by Miron Dolot; W. W. North and Company, 1985 "I DEDICATE THIS BOOK to those Ukrainian farmers who were deliberately starved to death during the Famine of 1932-1933, my only regret being that it is impossible for me to fully describe their sufferings."  Miron Dolot

INTRODUCTION 

The Wave of National Revival, a 12 meters high symbolic monument.

This is one of the rare eyewitness accounts of the Great Famine which struck several regions of the Soviet Ukraine in 1932-1933. The author experienced its horror as a young lad in a Ukrainian village, and Ukraine was one of the areas struck most cruelly by the disaster: it is estimated that five to seven million Ukrainians starved during that terrible year... Famines when caused by natural factors such as drought and crop failure are terrifying phenomena. But what endowed the one of 1932-1933 with special horror was that it was both caused and compounded by the policies of the Soviet government or, more specifically, those of Stalin, by that time the absolute dictator and the main author and enforcer of the scheme that caused the deaths of millions of his countrymen, as well as untold sufferings to the entire rural population of the USSR...

AUTHOR'S NOTE 

The policy of compulsory collectivization introduced at the end of 1929, called for all farms to be collectivized, and the farmers to be firmly bond to the collectives just as they used to be bound as serfs to the feudal estates some seventy years before. The farms were collectivized, but not without struggle. The farmers fiercely resisted the collectivization efforts. They clung to their plots of land and their possessions for dear life, and the struggle became one for life or death. But unarmed, disorganized, and leaderless, the farmers were no match for government forces. They were crushed mercilessly. 

Their villages were ruined and depopulated. Millions died. Many were sent to concentration camps, or banished from their villages to God-forsaken northern regions, and still others simply disappeared mysteriously, without a trace. Those who survived swallowed their pride and finally joined the collective farms in order to save themselves and their families. Thus the battle came to an end: the farmers lost and the Communists triumphed. Within only a few years - four in all! - the traditional patterns of village life were destroyed... But the famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine was a political famine. In the words of Malcolm Muggeridge, who personally witnessed the famine, "it was the deliberate creation of a bureaucratic mind".

The Wave contains a monument to the 1932-33 famine built into its sculpture.

Indeed it was a genocidal famine, the one that was employed by Stalin and his followers as a means of subduing the Ukrainian farmers. 

The famine of 1932-33 in the Soviet Union has been an entirely ignored, neglected, misinterpreted, and distorted event. To this day even though Soviet dignitaries themselves matter-of-factly discuss it, some "experts" on the Soviet Union ("Sovietologists") here in the United States persistently adhere to the original Soviet denial of its existence. This probably explains why no thorough study of this famine has ever been made in the USA.  Americans have had difficulty in accepting a story so unbelievably inhuman. 

In this book, I have described what happened in my village during those four years, between 1929 and 1933. It is a reconstruction of what I saw and experienced personally. Everything recorded actually happened: only authenticated facts are presented. Although conversations and speeches are not reproduced verbatim, they accurately convey what was said at specific times. I based them on my living memory. 

Some of my readers will wonder how I could reconstruct so many events, in such detail, after so many years. Actually, there is no mystery involved. First of all, one does not forget the trauma and tragedy of one's life, no matter how hard one tries. Secondly, one cannot forget the details of one's struggle to survive. This was the time when all people, in all of Ukraine, lived from one campaign to another, from one leader's speech to another, from one Party resolution to another, from one government decree to another, and finally from one village or factory meeting to another. I cannot forget these things.  Details and dates of the events described within this book have been verified through Soviet periodicals of that time which can be found in major American libraries.

This book gives an accurate portrayal of events in my village during the collectivization. 

There is one other detail that must be pointed out to my readers: Miron Dolot is my pen name, under which I have published articles and brochures about the famine in the USA, Germany, and Switzerland."