Oksana Kis. Aspasia. Volume 7, Annual 2013.
Although the tragedy of the Holodomor (the Great Famine) of 1932 and 1933 figures prominently in public discourse and historical scholarship in Ukraine today, its gender dimension has not yet been examined. This article is based on an analysis of personal narratives of female survivors of the Holodomor, collected and published in Ukraine since the 1990s until now. It focuses on the peculiarities of women’s experience of the Holodomor and explores women’s strategies of resistance and survival in the harsh circumstances of genocide. It exposes a spectrum of women’s agency at the grassroots and illuminates controversies around women’s ways of coping with starvation. The article also discusses the methodological challenges and ethical issues faced by a Ukrainian female scholar studying women’s experiences of famine.
The First Five-Year Plan (1928-1932), which was designed to strengthen the Soviet economy, represented a radical change in economic strategy and policies. The Plan focused on making the Soviet Union militarily, industrially, and financially self-sufficient, thus showcasing the advantages of socialism. One of its primary objectives was to build up the country’s heavy industry. The state also sought increased control over agricultural production in order to feed the rapidly growing urban population and to export grain, a source of foreign currency needed to import technologies necessary for heavy industry.
The year 1928 marked the beginning of the Soviet push for the total collectivization of agriculture. Upon joining the collective farms (kolkhoz), peasants had to give up their private plots of land and property, and their produce was sold to the state for a low price set by the state itself. However, the pace of collectivization was slow, and in November (1929) the Communist Party leadership decided to implement an ac celerated, forced collectivization. The majority of Ukrainian peasants, especially the wealthy farmers, met the state policy of collectivization with disapproval and hostility. Individual resistance against collectivization soon turned into a wave of peasant riots throughout Ukraine. The Soviet regime brutally suppressed those disturbances. Prosperous farmers (kulaks) were accused of being exploiters of the working peasantry and enemies of Soviet rule. They were, therefore, condemned to extermination as a class. About 50,000 peasants were arrested in Ukraine from 1928 to May 1931, and many of them were subsequently executed, deported, or imprisoned. The implementation of collectivization continued in a forcible, violent manner, applying new tactics, which included the total confiscation of all kulak property-crops, food reserves, livestock, valuables, farming tools, and not infrequently entire households-by the state.
After this dekulakization in 1931 and 1932 a great number of peasants were left without any means of livelihood and thousands were homeless. The newly organized kolkhozes lacked efficient management, and their workers showed little motivation to do their job. The kolkhozes’ efficiency was extremely low, and the harvest of 1932 proved to be a complete failure. As a result, a severe famine hit the agricultural regions of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933. Special armed units were assigned to surround the famine-affected territory and the starving peasants, now forbidden to leave their native villages, were actually doomed to die. The exact number of those who died as a result of starvation is unknown, as no accurate records exist. However, the Institute of Demography of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine estimates that in 1932 and 1933 Ukraine lost approximately 3.9 million people as a result of starvation.
The past decade has been marked by a growing public and academic interest in this most dramatic, and, simultaneously, least studied page of Ukraine’s recent history. The tragedy of the Great Famine (Holodomor) has attracted perhaps the most attention from scholars, journalists, artists, activists, and high-ranking politicians. Besides legal action undertaken by the Ukrainian Parliament to recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide of Ukrainians orchestrated from Moscow by the Communist Party leadership, a variety of activities have taken place in Ukraine in terms of researching the history of the Holodomor and commemorating its numerous victims. Hundreds of media reports, dozens of scholarly publications, and the promulgation of original documents, together with numerous memorials to the victims of the Holodomor unveiled throughout Ukraine, make this issue a substantial part of public discourse and historical scholarship in Ukraine today.
The growing scholarly interest in studying the Holodomor, however, does not mean that all aspects of the tragedy have been given equal attention. Most research has focused on documenting facts and reconstructing events of the Great Famine, and in particular, its demographic aftermath and political implications. Many other issues, especially those related to the daily life and coping strategies of people who were starving, their collective trauma and its long-term impact on the survivors and their descendants-that is, the anthropology of famine-have not yet received sufficient scholarly attention. The gender dimension of this tragedy has not been studied at all.
Why Study Women’s Experiences?
Since societies are structured by gender, women’s experiences can be expected to reflect specific social influences—from archaic beliefs and myths to social roles and institutions. In the 1920s, Ukrainian peasants lived in a fundamentally traditional society, despite the effects of modernity (education, mechanization of some agricultural processes, electricity, transportation, etc.) on the countryside. The Ukrainian peasantry was ruled by age-old values, beliefs, customs, and norms. The family household was the basic unit of village social structure, and family farming was the most typical form of agricultural production. Roles within the family and the village community were defined by gender, age, and marital status. The prevailing patriarchal gender ideology constructed men and women as fundamentally unequal human beings, possessing different (if not opposite) inborn masculine and feminine qualities and therefore intended for different destinies. Girls were trained from a very young age to become good mothers and housekeepers, since marriage and motherhood constituted the core of a woman’s life script. A married woman, in addition to her numerous functions in the realm of farming and home crafts, was expected to be loyal and supportive to her husband under any circumstances. A married man was understood to be the formal owner of the household (patrilocality prevailed among Ukrainians), including the livestock, land, and farming tools. He was the head of the family, who made final decisions and represented the family in the village community. There was a relatively strict gendered division of labor in the family’s daily routine. Women did, however, enjoy a degree of economic autonomy as they controlled the so-called “woman’s sphere” of farming and home crafts—gardening, dairy, poultry keeping, weaving, and so on. A woman was also allowed to own land and other property received as her dowry or inherited from her mother. The culturally defined social roles of Ukrainian men and women endowed the two gender groups with different knowledge, skills, resources, and competences. Therefore it is logical to assume that there would also be different gendered responses to the Great Famine as an unprecedented crisis. Furthermore, the dispossession of dekulakization may have dramatically changed the power dynamics in the peasant family, undermining the father’s authority (based on property rights) and his ability to provide, a scenario that could potentially cause shifts in established gender roles, hierarchies, and interactions. However, no research exists on the gendered dimension of the Holodomor experience. This article represents a first attempt to address this issue, by proposing possible ways of examining the peculiarities of the everyday lives of women in the regions affected by the Holodomor.
