Execution by Hunger Read Online Free PDF Page A

officials, Uncle Timish’s wife and his children, wailing and shouting, disappeared in the winter haze.
    We later found out that they were taken to the railroad station and herded into a special freight train headed north. The same fate also befell all the families of the other arrested men. We never heard of them again.
    A few days after the arrest of those fifteen villagers and the eviction of their families, we were summoned to a meeting by a messenger. It took place in the former house of the same Timish Zaporozhets. The interior of the house had already been completely changed. The inner walls had been removed, and what had been a three-room house had become a type of hall, furnished with crude benches. Now it became clear to all of us that Timish had been a victim of his own house. The officials had arrested him because they needed a large building.
    At this meeting we were told that a new administration was about to be established in our village. This at first did not arouse any suspicion in us. Our village was simply to be divided into units and subunits called Hundreds, Tens, and Fives.
    I was only a youth at that time and I certainly was not concerned with the consequences of such a division. But later I realized what an inescapable trap that new system of “Cut your own throat” 3 administration was. Through these divisions and subdivisions, the Thousander, with his group of Party functionaries, was able to establish undisputed control over the villagers. Moreover, he was able to detect and destroy any opposition to Party policy and thereby rapidly collectivize the entire village.
    Our village comprised about 800 households and 4,000 inhabitants. It was divided into 8 Hundreds, 80 Tens, and 160 Fives, or a total of 248 units. Since each unit had an individual in charge assigned to it by the village soviet (council), our village had 248 subdivisional functionaries or officials. Besides that, a special propagandist 4 was assigned to each Hundred, and one agitator 5 to each Ten and to each Five. This doubled the number of functionaries to 496. In addition, a so-called Bread Procurement Commission was appointed to each Hundred.
    These commissions were set up in all villages throughout Ukraine. At first there was one commission for the entire village. Now, at the beginning of collectivization, such a commission was attached to each village subunit, as for example, to each Hundred. Controlled by the Communist Party, these commissions and brigades were organized with the single purpose of securing the collection of grain quotas. Later, when total collectivization and the policy of “liquidation of the kurkuls 6 as a social class” was announced, these commissions became the major force in organizing collective farms and in expropriating kurkuls. In fact, they became the arbitrary rulers of the countryside.
    This new bread commission consisted of ten or more members, increasing the number of village subdivisional functionaries by eighty to 576. Finally, there were three permanent vykonavtsi , locally appointed militia deputies, for each Hundred, or twenty-four in all. The permanent vykonavtsi were important officials because they actually performed the function of the local militia, the Soviet police. They could make arrests without any legal formalities. This made 600 subdivisional functionaries, or 75 functionaries for each Hundred. Thus, each unit of a hundred households was controlled by 75 persons. This number could be increased if one included the 35 members of the village soviet and the 17 kolhosp 7 officials. Actually, there were 652 active functionaries for the entire village. In other words, there was one functionary for every six villagers.
    The majority of appointees to these subdivisional positions were selected from among the ordinary farmers, and as such, they found themselves in a precarious situation. There was nothing they hated as much as collective farming, yet they became the