82 HUMAN LIFE IN RUSSIA
made by the German relief organizations to extricate them
from this position and to send them in a specially chartered
steamer to Brazil, where they were finally settled.
The evidence furnished by certain foreign observers who
succeeded in evading the authorities' precautions and in
reaching the famine areas is, perhaps, even more important
than the above accounts. In August 1934 a London paper
published an account by a young English "Intourist" traveller,
who had managed to elude the control of the authorities for a
time and to travel for some days through the Ukrainian pro-
vinces, the district of Poltava, Belgorod, etc. His observations
coincided to a considerable degree with those made in the
previous year by Malcolm Muggeridge, Harry Lang and
Mr. and Mrs. Stebalo. Most of the famine victims with
whom this traveller was able to talk confirmed that they had
to starve because they had been deprived of their grain in the
autumn of the previous year. They said "they would have
had enough bread to live on if members of the Red Army
had not taken away their harvest." The author describes a
scene witnessed at Belgorod, near Kharkov, where he entered
a cottage in a small village. It was, he writes, "a typical hut
with dirt floor, thatched roof and containing, as the only piece
of furniture, a bench. The occupants were a very thin girl
of fourteen and her brother of two and a half years. This
younger child crawled about the floor like a frog, its poor
little body so deformed from lack of nourishment that it did
not resemble a human being. Its mother had died of starva-
tion when it was one year old. This child had never tasted
milk or butter and only once in its life had tasted meat...."
This Englishman's evidence refers to the Kiev-Kharkov
district. He describes further the terrible effects of hunger
in a village twenty miles distant from Kiev, where most of the
inhabitants had died of starvation. The author finally succeeded
in returning to Moscow without having been stopped or
arrested by the local authorities, and placed himself again
under official guidance as an ordinary tourist. He lived in the