There is good reason to suppose that a patriarchal family structure and traditional gender roles would have caused men and women to interact differently with Soviet authorities during collectivization and would be reflected in differing survival strategies during the time of famine. Although the data available on Soviet repressions against rebellious peasants (statistics on executions, imprisonments, and deportations) are not broken down by gender, one may arguably assume that those repressions predominantly targeted men as formal heads of households. The testimonies of Holodo mor survivors support this assumption; the narrators often report their father being arrested, imprisoned, exiled, executed, or fled: “Mother had us five children during famine … Father was not there, we were without father … They put him into prison, and he never came back, he died there of hunger”; “They turned my aunt and her five children out of their house … And my uncle was jailed … and my aunt was left behind with the children … They all died of hunger in 1933”; “Father was accused of being a kulak, arrested and sent to prison. My mother was left alone with us, five children … Then they turned us out of the house”; “I don’t know where father went, but mother was left with three children.”
From survivors’ stories we learn that in some cases men maintained irregular contact with their families (sending food, trying to evacuate wives and [not necessarily] children from a locality affected by famine, etc.). Frequently, however, the contacts between a family and a fugitive father were disrupted for long periods of time, or forever. In short, fathers often were not there for their families during the famine.
Unlike many men, women—traditionally the primary caregivers—were tied to their children and their elderly parents, and therefore usually stayed in their original places of residence, where they faced the horrors of famine. Indeed, in the testimonies of Holodomor survivors, the mother figure appears central and significant, while the father is barely mentioned. Thus, men and women—especially those from wealthy families identified as kulaks and subjected to dispossession of property from 1929 to 1931—often had considerably different experiences of the subsequent Holodomor. A woman-mother had to take on full responsibility for her children and elderly relatives. Moreover, because the survival of families depended mainly on women (now the primary breadwinners), women’s coping strategies, the life-saving practices and methods devised by women to protect themselves and their families in a situation of total famine, are especially important to examine.
The available demographic data do not reflect the real scope of Holodomor mortality, as in a situation of mass death and uncontrolled migration of starving people, it was extremely difficult to keep accurate records. Because the figures on population loss due to the famine do not specify the age and gender of the victims, we cannot establish men and women’s death rates from starvation in Ukraine. In any case, assessing the efficiency of women’s survival strategies is not the goal of this article. But because we are dealing with the recollections of the Holodomor survivors, it means that most likely those measures did work and saved their lives.
This article shows how exploring gender aspects of Ukrainian peasants’ experiences under the Holodomor makes historical research of this tragedy more grounded, nuanced, and human-oriented. It enhances our appreciation of the ability of ordinary women to withstand death in the most desperate of circumstances and helps us understand this ability in relation to traditional gender roles, skills, and resources, as well as cultural expectations and attitudes toward women. What is more, exploring women’s experiences of the Holodomor is grounded in another profoundly ethical goal as it attempts to restore the voices of its female victims and their human dignity by paying tribute to their life-saving efforts.
Methodological Challenges and Ethical Issues
This research presented a number of methodological issues and challenges. The primary sources I used for analysis-personal testimonies of women survivors—posed a set of problems. In 2009 when I first decided to approach Holodomor experiences from a gender perspective, I was impressed with the large number of available publications of survivors’ personal recollections, which had appeared as a result of oral history projects and similar initiatives—international, nationwide, regional, and local-dedicated to the preservation of eyewitness testimonies. Besides ensuring the representativeness of my sample and the overall empirical strength of my research, those publications revealed yet another promising peculiarity: the absolute prevalence of women’s testimonies. (Despite the fact that thousands of women’s testimonies had been collected and published, no one had analyzed them from a formal feminist standpoint. Thus, I decided to focus my study on these readily available sources instead of conducting more interviews on my own.
My initial optimism was soon replaced with disappointment and frustration: the deeper I delved into the material, the clearer it became that many of those recollections would not be suitable for qualitative analysis. Most of the interviews had been conducted within a fact-oriented research approach, eliciting names, dates, and numbers of victims and perpetrators, but little in the way of stories about personal experiences. In many cases, no coherent narrative was produced. Such kind of testimony had to be discarded.
Only later did I realize why the interviews had been conducted in this manner: many of the projects had been designed on the model of the first large-scale oral history study of the Great Famine of 1932 and 1933 conducted among the Ukrainian diaspora community in the United States in the 1980s. Its initial goal was clearly political—to present to the US Congress sufficient evidence to support the labeling of the manmade famine in the USSR in 1932 and 1933 as genocide against the Ukrainian people. Naturally, the questionnaire developed for this study was designed to focus mainly on facts, so that the survivors were expected to testify as witnesses of the crimes. This same research model had been hastily applied to the design of oral history projects in post-Soviet Ukraine.
