Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

The sickness rate and mortality of the deportees is too great. . . . The monthly mortality equals 1.3 percent in Northern Kazakhstan and 0.8 percent in the Narym [Siberia] region. Among those that have died there are a particularly high number of younger children. Thus of those below 3 years old 8–12 percent of the group has died every month, while in Magnitogorsk it has been even more, up to 15 percent a month. It must be noted that on the whole the high mortality is not due to epidemic illnesses but to the lack of arrangements for housing and equipping these people, and child mortality climbs because of the absence of the necessary food. ⁴⁴

Menzhinsky and Iagoda had from the north Caucasus figures for deaths from starvation and disease and for cannibals or corpse eaters. In March 1933 they were informed:

Citizen Gerasimenko ate the corpse of her dead sister. Under interrogation Gerasimenko declared that for a month she had lived on various rubbish, not even having vegetables. . . . Citizen Doroshenko, after the death of his father and mother was left with infant sisters and brothers, ate the flesh of his brothers and sisters when they died of hunger. . . . In the cemetery up to 30 corpses have been found, thrown out at night, some gnawed at by dogs. . . . several coffins have been found from which the corpses have disappeared. . . . In Sergienko’s apartment was found the corpse of a little girl with the legs cut off, and boiled meat. . . .⁴⁵

For once, Menzhinsky and Iagoda’s men—Georgi Molchanov, who had organized terror in the north Caucasus and now headed OGPU’s secret political sector, and Genrikh Liushkov, Molchanov’s deputy and later a defector to Japan—decided not to punish the cannibals, and requested food, medicine, and doctors to be sent. In other areas, Molchanov and Liushkov found that even working collective farmers were dying: “On March 16 farmer Trigub, an activist, 175 days’ work credited, died of hunger. He applied several times to the farm administration for an issue of food, but received no help. For the same reason groom Shcherbina (185 days’ work) and carpenter Volvach died.”⁴⁶

Not only the authorities were brutalized. Surviving peasants turned on each other and the starving. In summer 1933 a GPU man from the north Caucasus reported: