country’s demographics, particularly in the southern regions.
NO ORDERS TO PROTECT PEASANTS
The fourth wave of depopulation of Ukrainian villages was caused by mass repressions that reached their peak in 1937-38. The cases of 170 residents of Trypillia and Khalepia (Obukhiv raion, Kyiv oblast) were typical of the period. The Chekists in their offices invented an underground insurgent organization and all 170 were arrested on April 1-3, 1938. The investigation took from seven to eight days and all were executed. I have studied a great many archival documents, criminal cases and court records. Often I had to stop reading because of psychological stress, for almost every file cried out at me with human suffering and imminent death. Most of the convicts were aged between 20 and 40 years. How many good things these people could have done, how many fatherless children and widows they left! They were all rehabilitated in 1957, for there had been no underground insurgent organization in Trypillia and Khalepia.
The fifth destructive wave came during the World War II. The occupier destroyed and razed to the ground 714 Ukrainian towns and over 28,000 villages, leaving 10 million residents homeless.
On Feb. 27, 1943, partisan forces under the command of Oleksii Fedorov attacked Koriukivka, a district center in Chernihiv oblast and killed seven Germans, On March 1, 1943, the town was surrounded by Germans who burned down 1,390 homes and killed 7,000 residents. On the night of March 5, the partisan commander, Fedorov, secretary of the underground regional committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (Bolsheviks) — or KP(b)U — flew in from Moscow to his headquarters. At the time his partisan forces numbered some 3,000. He later wrote in his memoirs that his comrades-in-arms told him about the most important combat operations, including the attack on Koriukivka, but he didn’t mention what happened to the town and residents afterward.
Oleksii Sunko, a former partisan, recalls that the partisans were then in Tykhonovychy, several kilometers from Koriukivka, and watched the town in flames and heard the gunfire, but they did nothing to protect its residents because “there were no orders to do so.”
In early December 1943, partisans burned down the home of the [Nazi-appointed] village elder in Sokoliv Brid (Popilnia raion, Zhytomyr oblast) and killed several Germans. On December 11, 1943, the Germans herded the residents, with children, into a two-storey timber building and burned all 320 of them alive. The partisans could have attacked the Germans and allow the victims to escape, but they never did so.
The sixth depopulation wave lasted until the end of the USSR. It began after the end of WW II. In 1947, another horrible famine struck Ukraine. All kolkhoz crops were taken away by the state. Collective farmers bitterly paraphrased a line from the [Russian version of] The Internationale: “We have the right to own our land, but never our crops.” Another campaign against religion and folk morals was unleashed after the war. Churches that had started functioning in recent years were being closed everywhere. The Soviet tax policy dealt a devastating blow the people who had won the war, particularly the peasantry. In 1945, the government went as far as levy a tax on fruit-bearing trees, which made peasants destroy their orchards. It was then that the new agricultural tax rates were enforced on Stalin’s initiative, with every peasant, even a soldier’s widow with many children had to supply the state (not sell but give for free!) with eggs, milk, meat, and pay 800 rubles worth of tax and 40 as insurance payment, along with 300-1,000 rubles as “voluntary” payments for state loans.
People were especially outraged by the tax on childlessness. At the time people in the countryside constantly racked their brains about getting money to pay the taxes, considering that they received no pay at the kolkhozes, and were not paid in kind for their work. On July 4, 1957, CC CPSU and the Soviet of Ministers of the USSR abolished the taxes and compulsory supplies of farm produce. From then on the collective farmers were paid money (although meager sums) for their workdays and also received compensation in kind, with grain. In the early 1960s, collective farmers started receiving old-age pensions (12 rubles a month) and were issued passports.
After the war people in the countryside lost all confidence in law and justice, and used every opportunity to escape to the city. It was their way to protest against the arbitrary rule of local authorities, and their miserable lives. In postwar years young people were forced to work as Donbas miners and on other communist construction projects.
PERSONAL PLOTS: UNACCEPTABLE ANOMALY
Discipline at the kolkhozes went from bad to worse each year, so the authorities resorted to new repressive measures, cutting workday indices for absenteeism or being late for work; those who failed to fulfill minimum yearly quotas were put on trial and expelled from Ukraine as “saboteurs.” On February 21, 1948, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued the Decree “On Expulsion from the Ukrainian SSR of Persons Who Deliberately Evade Work in Agriculture and Conduct an Anti-Soviet Parasitic Lifestyle.” In compliance with this decree hundreds of thousands of peasants were thrown behind bars and exiled to Siberia.
After organizing kolkhozes the government determined the sizes of personal plots for the collective farmers and factory workers, as well as the amount of cattle and poultry. These norms were repeatedly revised in terms of reductions. Their violations were ruthlessly punished by fines and double taxes.
On May 16, 1963, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR adopted a decree on the amount of cattle allowed to be owned by citizens. It read that each family could have one cow, one calf aged under one year, one pig or three sheep.
Starting in the 1930s, the Soviet authorities closely watched every collective farmer’s family lest it have an extra hen, calf or piglet, for this allegedly ran counter to the principles of socialism. The Soviet regime did its utmost to make the peasants completely dependent on the kolkhoz and the state, so as to prevent their “corruption,” lest they become more prosperous or sell their products “on the side.”
