Letter sent from: Village of Kalynivka, Narodychi raion, Zhytomyr oblast
Letter describes events in 1932-1933 in: Village of Kalynivka, Narodychi raion, Kyiv oblast
Current location name: Village of Kalynivka, Narodychi raion, Zhytomyr oblast
Petrenko was from a family of 6. There were 360 households in the village. With 4-5 people dying daily,
about a quarter of the houses were empty because their inhabitants had either died or left in search of food.
People were too weak by the time of the sowing campaign, so the collective farm board decided to distribute
some seed buckwheat. For this, 4 members of the board were sentenced to prison terms.
The famine was clearly artificial. Search brigades, known colloquially as the red broom, swept all grain and
food away from the villagers. Those who did not comply with grain procurement requirements were dispossessed and deported. Most of those who were sentenced never came back and likely died in prisons. Petrenko views the 1933 famine, the 1937-38 repressions, and 1947 famine as links in a single chain of Stalinist repressions aiming at mass-murdering the people. He mentions that during the 1947 famine people were travelling to the western oblasts of Ukraine and Belarus to exchange things for food but there were the police checkpoints on the roads that stopped them. Petrenko is a war invalid and veteran of war and labor.
Ukrainian transcription available.
