Stalin's 1932-1933 Terror Famine: Three Ukrainian Writers' Fiction

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	• A Hunger Most Cruel: The Human Face of the 1932-1933 Terror-Famine in Soviet Ukraine Anatoliy Dimarov, Yevhen Hutsalo, ... Language Lanterns Publications, 2002 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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Excellent Work

I was surprised by the quality of the fiction, particularly in the first two stories. It is not about horrors, so much as it's about the human spirit faced with these horrors.

Heart wrenching, clever, humble, and cruel.

Truly the human face of Holodomor.

Stalin's 1932-1933 Terror Famine: Three Ukrainian Writers' Fiction

Although A Hunger Most Cruel contains writings on a topic of great importance, Stalin's terror famine, something seems to be lost in translation of these three Ukrainian authors' works. The major issues are all included in some form or another about Stalin's decision to encourage "voluntary" collectivization of Soviet farms, which set off a chain of events resulting in a famine that killed millions (per page 284, 7,000,000 persons). But its importance is inversely proportional to its readability. A kind of stiff, old-style writing is a constant throughout the book (though less so in the third part), separated into sections by author. My favorite story, "Lucky" Hanna, written by Olena Zvychayna, is about a wife and mother who has fled her village after being labeled a kulak (rich peasant farmer) and is later befriended by a kind woman. One day the woman tells her that she is lucky for having thus far survived the famine, not knowing the fate if Hanna's family. While sleeping outdoors one night, Hanna, her husband, and her daughter, assumed dead, are placed in a truck filled with corpses. They escape. The husband dies (she is forced to leave him). And Hannah attempts to abandon her daughter in a marketplace in hopes that a rumor she heard was true - orphaned peasant children are picked up and taken care of. Too late, she changes her mind, and so spends the rest of her life in search of her child. Common story themes: city-dwellers are largely unaware and unaffected by the famine; farmers, whose participation in collectivization of farming is supposedly voluntary, are coerced into joining collectives; government representatives go from house to house attempting to squeeze every last grain, scrap and crumb of food from the villagers and leaving them to subsist on whatever they can find: leather, bark, grass, and human flesh; in turn, farmers use ingenious methods in attempting to hide enough food to avoid death by starvation. A Hunger Most Cruel is a book of great importance. Unfortunately, it is not reader-friendly. Better: Execution by Hunger by Miron Dolot.

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20TH century's great tragedy rivals the Jewish Holocaust

"A Hunger Must Cruel" is a must read for anyone interested in Eastern European history, particularly the history of Ukraine.
Surprisingly, very little information is available regarding the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933, but since the Ukrainian independence in 1991 the facts have started to come out. The Ukrainian famine was planned by the Soviet Union and its gang of communist ideologists, agitators, propagandists and apologists in order to destroy the Ukrainian people and their opposition to the Soviet Union. Millions of innocent men, women and children died of starvation while the Soviet NKVD/KGB shock troops destroyed crops and forcibly took food from people's homes.
The tragedy of the Ukrainian Famine rivals the Jewish Holocaust, a fact resented by some, yet it still remains largely unknown. It was deliberately suppressed during the Soviet era, and publicly denied in the U.S. by such notorious news reporters, as Walter Duranty of the NY Times, who, incredibly, won the Pulitzer Prize for his often distorted and false "news reporting". A massive drive is currently under way by Ukrainians in the U.S., Canada and Europe to posthumously strip Walter Duranty of the Pulitzer Prize he did not deserve, and the Pulitzer Committe is reviewing all the facts. No Pulitzer Prize has ever been revoked before.

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The theme of this book of Ukrainian short fiction translated into English is the terror-famine that ravaged Soviet Ukrainian territories in the early 1930s.

Intended for the general reader, A Hunger Most Cruel features selected works by three authors whose unflinching honesty and complementary perspectives on the horrific events around which their narratives are constructed create a compelling set of vivid, disturbing, and haunting images of the human toll that this ideologically motivated artificial famine exacted.

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