An Outsider's Reading of Forever Flowing (chapters 14 & 15)

A reading of chapters 14 and 15 from the novel "Forever Flowing" by Vasily Grossman.

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This is a partially fictional novel based on events that took place in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1963. It is about a former Gulag (Soviet concentration camp) prisoner named Ivan Grigoryevich. The book follows him after he is released from a twenty-year sentence following Stalin's death in 1955. Ivan tries to reintegrate into society but finds that task much harder than he expected. He discovers that everyone and every place he used to know has changed drastically, and can no longer connect with the society he was taken from in his youth.

This specific selection is about the de-kulakization and collectivization of the Ukrainian farms in the early 1930s, then the famine that followed soon after. "Kulak" was the term used to refer to wealthy peasants in the Soviet Union. They were usually former slaves that had become productive enough to buy another cow, add an extra room to their house, or hire one to two workers to work on the farm. These characteristics were viewed as exploitative in the Soviet Union. The"kulaks" were deemed enemies of the state as an entire class and killed or exiled. This was followed by the collectivization of the farms. Once the "kulaks" had been removed, it was hypothesized that a more fair and prosperous agricultural society would manifest itself. This new society would be communal, so all independent farmers were forced to join the collective farms. The idea was to pool the entire crop yield of an area to meet quotas imposed by the central government in Moscow. The collective farms would then be sent a specified amount of food. In this way, the system would be hypothetically self-supporting, while efficiently supplying the rest of the Soviet Union. As you will hear, in reality, this allowed the central government to supply or not supply entire areas as they pleased. This led to a catastrophe so absolutely terrifying that its difficult to imagine that human beings could allow it to take place. But they did and, painful as it is to admit, we could do the same.

It scares me that I only learned about the horrors of the Soviet Union from YouTube videos in my second year of college. Though it is hard to learn about, I think people need to know about these events just as much as those that took place in Nazi Germany. Certainly, even more people were killed in the Soviet Union than in Nazi Germany.

And I leave you with that. I know this reading may be difficult to listen to, but, the only way to protect from something like this happening again is to fully understand how horrifying it really is. So pay very close attention and try to imagine yourself there, in Ukraine, as your food supplies start running low.

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