"Defeated But Not Yet Exterminated"

[arisbe]

"In one hut there would be something like a war. Everyone would keep close watch over everyone else. People would take crumbs from each other. The wife turned against her husband and the husband against his wife. The mother hated the children. And in some other hut love would be inviolable to the very last. I knew one woman with four children. She would tell them fairy stories and legends so that they would forget their hunger. Her own tongue could hardly move, but she would take them into her arms even though she had hardly the strength to lift her arms when they were empty. Love lived on within her. And people noticed that where there was hate people died off more swiftly. Yet love, for that matter, saved no one. The whole village perished, one and all. No life remained in it."

The number of Ukrainian dead in the famine of 1932–33 has generally been given as five million. According to Conquest, other peasant catastrophes from 1930 through 1937, including enormous numbers of deportations of alleged "kulaks," bring the grand total of deaths to a mind-numbing 14.5 million. And yet if even one percent of my students in a given year have even heard of these events, it is a small miracle.

Comments

[kali-ma.livejournal.com]

Wow. I never heard of that. Of course I had a rural Southern education, so I am not surprised. But I'd think that I would have heard of it somewhere else by now.

[prester-scott.livejournal.com]

I was wondering whether I should link this story myself, but now I think I will.

[nephthys510.livejournal.com]

One of my biggest soapboxes is reserved for the Stalinist purges. People always bring up the Nazi atrocities, but few people know the extent of the death, exile, and terror of Stalin.

The numbers, while completely unverifiable, are astounding.

I finished Anne Applebaum's Gulag recently. Unlike the previous works by Solzhenitsyn, Anne was able to access some unclassified Soviet documents. Her numbers, while admittedly low, are as accurate as any given so far.

What is more appalling than the Universal lack of this important information, is the complete ignorance or apathy of Russians, from whom the truth has been hidden until just recently.

Neph,

Descended from Volga Germans. Half of my family at the time were either murdered outright or sent to the Gulag as Kulaks to die slow, painful, freezing, starving, overworked deaths.

[arisbe.livejournal.com]

I don't know what to say -- you are much closer to this than I am. Though there is a feeling of kinship. Sometimes when the weather is warm I walk over by the Irish cottage from which the family was evicted during the famine times, reconstructed stone by stone on the lower Hudson two blocks from the World Trade Center, across from the part of New Jersey where so many of the survivors and children of survivors settled, among them the grandmother I vaguely remember, and my father's grandfather who raised him.

Do you know Taverner's Akathist of Thanksgiving, a choral setting of a poem found hidden among the few posessions of a prisoner who died in an Arctic labor camp?

[nephthys510.livejournal.com]

Absolutely, I feel that my family's background is similar to your family's experience during the famine.

I think it's amazing that the cottage is here, and by where it is now located. Nothing could be more poignant.

I don't think I have ever ran across Akathist of Thanksgiving. I just googled it, and will read it tomorrow when I am no longer brain dead. Thanks for the heads up.

The sorrow I hold for my missing family, is that they are practically untraceable. If there ARE survivors, chances of finding them are slim to none.