Tag: famine

The Icelandic historian Thorarinn Hjartarson has written a piece about the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine. What follows is most of the second part of his analysis.

Causes of grain shortage

Historians explain the food shortage in the Soviet Union in 1933 in various ways. The predominant view is that the dramatic changes imposed by the collectivisation campaign led to confusion and chaos. This is the view held by, among others, R.W. Davies and St. Wheatcroft. This is, incidentally, also the view held by the current government in Moscow.

Others give preference to environmental circumstances as causal factors. Mark B. Tauger is probably the main proponent in the West of such views.

Tauger writes that the famine was primarily a consequence of a number of natural circumstances during the period 1931–32 that were not referred to in official statistics at the time (Stalin, Soviet Agriculture and Collectivization“, p. 112). A drought ravaged the land in 1931, whereas excessive precipitation and humidity was the problem in 1932 (in Ukraine precipitation was almost three times the average). The harvest looked promising during the summer, but various kinds of mould and mildew infected the harvest, particularly in Ukraine and North Caucasus, where as much as 70% of the harvest was damaged in large areas.

Tauger refers to figures from state farms (sovkhozi) in Ukraine in 1932, according to which only 60% of the required quota had been achieved. On the other hand, Tauger finds an abrupt 60 % harvest increase from 1932 to 1933, specifically in Ukraine. (The 1932 Harvest…, p. 81)

….

Collectivisation

Collectivisation, which was imposed – at breakneck speed – in 1930, revolutionised ownership and production in the countryside, where all the food was produced. More than half of all farms had been collectivised as early as in 1931. Such a “shock therapy” naturally spawned a whole series of problems that would necessarily lead to a decline in production; from discontent to anger and outright resistance among farmers, compounded by violence against owners of large farms.

Meanwhile, investment prioritised industry, and there was an exodus from the countryside to the towns. In short: Chaos.

What followed were two years of poor harvests, 1931 and 1932. Food was rationed in all of the country’s cities, and rations were repeatedly reduced both years. Tauger describes the ensuing chaos and some of the authorities’ reactions: People fled from factories and from collective farms, so there were millions of people just drifting throughout the country, in search of better conditions. Towards the end of 1932, the authorities re-introduced a “tsarist” rule requiring “internal passports”. (Ibid p. 86-87). The authorities particularly wanted to stop the influx of people to areas affected by food shortages. The internal passport requirement has been interpreted as part and parcel of Stalin’s authoritarian style, and of his genocidal intentions. In reality, it is more a reflection of the extent of chaos in the country at this point….

If the chaos in the country was a direct consequence of the collectivisation campaign, the subsequent famine can be said to be so too. In fact that is what the majority of historians studying the issue have concluded. Though meteorological conditions may have reduced the harvest, as described above, we should safely be able to say that harvest reduction hit the Soviet Union, and not least Ukraine, at a difficult point in time.

Mark B. Tauger is not convinced that collectivisation as such caused the famine. For one thing the harvest of 1933 was excellent, also in Ukraine, in spite of the fact that the grain seeds had been sown during the spring when the famine was at its worst (Tauger, Soviet Peasants and Collectivization, 1930-39: Resistance and Adaptation, p. 84-85).

In order to assess the effects of collectivisation, we have to take a look at the prevailing conditions at the time and also during the period preceding it. There were Socialist uprisings here and there in Europe at the end of the war in 1918, but only in one country was there a successful revolution, and that country was inhabited mainly by peasants engaged in primitive agriculture. According to Marxist theory, socialism required a well-developed industrial society. A bone of contention among the Bolsheviks was whether it was possible to create industry in a Soviet society without any help from other socialist countries, and if so, how.

The economic basis was rickety, indeed. Robert C. Allen, Professor of Economic History at New York University, Abu Dhabi, and Senior Research Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, is the author of Farm to Factory. A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution (2003). This is an extensive study of statistical material in several countries, including tsarist Russia …. Judging from official figures, the economy and productivity of Soviet Russia in the twenties – the period referred to as NEP (1921-28) – was equivalent to that of South-East Asia and the poorest parts of South America. The country had little in common with countries such as Germany and the USA (Allen, p. 3-4).

The crux of the problem was the backwardness of agriculture. Allen compares agriculture in the European part of Russia to agriculture in areas in Canada with similar meteorological and topographic conditions. … According to his calculations, production per hectare in the twenties was very similar in the two areas. However, production per working person was 8 times greater in Canada. (Allen p. 73).

