Nimenko, Petro

Description

Creators

Petro Nimenko (d.b. unknown), Author

Volodymyr Maniak

, Recipient

Media Type

Text

Item Types

Correspondence

Envelopes

Description

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

Petro Nimenko’s family of 8 was dekurkulized in 1930 and evicted. Some moved in with his elder sister’s family, some walked to Kyiv to find work, and one brother married a Komsomol member.

He blames what he calls the “Judeo-Stalinist” party for the hardship that the peasants had to suffer and the high taxes. He was arrested and served a term in a work camp in Sviatoshyne for hitting a Komsomol member with a frying pan. The incident happened in 1932 when a search brigade came to take away the seeds and that frying pan. He was released in the spring of 1933 and refused to join the collective farm. He bought a horse and plowed land for meager pay. He also took the dead, 30-40 corpses a day, into a mass grave.

Nimenko says taxes were too high and had to be paid 3 times a year. In 1946, he traveled to Kyiv to talk to poet Maksym Rylsky, who advised him to find construction work at The Exhibition [of the Achievements of the National Economy] in Kyiv. Nimenko apparently took his advice.

Notes