Title: Fields of Ashes
Genre: Historical Drama / Political Thriller
Logline:
In 1933 Ukraine, as Stalin’s regime enforces brutal grain requisitions, a schoolteacher risks everything to save her family and preserve the truth about a man-made famine that will kill millions, while a conflicted Soviet journalist struggles between serving propaganda and exposing genocide.
Synopsis:
The film opens with sweeping shots of Ukraine’s fertile wheat fields—“the breadbasket of Europe.” But as Stalin accelerates collectivization, grain is seized at gunpoint, leaving villages starving.
We follow Nadia, a young widowed schoolteacher in a rural village, who hides scraps of food for her two children while watching her neighbors wither away. Secretly, she keeps a journal documenting the famine, knowing that telling the truth is punishable by death.
Parallel to her story, in Moscow, Dmitri, a Soviet journalist with ambitions of rising in the Party, is assigned to travel to Ukraine and report that collectivization is a success. When he arrives, he confronts the horrific reality—emaciated children, entire villages wiped out, cannibalism whispered in the night. He must choose between loyalty to Stalin and the salvation of his own conscience.
The two storylines intersect when Nadia’s journal is smuggled into Dmitri’s hands. Together, they try to get the truth beyond Soviet borders—risking capture by the NKVD.
Themes:
- The struggle between truth and propaganda.
- The resilience of ordinary people against totalitarian cruelty.
- The moral cost of survival.
Tone & Style:
Think of Schindler’s List and The Pianist—a stark, emotional portrayal of suffering, with brief but powerful moments of human kindness and resistance. Cinematography would contrast golden wheat fields at harvest with the desolation of empty barns and frostbitten corpses in the snow.
Ending:
The film closes with Nadia’s children surviving through Dmitri’s sacrifice, as he is executed for treason. Her journal resurfaces decades later, becoming part of Ukraine’s testimony to the world. A final title card reminds the audience: Millions died in the famine of 1932–33. The Soviet Union denied it for over half a century.
i would share the movie on our own websites
if Kreviazuk makes the music i’ll put the movie on her website
be jeff bezos amazon ad salespeople
I want to put Psalm 33 on the beginning and the end of the movie
keeping them alive in times of famine quote
Black Hawk Down (2001) Hunger
by Hans Zimmer is the music KK
INT. KREMLIN – STALIN’S OFFICE – NIGHT
A cavernous room lit by a single lamp. Maps of the USSR line the walls, with pins stuck in Ukraine’s breadbasket. A decanter of vodka sits untouched.
At the desk sits STALIN, pipe smoke curling above his head. Beside him, MOLOTOV and a young ECONOMIC ADVISOR shuffle papers.
ADVISOR
(uneasy, reading figures)
Comrade General Secretary, the grain exports have arrived in Hamburg, London, New York. But… the markets are flooded. Prices are falling.
MOLOTOV
Yes, Comrade. The capitalists pay pennies for our wheat.
Stalin leans back, expression stone-cold. He exhales a slow drag of smoke.
STALIN
(pensively)
Pennies… is still money.
ADVISOR
But… the people, in Ukraine, in the villages—
Stalin slams his pipe down on the desk. The young man flinches.
STALIN
(interrupting, voice thunderous)
The people do not matter. The Party matters! Industrialization matters! Do you think I care what peasants eat?
A heavy silence. Molotov stiffens, waiting. Stalin’s voice drops to a chilling calm.
STALIN
We will take their grain… and we will sell it, even for kopeks. The factories must have steel, the Red Army must have tanks. Let the West gorge on our bread while our enemies starve.
He takes another drag from his pipe, smoke drifting like a phantom across the maps.
MOLOTOV
(history’s echo in his voice)
The famine will be… deniable, Comrade. Foreign correspondents see what we show them. Nothing more.
Stalin nods, satisfied. He stares at the map of Ukraine, eyes cold, calculating.
STALIN
Let them die in silence. The wheat will build our empire. History will forget the rest.
The Advisor lowers his eyes, trembling, as the sound of a ticking clock fills the room.
FADE OUT.
The Great Famine and Other Crimes
In 1929, there was open unemployment in the cities and concealed
unemployment in the countryside. The population could eat their fill in
that year and the Soviet Union exported 2.5 million tons of grain. On the
9th of October 1930, Stalin officially abolished unemployment by law.
The payment of unemployment benefits ceased at the same time.
Kaganovich believed it necessary to reduce the population at this point.
There were too many people left. The best means to get rid of them was to
bring about a famine. That was why forced collectivisation was introduced
in 1929. It was called “de-kulakisation”, that is to say – the land was taken
away from the land-owning farmers (kulaks). Many smallholders were
also affected, sometimes entire villages, regardless of the inhabitants’
social class. On the 27th of December 1929, Stalin began using Kagano-
vich’s slogan: “Liquidation of the kulaks as a class!” Kulak (‘fist’ in
Russian) was used to refer to a capable and wealthy farmer. Kaganovich
caused the dissolution of village life in Russia.