In 1928, 82% of the Soviet population lived in rural areas, working under relatively primitive conditions. Villages were over-populated and produced only a slim surplus to send to markets in the cities. The country was thus vulnerable to harvest fluctuations and food insecurity, and famines occurred fairly frequently. After all, one of the main demands of the October Revolution had been “Bread!” Hence there were several famines during the twenties. The worst of them was at the end of the civil war in 1921-22, when fatalities probably numbered about 5 million. Another serious famine occurred in 1928-1929, and not without reason.

After the October revolution, agricultural productivity decreased. One important reason for this was that the proportion of people living in rural areas had grown from less than 70% (in the last year before the war, 1913) to 82% in 1928. Per capita production in Russia/the Soviet Union was thus almost the same in 1928 as in 1900, and it had fallen since 1913 (Allen, p. 5).

The Russian Revolution had to a large extent been a peasant revolution. Peasants divided the major landowners’ land between them. This they felt entitled to do in view of the revolutionary activities in the cities. … As a result, the number of farms rose from 16 million in 1913 to 28 million in 1928.

Creating industry without foreign investment requires enormous economic effort. For the Soviet Union, there were few other sources of capital than the country’s agricultural sector. However, most farmers were still living practically in a barter-economy. They had little surplus to sell. What little excess production reached the cities was produced by large farms. Determining prices of industrial goods versus agricultural goods became a source of contention towards the end of the NEP period. When business conditions benefited the agricultural sector, owners of the large farms were the ones to thrive, something that stimulated capitalism within the sector. When, on the other hand, business conditions benefited industrial production, agricultural produce was not delivered to the market and the reciprocal exchange of goods between the sectors shrank.

One consequence of all the land partitioning was thus that the amount of agricultural produce for sale in the cities fell sharply. In 1928, it shrank by 24% compared to 1913. As for the most important of all the agricultural commodities, grain, the reduction of produce that reached the cities was 50%; likewise for potatoes and vegetables. The Communist Party and its policies were in deep trouble (Allen, p. 79-81).

Moreover, wheat and grain in general had constituted the country’s main exports during tsarist times. Exported grain in 1928 amounted to no more than 1:20 as compared to in 1913. …

In other words, the agricultural sector proved incapable of a substantial rise in productivity under the prevailing conditions, and as a result society as a whole was vulnerable to imminent famines. …

To ensure food security in the country and to stimulate industrialisation, the Communist Party decided to restructure the entire agricultural sector.

Collectivisation as a prerequisite for industrialisation

They opted for a fairly drastic measure: that of the collectivisation campaign. I won’t go into the details of how it was performed, but briefly look at the outcome in terms of production and productivity.

Production fell in 1931 and 1932, but rose during the following years. In 1937 the country’s total production was 10% higher than in 1928. More importantly, though, the supply of grain to the cities had risen by 62%. This can be explained by the fact that productivity had doubled after the collectivisation, not least since the new, large agricultural units could sustain tractors and other mechanised farming equipment. As a result, fewer working hands were needed, so large numbers of people left the land to work in industrial plants. During the thirties, 25 million people moved from rural communities to thriving and rapidly growing industrial towns (Allen, p. 100-101).

It seems clear, then, that though the collectivisation campaign was far from pretty, it did ensure future food security for the Soviet Union. Also, it seems to me, while recent history is dotted with numerous and terrible famines, only some are stridently flagged as “crimes against humanity”. The Holodomor narrative appears to be a cynical manipulation of a tragedy for political purposes.

I should add that the ongoing accelerating ecological breakdown is indeed a crime against humanity. Its results will include global famine. It is currently being hastened by Russia, Ukraine, the USA, the EU and other NATO countries. The victims: the largely powerless inhabitants of the countries perpetrating the crime and, to an even greater degree, the populations of the Global South.

The Icelandic historian Thorarinn Hjartarson has written a piece about the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine. What follows is most of the first part of his analysis. The quotes included by the author were translated by him to Icelandic from English. Since I have been unable to consult all his sources, I must include some of the quotes indirectly, foregoing quotation marks.

On 23 March, the Icelandic National Assembly (Allting) unanimously approved the following resolution: “The Allting declares that the Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933 was a genocide.”

