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Оleksandr Shvydny recalls events that occurred in the villages of Chervony Shliakh (currently Losynivka), Viunnytsia (Losynivka station), and Nosivka, all in Nizhyn raion, Chernihiv oblast, during the Holodomor.

He was one of seven children in the family. His father worked at Viunnytsia (now Losynika) railway station and had a land lot since 1927. 

He had a mare and a wagon that he donated to the collective farm once it was created in the village in 1930. Four out of seven children began working on the collective farm. Shvydny mentions that there were those who were hiding the grain from searches, engaged in sabotage, and did not deliver the required grain quotas. This was not the case with Shvydny’s father, who delivered successfully in-kind tax in 1929-1931. The local “Stalin’s activists,” Horobei, Petryk and Prokhor began persecuting Shvydny’s father “out of spite.” He was designated as kulak, although in reality he was hardly even a middling farmer, and forced to leave the village and even Ukraine. He left to work on the construction of the Moskow – Donbas railroad and did not return.

The family, left behind, was pillaged by the search brigade. Members of a search brigade Petryk and Prokhor took all the remaining food away in spring of 1932. Shvydny writes that in the fall of 1932, people affected by starvation began moving (through Chervony Shliak) from the Poltava region and die, and by 1933, starvation engulfed Losynivka and other nearby villages. Survival in the villages depended to a large degree on the actions of the local leaders. Some were more merciful, like the head of the collective farm in Chervony Shliak Bondar, who made sure that people in the collective farm were fed some gruel (zatyrka) after Petrovsky visited the village (and likely authorized to use some grain to feed the people) or Serhii Shumeiko in Nosivka, took steps to provide people with some food, was not too cruel to those designated as kulaks, and left a local church be. Shvydny claims that no one died of starvation in Chervony Shliakh. Others were cruel, committed violent acts and even extrajudicial killings. Starvation led some people to commit acts of cannibalism, which was the case in Losynivka.

Shvydny also mentions that there were “kulak gangs” operating in the village of Losynivka in 1928-1929. They would set properties on fire at nighttime. In Chervony Shliakh, the head of the collective farm Kh. Bondar and Ivan Horobei were shot at through the window by such a gang.

Shvydny names a few “activists” from search brigades and grave diggers in Chervony Shliakh and Losynivka who distinguished themselves by fervor and cruelty during the execution of their duties. In the end, he notes that either Stalin or Kosior made them do it.

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