Afanasiev, Ivan

Description

Creators

Ivan Afanasiev (b. cir 1925), Author

Volodymyr Maniak

, Recipient

Media Type

Text

Item Types

Correspondence

Envelopes

Description

Letter sent from: Hoholeve, Brovary raion, Kyiv oblast
Letter describes events in 1932-1933 in: unnamed location in Kirovohrad oblast (contemporary)
Current location name: Kirovohrad oblast (contemporary)

Ivan Afanasiev was 8 at the time of the Famine and had a sister. He remembers his legs being swollen. Some potatoes grew in the garden of a neighbor who had left the village because of the famine. Ivan started going there at night to dig them up with his bare hands. Once the village head, the collective farm boss and the accountant saw him in the neighbor’s garden and beat him up severely. People who saw this decided that he had been killed and told Ivan’s mother. However, he survived.

He says that those who praise and defend Stalin are the kind of Stalinists who were executing people who were already swollen and could barely walk during the Famine. Afanasiev notes that he witnessed an elderly woman being shot in the Kirovohrad area, where he appears to be from.

Notes