The statement accompanying the resolution reads:

The famine was a direct consequence of forced collectivisation, and was systematically used as retribution… The Soviet authorities’ aim was to suppress Ukrainian national sensibilities. Hence the Ukrainians were deliberately starved for political purposes.

https://www.althingi.is/altext/153/s/0834.html

A multinational effort

The Icelandic National Assembly (Allting) has taken the extraordinary step of determining the cause of a famine that occurred 90 years ago in Ukraine. I am not aware of any Icelandic historian who has discussed it, and it is hardly likely that members of the Allting have been able to acquaint themselves with its circumstances. Most probably, quite a few of them had never even heard about it. But do we really have to know? As long as others “know”, we should be on the safe side, no? This is, after all, a multinational effort, a response to the “plea from Ukraine” in which the expression “genocide” is used to describe the famine in question.

The essence of the Icelandic resolution and the accompanying statement is that the famine was perpetrated by the authorities in Moscow, “deliberately and for political reasons” and that it was targeted particularly against the Ukrainian population.

Why is the Allting adopting such a resolution? No resolution has been adopted about, say, the famine in Bengal in 1943, which killed millions. That affair would be closer to home, as it were, since the British were in charge there. The answer is pretty obvious: the purpose of the resolution is to support today’s Ukrainians in their war and to thwart today’s Russia and stir up more russophobia.

A famine ravaged in the Soviet Union during the winter and spring of 1933. According to Wikipedia it claimed 5.5–8.7 million lives, 3.3–5 millions of whom were in Ukraine. There is little controversy about the extent of the famine. Most historians today, including Timothy Snyder and Stephan G. Wheatcroft, who differ in most other respects, set the number of lost lives in Ukraine at around 3.5 million. Ukrainian nationalists, however, multiply that figure to 7 million, and the West-leaning former President Jushenko stated, on his visit to the USA in 2006 that “Holodomor claimed 20 million Ukrainian lives”.

During the Cold War, proponents of the blood-curdling theory that the famine was genocide – deliberately carried out by the authorities in Moscow against the Ukrainians – were mainly Ukrainian emigrants in the West.

The British historian Robert Conquest introduced it to the field of historical study with his book Harvest of Sorrow in 1986. Conquest was already world-famous after having written his anti-Communist magnum opus The Great Terror in 1968, about “Stalin’s purges”. In the 1986 book (Harvest of…) he maintained that the famine in Ukraine had been a deliberately engendered scourge upon the people. It was the result not of any food shortage, but of the authorities’ rigorous demands for and collection of grain in the wake of the collectivisation campaign in 1930. Conquest wrote that the lesson to be learned appeared to be that Communist ideology served as the basis for an unparalleled genocide of men, women and children. In other words the lesson he had learned was about the malevolence of Communism.

He quotes Ukrainian scholars who hold that collectivisation was imposed on the Ukrainian people with the specific purpose of suppressing the Ukrainian separatist movement and to do away with the social foundation underlying Ukrainian nationalism: private ownership of land (Harvest of Sorrow, p. 219). However, the collectivisation was implemented in the same manner elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Was it intended as a scourge on other peoples too? As theories goes, this one seems a bit far-fetched.

On the independence of Ukraine in 1991, and particularly after anti-Russian forces came to power and the orange revolution (2004), the Holodomor theory has become the bedrock of Ukrainian nationalism and national conscience and has been taught in all schools. Under the leadership of Viktor Júsjenkó (2005-2010) the Holodomor Law was enacted in 2006.

Section 1 states that Holodomor 1932–1933 was the genocide of the Ukrainian people.

Section 2 states that Public denial of Holodomor amounts to an insult against the memory of millions of Holodomor’s victims and an offence against the dignity of the Ukrainian people, and is punishable by law.

This law still applies, and Ukrainian nationalism systematically seeks to erase the distinction between the past and the present in order to nurture anti-Russian sentiment. Putin is said to continue where Stalin left off.

Harnessing history to politics is not a Ukrainian invention, but prohibiting discussion and alternative interpretations is undoubtedly a bit over the top. The Russian Duma’s reaction in 2008 to Kiev’s historical analysis was: “the famine in 1933 does not qualify as genocide according to the internationally accepted definition of the term”.

The purpose of the multinational declaration stating that the famine amounted to genocide is twofold:1) It serves to perpetuate the disrepute of Communism 2) It is a weapon in the ongoing campaign against present and past Russia.

So what actually happened in Ukraine in 1932–33?

