Page 62 - Communism in Ambush

COMMUNISM IN AMBUSH
60

who were driven by hunger to cut off ears of corn with scissors. Those
who were caught got a minimum of ten years under the Law of Seven-
eighths; some were shot. One Kharkov court issued fifteen hundred
death sentences in a month; a a woman was given a ten-year sentence for
cutting 100 ears of corn from her own plot, two weeks after her husband
had died of starvation. The remaining chickens and pigs were eaten in
the early winter of 1932. Then the dogs and cats went. 'It was hard to
catch them,' wrote Vasily Grossman. 'The animals had become afraid of
people and their eyes were wild. People boiled them...' … Only 4.7 mil-
lion tons of grain had been delivered by the end of 1932. A new levy was
announced. ...Meteorologists were arrested for issuing false weather
forecasts to damage the harvest. Veterinarians were shot for sabotaging
livestock. Agronomists were accused of being kulaks and deported to
Siberia...
Mass starvation started when the snow melted in March 1933. People ate
rats, ants, and earthworms. They made soup with dandelions and net-
tles. The New York Evening Journal correspondent visited a village
twenty miles from Kiev. 'In one hut they were cooking a mess that defied
analysis,' he wrote. 'There were bones, pigweed, skin, and what looked
like a boot top in the pot.'...
People abandoned their villages. They squatted along rail tracks begging
for crusts to be thrown from carriage windows, and inundated railroad
stations. They followed troops on maneuvers. They crawled about on all
fours in towns. Carts went through the streets of Kiev each morning col-
lecting the corpses of those who had died in the night. The children had
thin, elongated faces like dead birds...
Still the activists searched for grain; shot mothers who they found dig-
ging up potatoes; beat those who were not swollen up in the tell-tale sign
of starvation to make them reveal their source of food. 'We were realising
Historical Necessity,' wrote the activist Lev Kopolev. 'We were perform-
ing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain for the socialist fa-
therland... I saw women and children with distended bellies, turning
blue, with vacant, lifeless eyes. And corpses—corpses in ragged sheep-
skin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts, in the melting
snow of old Vologda, under the bridges of Kharkov...'