Analyzing these post-Soviet Ukrainian projects, many of them conducted by mandate of the Ukrainian government, I understood that the fact-oriented approach was doubly counterproductive when interviews were performed solely to fulfill a directive from state authorities. It was also clear that many of the interviewers (local historians, activists, teachers, students, etc.) had very little (if any) formal training in or experience collecting oral history, as evident from the curt answers and lack of coherent narrative in the record.
Fortunately, there is also a substantial body of published testimonies recorded by professional historians, ethnographers, and folklorists, which represent real and elaborate personal accounts of life during the Great Famine. Even these professional researchers, however, asked virtually no questions regarding the peculiarities of women’s experiences during the Great Famine—except for the topic of motherhood. As a result, the women’s narratives are largely silent on many important issues, such as sexuality and body concerns, reproductive health, and sexual violence. The lack of reflection on these topics may be explained by the fact that the recording of testimonies took place some sixty to seventy years after the tragedy, so only a few testimonies reflect the experience of adult survivors. The majority of the interviewees had been either children or teenagers in 1932 and 1933, so naturally their stories do not contain much information on the aforementioned issues. And given the fact that the number of female survivors is rapidly decreasing now, one has to admit that this gap in our knowledge on women’s experiences of the Great Famine will never be recovered.
The very issue of representativeness of the women’s narratives used for this study presents yet another challenge. There were at least three different groups of women whose experiences of the Holodomor differ drastically from one another: (1) the victims—peasant women dispossessed of food, property, and houses; (2) the perpetrators—women-activists of communist brigades carrying out forced expropriations; and (3) eyewitnesses—female residents of the region affected by famine who were not directly involved in either, but had a chance to observe events personally (rural medical doctors, school teachers, clerks, etc.). The available testimonies of the Holodomor, however, represent exclusively two groups—the victims and the eyewitnesses—while there is virtually no record of personal recollections of perpetrators. It is possible that those who contributed to the crime—now defined as genocidal—may prefer not to identify themselves and refrain from telling their stories to historians. The more probable explanation of the absence of perpetrators’ stories surfaces when we consider the time that elapsed after the tragedy: indeed, being adults in 1932 and 1933, those people had passed away long before historians began researching the Holodomor.
Researchers of women’s experiences of the Holocaust faced a similar problem with the representativeness of sources in the 1980s. Holodomor and Holocaust research share similar methodological limitations: “We cannot take random samples because the universe from which the samples would be drawn does not exist. Many of the people we want to know about have died. Some refuse to be identified. Others may be alive but we don’t know their names or we cannot find them. Still others, because of their advanced age, find it difficult to sustain an interview. This absence of random samples and the gaps in our knowledge should caution researchers against misusing statistics or offering premature generalizations.”
A great number of the published testimonies I examined were either unsuitable for analysis or not informative; however, a smaller subset of them turned out to be rich sources of women’s experiences. For this study I used only those women’s recollections that could be identified as narratives (a meaningful and socially relevant account of past events presented in their causality and temporal progression) by virtue of their constituting a story. My research is based primarily on an analysis of personal narratives of female survivors of the Holodomor, collected and published in Ukraine during the past two decades. Only the stories narrated by women born before 1930—those who were able to recall and verbalize their personal memories of the events—are under scrutiny.
Studying women’s narratives of the Holodomor represents a set of ethical dilemmas for me as a feminist scholar and as a Ukrainian woman. I found myself struggling with establishing and maintaining a sufficient emotional distance from my research subject. I had to negotiate constantly my different identities (academic, ethnic, gender) in order to keep a balance between my spontaneous empathy for the Holodomor victims and the detachment from them I deemed necessary for critical analysis. I could not escape the feeling that in a coldhearted dissection of their extreme suffering, I would be exploiting the women’s pain and degradation. That is why I deliberately chose to focus on women’s coping and survival strategies rather than on the darkest aspects of their victimhood. Even while purposely excluding this part of women’s experiences from scrutiny, I am aware of the limitations and perils of such a highly selective approach. Nonetheless, I share the standpoint of Janet Liebman Jacobs who faced a very similar moral choice in her study of the Holocaust: “Because I am speaking for and representing dead women to whom I feel connected by both gender and ethnicity, I am especially cognizant of the way in which my research shapes the memory of the subjects … I am acutely aware of my responsibility to sustain a dignified memory of [Jewish] women who died.” I believe that by exploring and highlighting women’s practices of resistance and survival strategies in the harshest circumstances this article shows that women were not submissive victims passively accepting their fate. On the contrary, they defied death. I hope to contribute to restoring the human dignity of those who died and those who survived.
My decision to focus mainly on women’s survival strategies was to some extent motivated by something I noticed in the practices of commemorating the Great Famine of 1932 and 1933. Almost invariably, Holodomor monuments and memorials feature an exhausted or dead woman’s body as a symbol of the nation’s suffering. Both scholarly and popular writings on this subject tend to illustrate the horror of starvation by employing heart-breaking images of desperate women. In this context, the association between the concepts of womanhood and victimhood is reinforced and consequently women’s historical experiences are conceptualized mainly in terms of suffering and loss. Promoting a public discourse of Ukrainian women as the stereotypically passive victims of historical cataclysm is not only incorrect but destructive in that it ultimately dislodges the possibility of recognizing women as agents of historical events.
The feminist notion of woman’s agency is of special relevance to research on women’s historical experiences. In general, “agency” refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make free choices, in contrast to “structure,” which refers to the factors (social class, gender, ethnicity, age, religion, etc.) that seem to limit or influence opportunities to act. The correlation between structure and agency is dialectical, in that they mutually determine one another, and thus “structures of domination are best understood if we can grasp how we remain agents even in the moments in which we are being intimately, viciously oppressed.”
