1932 Russia: I looked Out the Train Window at Ten

The Russian Civil War's economic damage led to widespread famine and food shortages. Stalin's harsh actions followed a devastating 1921 drought that wiped out a fifth of Russia's crops.

In 1930, Russia was the place. Stalin was in power. He pilfered grain from the peasantry, giving it to wealthy oligarchs and the higher ups in government. Because the Russians kept it a secret for so long, the people starved in silence, and cannibalism reappeared.

Government actions resulted in winter food shortages. When I turned ten, my parents and I returned from a trip to Crimea. We rode the same train that seized the grain, worsening the famine. Our train stopped in every little village between

My family and I were not peasants, but travelled on a train that stopped in every small town on the way back to Moscow. I created the names and scenarios of three children and their stories. I based my stories on what I saw as we went through those towns, and I looked out the train window to see what devastation and suffering hit those towns due to government influence. And this is where our story begins.

I made observations in each town and village. In 1921, sociologist Pitirim Sorokin visited villages in the Saratov and Samara regions and observed abandoned shacks: roofs missing, empty window sockets, and doors gone. Those previous straw roofs were dismantled a long time ago and utilized as a food source. The village, of course, was void of animals - no cows, horses, sheep, goats, dogs or cats - not even crows. All were eaten. A dead silence hung over the snow-covered streets.”

Yet, those of us, including my parents, oblivious to the events, were baffled by the heartbreaking scene. There was no reason to think anything other than what it was. Blatant haves and the have nots. The bringing in of full-fledged communism and all of its forbiddance along with it.

From 1932-1933, it was a Holodomor. An all-out exodus had begun. People would sell and abandon all their life’s possessions, running wherever their legs would take them, with no concrete plan. Cannibalism had become rampant in select locales: people would be hunted down on the streets in broad daylight and murdered for food, with families often consuming their children, sparing them the pain of a hungry, torturous death - and to fill up on much needed sustenance. 

After a long period of secrecy, the Soviet government revealed the horrifying truth in summer 1921 and sought international aid. Numerous charitable organizations and renowned Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen himself, brought humanitarian aid to Russia. Thanks to the assistance and the successful 1922 harvest, a worsening crisis, responsible for five million deaths, was averted.

For many years, the Soviet government kept the horrific truth secret; however, in the summer of 1921, they decided to seek international aid. Numerous charitable organizations and renowned Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen personally delivered humanitarian aid to Russia. Five million lives had already been lost, but support and the large 1922 harvest prevented a complete catastrophe.

Ten years later, though, another famine arrived. The forced collectivization of peasant land into kolkhozes, along with the dispossession of wealthy peasants, caused widespread famine and millions fled. Ignoring the approaching crisis in Soviet villages, the government compounded the problem by increasing bread production quotas. Any protests put up by the peasantry were considered sabotage, and were ferociously struck down. 

Caught between meeting quotas and avoiding penalties for failure, local governments faced a difficult situation. Moscow received a deluge of misinformation, obscuring the true extent of the suffering.

The 1932-33 famine devastated much of Ukraine, the Caucasus, Kazakhstan, Belarus, western Siberia, and European Russia. The 1920s horrors had resurfaced. The Kuban people remembered feeling spent and apathetic that the dead went unnoticed. They both took their own lives on the same day, leaping in front of a tram. As was later discovered, someone had forgotten to include their names.

“My father left in search of bread and never returned. Soon, my brother left - and also never came back. We were left just the two of us with my mother”, Vladimir Pachenko, a Ukrainian from Russia’s Khabarovsk Region remembered.

“My mother - in apparent anticipation of death, told me then: ‘When I start to die, I will strangle you, too, so that you don’t die a hungry death.’ That evening, my poor mother gave her soul to God. Seven years old at the time, I was put in village foster care.”

Over seven million people perished in the 1932-33 famine. The fact that more than half of the casualties were Ukrainian has given modern Ukrainian researchers a firm reason to treat the period as a deliberate program of genocide of the Ukrainian people at the hands of the Soviet rule. The event was termed Holodomor, which literally translates to: to kill by starvation.

Russia, meanwhile, has its own perspective - that the harmful policies of the communists simply hit most of the territories of the former Soviet Union. Moreover, in 1933, Stalin personally sanctioned the shipment of grain to Ukraine, to the detriment of several Russian regions. 

Over 630,000 Leningrad citizens died of starvation during the 872-day blockade imposed by German and Finnish forces. The population had consumed the city’s entire population of cats and dogs, transitioning to birds and bird feed, medications, sunflower cakes, wood glue, animal hides and leather belts, which were boiled. I felt numb. I traverse the bridge by walking. In front of me, slowly staggering, walks a tall man. Another step, and he falls down. I simply walk past him, lying there, dead - I don’t even care. I enter my building, but can’t ascend the steps. So I take one leg with both hands and place it on a stair. Then the next one on the following one…,” Milanya Chetchanova remembered.

The 1946-47 famine: a consequence of World War II’s destruction compounded by a 1946 drought severely reduced crop production. However, the disaster could have been avoided—the USSR possessed enormous grain reserves—if they hadn't made the catastrophic decision to double grain exports. Aside from that, cautious of another war - this time with former allies, management was trying to preserve its agricultural reserves, and denied any produce to the regions - all while never reducing its demand for them. The resulting famine annihilated 1.5 million people. 

"We walked from village to village, begging, but with little success; those weren't easy times," recalls Petra Dosdoyetzkov, a resident of the Povolzhye region. "I remember coming home once with the paltry sum I'd managed to gather. I reassured my mother, gave her some bread, and she stood up. She turned on the stove."

These poignant stories, I realized, could have been real accounts of lives lost during the Russian famine under Stalin.