Ukrainians forget harvest of sorrow, vote Communist
08:20 a.m. Mar 29, 1998 Eastern
By Chris Bird
USTYNOVA HREBLYA, Ukraine, March 29 (Reuters) - In a tiny village east
of Kiev, old Ukrainian women chose to forget a Soviet-made famine and
planned to vote Communist in Sunday's parliamentary election.
''Ach, I'll vote for the Communists,'' 68-year-old Natalya said with a
shrug as she waited with her friends for a bus to take them to vote in a
neighbouring town.
''We haven't had our pensions for five months and we barely feed
ourselves on what we grow on our own plots,'' she said, her tanned face
muffled in a brown shawl. ''We hope for a better life through them
(Communists).''
The other elderly women, standing under a silver birch near a well in
the village of Ustynova Hreblya, nodded their heads in a agreement.
Many in Ukraine, especially its 15 million pensioners, are fed up with
empty pockets and the empty promises of a better life since independence
from Moscow in 1991.
They are likely to give stalled market reforms a vote of no-confidence
by casting their ballots for the Communists and other left-wing parties.
But Natalya, born in Ustynova Hreblya, remembered harder times in the
village, dwarfed by a vast blue sky dotted with strings of geese
returning north and surrounded by waterlogged Ukrainian steppe.
Under the Soviet Communists, the village was one of thousands forced to
starve under Josef Stalin's forced collectivisation of agriculture in
1932-33.
Canadian historian Orest Subtelny has written that Stalin's prosaic
orders for grain procurement created Ukraine's own holocaust.
''His decision, and the regime's brutal fulfilment of his commands,''
Subtelny wrote, ''condemned millions to death in what can only be called
a man-made famine.''
''It was very hard, it's difficult to even talk about it,'' said Natalya
with tears in her eyes.
The other women looked away, embarrassed.
Natalya was three years old during the famine. Her mother and her elder
sister survived but eight other siblings died of hunger. Her father was
executed by the Soviets.
Ukrainians were automatically sentenced to 10 years in the Gulag camps
if caught picking stray stalks of wheat off the road.
An armed Soviet requisitioning band came one night and confiscated the
last of Natalya's family's jam and potatoes.
''It's a miracle that I'm alive,'' she said.
But the Soviets put a tight lid on memories of what Ukrainians call
''the hunger.''
There is no place in Ukraine like Auschwitz or Yad Vashem to serve as a
memorial to the estimated seven million people who starved to death,
only one small display cabinet of black and white photographs in Kiev's
historical museum.
''It is strange to vote for the Communists,'' Natalya said. ''But I
can't see any party better than them.'' ^REUTERS@
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited. |
