Tag #144478 - Interview #78227 (frieda stoyanovskaya)

Our son was born in 1933 and that was an awful period in our life, the period of collectivization [7], i.e., the period of collective farms formation, and the 1933 famine in the Ukraine. The Soviet government took all the grain and bread away from the peasants and farmers to force them into joining the collective farms. This was called the 'state grain procurements'. My husband had to go to villages and describe these processes in the newspaper. He was a Soviet writer. His business trips to villages were very long. This work was not just psychologically hard, but also dangerous - the starved people hated those who were doing this to them and often fought for their bread and families with pitchforks in their hands. Ukrainian villages were full of rumors about cannibalism. My husband returned from these trips morally depressed and physically ill. In Kiev or other bigger towns of Ukraine the situation was not so adverse. Townsfolk were getting rationed food. Our family also got rationed food. But I saw women dying from hunger in the streets. They were coming from villages but didn't get any help. This lasted until the end of 1934. Until 1934 we also got meals in the special canteen at the Regional Committee of the Communist Party. I took food for my family from there. This food supported our family and my mother. She was still working and also received rationed food. I also gave some food to my husband's mother - she wasn't working and couldn't earn her living. My sister Ida and her husband were in Donbass then. They managed, more or less.