Some Red Army officers could not eat silently as they saw the Ukrainian countryside dying

On April 5, 1933, almost all army counterintelligence elements and Soviet Ukraine’s secret police (GPU) units suddenly evinced interest in the previous year’s graduates of the Ukrainian Cavalry School stationed in the provincial town of Zinovyevsk. The Vinnytsia oblast GPU branch and counterintelligence officers David Sokolinsky and Danylo Leopold-Roitman, “emphasizing the extreme importance of this case” (the school case dealing with the just-exposed “counterrevolutionary organization” — Author) and the necessity of immediate and complete elimination of the whole organization,” suggested that the officer corps of all cavalry units be reshuffled, and all commanding officers who had graduated from the Zinovyevsk Cavalry School in 1932 be thoroughly verified.

Was it simply one more of the fabrications so common at the time? If not, what were these twenty-year-old boys guilty of?

ALMA MATER OF CAVALRY OFFICERS

There are a host of well- known and acclaimed names among Yelysavethrad Cavalry School alumni. The school was once headed by General Aleksandr Samsonov (1859-1914), World War I hero and Commanding Officer of the Second Russian Army. Anatoly Velichkovsky, a “Tiutchev-style” poet well known in ОmigrО circles, spent his childhood here together with his officer father. Amvrosy Zhdakha (1855-1927), a well-known illustrator of Ukrainian folk songs, also studied here.

Other alumni were the famous Ivan Omelianovych-Pavlenko, lieutenant-general at the UNR army, and Ivan Poltavets-Ostrianytsia, the appointed ataman of Free Cossacks. On the downside, in the first years of Soviet power the cavalry school cadets played a key role in suppressing the last pockets of fighting for Ukrainian independence at Kholodny Yar. At about the same time in 1924 the name of the school and the city was changed. The latter was stripped of its “disgraceful” name after the Russian Empress Elizabeth and was from then on to immortalize the Communist Party pseudonym of Grigory Zinovyev, a “passionate revolutionary,” chairman of the Communist International, who was born here. Many Ukrainian Cavalry School alumni and instructors were repressed in the 1920s. Suffice it to recall the now well-known case of wiping out former tsarist officers on one sixth of the globe, romantically code- named Spring.

PEASANTS’ WOES CLAMORED FOR FIGHTING

A closely-knit group of young Red officers, including Hryhory Kosiakov, Vasyl Molchanov, Kindrat Taranenko, Petro Strohanov , Andriy Nazarenko, Vasyl Tarasenko, Ilarion Pidvalny, Kostiantyn Nevdakha, Volodymyr Sukhar, Oleksandr Kryvonohov, and Viktor Kuryliakh, was supposed to be a reliable and unbreakable defender of the new regime. Moreover, the social origin of almost every one of them — workers and peasants — was precisely what the Red Army wanted. They were well fed and clothed during and after school. Why then did they hit upon “bad” ideas? Why were they not afraid to say that their goal was to form a military organization to incite the intimidated populace to an armed uprising “to liberate Soviet power from Communists?” This is precisely what the documents say. For the sake of maximal objectivity, let us quote our heroes from the “historical” records of punitive bodies.

From the letter Kosiakov sent to Molchanov on March 3, 1933 (intercepted by the GPU):

“A Red Army man from Pidvalny’s squad, 4th Squadron, 14th Cavalry Regiment, received a letter from his uncle and aunt (his father and mother were killed in the Civil War for Communist activities) who said they greatly suffered from famine. He could not bear this and went mad. He was taken to Kyiv for medical treatment... Our ‘authoritative’ party has reaped the fruits of its policies. Lenin was right to say that ‘there is no field of life outside of politics.’ So the latter hit [the soldier] on the head, knocking his brains out.”

Then Kosiakov cites another striking fact that duly characterizes the epoch once extolled as a “beautiful and inimitable time.” He says that when division commander Serdich saw eight just- drafted 15th Cavalry Regiment peasant soldiers eating voraciously, he ordered issuing them more soup and bread — “‘as much as they can eat’ — and how much do you think they ate, Vasylko? Forty helpings of soup and bread!” Then he recounts some other observations: the former famine-stricken people, now Red Army soldiers, would in some cases steal food, “...one stole some sugar, another sneaked into the refreshment room at night through the window and walked off with a box of candies. He hid himself in the attic and began eating voraciously... It took the doctors great effort to cure him!”