The notion of women’s agency was initially conceptualized in feminist political theory to examine women’s collective organized actions against gender-based discrimination. Further feminist research in other disciplines has proven that worldwide and throughout history women have protested and resisted subordination, abuse, oppression, and indecent conditions in a variety of ways. They did so using methods, skills, and resources available to them as women living in patriarchal societies, in which they had been relegated to disadvantaged positions, finding agency in their gender specific knowledge, skills, and social roles in order to make effective choices and take relevant action.
Studies of the experiences of Jewish women during the Holocaust serve as a model for research on women’s experiences of the Holodomor. In fact, the situation Ukrainian women faced in the starving and isolated villages is similar to that of the ghetto in its deprivation of human rights, extremely limited resources, restricted opportunities to act, and in the impossibility of escape. The necessity to take gender into account was realized over thirty years ago in Holocaust studies. There was a boom in the 1990s in research exploring the variety of women’s experiences of the Shoah through analysis of survivors’ personal narratives (oral histories, diaries, and memoirs) and archival documents. This trend went on to encompass studies of public representations of the experiences of female victims (in memorial sites, museums, literature, and cinema), so today women’s and gender studies are recognized as a legitimate and firmly established part of historical scholarship on the Holocaust.
These studies demonstrated that Jewish women were able to exercise a grassroots agency during the Holocaust: they not only resisted Nazi genocidal practices in a variety of ways, but developed efficient coping strategies that helped them and their families survive the harshest circumstances of ghetto life and the concentration camps. In Holocaust studies women’s agency is conceptualized primarily in terms of women’s resistance to Nazi oppression and their survival strategies under the extreme structural restrictions of the ghettos and camps. Similarly, my study focuses on the most typical patterns of peasant women’s resistance to their dispossession and their survival strategies that sustained life within the starving villages in 1932 and 1933.
Women Resisting Violence
Despite their traditionally subordinate role in the peasant family, there is no reason to regard all women as passive victims of forced collectivization and the subsequent famine. Indeed, women’s practices of resistance to violent dispossessions of property deserve special attention. Available sources reveal that women resorted to a variety of methods to safeguard subsistence, including practices of passive resistance (hiding food, clothing, valuables, etc.), of open counteraction (women’s revolts called babii bunt, physical or verbal abuse of activists, personal attacks on collectivization agents), and of legitimate advocacy for their rights (petitions, appeals, and complaints submitted to regional, republican, or state authorities and officials by mail or in person).
Caught in a situation of lawlessness and mass violence and deprived of all civic rights, many peasant women demonstrated significant courage and persistence in protecting their interests. Virtually each survivor told of hiding food or valuables and women’s central role, indeed even their remarkable ingenuity, in finding ways to conceal foodstuffs in their houses. Traditional Ukrainian culture dictates that women cook and serve food and take responsibility for feeding others. Thus, it was women who were especially resourceful in knowing how to hide food, because they were the ones responsible for rationing foodstuffs and ensuring sufficient food reserves for the household.
Hiding foodstuffs as a method of indirect resistance against forced requisitions was of mass character, but the instances of active and open counteraction to forced collectivization were not rare either. The scope of Ukrainian peasants’ opposition to collectivization is illustrated by the number and character of their protest actions. There were 848 spontaneous peasants’ riots recorded in Ukraine between October 1928 and August 1929. From the beginning of 1930, these rebellions became better organized, longer lasting, and showed clear indications of open opposition to the authorities. Remarkably, because of the prevalence of women in the rebellions, official reports often recorded these as specifically women’s demonstrations, using the term babii bunt or babii volynka. In the Zhytomyr oblast (region), for instance, women constituted up to 70 percent of all the participants of the peasant riots (although they were led predominantly by men); the rebels—women among them—often physically assaulted collectivization activists.
Later in 1932 and 1933 village women also occasionally banded together to stand up for their interests—protecting grain reserved for sowing, striking against unpaid labor in the kolkhoz, or protesting the illegitimate dispossession of their neighbors’ property. It is clear from official reports that women’s activism was most often triggered by the failure of local Soviet authorities to provide food for their starving children. Local Soviet authorities in Vinnytsia oblast, for instance, systematically reported such cases to their superiors during 1932 and 1933: a mob of 150 persons, the majority of them women, took over a field of sugar beets in one village; a group of 300 young women attempted to take corn stored in another kolkhoz. There were also numerous remarkable incidents of women’s groups attacking office buildings, the residences of the heads of local authorities, village councils, and kolkhoz offices: they threatened to destroy the buildings if their demand for food for their children was not met. Taking into account a woman’s traditionally central role in a family subsistence, Lynne Viola argues, it was natural for women to take the lead in “resistance to policies and practices that threatened their families’ existence and encroached directly on their sphere of labor and life.”
While archival documents inform us about women’s riots as group protests, personal testimonies reveal numerous examples of individual resistance. Remarkably, even the most vulnerable women—even those with disabilities, for example—actively protected their property: “One old blind woman remained alone [in a house]. The activists showed up and said: ‘Bring the cow out to us!’ That old woman, who had never seen the world, went to the woodshed, defecated and started pelting them with feces! The commissars ran away! The babas were happy to see Mania teaching them a lesson.”
