Miron Dolot, "Execution By Hunger"

• Setting: 1932 famine-ridden Ukraine in which the Communist government has resorted to getting as many agricultural products from the countryside as possible, leaving the farmers on the verge of starvation trying to stay alive.


• Men, women, and children alike all do backbreaking work and scourge the potato fields looking for something to eat, whether the food is rotten or frozen.


• Farmers used to be able to move to the city to find work but now it has been made illegal to hire farmers in order to stop the flor of labor from the collective farms and to prevent farmers from receiving food rations from other cities.


• Deaths from starvation slowly start to become daily occurences.


• Soon the "Hundred Thousanders" or "Thousanders," 1120,000 of the Party's most active and reliable members, started showing up in villages like tryrants, imposing their demands in order to organize a speedy harvest.


• The Thousanders demand that the grain quota be just as much as last year's - something that is impossible to do.


• In order to save themselves and their families, people started to eat anything and everything (dogs, cats, small forest animals, small birds, crustacean shells, bark, weeds, leaves, diseased animal meat, etc.) - even food that had already rotted.


• When Dolot and his mother try to leave the village they are confronter with thousands of frozen bodies lining the roads - there was absolutely nowhere to go.


• The village eventually ceasmed to exist as a coherent community - instead it was replaced with a sort of tribal survival of the fittest atmosphere.


• Mothers abandoned children; people stayed locked in their houses


• Eventually, rumors of cannibalism were found to be true, particularly with one case when "a woman was found dead, her nock contorted in a crudely made noose. The neighbors who discovered the tragedy also found the reason for it. The flesh of the woman's three year old daughted was found in the oven."