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Iron children

Life became more and more difficult. Horse skeletons with scabby skin stretched on their bones roamed the streets. Having no food for them the peasants abandoned them like pups, in other villages. The peasants that have refused to join kolkhoz had their bread, potatoes and beans confiscated. Often during the confiscations,their stoves and sometimes entire huts were disassembled. In 1933 there were no kulaks or private owners. Now it was the kolkhoz members turn.

There were "bread delivery plans" for kolkhoz and their members, although they had no land anymore, only tiny allotments. There were no solid plans for the amount of bread. If a kolkhoz would accomplish the main plan, an "upcoming" was sent immediately. Those "upcoming plans" were one of the examples of the evil lies of those dreadful times. As if the kolkhoz members themselves were not satisfied with "too easy" plans, as if they voluntarily offered to give away all their food till the last grain.

As if it wasn`t their staple food, but some kind of sweets that they easily could survive without. And the performers of these lies entered the huts, taking away everything they could find, even the last loaf of bread, made with weeds and bark. They took away the planting grain for the new crops. When being told there was "none", they replied "there is no such thing is none, you are eating something, aren`t you, and you don`t want to share it with the country".

And the epidemy started- worse than a plague, famine was killing people one by one.

Hava Volovich
Hava Volovich

How many remember this? I don`t know. My friend`s sister, a 15 year old girl, had an affair with a policeman. It wasn`t love of course, only an attempt to survive the famine. At 16, she gave birth to a baby girl and her husband had sent her to a far away village to his father-a local priest. In a year she came back- her husband`s parents have been sent away and Dunya was told to go wherever she wants. Her marriage wasn`t registered because of her age. She wasn`t allowed to take a piece of bread or a cloth for her baby. One of the activists grabbed her baby`s blanket, rolled the baby out of it onto a wooden bed and threw the blanket in a pile of the confiscated family belongings.

One can get used to his own hardships like to a chronic disease, but another person`s sorrow can still drive you to tears. It wasn`t Dunya`s destiny that had shocked me. She left her child with her mother and went away to seek better life. The father died, the family was starving. Her mother, if she was lucky to get any food, fed her own children first, and didn`t feed her new granddaughter at all, waiting for her to die soon. Vera turned into a skeleton covered with yellow skin and small white fluff.

She lied in her cradle with her eyes open. they shone like glass buttons on her lifeless face. And yet she refused to die. her lips that haven`t yet say "mama", whispered "eat". Out of all our own family, I was the only one who was entitled to receive food allowance. 30 pounds of flour a month. It`s not little for one person, but it`s nothing for a family of seven. We stretched it for two weeks, boiled a flour soup, added sorrel and weeds. But often even this petty stew was hard to swallow. There was a queue of starving people from the southern regions outside of the window They were asking to give them some food and it was tearing my heart apart.

If we had any food at home, I would bring some for Vera. Grabbing the bowl with her chicken hands, she would swallow the content in a second, then point at the window. My friend used to take her out in the sunshine and sat her on the grass. The child would fall on her stomach and with her yellow, old woman`s hands tear the grass and greedily stuff it in her mouth. She was an iron child.

This grass diet had killed many and many of adults and children, but Vera lived, made it to the better times and turned into a lovely little girl. Watching the labor camp pellagra sufferers later, I would think about Vera on the grass in which her baby mind discovered a source of nutrients. Typing letter after letter, i was thinking about the deeper meaning behind the text, he "bread extortion", the "upcoming plans" such routine words for those times and such a terrible meaning behind them.

The "upcoming plan" made kolkhoz communities go bankrupt before they were even formed. "Bread extortion"- in other words, crowds of starving people, moving from place to place in search of food. Hundreds of empty villages, corpses on the streets, abandoned children, mountains of dead bodies on hospital carts that nobody would care to cover and that would be brought to the cemetery and dumped into a pit like rubbish. Coming home from work, i always tried to avoid the closer route that was the main street,nand instead went past the farmlands near the cemetery. This way i would meet less people with their desperate hungry eyes. One day near the cemetery fence i have noticed a six year old boy. His green swollen face oozed with green liquid from the cracks on it. His legs were covered in green liquid too. something that looked like grass that he ate recently, it was flowing down his legs under his handcrafted trousers. His atrophied stomach could not digest it any longer.