There are also numerous stories of women who physically fought with activists, risking their lives, to rescue their family’s subsistence:
Those aggressors-procurers came again … to finish us off. Mom was fighting desperately to protect our provisions. They kicked her and twisted her arms, but she broke away and pelted them with stones and tiles…. She was covered with bruises and scratches, her entire body was beaten up, hair torn away, but she sent those procurers away…. They took her to court. She won the battle, but they won the trial. They condemned her to half a year of forced labor in the kolkhoz.
Many stories describe how women took up arms to fend off or retaliate against the expropriations of property. A woman from Vinnytsia oblast attacked one of the activists with an axe to prevent a search for grain in her house. Another woman from Kiev oblast first abused the activists verbally when they were taking away her possessions; later that same day she showed up in their leader’s home and threatened him with revenge, and finally she set fire to his granary.
In their confrontations with state power, however, women had little chance of success-most of those who resisted the regime’s brutality and violence were doomed: “Marfa Zuyeva lived next door. The activists came to her, they found some cooked potatoes in the pot, so they spilled them on the floor and smashed the potatoes with their boots. The woman grabbed a knife and rushed toward one of them…. She was shot on the spot.” Although women who openly harassed the dekulakization activists were usually sentenced to short-term imprisonment, there are relatively few testimonies that mention rebellious women being arrested. It seems that in most cases women were penalized for minor offenses such as “grain theft,” concealment of provisions, or a transgression of migration restrictions. They received sentences of temporary forced unpaid labor on-site, and sometimes in isolated barracks. But even in such cases where groups of women openly resisted collectivization, women’s sentences were much lighter than those for men, mostly because women were not considered to be a serious threat to the Soviet regime. Two stereotypes regarding peasant women overlapped to soften the state persecutions for women’s disobedience. On the one hand, the communist leadership considered women-the majority of whom were illiterate—as backward people who could not grasp the great ideas of building socialism. As Lynne Viola pointed out, “The baba was not perceived as the fairer sex but as the darker sector of the already dark peasant masses.” On the other hand, the cultural stereotype of women as the legitimate custodians of children and the family hearth made Soviet authorities more tolerant of women’s riots and individual protests.
While focusing on women’s resistance to collectivization, one must not forget that women also participated in the communist brigades carrying out the forced expropriations. In the victims’ testimonies one finds numerous recollections of female activists taking part in violent dispossessions of kulak families. It is remarkable that frequently these activists were neighbors or close acquaintances of their victims. Nevertheless they showed neither empathy nor mercy to families whose property, homes, and provisions they confiscated. What is more, female activists took advantage of their gender-based experience when searching for concealed grain—as they knew well where and how a woman could hide things. They often surpassed their male comrades in their meticulous searches and shrewd intuition about where food might be hidden, as the following stories show: “Our female neighbor. was an activist. My father put some corncobs under the roof. So she climbed to the attic and took away those corncobs … My mother asked her: ‘Sofia, my neighbor! There are children—they will die!’—’So, let them die out!'”; “When Nykyfor Onyschenko was evicted from his house as a kulak … his wife was sitting on the wagon and crying, and Man’ka Riaba took off her [the wife’s] boots”; “Then Man’ka pulled out the earrings straight from Kharytyna’s ears, and she stripped dispossessed Skrypnyk of his boots, too.”
These recollections suggest that by stirring up class hostility among peasants, the Soviet regime undermined traditional social institutions (neighborhood, family, god parents’ relations, in-law kinship, etc.) and contributed to the erosion of corresponding social networks, which had ensured stability and security in the rural community through its age-old practices of mutual aid. It shows the effectiveness of Soviet propaganda that served to divide villagers along class lines: many women from disadvantaged social background (poor peasants) bought into the propaganda and began to see their wealthy neighbors and relatives as exploiters, as enemies, as not worthy of living. In addition, one should not disregard the fact that some members of communist brigades used dekulakization as an excuse and an opportunity for personal revenge or for personal gain, as much of the expropriated property ended up in the possession of activists.
Women’s personal narratives and archival documents prove that in addition to their active (even if ineffective) resistance, some women also tried legal avenues of appealing to the higher authorities against the unlawful actions of local collectivization activists. Occasionally women succeeded in having their claims satisfied, despite the high level of illiteracy among peasant women at the time. Women’s stories of the Holodomor suggest that neither age nor any other social characteristic itself was a predictor of their success, but that it was rather personality-courage, persistence, and self-confidence—that helped vindicate their rights: “My step-sister had been going to the raikom [daily] for two months and ultimately she was successful, so they returned our house and belongings”; “I don’t know how many times my grandma visited the raion; finally she insisted on our house being returned!”
Obviously, claims submitted to local authorities rarely brought positive results, so some women addressed their grievances to the highest officials of the Ukrainian republic. Klavdia Sedinkina recalls that her mother saved the children’s lives through her own sheer assertiveness: “She was illiterate, but she was a wise person able to bring up nine children … She managed to meet Petrovsky and get an order that the local authorities return our house and all our belongings … Ultimately, they gave us nothing back … but after that they left us alone.”
The archives include numerous letters addressed to Hryhorii Petrovsky, the head of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, from ordinary peasant women appealing for the return of their family property and describing the violence and injustice they suffered. These narratives are marked by a paternalist discourse, which is vividly represented by the following quote from a characteristic letter:
I have to turn to you as to my own father, the highest lord of our Mother Ukraine…. Tears in my eyes, I beg you, father of our Ukraine, to protect us, downtrodden by misery and sorrow, and to remove us from the list of “hard quota” and to give us back at least the house, so we don’t roam the streets hungry and unfortunate, four girls and I myself. poor, having no place for the children to sleep.
