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the village, leaving a tangle of loose ends behind. No one knew where he had gone or what he was doing. The villagers began to forget about him, but when the collectivization started, Khizhniak reappeared.
    In organizing the Hundred’s Bread Procurement Commission, Comrade Zeitlin and his Party and government assistants seemed to have drawn mainly on the degenerate elements of our village for their workers. Khizhniak’s commission serves as a vivid example of this. True, there were honest and industrious villagers whom we knew and respected among the members of the commission, but its core was composed of individuals with sadistic impulses. Besides Comrade Khizhniak, one of the other members that I knew was the vicious Vasil Khomenko, a man whose sadism made him infamous in our village.
    The other commission members were not so notorious as Khizhniak or Khomenko; nevertheless, they still belonged to that troublesome group that made the villagers’ lives insecure and miserable.
    Ivan Bondar, or “Comrade Judas,” was another member. He came to our Hundred a few days after the church was destroyed. As our Hundred happened to bear the number “One,” the village officials wanted to make it a model for the other Hundreds. Therefore, they staffed it with the most trusted individuals. Comrade Judas soon found perfect accord with Comrades Khizhniak and Khomenko.
    Almost absolute power was given to these Party and government functionaries. Their abilities were measured by the amount of foodstuff they could extract from the farmers and by the number of farmers they could collectivize in the shortest amount of time. They used whatever methods were effective in accomplishing their task. The Communist dictums that the end justifies the means, and that the winner is always right, were the credos of the day.
    There is a Ukrainian proverb that says that a master is not as cruel as a servant would be in his place. Comrade Khizhniak and his lieutenants, all farmers themselves, promoted to official positions, became drunk with power; they used their officialdom to exert a ruthlessness and cruelty unheard of in our village. There seemed no limitation to their arbitrariness and vanity. The activity of the commission was carefully planned and coordinated. Comrade Khizhniak, the propagandist, and a few other members of the commission presided at the court in the Hundred’s headquarters. They would summon those farmers who had shown themselves to be stubborn or suspicious and would “work” on them individually. Comrades Khomenko and Judas, with the rest of the Hundred’s functionaries, worked through the Tens and Fives, also individually. However, they concentrated their efforts on conducting meetings of members of those units. We had to attend one meeting or another practically every day, Sundays included. The Sunday meetings would usually start early in the morning and last all day long.
    The commission functionaries of our Hundred, as well as those of all the others, used strictly prescribed methods in dealing with us. One method, unsophisticated but effective, was “path treading,” as the functionaries termed it. A farmer would be called to his Hundred and the usual interrogation would follow. Why had he not joined the collective farm? This same question would be asked repeatedly. The Hundred’s officials would tell him that only an “enemy of the people” opposed the Communist policy of collectivization. Since there was no place for an “enemy of the people” in the Soviet Union, there would be no choice for him: he either had to join the collective farm, or be eliminated. Finally, they would give him a pencil to sign the application and thus avoid all trouble. Some did sign, but the majority refused, using various excuses and pretexts.
    At this point, the “path-treading” method would be used. The official would tell the farmer to take some message to the