KIEV, Ukraine – If a black flag waved in the air above a Ukrainian village in 1933, Ukrainians knew that every single resident was dead and their emaciated bodies were waiting to be collected.
Today, this former Soviet republic marks the 73rd anniversary of the Great Famine – a tragedy orchestrated by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin that continues to haunt and divide the nation of 47 million. President Viktor Yushchenko wants the deaths of an estimated 10 million of his countrymen recognized as genocide, but Russia has warned Kiev against using that term to describe the mass starvation.
During the height of the famine, 33,000 people died of hunger every day. Cases of cannibalism were widespread as desperation deepened. Parents ate their children, and adult children ate elderly parents.
“Cats were eaten, dogs were eaten, then people started eating each other,” said Anna Vasilieva, 85. She said her younger brother, Oleksiy, once returned home and told her he had just seen their neighbor eat a boiled hand.
“He told me, ‘I also want to eat an arm, I want to eat fingers,’” said Vasilieva.
Stalin provoked the famine in a campaign to force peasants to give up their private farms and join collectives. Authorities collectivized agriculture throughout the Soviet Union, but farmers in Ukraine – known as the breadbasket of the U.S.S.R. – fiercely resisted collectivization and bore the brunt of the man-made disaster.
Historians say the overwhelming majority of deaths in the Great Famine occurred in Ukraine, which lost one-third of its population.
Authorities ordered each village to provide the state with a quota of grain, but the demands typically exceeded crop yields. As village after village failed to meet the requirements, they were put on a blacklist. The government seized all food from blacklisted villages, but residents were prohibited from leaving – effectively condemning them to starvation.
During the Soviet era, the mass starvation of a nation with some of the world’s richest farmland was a closely guarded state secret, but information trickled out over the years and Ukraine declassified more than 1,000 files documenting it in 2003.
Ten nations, including the United States, have recognized the Great Famine as an act of genocide.
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