296
Kaganovich’s most heinous crime was the organisation of the famine in
1932-33 in the Ukraine and northern Caucasia together with Yan Yakov-
lev (Epstein). Lazar Kaganovich took responsibility for agriculture in the
Central Committee in 1933, in order to complete this project more easily.
According to the historian Vladimir Tikhonov, who is also a member of
an academy, there were 26.6 million households in Russia in 1929. Five
years later this figure had sunk to 23.3 million, a reduction of about three
million or 11-12 per cent. Tikhonov’s conclusion: over ten million people
were subjected to arbitrary punishment. The farmers and peasants affected
were “the best, the most experienced and the hardest working”. It had been
decided in the beginning that at least 6.8 million “kulaks” had to be
eliminated. (“The Socialist Build-up of the Soviet Union”, Moscow,
1934.)
The “de-kulakisation”, or collectivisation, was brought about in the
following way: confiscation of houses and all property, and removal of the
kulaks and their families without food in cattle wagons. These transports
meant death to most of the children and the aged. Subsequently, the adults
were forced into hard labour, from which most of them eventually died. In
the construction of the 227 km long White Sea Canal alone, which was
finished in 1933, 250 000 slave labourers died. They were forced to work
at marching pace!
8 million people died as a result of the famine, according to the
historian Sergei Naumov. Some of the victims were eaten (Molodaya
Gvardiya, September 1989). It was an exceedingly serious crime against
humanity, but those responsible for it were never punished. Many
historians have recently reached another figure when calculating the
number of fatalities. Six million died in 1933 alone. 25 000 people died
every day in the Ukraine in the spring of 1933. The dead lay everywhere
in the streets.
Kaganovich had exported most of the grain then produced in the
Ukraine whilst the population starved. About 15 million people died in
connection with the collectivisation. This was genocide. The Bolsheviks,
however, regarded their subjects as the property of the state. They thought
thcy could do whatever they wished with them. Stalin was forced to do
something about unemployment for the sake of propaganda and he made
no secret of this. The foreign financiers could have ended this wholesale
slaughter, but they did not.
297
Three Jews, Lazar Kaganovich, Yakov Yakovlev (Epstein) and Grigori
Kaminsky, decided how many kulaks were necessary and who should be
regarded as “kulaks” and be driven away from their land to Siberia, to
prisons and forced-labour camps. They decided to deal with the threat of
the other independent peasants by forcing them into kibbutzes (milder
versions of which have been tested in Palestine since 1909). The members
of those kibbutzes, called kolkhozes and sovkhozes in Soviet Russia, were
not given passports, since the Soviet authorities regarded these new slaves
as their property. They were not allowed to move or escape from their
virtually unpaid and degrading work (there was always a Politruk in every
kolkhoz, who made sure that everything happened in a Communist way).
Since those compulsory workers lacked domestic passports they had, in
principle, no civic rights. Special permission was needed even to go
shopping or trading in the nearest town. This system was only abolished in
the 1970s.
Trotsky, in exile, wrote in 1931 that collectivisation was a “new era in
the history of man and the beginning of the end of the idiocy in the
countryside”. (Leon Trotsky, “Problems of the
Development of the
USSR”, 1931.)
During the time of the first Trotskyist collectivisation policy, between
1929 and 1932, not only human beings were destroyed but also 17.7
million horses, 29.8 million cattle (of which 10 million milk cows), 14.4
million pigs and 93.9 million sheep and goats. There were 19.6 million
horses, just 40.7 million cattle, 11 million pigs and 32.1 million goats left
in 1932. A total of 159.4 million farm animals vanished between 1929 and
1934. The author Yuri Chernichenko commented on this in the newspaper
Literaturnaya Gazeta on the 14th of April 1988, where he said: “It was a
war, a strike against the nation’s productive powers, of such magnitude
that the classic horror scenes from the battle of Stalingrad seem pale and
naive in comparison.”
This led to a famine in the winter of 1932-33, just as Lazar Kaganovich
and his closest comrades had planned. It was forbidden to sell grain on the
open market. The agricultural production was reduced by a quarter and the
meat production by a half during those five years, 1929-1933, according to
the historian G. Shmelev. At the same time, 1.8 million tons of grain were
exported. The official Soviet slogan was very cynical: “All for the good of
the people, all is done in the name of the people’s happiness!”
