Famous Monsters

Respectively,these stamps are titled Famine, Taras Shevchenko, Death Stalking Peasant and Ukraine Distributing Food. As semipostal stamps, part of the revenue from their sale was earmarked for relief caused by an economic collapse and famine in the Soviet Union during the years 1921-22. This famine is said to have claimed 5 million lives.

In 1921, the Soviet's New Economic Policy allowed landownership by peasants and some private commerce and industry. By 1923, at the time these stamps were minted, Soviet Ukraine was allowed to practice a policy known as "indigenization." These policies, a part of that New Economic Policy, allowed non-Russian ethnic groups to re-establish some of their pre-revolutionary cultural life. The following citation comes from editor James E. Mace's Introduction to The Ninth Circle --In Commemoration of the Victims of the Famine of 1933, by Olexa Woropay.

Since the Ukrainians of all the non-Russian nations were the most numerous and constituted the greatest political threat to Moscow, Ukrainization went much farther than any of its counterparts. Many prominent Ukrainian intellectual and political leaders returned from exile to take advantage of the cultural opportunities afforded by this relatively benevolent policy. A national cultural revival of unprecedented creativity took place in literature, scholarship and the arts.

Joseph Stalin was general secretary of the Communist Party from 1922 to1953 and premier from 1941 to 1953. In 1929 Stalin decided to end the indigenization policies and began forcing peasants into collective farms. In subsequent trials, some of Ukraine's most distinguished intellectual and spiritual leaders were convicted of "wrecking," a term given to a host of crimes that included just about anything that the prosecutors could concoct. The typical sentence was exile to Siberia or execution. According to Mace,

...The Soviet government had collectivized agriculture, forced the farmers to give up their individual farms, pool whatever resources could be taken from them, work the land in common on estates not unlike that on which Shevchenko worked as a serf, and give a far greater share of what they produced to the state. The farmers fought against this, and they also fought for their national culture, which was under attack by the Soviet regime. It was in order to break this resistance that government agents were sent into the countryside and ordered to take away all food stuffs. As a result, the people starved.