This case exemplifies women’s attitudes toward the patriarchal Soviet state. In fact, in Soviet times the state socialist system emasculated and displaced the father figure, substituting his authority with state power and control. The state was the sole provider of jobs, goods, services, social benefits, (in)justice, and so on. (64) Women depended more on the state than on their husbands, so for some peasant women the Soviet state (personified by its officials) represented an omnipotent father whose protection and help they desperately sought.
Deprived of their means of subsistence and facing starvation, many women did not give themselves up to despair. Available documents and testimonies indicate that women frequently showed remarkable resoluteness, personal initiative, courage, and leadership in protecting their rights. Unfortunately, they were not equally matched and only a few of them succeeded in their struggle against the repressive machine of the Soviet state.
Women’s Survival Strategies
Women’s Personal Belongings as a Resource
Holodomor survivor testimonies allow us to study women’s survival strategies in the face of starvation. The most common survival strategy mentioned was the exchange of personal belongings for food. High quality clothing and jewelry served as a valuable resource for starving families. These possessions were sold or exchanged for food at the market or in the Torgsin. The wealthy families (kulaks) were dispossessed first and foremost of their principal means of livelihood-livestock, house, foodstuff, farming tools. In most cases activists also took away all the family belongings including bedding, kitchenware, and clothing. However, sometimes people managed to hide their most valuable things, including women’s jewelry and high quality cloth. These turned out to be the main guarantee of a family’s survival. Time and again Holodomor survivors testify that their lives were saved owing to mother’s kerchiefs, skirts, outerwear, embroidered towels, sold or exchanged for small amounts of food:
During the famine my mother exchanged her earrings and wedding ring for flour; Mother used to take some clothes for exchange: skirts, blouses, everything, so she managed to get either some beet roots or grains for it; Mother had those coins on her necklace. So we lived on that, and we survived; My mom used to take her dowry-fabric, embroidered towels, linen-and exchange all that for some bran or millet.
It is remarkable that, while repeatedly stressing the high value of clothing and jewelry, the survivors never expressed any regret for the valuables their families were forced to give away at extortionist rates. On the contrary, in every recollection of food acquired in exchange for women’s belongings, survivors emphasized that those valuables ensured their survival, so the real price of the exchange was right-as it saved human lives.
Women’s Mutual Aid
Women’s mutual gratuitous aid and sharing of scarce food appear to be core strategies of survival. The stories of women’s selfless assistance-often to strangers-are mentioned in virtually every testimony. Severe starvation caused unprecedented de humanization, devaluation of human life, moral degradation, mass violence, apathy toward oneself and others, and destructive social-psychological disorders in the starving Ukrainian villages. In such a context virtually every gesture of empathy, mercy, and aid must be understood as an act worthy of respect. Narrators recalling such instances of assistance most often tell of women who could not deny food, regardless how scarce, to one who was hungry. In fact, in Ukrainian traditional culture, to deny the hungry food or to reject a beggar was considered a serious sin. From eyewitnesses: “My aunt, my mom’s sister, she was a widow. She had four kids, so sometimes she used to come to us. We shared with her what we could”; “Our neighbors, who had many children, had no cow. We used to give them some milk”; “And the beggars—twenty people came every day. So I took a little bowl of apples from the attic and gave them two or three each. I never sent them away empty-handed. I either gave them a piece of beetroot, or a little cooked potato.” Some narratives are striking for their gender dynamics, in that all the actors in the testimony are women and girls. The following situation witnessed by Tetiana Babych (b. 1919) from Chernihiv oblast is representative of these: “I remember there was a family wandering around—a mother with three small children, the youngest was no more than three years old…. They started knocking on windows begging for food. My sister and I asked our mother to give them our dinner…. Mother gave them some bread and a bit of milk. Never will I forget how that girl embraced my mother and said: ‘Lady, let me kiss your hand.’ My mother, may she rest in peace, used to say that she won’t forget those words and that grown-up, adult look.” Examples of solidarity between women similar to the one described above were numerous, as recollections of survivors show.
Another manifestation of women’s mutual help was the adoption of children from starving families by distant relatives, neighbors, or merely acquaintances. In most cases they did not wait until the child was orphaned, but offered their help when the situation was becoming threatening, so that children were taken away from starving families and localities (to another village or to the cities):
At that time my parents’ cousin and her husband were leaving for Kharkiv, and they took me and my little sister along … because of this we survived; My foster mother Hapka abandoned us straight away, and father fled to Kyiv…. Aunt Iavdokha, mother of Stepanyda, a friend of mine, gave us shelter; I was wandering around until night … I didn’t know where to go…. I saw a house, knocked on the door and asked to stay over. A woman gave me shelter, and I began living in that family…. Even today I remember aunt Marfa with gratitude and warmth as she saved my life in those years of famine; We became orphans … our aunt adopted us; But little Dusia survived, because she was taken by childless relatives earlier; We lived in Maslovka village…. When they took away our cow, our father died…. I and my brother, we were given to our aunt in Kochetok village.
Amid the total dehumanizing famine and despair, in a society ruled by the instinct of self-preservation, in times when moral decay reached its extremes and virtually all social norms had been transgressed and trampled, some women managed to preserve their humanity. They never ceased to empathize with those in need and supported others by sharing scarce food and adopting children from starving families. Their generosity saved many lives, and under the circumstances their behavior must be recognized as extraordinary.
