Letter sent from: Bernashivka, Mohyliv-Podilsky raion, Vinnytsia oblast
Letter describes events in 1932-1933 in: Mohyliv-Podilsky, Suliatytska, Yaryshiv, Khonkivtsi, Sloboda Yaryshivska, Ozaryntsi all in Mohyliv-Podilsky raion, Vinnytsia oblast
Current location name: Mohyliv-Podilsky and Mohyliv-Podilsky raion, Vinnytsia oblast
Melnyk was a member of a search brigade headed by one of "25 thousanders,” a village council head called
Vorokhob, who would take away every speck of grain and other foodstuff from the villagers.
In 1932-33, Melnyk was a student of Mohyliv-Podilsky Radnarshkola in the Komsomol department. He remembers piles of dead and half-dead bodies on Suliatytska Station, and a fire that destroyed the mounds of corn stored there. The guards would rather let it burn than allow the dying people take any. He estimated that
over 50% of the population died in villages like Yaryshiv, Khonkivtsi, Yurkivtsi and Suliatytska.
As a student, he witnessed large groups of peasants being taken from the Mohyliv-Podilsky jail to the station.
When he was imprisoned with tuberculosis in 1937-38 on fabricated charges as a “saboteur of the Stakhanov
movement,” he witnessed the execution of peasants who refused to sign falsified records of interrogation. He
names a few people who were beaten to death during such interrogations or signed the falsified statements to
stop the beating.
Melnyk was arrested and sentenced again in 1949. He describes in detail how the charges were fabricated,
despite his appeals to all levels of the justice system. He ended up serving 25 years in the Taishet penal colony prison hospital until he was released in 1955. He considers himself a Leninist, while Stalin was a “criminal element” who abandoned the ways of Lenin.
Ukrainian transcription available.
