Kyiv during the Holodomor-Genocide

Kyiv remained an agro-industrial and cultural-educational centre between 1923 and 1933 and did not experience the pathos of Stalinist industrialisation, in comparison with the industrial cities of Donbas, Kharkiv, and Zaporizhzhia. Nevertheless, throughout the 1920s, the communist regime persistently attempted to change the traditional urban space, imposing a so-called ‘new’ Soviet one in its place: street names were changed, institutions and centres were created to ensure the development of Soviet logistics, familiar centres of urban space were closed, and new ones were created in their place. In particular, apartment buildings were erected in Pechersk for the management of the Arsenal and Bolshevik factories, and schools for children of German, Polish, and Jewish nationalities were closed en masse.

Holodomor witness Olena Lyskivska described the city on the eve of the tragedy: “We knew that if the portraits of certain leaders were taken down, it meant that they were no longer there. And that was it. Every May Day, before the parade, portraits were displayed, and if we saw someone missing from the display, it meant that they were not saints anymore; they were no longer among the saints. Back then, things changed very easily. The Dynamo Stadium, I think, belonged to Liubchenko. Then it was changed. They renamed it after Postyshev, but then Postyshev left, followed by Kosior, and then Kosior left. In short, they finally decided that there was no need to attach anything to it; it was the Dynamo Stadium, and that was all.

Kyiv experienced terrible changes during the Holodomor. In 1932–1933, most people who had the opportunity to come to Kyiv reached the city by train or via the Dnipro River. The situation at the Central Railway Station was even worse. Peasants who managed to get on the train by any means came to Kyiv in the hope of finding work or getting to the Zhytnii Market to exchange goods that had miraculously survived in their families for food.

Reaching Kyiv by train did not mean that the journey had been completed successfully. At the station, police patrols conducted raids on peasants, constantly checking their documents (a passport regime had been introduced in 1933, but peasants did not receive passports, thus turning them into hostages of the totalitarian system, preventing them from leaving their starving villages for the city). Many people died of exhaustion in the station building or on the station square. The dead were collected by so-called ploshchadniki (‘workers who collected bodies on the streets’)

Ukrainians who were lucky enough to get through the police cordons at the station hurried to the market to buy or exchange goods for something edible. Halytskyi, or as the Kyivans called it, Yevbaz (Jewish Market), Bessarabka, Zhytnii Market in Podil. The latter was known for its criminal and speculative atmosphere, which prevailed there during the Holodomor. Stolen goods were sold and resold there, and cases of necrophagia were common.

The Holodomor witness of 1932–1933 said: “…around the Jewish market, because there was a Jewish market, peasants came and sold their last shirts, even before commercial bread, to buy a piece of bread. They brought the last of their possessions. Some of the urban population also sold their last belonging to purchase food, as, for example, a pound of potatoes cost 70 karbovanets at the market in 1933, on the black market. Well, at that time, a teacher earned 350 rubles per month.”

Another Kyiv resident, Holodomor witness Lavro Nechyporenko, noted in his memoirs that for his work as a teacher, he received 200 grams of bread on his bread card, while his family members were considered his dependents and they got 100 grams of bread and 400–600 grams of millet or barley groats per month. Olena Lyskivska stated that in 1933, peasants hardly brought any food to the market because they had nothing left for themselves. When they occasionally managed to find something at the local market, they asked not for money but for something in kind: “And what was that something? Either salt or yeast…”

In addition to market trade, the sale of so-called commercial bread began in April 1933. The cost of bread there ranged from 2.50 to 3.50 karbovanets per loaf, with the average worker’s salary being 125 karbovanets. On the first day, the queue for ‘commercial’ bread was small – about 300 people, but the next day, the queue stretched across the entire neighbourhood. Eyewitness Oleksandr Honcharenko recalled: “The queue is standing. All day, all night, the next day, waiting for his turn to buy bread. He [the man mentioned in O. Honcharenko’s story] had been standing in line for two or three days, and he fell down from hunger and died. I saw this firsthand in Kyiv.” It was dangerous to take children to the bread queue: they could be crushed or pushed out of the queue in the shoving, and there was a risk of losing them forever.

In large cities, there were also torgsins (literally translated as ‘trade with foreigners’). It was a network of state-owned shops that traded industrial and food products for foreign currency and household gold. During the Holodomor, the shop windows of torgsins were full of various goods, mainly loaves of bread, meat delicacies and cereals. Eyewitness Lavro Nechyporenko described the work of the Torgsin in the centre of Kyiv in his memoirs: “All sorts of people crowded around the shop windows of those Torgsins… The vast majority of “foreigners” who entered the shops were ragged and exhausted people from the countryside. They brought there “crumbs” of “precious metal”, some small stuff that had been kept in the family one way or another. They brought gold and silver crosses, wedding rings, and earrings, given by loved ones or purchased with money earned through hard work. Sometimes they brought a gold coin or a silver karbovanets, which had been secretly kept in a knot by a grandfather or grandmother for a long time, to be given to a grandson for his first tooth, or kept for “after death”.

All market squares were crowded not only with merchants, but also with exhausted people begging for alms, numerous homeless people, stray children, and even corpses of people who had died of starvation, which no one paid attention to anymore: so commonplace had deaths from starvation become in everyday Ukrainian life.

Although peasants flooded the cities in search of food, they were not allowed to stay there. According to Varvara Dibert: “Nobody in Kyiv had the right to allow even their closest relatives to spend the night at their home. They had to go to the building commandant with a certificate and have it stamped with the date and duration of their stay. It was not easy for many peasants, especially men and boys, to obtain such certificates. Unmarried women and girls were more fortunate. Sometimes they managed to find work as servants for party officials and thus obtain trade union cards, even without a residence permit.”

City dwellings also fell into disrepair. According to Zahoruiko, a representative of the Kyiv Commission of the City Control Commission of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, the workers’ houses he visited were cold and dirty. Five to seven people lived in rooms measuring 12 square metres. Even in winter, half-naked children were hiding on the stove. There was frost on the walls, and the rooms were not heated because all wages were spent on commercial bread.

Therefore, during the Holodomor of 1932–1933, Kyiv changed irrevocably and permanently. Behind the scenes of the ‘new’ Soviet urban space with its fake prosperity, there were hundreds of thousands of starving people: both Kyiv residents and peasants who tried in every way to get to Kyiv to trade or buy something at the market. The latter turned from ordinary marketplaces into centres of criminal activity, and homeless people shamelessly robbed ordinary shoppers. Quite often, peasants who brought their last goods to exchange for money or food left with nothing, and in essence, they and their families were doomed to starvation. Another centre of extortion was the trade centres, which accepted the last valuable items from Kyiv residents and peasants who came to the city at reduced prices. However, with the money they received, people were able to buy bread or cereals, offering them a glimmer of hope for survival. The Holodomor shifted all emphasis in people’s perceptions of well-being. All thoughts and attention were focused on finding bread or food. Children swelled with hunger, fell ill and died in front of their parents’ eyes. Kyiv was shrouded in the darkness of the Holodomor: train stations crowded with starving, exhausted peasants, endless bread queues, and half-dead beggars on the streets. All this was etched in the memory of those who survived the Soviet genocide. And they could never forget it… And we must remember those terrible years of famine.

Inna Shuhaliova,

Senior researcher at the Department of Holodomor Research

and Man-Made Mass Famines at the

National Museum of the Holodomor Genocide

The photo shows Kyiv Central Railway Station. 1932.

Photo source: Київ від минулого до майбутнього. 

Published in the newspaper ‘Ridnyi Krai’, 18 March 2025.