Kilde: En sovjetborgers erindring fra korninddrivelserne i 1932-1933

I heard the children… choking, coughing with screams. And I saw the looks of the man: frightened, pleading, hateful, dully impassive, extinguished with despair or flaring up with half-mad, daring ferocity. “Take it. Take everything away. There’s still a pot of borscht the stove. It’s plain, got no meat. But still it’s got beets, taters’n’ cabbage. And it’s salted! Better take it, Comrade citizens! Here, hang on. I’ll take of my shoes. They’re patched and repatched, but maybe they will have some use for the proletariat, for our dear Soviet power.”

It was excruciating to see and hear, all this. And even worse to take part in it … And I persuaded myself, explained to myself. I musn’t give in to debilitating pity. We’re realizing historical necessity. We were performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain for the socialist fatherland. For the Five Year Plan.

With the rest of my generation I firmly believed that the ends justified the means. Our great goal was the universal triumph of communism, and for the sake of that goal everything was permissible – to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousand and even millions of peoples, all those who were hindering our work or could hinder it, everyone who stood in the way. And to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to ‘intellectual squeamishness’ and’ stupid realism,’ the attribute of people who could not see the forest for the trees’.

That was how I reasoned, and everyone like me, even when … I saw what ‘total collectivization’
Meant – how they ‘kulakized’ and ‘dekulakized,’ how they mercilessly striped the peasants in the winter of 1932-3. It took part in this myself, scouring the countryside, searching for hidden grain, testing the earth with an iron rod for loose spots that might lead to buried grain. With the others, I emptied out the old folks’ storages chests, stopping my ears to the children’s crying and the woman’s wails. For I was convinced that I was accomplishing the great and necessary transformation of the countryside; that in the days to come the people who lived there would be better off for it, that their distress and suffering were result of their own ignorance of the machination of the class enemy; that those who sent me – and I myself – knew better than the peasants how they should live, what they should sow and when they should plough.

In the terrible spring of 1933 I saw people dying from hunger. I saw women’s and children’s distended bellies, turning blue, still breathing but with vacant, lifeless eyes. And corpses – corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots, corps in peasant huts, in the melting snow of the old Vologda, under the bridge of Kharkov … I saw all this and did not go out of my mind or commit suicide. Nor did I curse those who had sent me out to take away the peasant’ grain in the winter, and in the spring to persuade the barely walking, skeleton, - thin or sickly – swollen people go into the fields in order to ‘the Bolshevik sowing plan in chock – worker style’.
Nor did I lose my faith. As before, I believed because I wanted to believe.