Dilemma of Motherhood
The tragedy of motherhood is perhaps the most dramatic aspect of women’s testimonies from the Holodomor, because it undermines the myth of the unconditionally selfless mother instinct. Faced with starvation, mothers confronted an impossible dilemma: to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their children or to save their own lives at the price of their children’s survival. Despite the popular stereotype that a mother always acts for the benefit of her child, one can find among the Holodomor narratives sufficient cases illustrating the opposite behavior. Survivors from the Luhansk region recalled several instances of mothers’ selfishness and neglect: one starving mother whose child was taken to a state-run shelter used to visit him just to steal his bread; another mother of two teenage daughters let them die when she decided to stop feeding them and kept all the food for herself.
Instances of child abandonment were numerous. Driven by hunger, adults who were eager to save their own lives often left home, leaving their children behind. Many of these abandoned children tried to survive wandering around in search of food, but usually they were doomed to die. A woman from Kaniv told a story, which appears typical for the time, about her neighbors: the father went to find work and died, and the mother left for Belarus to procure some bread; meanwhile all four children (the oldest was eight years old) died of starvation in their own house. Another testimony from Vinnytsia oblast echoes many similar stories from other regions stricken by famine: “One man went to the Donbas, leaving his wife and child behind. The baby was about two years old. The woman left the child at home and went after her husband. … The poor child wandered into the forest and died there.” This practice, however, does not appear that shocking or outrageous if one takes into account that in the traditional Ukrainian peasant family, a baby’s life has relatively lower value than the life of an adult. In fact, despite the established social imperative of selfless motherhood, traditional culture prioritized a mother’s survival, so that some women made their impossible choice in favor of their own lives.
The following case is remarkable as it illustrates an atypical solution found by a desperate mother of four who was unable to feed her dependents—she showed up at the kolkhoz office, her children in tow, and publicly resigned her maternal authority, leaving them there as charges of the kolkhoz officials who would now be responsible for their nutrition. She resumed her custody over the children only after the kolkhoz provided her with bread for them. This incident illustrates how women were well aware that the Soviet state—represented by local authorities—was responsible for the famine. She felt no guilt or shame for being unable to fulfill her maternal duties, but in admitting her failure, she placed the blame squarely on the state for causing the situation.
The number of children who actually died as a result of the Holodomor is unknown, as there are no reliable data. But the scope of abandoned and orphaned children allows estimating the level of their death rate. In the spring of 1933, the streets of large Ukrainian cities were flooded with thousands of homeless children arriving from the countryside in search of food. The local authorities were alarmed by the situation, so in May 1933, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine issued a decree “against child homelessness” and established a special commission charged with the creation of state-run shelters and orphanages in the affected regions.
Besides providing shelter to real orphans, those orphanages became the last resort for many other starving children. Often desperate mothers attempted to rescue their children by trying to put them in state-run shelters in nearby towns. Survivors’ stories reveal the controversial character of the method involved: “In order to prevent their children from starving, mothers took them out of the house and left them at the train station or by the orphanage. They said they are going to buy some food, but in fact, with tears in their eyes, they abandoned their children. After a while they returned to find out if the child was in the orphanage, but not all of them were there.”
Despite widespread malnutrition and unacceptable sanitary conditions that prevailed in orphanages these institutions actually represented the last chance of survival for many children. According to Halyna Kovtun (b. 1918) from Cherkasy oblast: “Only I and my brother remained…. We would have probably died too, but we were taken to the orphanage.” The testimonies of former residents reveal terrifying pictures of living conditions and mass death in the orphanages. Nevertheless, none of them expressed any grievances or complaints toward their parents; on the contrary, they considered their parents’ decision to take them to the orphanage with understanding and deem their action a manifestation of real love, the best solution in an impossible situation. The following story involves three women who—each in her own way—contributed to saving a child’s life: “There were three of us, without father. Every mother wishes the best for her children, so my mother wanted to save my life and she put me in shelter…. I was five years old. There were no beds; we slept together on the floor.. In the morning some did not wake up, every night somebody died…. When my aunt came to take me out I was almost lifeless…. For two years I was not able to stand, much less walk. I am very grateful to my grandma who [took care of me later and thus] saved my life, no matter what.”
The Holodomor caused the complete dismantling of the family as the basic unit of society. The totality of its destruction is exemplified by the story of Olha Tsymbalyuk (b. 1917) from Khmelnytsky oblast:
Our family was big. And then we began to disperse in different directions. Relatives took the older sister to [work in] the coalmine [in Donbas]. Mom took my little sister and left her by the orphanage in the town of Izium. Later I was also taken to my sister in the Donbas. My sister Paraska died at home, and my brother Dmytro went away and I don’t know what happened to him. Mother and father starved to death at home.”
The famine forced mothers to choose between their own lives and that of their children, and even then, the most reckless of efforts did not always guarantee survival, but inaction inevitably led to death. Holodomor survivors expressed little moral judgment when speaking of the controversial decisions made by women on the cusp of life and death. This moral relativism is characteristic of the women’s narratives of Holodomor experience, even with respect to the most glaring transgressions of established gender, and even human, norms.
A Woman’s Body as a Resource and a Risk Factor
Women very rarely mention their bodies or sexuality in their personal narratives of the Holodomor. The few available stories of women’s bodily experiences reveal that a woman’s body represented both a resource and a risk factor for starving women at that time.
Holodomor survivors who were small children during the famine remember their mothers bringing them some scarce food stolen from a kolkhoz or elsewhere, safely hidden in her bosom: “We three children were left with our mother, and we were in great need, there was no piece of bread. If mother earned a little piece of bread, she would carry it in her bosom all day long to give it to her children at night”; “Mother was working in the kolkhoz, she was feeding cattle with bran…. In order to prevent women from taking anything away they searched women. So mother used to hide some bran in her bosom…. At night she cooked that bran.”
