Famine Stories

The weather was mild yesterday and, wanting to take advantage of the weather before the onslaught of -20 degrees, I wandered around the neighborhood of Podil. I ended up at St. Mikhayil's Monastery of the Golden Domes, a beautiful Orthodox church that was blown up by Stalin and just reconstructed in 2001.

As I approached the plaza, I saw hundreds of flickering lights---candles in glass holders, lining the square, arranged in the shape of crosses or circles, some with sheaves of wheat before them. Crowds of people were walking around, carefully stepping over the candles. Everyone was quiet. There were families, teenagers, old people.

The memorial to victims of the 1932-1933 famine is at St. Mikayil's. This is a famine I'd never heard of before I got the job in Ukraine and started reading up on Ukrainian history. Ukraine was known as the "breadbasket of the Soviet Union" but in the early 30's, Stalin forced farmers all over the country to give their grain to the Communist government. At least 6 million people died of starvation.

The candles and sheaves of wheat were in honor of the victims--yesterday was the 2nd official commemoration of the famine. Today at school, when I talked about seeing the memorials, every Ukrainian teacher had a story to tell. Olga said that her grandfather had worked in the city and was able to get food. He took it to his parents in a village, they ate too much (after being starved) and died from the shock. Natasha told me that her grandmother had had a baby and was unable to nurse him. She fed him whatever food she had been able to hoard. Children in the village scrambled around to eat the baby's "poop"--there was nutrition in it. The grandmother and the baby both died. And on and on...