Account of Engineered Famine in the Ukraine

At the same time, Dolot's account provides an example of some of the difficulties which the use and interpretation of primary sources poses for the historian. The principal difficulties are two: the scope of the author's observations, and his interpretation of them. With respect to the first of these difficulties, Dolot was, so far as we can judge from his own account, an ordinary ordinary village youth, and his account is thus necessarily a "worm'seye" view of the events he recounts. He saw and records what happened in his village, sometimes what happened in nearby villages and towns, and hearsay accounts of events elsewhere which were reported to him. He had no access to other information or perspectives, and thus we are denied any broader context for these events, save in the introduction  this context, not being obtained at first hand, does not shar

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most a (sympathetic) caricature of peasants. Already, when Party officials first appeared in the village, we were shown them being made fools of by the villagers for their ignorance of the most basic facts of rural life; the new Party chief of the village is pictured as being defecated on by a mare, and as not knowing the difference between a colt and a calf (p. 6). In another early encounter, villagers disrupt a compulsory meeting by insisting on bathroom breaks (pp. 2021). Nevertheless, the Party officials quickly impose their power, using what Dolot characterizes as a "cut your own throat" system of administration, in which the farmers were effectively compelled to carry out state policy against themselves (p. 9). Some of the first farmers to yield to the demand for collectivization were rewarded by official positions. In one night, Comrade Zeitlin [the one who didn't know a colt from a calf] collectivized almost twenty percent of our villagers, and also turned some of those farmerfunctionaries into ferocious executors of the Party policy in the village. Having lost their own farms, they could only cling to what they had left, their official position, and so they exerc
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2803
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)