My great–grandparents may have borne witness to Holodomor survivors’ testimonies, but this isn’t my family’s story—thankfully they didn’t suffer that horror. Inspired by the snippets of tales my great–grandmother passed on, I did extensive research into written and oral interviews of survivors, scholarly journals, books, and museums. While artistic license is always a factor in a work of fiction—such as placing Pavlo’s rebellion in 1931 instead of 1930, when most rebellions occurred, or using Slava Ukrayini as a toast instead of a greeting—the facts of this atrocity were horrific enough without me having to embellish them. I wish I could say the historical details surrounding this novel were exaggerated, but the truth is, the Holodomor—or death by hunger—was devastatingly brutal and only one part of Joseph Stalin’s larger assault against the Ukrainian people.
Between 1932 and 1933, one in every eight Ukrainians died in this manmade famine. And it was absolutely manmade. During this time, the USSR exported tons of apples and tomato paste, barrels of pickles, honey, milk, and almost two million tons of grain in 1932 alone. Stores of crops, rotting sometimes as they awaited exportation, sat at railway stations and on the sides of roads under guard while the people starved within sight of them. Grain procurement quotas were kept unreasonably high, even though the spring seed grain had already been seized and the farmers of Ukraine had nothing left to give.
Across the Soviet Union, food shortages resulting from the chaos of collectivization and dekulakization, and Stalin’s refusal to lower grain quotas in the wake of these issues, led to an estimated 8.7 million deaths. This included people in Soviet Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and certain provinces of Russia. In August 1932, Stalin issued a statewide decree known as “The Law of Five Stalks of Grain,” calling for ten years’ imprisonment or death for anyone caught taking any state-owned property—which, to be clear, was everything—even a handful of grain, rotten potatoes from a field, or fish from a stream. Armed activists patrolled the countryside and sat in watchtowers, shooting, beating, and arresting men, woman, and children as they tried to avoid starvation by eating the very crops they’d sown or gathering food from the land they’d lived on their whole lives.
Stalin’s measures affected the entire region, but he targeted Ukraine with further brutal decrees in an attempt to subjugate the Ukrainian nationalism and culture he saw as a threat to Soviet ideology. Guards closed Ukraine’s borders and a new internal passport system effectively prohibited travel between villages and cities, locking Ukraine into one giant death camp. The state began ”blacklisting” communities that didn’t meet their grain quotas, leading to punishments such as the banning of trading or receiving any food or manufactured goods—including kerosene, salt, and matches—and new higher food requisition quotas. To fill these quotas, activists visited homes and ripped apart ovens and walls, then plunged metal rods into hay, yards, and bedding to find every last bit of hidden food and remove it from the already starving peasants. All of this followed an ongoing assault on cherished Ukrainian cultural traditions—holidays and events such as Christmas, Easter, weddings, and Sunday services were banned, churches were desecrated and their bells melted down for their metal, and priests were arrested and deported en masse.
Due to a lack of adequate records, death toll numbers have varied widely through the years. While we’ll never be able to fully calculate the losses, studies in 2018 estimate 3.9 million Ukrainians died in the Holodomor.
In a stark reminder of the effectiveness of Stalin’s anti-Ukrainian policies, Ukraine lost 12.9 percent of its population. Over 1 million people died in the Kyiv oblast alone. While Katya’s village of Sonyashnyky is fictional, the raion of Tetivv, where I placed her village, is real. This district of the Kyiv oblast had a death rate of 50 percent. At the height of the famine, roughly 28,000 Ukrainians were dying each day, and 30 percent of those were children. Desperate people resorted to eating tree bark, leaves, grass, weeds, grains flushed out from vermin burrows, worms, tadpoles, baby birds, rotting livestock carcasses, crows, cats, dogs, and corn cobs.
Despite these horrifying numbers—which do not reflect the hundreds of thousands deported during dekulakization or the decimation of Ukrainian religious, cultural, and political leaders—the existence of the famine was simply refuted. Walter Duranty, a New York Times journalist, won the Pulitzer Prize for his articles downplaying the rising hunger and lauding the success of collectivization. When the 1937 census showed a significant decrease in the population, Stalin arrested and executed many of the census bureau workers, then ordered a new census with falsified numbers showing a population surplus. Collectivization was declared a success and, in need of Stalin’s support against the threat of Hitler, world leaders ignored the truth of the Holodomor. Any Ukrainians who dared to speak out were arrested, and the realities of the famine were left to be carried on in oral histories and hidden away in journals buried in walls or yards.