The Soviet collectivization of farms by Stalin and the Ukraine terror famine led to the most horrendous events of the 20th century. Below are some first hand accounts from the book, “The Harvest of Sorrow”.
Up to 15 and even 20%, especially young children, are reported dying in transit, as was to be the case again in the 1940’s with the mass deportations of minority nationalities. Of course, the deportees were in every sort of physical condition, some of the women pregnant. A Cossack mother gave birth on a deportation train. The baby, as was usual, died. Two soldiers threw the body out while the train was on the move.
As people from the village began to flood Kiev looking for food, the Soviets made it illegal to feed them. Anyone caught helping them risked their lives and put their family in jeopardy. The result was the following:
In the morning horses pulled flattop carts through the city [Kiev], and the corpses of those who had died in the night were collected. I saw one such flattop cart with children lying on it. They were just as I have described them, thin, elongated faces, like those of dead birds, with sharp beaks. These tiny birders had flown into Kiev and what good had it done them? Some of them were still muttering, and their heads still turning. I asked a driver about them, and he just waved his hands and said: “By the time they get where they are being taken they will be silent too.”
Some people went insane.
There were people who cut up and cooked corpses, who killed their own children and ate them. I saw one. She had been brought to the district centre under convoy. Her face was human, but her eyes were those of a wolf. These are cannibals, they said, and must be shot. But they themselves, who drove the mother to the madness of eating her own children, are evidently not guilty at all!… Just go and ask, and they will all tell you that they did it for the sake of virtue, for everybody’s good. That’s what drove the mothers to cannibalism.
Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, thought Stalin was misinformed about what was taking place in Ukraine. But Stalin knew. He got reports from the OGPU on the millions that were dying. When she told him what was happening he dismissed it as ‘Trotskyite gossip’. Nadezhda Alliluyeva committed suicide in the winter of 1932.
The record of western reporters was not good. Walter Duranty damned the truthful reporting of Gareth Jones. Walter Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize. Gareth Jones was murdered. The Pulitzer Prize board refused to revoke the Pulitzer Prize. Today, we have a massive decentralization of information thanks to the internet. The ‘gatekeepers’ of information at the New York Times have become a joke. This movie looks like a good one to catch.