Asking Ukrainians will probably not be helpful, since any surviving doubts about the official storyline are punishable by law.

During the cold war, discussion in the West about the Soviet Union tended to be highly politicised and dichotomous. Political sympathies inevitably coloured analyses of the country’s history and the ideological dividing line between opponents ran between (market) liberal and socialist sympathies. The narrative about the collectivisation held a fairly prominent position in that discussion, not least because that was a field in which anti-communist authors held excellent ammunition.

With the gradual opening of the Soviet archives starting under Gorbachov, we have seen the emergence of interpretations that tend to explain developments around 1930 in economic rather than political terms. However, ever since Ukraine was dragged into a geopolitical confrontation in the wake of the Orange Revolution in 2004, the Maidan Revolution in 2014 and the invasion of Russia in 2022, Ukrainian history has once again increasingly been understood from a political and moral perspective, cf. The Turn Away from Economic Explanations for Soviet Famines.

What side we are on about our interpretation of history tends to determine what side we are on in the present conflict and vice versa.

Timothy Snyder

In 2010, a book published by the US history professor Timothy Snyder became a best-seller in the USA, Germany and Poland: Bloodlands. Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, about the Soviet Union, Poland and Ukraine from 1932 to 1945. Morally, he basically equates Stalin’s and Hitler’s regimes and adds that we now know, having discussed Soviet documents for 20 years, that in 1932, Stalin turned collective farming’s famine into a politically motivated deliberate starvation campaign. (Chapter 1). He adds that Stalin’s campaign targeted the Ukrainians because of their nationality.
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/136199

Snyder has no primary references about the famine, but he supports his claim by extensively quoting nationalist Ukrainian historians. His book has lent academic credence to the Holodomor narrative. Snyder is much appreciated in Ukraine and has been a guest of President Zelensky.

He is using history as a political crowbar. Ever since the occupation of Crimea in 2014, he has written a barrage of articles explaining how Putin is an existential threat not only to Ukraine but to all of Europe and that he continues where Stalin left off.

Davies and Wheatcroft

Over the past twenty years or so, the British professor, R.W. Davis has been the West’s grand old man about Soviet economic history. (He died in 2021.) Together with E.H. Carr, he wrote the last volume of the great History of Soviet Russia. His bibliography includes the seven-volume Industrialisation of Soviet Russia, one volume of which is called The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931-1933. The co-author to that volume is Professor Stephen Wheatcroft, based in Melbourne, whose specialist field is Soviet social, economic and demographic history, as well as agriculture and famines all over the world. He has engaged in detailed studies of the Soviet collectivisation campaign.

Davies and Wheatcroft’s book is the single most detailed and thorough book about the “grain crisis” in the Soviet Union in the 1930s that has ever been published, at least in the West. One of the main conclusions of the book is that the famine was a result of a severe grain shortage in the country, not that grain was withheld from people. The authors take pains to dismiss Robert Conquest’s claims on that score, not least because those claims had been so widely disseminated and trumpeted.

[The following is a back translation:] Our studies about the famine have led us to completely different conclusions than those reached by Dr. Conquest. He argues that Stalin “wanted the famine”, that the Soviet authorities did not want to deal with it successfully and that the famine was deliberately imposed on Ukraine. The story we are telling in our book is the story of Soviet authorities struggling with a famine crisis that to some extent was caused by their own failed policies, but which at any rate was unexpected and unwelcome. Their agricultural policies were formed by conditions preceding the revolution, by civil war experiences, by the situation on the international stage, by intractable geographical and meteorological conditions as well as by the modus operandi of the Soviet system during the Stalin era. They were formed by people with inadequate relevant training. Above all, the famine was a consequence of the decision to industrialise agricultural land in record time.

R.W. Davies og Stephen G Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture 1931-1933, p. 441

The book includes a footnote quoting R. Conquest explaining that he had not maintained that Stalin had intentionally caused the famine in 1933, only that when the famine was imminent, he could have prevented it. Here Wheatcroft writes that when he and Davies confronted R. Conquest with evidence about the extent of the crisis and the number of secret emergency measures taken by the Politbureau to mitigate it, he withdrew his previous criticism.