298
Kaganovich and his cronies brought about this genocide by the intro-
duction of confiscatory taxation on those peasants who remained after the
extermination of the “kulaks”. Meanwhile, he sent out new gangs of fana-
tical activists who commanded enforcement patrols, especially in the
Ukraine, where the borders to the other Soviet republics had been closed
off. The political activists took away every grain of corn and every egg,
every vegetable and every fruit of the farms’ produce. Convoys of trucks
carried all the food away. Each piece of bread, which should have been
brought to the starving, was confiscated at the border. Every Ukrainian,
who might be suspected of the least, often invented, attempt at lessening
the full impact of the famine or of hiding foodstuffs from the authorities,
was shot or sent to the labour camps. (Robert Conquest, “The Harvest of
Sorrow: Soviet Collektivization and the Terror-Famine”, Alberta, 1986.)
Each morning, wagons drove about to collect the dead in the Ukraine
and southern Russia. Bodies lined the roads in Central Asia too. Canni-
balism became increasingly common in the Ukraine in 1934. Several
sources show that the famine even brought forth actual slaughterhouses
for orphaned children, whose meat was later sold.
Victims of the famine in the Ukraine in 1933.
299
Lazar Kaganovich and his accomplices were ultimately responsible for
the deaths of nearly 15 million people during the great famine. If we add a
further 15 million – the number of those who died during the collectivi-
sation, we see that Kaganovich and his gang of bandits destroyed nearly
30 million human lives in just a few years. But not even that appalling
mountain of victims seems to have satisfied Stalin’s or Kaganovich’s thirst
for blood.
Therefore, in 1932, they also began the first massive wave of terror
since Lenin’s death. Most of those who were sent to forced-labour camps
were thereby practically sentenced to death. Already in 1921, Lenin and
Trotsky had built the Kholmogory death-camp near Arkhangelsk, where
prisoners were slowly killed and constantly replaced. Kaganovich used the
same method. It usually took just two weeks to kill the weakest prisoners.
Many of the inmates in “normal” camps were later sentenced to death by
shooting, either by special “revolutionary” tribunals or by instruction from
the NKVD. There were also special elimination camps, where prisoners
were sent in a steady stream to be killed.
I must point out here that a large number of prisoners never even
reached their camps due to the immensely cruel treatment they received.
For example, the Jewish administrators had worked out the following
method: the train was stopped at some station where the temperature was
20 degrees below zero and everyone was commanded to undress. The
prisoners were then “showered” with ice-cold water from hoses. The
soldiers shouted: “Lovely steam!” (Rahva Haal, 12th of July 1989.)
This terror knew no limits. When all the jigsaw pieces are finally in
place, we are faced with the most horrible picture of reality I have ever
heard or read about. Dante’s “Inferno” is child’s play by comparison.
The Great Terror
By 1937, another 18 million people besides the 30 million who had been
eliminated during the collectivisation and the famine had lost their lives as
a result of Kaganovich’s wave of terror. It was still not enough. There
were still “too many people” left. That was why the great terror was begun
in 1937. People were executed in waves, according to the historian Dmitri
Yurasov. One such wave occurred in Moscow and Leningrad on the 30th
300
EXT. UKRAINIAN VILLAGE – DAY
Winter frost coats the wheat fields already stripped bare. Emaciated villagers huddle by their huts, their eyes hollow, clothes in tatters. An eerie silence hangs—no livestock, no bread, no laughter.
The stillness breaks with the thunder of TRUCKS. Red Army soldiers in greatcoats march in, bayonets gleaming. Behind them steps LAZAR KAGANOVICH, sharp-eyed, expression of stone, clutching a leather ledger.
He surveys the village like a man taking inventory of furniture, not lives.
KAGANOVICH
(to soldiers)
Search every house. Every barn. Every cellar. Leave nothing behind.
The soldiers fan out. Women cry out, clutching sacks of grain or meager potatoes. Bayonets push them back.
Inside a hut, a soldier drags a hidden sack of flour from beneath the floorboards. A starving MOTHER throws herself at his feet.
MOTHER
Please! My children—without it they’ll die!
Kaganovich steps into the doorway, unflinching.
KAGANOVICH
(speaks coldly, rehearsed)
The grain belongs to the state. To the Revolution. To Comrade Stalin.
MOTHER
(weeping)
They will starve!
He gestures to the soldier.
KAGANOVICH
Then they will learn that loyalty is stronger than hunger.
The soldier yanks the sack away. The mother collapses.
Kaganovich notes something in his ledger, like a banker tallying debt. He steps outside, looking over the confiscated piles of food stacked onto trucks.
Villagers watch in silence, gaunt faces twisted with despair. One boy, no more than ten, spits in the dirt at Kaganovich’s boots.
The soldiers raise their rifles, but Kaganovich waves them down with a slight smile.
KAGANOVICH
(to the boy)
Spit all you like. You will have no strength left tomorrow.
He climbs onto the truck as engines roar to life. The convoy pulls away, leaving behind a village stripped of life.
The camera lingers on the mother, cradling her skeletal child, whispering a lullaby too weak to soothe.
FADE TO BLACK.