The boy stood motionless. His half-opened mouth made sounds, "ee-ee". He did not beg and did not expect help from anyone. He saw how adults, who were supposed to protect him and not destroy his childhood, came and took the last piece of bread from his family, condemning them to death through starvation. People were his enemies and he was afraid of them. That`s why he didn`t look for anything on the crowded streets, he just came to the cemetery fence, maybe trying to find something to eat and found his death.

What happened to the "child`s tears that no goods of the world are worth"?

Nikolai Ostrowski wrote nothing about these boys and girls of the 30s. This "young drummer of revolution", looking far and high, saw legions of marching enthusiasts, who obstructed the ordinary people that he couldn`t see with his blind eyes even if he wanted to. Evil force, in its sound mind and memory had systematically and mercilessly murdered many thousands of nameless boys and girls alongside their parents. And if we are talking about the nation`s heroism of those years, we should mark Vera and the boy from the cemetery and countless amount of other children as heroes too. They had died with no no complaints and no begging for mercy, they knew- those who took their last bread is merciless and cruel and no kind hand will reach out behind his steel back to save them.

But they also dreamt about the blue sky and sunshine above them, for their mothers to always be there. And they wanted to have bread. Doesn`t matter what kind, even made out of wood chips, only to have it. That bread taken away from children- I don`t know if it helped the industrialization in those critical years when the bread from the rich countries couldn`t find the buyers and was thrown in the sea. Our bread rotted in storages and instead of giving even part of it back to people, they opened liquor factories and started to give people vodka- those people were the ones that still could afford drinking and were still physically able to do so.

The Father of Nations didn`t want to be a scary madman in his people`s eyes. He understood that he went too far and caused great damage. What was he to do? Apologize, repent his deeds? Voluntarily take off the Father of Nations crown and ask the half-dead nation for forgiveness? Not at all! He wanted to continue being the Father and the benefactor and also to acquire love, admiration and loyalty of his brutally whipped children.

That`s when the famous article appeared. "Dizziness from success", where the local authorities were accused of everything. The reality is- they couldn`t do anything without the regulations and orders from above, and having received the orders, the carried them out fanatically. Except that fanaticism was at ordinary people`s expense. No one, from rural to republican governance and leaders wouldn`t dare to do anything without Stalin`s command. And these commands, rolling down the hill, bumped into the dung heaps of servility and careerism, were overgrown with plans and demands that brought the agriculture to devastation and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. If Stalin hadn`t changed his mind on time, the whole country would turn into a desert, with only hungry activists and enthusiasts roaming it and scratching their heads.

Then suddenly- although the new crop hasn`t ripen yet (in many areas the fields hadn`t been sown or sown poorly) in 1934 like manna from heaven- bread, butter and other products arrived. The taxes were revoked (why wouldn`t they be, with the upcoming plans people had them paid 5 years in advance). Vast selection of wines and vodkas, mountains of smoked and pickled goods. Cascades of exultant songs and streams and later seas and oceans of praise and glorification. The "Steel Tyrant" rose higher than the Everest, made himself comfortable and started devouring his subjects with their own help, while assuring them that their lives are better and happier now. "The life became better, the life became happier"- as the song went.

Of course it wasn`t my business to condemn leaders and geniuses. And I didn`t. But I openly and out-rightly spoke about what was happening in front of my eyes, innocently believing that the Truth can not be punished.

Hava Volovich

Hava Vladimirovna (Vilkovna) Volovich was born in village Sosnitsa in chernigov province, in a poor Jewish family. In 1931 she had finished a seven-year school and started working as a typist in a printing house. She worked as a corrector in an editorial office of "Kolhozniy Troud" (Kolgospna pratza) in Mena, Chernigov province, USSR, at the time of her arrest.

Was arrested on 14.08.1937 for openly saying that "the upcoming plans harm the building of kolkhozes". In 20.03.1938 was accused of "anti-Soviet agitation", condemned to 15 years of GULAG and 5 years of revocation of right. Served her time in Sevzheldorlag, Northern Railway ITL; also in Mariinsky labour camp in agricultural works; also in Ozerlag and in Jezkazgan. In 1942 Hava gave birth to a baby girl, but the child died in 1944. Hava had participated in amateur talent group performances in the camps and was an actress in the amateur theaters. She had also organized a puppet theater in the camps.

Had been released on 20.04.1953. After the camps Hava lived in the forced exile in Krasnoyarsk region until 1956. In 1957 she came back to her homeland. In 1958 she guided a local puppet theater. She had been exculpated on 28.12.1963. Hava had died in Mena on 14.02.2000

Автор перевода: Ольга Д.

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