Daniel Little hat in seinem Blog anlässlich 90 Jahre Holodomor Reiseerinnerungen Arthur Koestler zusammengetragen, der 1932/33 die Sowjetunion und dort auch die Ukraine besuchte. Dort erlebte er den Beginn der großen Hungersnot:

„The train puffed slowly across the Ukrainian steppe. It stopped frequently. At every station there was a crowd of peasants in rags, offering ikons and linen in exchange against a loaf of bread. The women were lifting up their infants to the compartment windows — infants pitiful and terrifying with limbs like sticks, puffed bellies, big cadaverous heads lolling on thin necks. I had arrived, unsuspecting, at the peak of the famine of 1932-33 which had depopulated entire districts and claimed several million victims. Its ravages are now officially admitted, but at the time they were kept secret from the world. The scenes at the railway-stations all along our journey gave me an inkling of the disaster, but no understanding of its causes and extent. My Russian travelling companions took pains to explain to me that these wretched crowds were kulaks — rich peasants who had resisted the collectivisation of the land and whom it had therefore been necessary to evict from their farms.“

Arthur Koestler zu lesen, und damit auch seine Erfahrung der ideologischen Verblendung nachzuerleben, ist sicherlich immer eine gute Idee.