Oleksandra Radchenko: Ten Years in the Gulag for Keeping Diaries About the Holodomor
In 1945, Ukrainian teacher Oleksandra Radchenko was sentenced to ten years in Soviet forced labour camps. Among the principal pieces of evidence against her were her personal diaries, in which she had documented the Holodomor of 1932–1933.
She had written them for her children, hoping that one day they would understand what had happened in Ukraine. But when her daughters read the diaries after their mother's arrest, they became so frightened for their family's safety that they burned several notebooks.
Other diaries survived in the archives of the Soviet security services — preserved as evidence in her criminal case.
A Teacher from Okhtyrka
Oleksandra Radchenko was born in 1896 in Okhtyrka, in what is now Ukraine's Sumy region.
She worked as a teacher, was married to a forester named Vasyl Radchenko, and raised three daughters.
During the Holodomor of 1932–1933, the family lived in the Kharkiv region, near Chuhuiv. Forestry workers were exempt from grain procurement quotas, and the family had some food reserves.
Oleksandra and her husband tried to help starving peasants. They hired severely weakened people from neighbouring villages for day labour, giving them an opportunity to obtain food. For some, this help meant the difference between life and death.
Oleksandra witnessed what was happening around her. People were starving, families were losing loved ones, and the familiar life of Ukrainian villages was being destroyed.
She wrote down what she saw.
Diaries for Future Generations
Oleksandra Radchenko began keeping diaries in 1926. She recorded everyday life, her personal experiences, and events she witnessed.
During 1932–1933, her writings became a record of the mass starvation unfolding around her.
She was neither a journalist nor a professional historian. She was not gathering material for publication, nor did she expect her diaries to become known to a wider audience.
She was writing for her children.
At her trial in 1945, Oleksandra explained:
“I have a passion for recording all my experiences in diaries. I dedicated my diary to my children so that, twenty years later, they could read it and see how the people suffered and groaned, what a terrible famine there was. Everything is reflected in my notes. I did not exaggerate; I described all the horrors.”
These words explain why she continued writing despite the danger.
She wanted her children to know what had really happened.
Arrest and Ten Years in the Gulag
In 1945, Oleksandra Radchenko was living in Horodok, then part of the Kamianets-Podilskyi region, now Ukraine's Khmelnytskyi region.
During a search of her home, Soviet security officers discovered seven notebooks containing her diary entries.
Investigators accused her of anti-Soviet activity. According to the case materials, she had recorded allegedly slanderous statements about the Soviet authorities and the Communist Party.
On December 14, 1945, Oleksandra Radchenko was sentenced to ten years in forced labour camps, with confiscation of her property and deprivation of certain civil rights for five years.
She served her sentence in the Norilsk labour camps.
After her release in 1955, Oleksandra returned to Ukraine and settled in Vovchansk, in the Kharkiv region.
She died in 1965.
In 1991, Oleksandra Radchenko was officially rehabilitated.
“We Thought They Would Execute Our Entire Family”
After their mother's arrest, her daughters found several diary notebooks that had not been confiscated during the search.
Years later, Oleksandra's daughter Elida recalled:
“Mama never hid her diaries. They got to the box where the diaries were kept. I managed to hide five or six notebooks that were lying on the table under a pillow. After Mama's arrest, we began reading them, and there were so many horrors written about the Holodomor that we thought they would execute our entire family. So we burned them…”
The daughters destroyed some of their mother's writings because they feared that the contents could lead to the persecution of the entire family.
Oleksandra Radchenko had written her diaries so that her children would know the truth about what people had endured. But when her children finally read them, they feared that this truth could cost the entire family their lives.
Elida's testimony reveals something beyond the fate of one woman. It shows how state terror compelled people to destroy documents, letters, and personal records that might otherwise have preserved the memory of what had happened.
The Diaries Preserved in a Criminal Case
The fate of Oleksandra Radchenko's diaries was extraordinary.
Some notebooks were destroyed by her daughters. But the seven notebooks confiscated by Soviet security officers survived in the archives, together with the materials of her criminal case.
In 2001, they were discovered in the Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).
Some of the entries were published in 2007 in the documentary collection Declassified Memory: The Holodomor of 1932–1933 in Ukraine in GPU–NKVD Documents (Розсекречена пам’ять. Голодомор 1932–1933 років в Україні в документах ГПУ–НКВД).
Thus, the diaries for which Oleksandra Radchenko received a ten-year prison sentence became accessible to historians and readers.
Soviet investigators had preserved them as evidence of what they considered a crime committed by their author. Today, those same documents help researchers investigate the crimes of the Soviet authorities.
Oleksandra Radchenko at the Museum of State Terror
At the Museum of State Terror, we are creating an exhibition dedicated to Oleksandra Radchenko.
We are recreating the interior of a Ukrainian home from the 1930s, with a wooden table, traditional embroidered textiles, furniture, and everyday household objects.
We want visitors to be able to imagine the surroundings in which a woman lived who left behind such important testimony.
But the central element of this exhibition will be her diaries.
We intend to gradually publish Oleksandra Radchenko's surviving diary entries on the museum's website, introducing readers to her accounts of the Holodomor and telling the stories of the people and events she described.
We will accompany these publications with historical context to help readers understand the circumstances in which the entries were written.
For us, it is important to preserve Oleksandra Radchenko's own voice — the voice of a woman who continued recording what was happening around her despite the danger.
She wanted her children to read her diaries twenty years later.
Nearly a century has passed since the Holodomor.