The Kremlin rulers systematically made the life of the collective farmers, factory workers, and office employees “easier” by cutting parts of their personal plots that exceeded set standards, destroying their hothouses in which they grew tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, and other vegetables. Collective farmers failing to fulfill their yearly minimum quotas also had their plots reduced. “Financial agents” regularly checked the size of personal plots and, on discovering an extra square meter, levied ruthless fines and double taxes.
For decades personal plots remained the peasants’ sole means of survival, but in most villages their size did not allow to grow sufficient crops. Some kolkhoz chairmen tried to help them and allowed them to have a dozen square meters from unused soils, so they could plant potatoes, whereas forest rangers allowed them to sow forest crops in between rows of trees.
On Sept. 19, 1946, The Soviet of Ministers and CC VKP(b) adopted a formidable decree that read: “…embezzlement of public lands leads to the interests of collective ownership of land, as the basis of the kolkhoz, being sacrificed for the benefit of private property possessing, self-seeking elements that are using the kolkhoz for speculation and personal gains.” The decree envisaged severe punishments for transgressors.
The Bolsheviks always sought to prohibit personal plots as an anomaly that was unacceptable under socialism. During the 18th congress of the VKP(b) in 1939, Politburo member Andreyev (he was in charge of agriculture) noted that “in certain areas private farming is dominating collective farming, whereas it should be the other way around…” He went on to say that personal plots are totally unnecessary because the kolkhoz are capable of meeting all peasants’ needs.
In 1946, Korniyets, chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (Radnarkom) of the Ukrainian SSR, declared that a peasant will take even the single cow he has to the collective farm because keeping it at home won’t be profitable; because a collective farmer receives all he needs from the kolkhoz. To think that such characters ruled our country for decades, guiding us to the “shining summits of communism”!
UNVIABLE VILLAGES
In the 1950s, the Kremlin leadership, relying on the Marxist-Leninist theory, struggling to build a communist society, decided to eliminate the difference between the city and the village. On Nikita Khrushchev’s initiative, unviable villages started being liquidated and collective farms expanded. Such villages had been there for hundreds, even thousands of years, teeming with life, and now they were proclaimed economically unviable.
Historians have estimated that Bila Tserkva, the center of Porossia [ethnic Ukrainian territory along the Ros River, including the south of today’s Kyiv and Zhytomyr oblasts and Pohrebyshche raion in Vinnytsia oblast. — Ed.] was a powerful fortress besieged and destroyed 46 times. Various enemies have razed to the ground unprotected villages in Porossia dozens of times, yet each time they rose from the ashes like a Phoenix; but then the Bolsheviks came to power and the Kremlin rulers succeeded in finally annihilating a great many populated areas, using dekulakization, collectivization, terror by famine, repressions, taxes, expansion of kolkhozes, and then proclaiming a number of villages economically unviable. To speed up their liquidation, no roads were built and schools, stores, post offices, and hospitals were closed. No housing construction was allowed. It was thus, in peacetime, without any calamities, that the Soviet regime turned many villages into wastelands.
In 1959-60, a total of 113 economically weak, unprofitable collective farms were liquidated, along with 252 villages with a total population of 168,500, with their lands transferred to the state forest fund. With time all these deserted villages vanished.
After the proclamation of Ukrainian independence, Leonid Kuchma’s land reform (Edict No. 1529/99 “On Urgent Measures to Accelerate the Reform of the Agrarian Sector of the Economy,” of December 3, 1999), the process of destruction and depopulation of villages gained momentum. Young people kept running away to cities. In many villages pensioners are the only residents, with empty boarded-up homes everywhere, in place of once neat white-plastered cottages. These abandoned structures, kitchen gardens overgrown with weed, look incredibly out of place amidst the rich verdant environs. I have written about what evil forces drove people away from their homeland, leaving the world’s most fertile soils barren, considering that they had produced bumper crops for hundreds of years. It should be stressed that the agrarian sector has always been predominant in Ukraine; it was the core of the Ukrainian nation, its culture and traditions. If the Ukrainian villages die, so will Ukraine.
Leonid Kuchma introduced an agrarian model that finally destroyed the agro-industrial complex and the villages as its basis, causing the peasants’ mass unemployment. The current Ukrainian government intends to lift the moratorium on the sales of farmlands. This crime must be prevented, for without this moratorium Ukraine will be left without its fertile soils and the peasants will become nothing but a cheap labor force.
Finally, a bit of statistics. In 1999, there were 12,421 collective and state farms, most of which weren’t economically ineffective, each with an average of 3,100 hectares of farmlands. In 1926, a census was carried out in Ukraine. Its findings were published in 1928. It read that Ukraine had 54,470 populated areas in the countryside under the jurisdiction of 10,733 villages councils (then known as Soviets).
According to Naulko (“Culture and Daily Life in Ukraine,” Kyiv, 1993, p. 14), in 1959-79, the number of villages had decreased from 42,229 to 29,806. A census is apparently now in order. Most importantly, our government should think of ways to save our villages from final destruction.
