Authors

Discussion

In March 1932 there was an extreme weather event in southwestern Ukraine. Average daily temperatures plummeted to -23 degrees Celsius and the southern half of the Dniester River was covered in ice three metres deep. Thousands of peasants saw their chance to escape from the Holodomor; they stormed across the river into neighbouring Romania. In response, the Soviet border police began gunning down crossers, perpetrating a series of massacres in which hundreds were killed.

This event was made possible by the imposition of a new border along the Dniester River in the aftermath of the First World War. The new border disrupted every aspect of peasant life, particularly for the ethnic communities who found themselves separated by it: Ukrainians, Moldovans and Jews. My paper examines how these communities on the Soviet side of the river responded to the imposition of this new border and, in the Spring of 1932, its sudden and temporary disappearance. This event disrupted peasant behaviour – they abandoned their protests, strikes, babi bunty, relocations to urban areas, and illegal grain hoarding in favour of a new survival strategy: fleeing to Romania. Similarly, it disrupted the GPU’s border policing operations, prompting them to adopt brutal new tactics during the crossings and new methods of surveillance from then on.