Occasionally even an exhausted body gave a woman a last hope to survive: there are testimonies of peasant women having sex with local officials in exchange for food or other favors. For instance, there were several instances of women who received immunity from dekulakization for their families after being forced to engage in sexual activities with the members of the local commission on dekulakization in the village of Holubivka, Luhansk oblast. In another village one couple decided that the wife would periodically be sexually involved with the director of the machine-tractor station in exchange for flour for the entire family.
One may arguably assume that many women found themselves in such critical situations, and that sexuality perhaps offered the only way to survive. An old woman (b. 1908) from Luhansk oblast recalled with bitterness the moment in 1933 when she faced starvation and decided to give herself to the head of kolkhoz, who had pursued her for a long time: “There was no food. My legs and my children’s legs began swelling. … I had no information about [my husband] Ivan…. So I gave myself to that bastard for two sacks of millet.” At the same time a woman’s body represented an additional risk factor for her, especially if her husband was missing. Women were prime targets for all kinds of violence, including rape and sexual harassment. The stories of women prostituting themselves for food are rare, but it does not mean those were isolated cases. Most likely it is the case that women, due to shame, guilt, or trauma, preferred to keep silent.
Hunger distorts and destroys a human body. Besides its physiological dimension, a woman’s body is invested with a powerful aesthetical meaning. A healthy and vibrant body is essential to the traditional notion of a Ukrainian woman’s beauty. Therefore, besides physical suffering caused by starvation, women also suffered psychological stress in seeing their emaciated and dying bodies. Women’s testimonies of their bodily experiences are very rare, while the existing few are especially difficult, being graphic in depiction and deeply emotionally charged.
Conclusions
Women’s personal narratives of the Holodomor reveal gender peculiarities of women’s experiences of famine. They were often left holding full responsibility for their families’ survival. Various forms of women’s passive and active resistance to wrongful dispossessions of property represent primary survival strategies. Women’s individual and group protests had roots in their traditional roles as caregivers and housekeepers. Women tried to protect the means of subsistence during forced collectivization and dekulakization, and later during the famine their demands were also focused on providing food for their children. Since women spoke from the standpoint of the culturally approved and legitimate role (as mothers), those protests brought about relatively soft punishments.
Women’s personal belongings (hidden and later exchanged for food) proved to be the major resource enabling them to maintain a minimal level of nutrition for their families during the famine. Women’s solidarity and mutual aid (food sharing, adoption of children) helped to save many lives of those otherwise condemned to starvation. Facing death, some women were forced to make an impossible choice between their own lives and the lives of their children, so in many instances motherhood as a cultural value and woman’s primary social role was contested. In fact, the famine caused unprecedented dehumanization among the starving population; many fundamental social norms were transgressed and temporally suspended.
The female body itself represented both a resource and a risk factor for the starving: a woman could earn some food by prostituting herself, or could be raped by activists, having nobody around to protect her. Women’s bodily experiences of the Holodomor proved to be the most suppressed as well as the most traumatic aspect of the Holodomor survivors’ memories. This study has proven that many women did not accept their fate passively, but rather they confronted and defied death.
The prevalence of women’s narratives of the Holodomor (up to three-fourths of all testimonies) requires a scholar to take the gender aspects of women’s experiences and memories of Holodomor into account at all stages of research. Historical research of women’s experiences during the Holodomor has just begun. This article in fact represents the first attempt to explore Ukrainian women’s agency in the context of the Great Famine of 1932 and 1933. The limitations of this research do not allow for an evaluation of the efficacy of women’s attempts at resistance or of their survival strategies, nor of the prevalence of specific practices or patterns of behavior.
My special interest in and emphasis on women’s agency was not intended to diminish the tragedy of the genocidal famine in which these women were deprived of their humanity, victimized, and sentenced to a terrible death. By focusing on women’s active efforts to protect their families and confront death, I tried—at least partially—to restore their dignity. The Holodomor fundamentally challenged many elemental cultural values of the Ukrainian people. The collective trauma and its long-term consequences have yet to be properly appreciated. For women, their Holodomor experiences have ambivalent meaning. On the one hand, survivors learned that, despite the horror they suffered, they as women were able to take charge and manage. Women’s practices of survival during the famine also revealed the constructedness and relativity of some seemingly fundamental postulates of “genuine femininity,” for example, a mother’s total dedication to her child’s well-being, among others. Indeed, on the verge of death a mother’s instinct proved not to be a true instinct at all, but a deeply rooted cultural norm that could be consciously overridden in favor of an alternative broader survival strategy. On the other hand, the experience of trauma obviously left its traces on women’s psyches, and those “signals of trauma” could be identified in women’s narratives. Further research on many other aspects of women’s lives and deaths during the Holodomor is necessary if we are to reconstruct an accurate and comprehensive history of that tragedy and understand its long-term effects. This article presents several methodological problems and ethical challenges, some of which cannot be solved, while others require wider theoretical discussion and close scrutiny of available data. Existing works on gender and the Holocaust—despite the differences between the two genoddes—could serve as a model for future studies on the Holodomor.
What actually happened to the entire generation of traumatized women? Did their survival experience make them and their descendants stronger? Did it destroy their human dignity and self-confidence forever? Did they learn to adjust to or resist violations of their rights? What impact did it have on the life trajectories of the Holodomor survivors? It is clear: to find answers one has to ask and to listen to what is (un)said.