Derkach, Olha

Description

Creators

Olha Derkach (b. cir.1918), Author

Volodymyr Maniak

, Recipient

Media Type

Text

Item Types

Correspondence

Envelopes

Description

Letter sent from: Novivosilky, Makariv raion, Kyiv oblast
Letter describes events in 1932-1933 in: Novivosilky, Makariv raion, Kyiv oblast
Current location name: Novivosilky, Makariv raion, Kyiv oblast

Olha Derkach responds to a call about the publication of a memorial book in Silski Visti on February 18, 1989. She is particularly upset by those who glorify Stalin, who she says was not a great leader but a criminal and the enemy of the people. If not for Stalinist repressions and the Famine, the Nazis would probably not have captured so much soviet territory in 1941, she says.

Derkach recalls NEP as the time when agriculture, culture and education flourished in her native village. Peasants voluntarily pulled resources and set up an Association for the Joint Cultivation of Land. But that lasted only until 1929. Forced collectivization, grain requisitioning and dekurkulization left people with nothing to eat by the spring of 1933. The 1932 grain harvest was sufficient but search brigades took away everything. A terrible famine ensued.

Derkach was a student in a trade school (FZU) in Kyiv where she was given some bread and food stamps. She was shocked at the condition of her fellow villagers—swollen, sick and completely apathetic—when she visited it in the spring of 1933. They were given some broth and a slice of bread a day in the collective farm only if they worked on that day.

Derkach supports perestroika and the need for a truthful history. She calls those who glorify Stalin “slave-activists” and believes that good people will prevail over the Stalinists and “late bureaucrats.”

Notes