Was there a grain shortage

What was the real extent of the crisis, i.e. the size of the harvest following the summer of 1932? Encyclopedia Britannica reflects the prevailing line of thought in the West, explaining that the famine was no less than an attack on Ukrainian farmers; that it was engendered deliberately is inferred from there being no preconditions for any famine in Ukraine; that the harvest there in 1932 had been less than average, (partially due to the chaos caused by the collectivisation) but sufficient to feed the population.

This is the crux of the matter, then. The Holodomor narrative is underpinned by the assumption that the harvest in 1932 was normal, so that the sole cause of the famine was the state’s excessive grain collection. Was that the case? Stephen Wheatcroft writes, in 2018:

The famine was associated with two years of harvest failure in 1931 and 1932. 1931 was a year of drought with demonstrably excessive temperatures and low rainfall in the early summer injuring the flowering and filling out of the grain. 1932 was a year in which the biological yield (prior to harvesting) was relatively normal, but in which harvest losses were excessively high as a result of damp weather during the harvest period, and a slow progression of the harvesting which greatly increased harvest losses. …In 1931 and 1932 the level of grain actually available for use was dangerously low.

Roundtable on Soviet Famines

Mark B. Tauger

Mark B. Tauger, professor at West Virginia University is one of the world’s most prominent specialists on famines and has devoted 30 years to studies of famines in the Russian empire and the Soviet Union. In 1991 an article by him appeared in Slavic Review: “The 1932 harvest and the Famine of 1933”.

One important conclusion reached by Tauger in that article is that publicly available harvest figures for the years following 1930 were extremely unreliable. The figures for expected yields tended to be exaggerated, and the authorities’ demands for and collection of grain (so-called procurement quotas) were based on those figures. Modern assessments of the causes of the famine are also based on those figures. He writes that due to the drought-reduced harvest in 1931,

the 1932 grain procurement quota, and the amount of grain actually collected, were both much smaller than those of any other year in the 1930s. The Central Committee lowered the planned procurement quota in a 6 May 1932 decree,… from the 1931 quota of 22.4 million tons to 18.1 million tons;

The 1932 Harvest…, p. 71

Although the procurement quota had been sharply reduced, harvesting in 1932 did not go well and 10% was missing from the much reduced quota that was collected. As a result there were violent confrontations between collectors and farmers in the autumn of 1932, not least when it became clear that there was insufficient grain to feed the country’s population.

At the time, the authorities always operated with overoptimistic assessments of the amount of threshed grain. Tauger refers to annual reports from collective farms (in 1933, we find reports from about 150 thousand collective farms handed in when the harvest was over) which indicate that the harvest was poor compared to official expectations.

Tauger also points out that the famine was not limited to Ukraine:

Soviet regional mortality figures for the early 1930s, compiled by TsUNKhU [the Soviet Statistical bureau] and recently published by Wheatcroft, show that while the famine was more severe in certain Ukrainian oblasts than elsewhere, it was by no means limited to Ukraine. Both urban and rural mortality rates in 1933 considerably increased over those of 1932 in most regions, and in the Volga basin,Urals, Siberia, and central agricultural regions, they approached or equalled Ukrainian levels.

Ibid, p. 87

In Bloddlands (p. 41–42) Snyder maintains that Stalin’s governmnt had not cut back grain exports in 1932–33 and did not send relief to the affected areas. Tauger provides exact figures:

Due to the poor harvest in 1931 and the need to transport grain to areas affected by famine, the government reduced grain exports from 5.2 million tonnes in 1931 to 1.73 million tonnes in 1932. They declined to 1.68 million in 1933

Ibid p. 88

There is no doubt that grain collection during the autumn and early winter of 1932 was extremely harsh…. Moreover, the authorities did not understand until too late and poorly the truth about the real amount of grain, the local shortages and the imminent famine.

Only in November were the procurement quotas reduced for North Caucasus and Ukraine. In February 1933, grain seed and grain for food was sent back to areas where the need was greatest, 320 tonnes to Ukraine and 240 tonnes to North Caucasus. By April, total aid to Ukraine had exceeded 560 thousand tonnes.

Ibid p. 88

To my mind, Thorarinn Hjartarson has convincingly made the case
1) that the famine was ghastly, but that it was not due to malevolent intentions on the part of the Soviet authorities;
2) that when one country wishes to support another country, it should be wary of hot-headed political rhetoric.

When engaged in contests or conflicts, humans tend to forget what differentiates them from other mammals.

I may or may not translate and publish the rest of T. Hj.’s analysis where he examines various theories as to why the grain harvest was poor two years in a row.