Ukraine: Death by hunger

KRASYLIVKA, UKRAINE - After authorities broke into Yakiv Atamanenko's home in autumn of 1932 and confiscated the family's food, his mother and two brothers died of starvation and their bloated bodies were tossed among others in a freshly dug grave on the outskirts of this farming village.

Atamanenko and other survivors said their neighbors, Oleksandra Korytnyk and her husband, ate their two children. "They cut their children into pieces and ate them," recalled Atamanenko, 95. In the end, the Korytnyks died as well.

Today, Ukraine marks the 75th anniversary of the famine of 1932-33, engineered by Soviet authorities to force peasants across the former U.S.S.R. to give up their privately held plots of land and join collective farms. Millions died.

Now President Viktor Yushchenko is leading an effort to gain international recognition of Holodomor -- or death by hunger, as it is known here -- as a crime rather than merely a disaster, by labeling it an act of genocide.

Long kept secret by Soviet authorities, accounts of the Great Famine still divide historians and politicians, not just in this nation of 47 million but throughout the former Soviet Union. Some are convinced that the famine targeted Ukrainians as an ethnic group. Others say authorities set out to eradicate all private land owners as a social class, and that the Soviets sought to pay for industrialization with grain exports at the expense of starving millions of its people.

Josef Stalin's collectivization drive affected the entire U.S.S.R, but was particularly calamitous for Ukraine, which had some of the richest agricultural land. The campaign coincided with the Kremlin's efforts to root out a Ukrainian nationalist movement.

Estimates of the number of people who died in Holodomor differ, but there is no doubt the death toll was horrific. Yushchenko estimates 10 million Ukrainians died; historian Stanislav Kulchitsky believes the number is closer to 3.5 million.

Authorities set production quotas for each village. But these quotas generally exceeded crop yields and in village after village, when farmers failed to meet their targets, all their food was confiscated. Residents were prohibited to leave their homes -- condemning them to starvation.

In Krasylivka as many as 1,017 people -- roughly the village's current population -- died in that terrible year, according to a list of the victims compiled by village authorities. Elders say the famine nearly wiped out the village.

Villagers tell stories of their neighbors collapsing in the street and dying. Driven to despair, people ate whatever they could scrounge: leaves, dirt, birds, dogs, rats and -- witnesses said -- even each other.

Olena Yaroshchuk, 94, said she filled her aching stomach with grass. "Those who could survived, those who couldn't -- that was the end of it, one house after another -- almost all died," she said.

Kulchitsky, a famine researcher, argues the famine was a genocide aimed at Ukrainians who resisted Soviet rule. "The conditions authorities created for the Ukrainian peasantry were incompatible with life," he wrote in a recent article.

But Heorhiy Kasyanov, a top historian with the National Academy of Sciences, says the issue is more subtle. "There is no hard evidence that there were concrete statements or actions aimed at destroying ethnic Ukrainians by someone else."

The Ukrainian parliament has labeled the famine genocide. So has the United States. But Russia, the legal successor to the Soviet state, resists the label. It says the famine did not single out Ukrainians; Russians and Kazakhs were also targeted.

"There are no grounds to talk about genocide. We can talk about 'sociocide' ... on the part of Soviet leadership," said Russian historian Andrei Petrov. But another Russian historian said Holodomor was one of many acts of genocide by Stalin. "It was genocide in the direct sense of this word -- it is the killing of people, the killing of the Ukrainian people," he said.

Even in Krasylivka, people say the issue is complicated. Many survivors blame the Soviet government. But many also say that the cruelty of the local authorities compounded the tragedy.