My worldview was defined by an episode encountered during the terrible year 1933. I was working as a teacher of the Ukrainian language in a seven-grade school in the village of Rudky, Dnipropetrovsk Region. The village was located in the Tsarychansk district, neighboring my native Kobelets district in adjacent Poltava Region.
On one May day hot meals were delivered to feed the schoolchildren. The school director wanted to report that nearly all students were regularly attending school, handing in their lessons, and that rumors of a famine were nothing more than propaganda from enemies of the working class. A young girl named Marika Khaylo sat in the first row of my class. She had a younger sister who attended the school, a mother and a father – who lost his leg in the civil war. After fighting for Soviet rule, he was left with a stump for a leg.
The hot meals were handed out after lessons. Marika took her spoon to eat, but it fell from her hand. She placed her head upon the desk and then her body slid off her chair onto the ground. Her legs began twitching.
I understood this is death – it was clear from the eyes and face. For me, a 17-year-old teacher, this was the first death I ever encountered.
The other children grew quiet. I could not speak, lost and shocked by what just happened. Only Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin] was smiling from the portrait hanging over the chalkboard, sporting a cap and red-ribbon lapel, his hand waving a greeting. From across the room Taras Shevchenko gazed solemnly down upon the children with sad and tearful eyes. All the while a woman’s Russian voice sang cheerfully from the radio speaker mounted on a schoolyard post: “We’ll live happily today and even more happily tomorrow!”
This was not a dream or a frightening fairytale, and it wasn’t occurring somewhere beyond seas and oceans. It happened when nature was joyously growing and flowering in springtime and songbirds praised life. But on that day, Marika bid farewell to her little life, never knowing why her precious gift from God was snatched away in such a barbaric and predatory manner.
On her last day of school, no one came to take her home for burial like a Christian. Her mother did not come because she was lying alone at home, famished and demented… her younger sister did not come because she died a hungry death a month earlier. The father did not come, because his corpse was picked up from the yard a day earlier and dumped into a mass grave for famine victims in the cemetery. Marika eventually followed her father into that anonymous pit.
This episode reflects Ukraine’s fate in a drop of water. So much evil and cruelty! And if you consider the fact that Marika’s father fought for the Soviets in the civil war and came home a paraplegic… the Communists thanked him by strangling his children, wife and himself with famine.
I was aghast. Marika was at the top of her class, sang beautifully and recited poetry. I ran to the principal’s office and yelled in despair, “You’re sitting here while children are dying in class!” The principal yelled back in Russian, “Why shoot off your mouth? What famine, what death? Nothing of the sort!” A teacher was seated in the office, her own feet swollen from hunger.
I began to express my anger and openly blamed the government and the principal himself, to which he responded by yelling accusations of slander.
Before sunset that evening, a fellow teacher came and said that the principal had reported me to the district authorities and secret police. They said they would come and take care of the matter. My colleague urged me to leave if I wanted to avoid arrest.
I gathered about 10 kilos of grain (we were paid 16 kilos plus breakfasts), some books, threw the sack over my back and rushed off to cross the Orel River back to Mayachka, to my mother and sister in our native village… Famine raged at home. I gave my mother and sister all I had and they rationed it for the next month.
When the month was over, I left for Kharkiv Region, Sakhnovshchansk district to a school where my former classmates worked. By summer of 1933, I was teaching Ukrainian language and literature in the seven-grade school in the village of Kokhanivka. The village had been decimated and there were many empty homes. There were very few children left to parents and there were many vacant seats in the classrooms. I remember teaching a class in May of 1934 when I heard thumping in a hallway. Upon opening the door, I saw some 30 children wearing reed sandals with wooden heels to keep the “lapti” from getting wet.
After the lesson, I learned that the children were from Sverdlovsk Region in Russia. Their families were being resettled into the abandoned homes of famine victims.
A separate class for the Russian children was not introduced, because they differed in age. They were included into the Ukrainian classes. District authorities issued instructions for teachers to begin instruction in Russian. This worked against the Ukrainian students.
The artificial assimilation of Ukrainians after the famine by making schools Russian-language angered me. When I began to openly voice my discontent, the principal called me in and suggested I write a resignation. I was fired at the end of the school year. The principal told me to be happy because matters could have been far worse.
From there I went on to teach in Donbas (I was told there was no famine there) and was then enlisted by the Red Army…
These events came to define my worldview. Propaganda about “the bright future” could not convince me. There was, nor can there be, any justification for Communist brutality.
More than 75 years have passed since those times and the Communists have never apologized before the people. Their cruelty and evil knows no bounds. And there is no conscience in their words.
This article is a translation of two episodes recalled by Ivan Brovko in his memoirs “Dobrom Nahrite Sertse” (“Heart Warmed with Goodness”) reproduced with the author’s permission. After surviving two wars and two famines, Brovko went on to take Berlin as a long-range katiusha artillery officer. He worked with Soviet space rocket pioneer Serhiy Korolyov in the post-WW2 race to launch the first ballistic missiles to achieve sub-orbital spaceflight. Throughout Soviet rule, Brovko remained steadfast in his condemnation of Stalin and communism, suffering persecution as a university professor accused of nationalism. Brovko, 92, resides in Kyiv.