From the minutes of the interrogation of Pidvalny, a platoon commander at the 14th Regiment of the 3rd Cavalry Division:

“I joined the counterrevolutionary grouping for the following reasons... Staying in the village of Rivne, Novo-Ukrayinsk district, Odesa oblast (now Kirovohrad oblast —Author) in October 1932 and watching the rural life, I saw that most collective farmers were literally starving, the village was completely short of basic necessities, and the life of peasants was dramatically worsening instead of improving. I saw the same picture as I went down the road... I personally put this situation down to the Party’s incorrect policy in the villages... When we were discussing Comrade Stalin’s speech at the January plenum, Nevdakha said that pauperism had deepened instead of being ended. Late in February, Kosiakov told us bluntly that it was time to do, rather than discuss, things: he claimed the masses had already begun to rise...” (on that day, January 14, somebody clumsily scattered leaflets among the machine-gun squadron soldiers of the 13th Cavalry Regiment — Author).

From the minutes of the interrogation of Prysiazhniuk, a platoon commander at the 15th Cavalry Regiment of the 3rd Cavalry Division:

“I joined the Ukrainian Cavalry School in 1929... Our conversations often slid to pure politics because we discussed the plight of peasants. The countryside is in dire straits, bread is being requisitioned, peasants often remain hungry... What in fact added fuel to the fire were the impressions I gained traveling from Zynovyevsk to Berdychiv... Stations and trains were crammed with peasants, as if it were the great migration of peoples... Of course, we — Vasyl Molchanov, Prokopy Molchanov, and me — kept asking where all this mass was going and were answered that these famine-stricken people were searching for bread...”

Interestingly, the letter by Kosiakov also contains a generalization seemingly addressed to a wider audience, not just to his former schoolmate and like-minded person. “Our soldiers,” muses the 21-year-old Red Army officer, “especially those drafted in the past three years, see that Soviet power has ruined their farms, robbed many children of their parents, thrown millions of people into the grip of famine, created an atmosphere of unpunished plunder and arbitrariness, forced people to join collective farms and part with their cattle. The soldier no longer trusts Soviet power, he is fed up with lies about the bright future and the good present. Nobody feels anything positive in this. The soldier can see a gigantic abyss between word and deed. He saw that Soviet power is full of and fraught with contradictions in all fields. The three-year-long malnutrition and exhausting slave labor for the upper crust have finally sapped the strength of people... The soldier does not feel himself as part of his Fatherland because his family is wretched, he has been deprived of all things to rely upon, so he feels alien in this country..., is indifferent to everything..., his morale is plunging to still lower depths...”

REPRESSIONS

Naturally, our “counterrevolutionaries” confined themselves to talk and correspondence, which was then used to incriminate them. Everything ended with the arrests of former cavalry school cadets the overwhelming majority of whom served in the 14th Regiment of the 3rd Cavalry Division garrisoned in Berdychiv. A “well-deserved” punishment was meted out to the culprits: some like Nazarenko were banished to the North, others like Kryvonosov were shot later in 1937, while the analytically- minded Kosiakov was sent for three years to the just-launched “construction project of the century” at the village Zavita, an integral part of the Baikal-Amur prison camp chain. After doing his term, he came back to the city of his childhood and youth, again renamed (this time after the more correct Bolshevik Kirov who fell victim to his own Party comrades), settled on Red Invalids Street, and worked as an unskilled worker at the Red Star Factory, the flagship of national farming machine building.

PS. On the Ideologically Unfriendly Remarque

On closer examination of the case, we also find some, so to speak, less essential explanations of ideological instability in the minds of recalcitrant career officers who served in the “armed vanguard of the Party.” This applies, first of all, to preferences in the field of fiction. Case records mention the oeuvre of the then popular whipping-boy, Sergei Yesenin. But what really raises eyebrows is the following conclusion: “They began to show some apathy toward military service and to reason about man’s predestination and life under the influence of Remarque’s All Quite on the Western Front”. Fantastic! This means that after the first publication of this novel in Kharkiv in 1930 the Ukrainian reader might have lost a chance, under less favorable circumstances, to read, say, Three Comrades. Moreover, this also means that our best young people, even when they wore a uniform, knew better about art and literature than some critics and did not remain silent about the Holodomor. They even understood who was to blame for the tragedy.

Therefore, those interested in the history of the Yelysavethrad- Zinovyevsk Cavalry School, now manned by officers and men of independent Ukraine’s Armed Forces, should also remember these 1932 graduates who could not eat silently when the rest of Ukraine was in the grip of starvation.