Excerpts from the book Red Famine–The Brigades

Local party leaders, their careers on the line, organized groups of activists and sent them, village by village, to begin confiscating whatever grain they could find. A peasant in the village of Sobolivka, in the western part of Ukraine, wrote to his Polish relatives describing how this worked:

The authorities do as follows: they send the so-called brigades which come to a man or a farmer and conduct a search so thorough they even look through the ground with sharp metal tools, through the walls with matches, in the garden, in the straw roof, and if they find even half a pood, they take it away on the horse wagon. This passes for life here... Dear brother Ignacy, if it is possible, I ask you to send me a package, as it is very needed. There is nothing to eat and one must eat.

All these methods recalled the events of the past: in the days of "War Communism" the Red Army had searched peasants' property with similar violence, and with similar disregard for their lives. But they also foreshadowed the immediate future: these were the first of what would bc thousands of many intense, destructive searches, conducted by activists all across Ukraine a year later, in the winter of 1932—3. The use of violence, the smashing of walls and furniture in search of hidden grain—these were a harbinger of what was to come.

Source: Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine (2017) by Anne Applebaum.