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“НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ЛИСТОПАД 2011 19 “... ORDINARY U KRAINIAN PEASANTS WHO HAPPENED TO LIVE IN THE S TALINIST ERA AND THEREFORE ENDED UP INSIDE S TALIN ’ S KILLING MACHINE ." by Pavlo Makiyenko In memory of my parents Each year puts more and more distance between us and the 20 th century, which had plunged the Ukrainian people into the worst suffering in all of their history . The number of living eye - witnesses of those terrible times is dwindling inexorably, and memories themselves do not live forever. At the same time, despite all the efforts by the contemporary Stalin’s apologists to destroy and falsify historical documents , the quantity of documented testimonies about the crimes of the Communist regime is growing. Archives are gradually being opened, and the revelation of truth cannot be stopped. We already know much about the terrible famines of 1921 - 22, 1932 - 33, and 1946 - 47 , and other crimes of the regime in Moscow against the Ukrainian nation. Yet, for some reason, there are few historical studies on the horrible, cruel mass deportations of Ukrainians to the North in 1929 - 1930, which were given a cynical name of dekulakiz ation by the Communists. Incidentally, Ukrainian historians keep repeating this Stalinist term and have not managed so far to replace it with a more adequate and historically justified name. Of course, one cannot say that there were no mentions before abou t “eradicating the kulaks as a class.” Even the Soviet history textbooks discussed it. However, as it turned out, this phrase is to be understood literally — as physical destruction of the entire class of well - to - do peasants. These deportations were Commun ist rehearsals before the removals of other nations in 1944 - 45. However, the latter are relatively well - known whereas the first deportations of Ukrainians, which removed the greatest numbers of people and were extremely cruel, are known by few. At the end of 2010, two authoritative historical monographs were published in the U.S. — Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University and Stalin’s Genocides by Professor Norman Naimark of Stanford University. On the basis of new evidence, these studies argue for recognizing these deportations — for the first time on the international level — as genocide against the Ukrainian people. Perhaps now the Ukrainian historians will finally pay more attention to this Stalinist crime, bo th understudied and unprecedented in cruelty and numbers (the figure of those who died alone reaches several hundred thousand!) Using my family as an example, I would like to tell readers about those evil times so that nothing of the kind could ever again occur in Ukraine or anywhere else in the world. Both I and my parents are Ukrainian, but I was born in 1949 in the far North — in the Arkhangelsk region of Russia, far from Ukraine, in the location to which my parents and their families were deported. My r elatives were ordinary Ukrainian peasants who happened to live in the Stalinist era and therefore ended up inside Stalin’s killing machine. I did not find out about the fact that my family was deported in 1930 on political grounds until I was nineteen and we had been living back in Ukraine for some time, which shows how intimidated my parents were by the totalitarian regime. My family lived in the village of Lekhnivka in the Berezany rayon of the Kyiv oblast . My grandfather, Pavlo Oleksandrovych Petrenko, was born in 1895. My grandmother’s name was Oksana Kuz’mivna (née Didenko). In the terrible year of 1930, when the Communists were trying to break the back of Ukrainian peasantry, forcing it to join the collective farms, my grandparents, my mother Laryssa (aged nine at the time), and my aunts Olia and Halia (aged eleven and three respectively) were thrown into the carriages of a freight train and transported to the North. I do not even know how much
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