He told us we would work at night, feeding the horses linseed cakes mixed with chopped straw. He said we should do this when people are asleep, because if they were awake, they would eat the horses’ fodder. We said, “How can we do that? People are more important than horses.” And he said, “We need the horses to cart the corpses away.” (oral testimony of Fedir Wereteno)
The Soviets criminalized any mention of the famine and continued to officially deny its very existence until the 1980s, enabled all the while by the slavish gullibility of Western-press...