Mykhailenkо, Olha

Description

Creators

Olha Mykhailenko (b.1919), Author

Volodymyr Maniak

, Recipient

Media Type

Text

Item Types

Correspondence

Envelopes

Description

Letter sent from: Bohuslav, Kyiv oblast
Letter describes events in 1932-1933 in: Village of Shupyky, Bohuslav raion, Kyiv oblast
Current location name: Village of Shupyky, Bohuslav raion, Kyiv oblast

Olha Mykhailenko

Notes

Author's gender: Female
Author's name in Ukrainian: Ольга Михайленко; Ольга Іванівна Михайленко
Category: Child; Child labour

Olha Mykhailenko responds to a piece by Oleksandr Matiiko, writer from the village of Ivky in her native Bohuslav raion, published in Silski Visti on 17 September 1988.
Her father died in 1920 of typhus and her mother became a widow with 4 children, Olha was the youngest.
During the Famine, Olga initially worked in the collective farm weeding the beets "for a bowl of cereal" until her sister found her a job embroidering men's shirts. The pay was good but it was never on time. So Olha's supervisor was finding customers - "doctors and pharmacists" who were paying her in advance for her work. With this money, Olha was able to purchase grain at a local farmer's market. She then pounded grain in a mortar and cooked with it. She mentions that mortars were not prohibited to use as opposed to millstones. Those who owned millstones could be sentenced to a five-year prison term.
Olha mentions that she is semi-literate and that she only sings and speaks in Ukrainian but writes in Russian because she moved to Russia in 1938 and studied during the war in Russia.
She recalls anecdotally a neighbor named Chubar who sold his house for a loaf of bread and was later killed in a neighboring village for stealing. His younger daughter, a 12-month baby, died of starvation, and his older daughter eventually died after she ate some mushrooms that she gathered.

Mykhailenko calls the famine artificial, caused by grain requisitioning, not poor harvest in 1933.

Matiiko is mentioned in Wiki, he was at some point editor-in-chief of Silski Visti.
https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%96%D0%B9%D0%BA%D0%BE_%D0%9E%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B4%D1%80_%D0%9C%D0%B8%D1%85%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87

Date of Original