In the Eye of the Storm: Letters From Starving Ukraine
In the early 1930s, many Westerners couldn’t find a job because of the Great Depression. Some of them rushed to the USSR where the Communist regime launched industrialization and needed a lot of specialists. Jerry Berman from South Africa went there as well. He arrived at Stanytsia Luhanska in Ukraine and was shocked by the food supply situation. Jerry didn’t know that it was the beginning of the artificial hunger known as the Great Famine or Holodomor…
I would have never heard about this engineer from South Africa if the Ukrainian media outlet, Novynarnia, hadn’t written about his letters. Jerry sent them to his friend Meyer Fortes who used to study with him and lived in London. In 2016, Meyer’s granddaughter, Alison Marshall, found these letters and later passed them to the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide in Kyiv.
The first Jerry’s letter from Ukraine was written on the 7th of November 1932. He joined the construction of a bridge across Siverskii Donets where he managed a team of workers. It was the climax of the Holodomor and its impact was easy to see both in villages and cities. Soviet authorities introduced food rationing and decided how much bread every worker would get. ‘My “Punkt” & my “Peregolnik” shall decide henceforth whom bread is to be given and in what %% (percentages) if the workmen gives only 50–60–70–80–90 % of his “plan”! — — Who is to get lunch and how much?!’ Jerry wrote with indignation in December of 1932. As a foreigner, he could get the wire transfers from his family but refused to receive that money. ‘SEND NO MONEY. I shall not take it. I can starve with others’ he wrote in January of 1933.
Food shortages, hunger, starvation — these topics dominate Jerry’s letters. He spent a lot of time providing his workers with ration cards that gave them a chance to survive. According to his letter, it was a horrible task:
My heart is sore & I feel like crying i.e. weeping…
I left my job last night to perform many deeds! I got in at 7 p.m. & till midnight saw people & phoned and went to station to offload engines and material. Gave instructions home. I am in the Stanitza now & the main object was to get money (17,000 roubles), and what is more important bread cards for members of workers families. Every month gets worse & worse, so that month I get cards on 4 workmen, i. e., one card to be divided between 4 workmen & their families. i.e. each one gets “nothing”!! Here we all work for bread only. We get nothing else, except a few roubles. Hence a man, his wife and four children, if the first two work get 800 plus 600 gr. i.e. 1 ½ klg. Bread for six. Remember there is nothing else. So, all my new arrivals all specialists of high grade are simply leaving me!
Another thing that stroke him the most was the inefficiency of the Soviet system. As a Western-educated person, Jerry was astonished by the wastefulness he saw. It was true that the Soviets built the industrial objects very quickly but invested too many resources into them. That was what he wrote to his brother in February of 1933:
Take as an example. In five years they build on the Dnieper a Dam and a huge 1500 meter bridge near “Ekaterinaslav”. They built these in good record time. There is no doubt it! But what of the means!… It cost in human victims and money twice and more that it would have in America on similar jobs.
Under the 5 years plan things were done irrespective of costs. Entirely irrespective!!!… Nothing counted, only finish to be able to say so!… Quality suffered. Factories completed a year ago, have given as yet nothing.
All these problems were driving Jerry up the wall so he started trying to find another job. Finally, he managed to move to Nizhnii Novgorod in Russia where there was no such food shortage. Moreover, Jerry had some privileges as a foreigner. He could get food in INSNAB — a special retail chain for foreign employees. “Today I get unheard of things, butter, cheese, rice, sweets, sugar, tea, on liberal norm — the very best that Russia gives anyone,” he wrote in the May of 1933. The reason why local authorities were so generous was simple: they just wanted to grab their hands on deficit goods (for example, cigarettes which were hard to buy at that time). Other employees weren’t so lucky. That’s what he wrote about his boss:
My immediate superior — the “prorab” gets 425 roubles a month. I get as you know 400 roubles. He has a wife and two children, one of whom is an infant 14 month old. His monthly deductions are 80 roubles (income tax, loan subscription, culture deductions etc). That leaves 345 roubles. He buys daily one litre of milk for his child, that 2p50 or 3 руб i.e 80 roubles a month. That leaves 265. The Stolovia wherein he alone gets one daily meal of two courses (soup + kasha) charges 1p50–2p50 a day. That leaves 200 roubles a month. His “паек” that he gets in a centralized way is merely 800 gr bread for self + 1 klg for his family. The rest, as all here, must be bought at the market at market prices. Can you imagine how four people live?? — And that is a man of high position and responsibilities, who get a good specialist`s wage. And what of the workman who gets not 425, but only 130–180 roubles a month in all? [Or] the clerk, that gets 175–250 roubles and the inspector with his 220–260 a month? –
Jerry Berman stayed in the Soviet Union until 1935. Then he came back to South Africa where he made a successful career in one of the ministries. Jerry died in 1979 and had never known what the valuable information he left about the Holodomor in Donbas. Ironically, the bridge he built in Stanytsia Luhanska was destroyed by the Red Army in 1942. Now this town is occupied by Russia which is trying to whitewash the Soviet past as much as possible.
You can read all of Jerry Berman’s letters here.
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