Soviet famine of 1930–1933

For the same famine particularly in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, see Holodomor and Kazakh famine of 1932–33.

Famine in the USSR, 1933. Areas of most disastrous famine marked with black. A – grain-consuming regions, B – grain-producing regions. C – former land of Don, Kuban and Terek cossacks, C1 – former land of Ural and Orenburg cossacks. 1. Kola Peninsula, 2. Northern region, 3. Karelia, 4. Komi, 5. Leningrad Oblast, 6. Ivanovo Oblast, 7. Moscow Oblast, 8. Nizhny Novgorod region, 9. Western Oblast, 10. Byelorussia, 11. Central Black Earth Region, 12. Ukraine, 13. Central Volga region, 14. Tatar, 15. Bashkortostan, 16. Ural region, 17. Lower Volga region, 18. North Caucasus Krai, 19. Georgia, 20. Azerbaijan, 21. Armenia.

Depopulation of Ukraine and southern Russia, 1929–33

The Soviet famine of 1932–33 killed millions of people in the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, Northern Caucasus, Volga Region and Kazakhstan, the South Urals, and West Siberia. It has been estimated that between 3.3 and 3.9 million died in Ukraine and 2 million (42% of all Kazakhs) died in Kazakhstan. Robert Conquest had cited a number of Kazakhstan losses of one million. A large number of nomadic Kazakhs had roamed abroad, mostly to China and Mongolia.

The exact number of deaths is hard to determine due to a lack of records, but the number increases significantly when the deaths in the heavily Ukrainian-populated Kuban region are included. Older estimates are still often cited in political commentary. In 2007, David Marples estimated that 7.5 million people died as a result of the famine in Soviet Ukraine, of which 4 million were ethnic Ukrainians. According to the findings of the Court of Appeal of Kyiv in 2010, the demographic losses due to the famine amounted to 10 million, with 3.9 million direct famine deaths, and a further 6.1 million birth deficit. Later in 2010, Timothy Snyder estimated that around 3.3 million people died in total in Ukraine. In 2013, it was argued that total excess deaths in Ukraine could not have exceeded 2.9 million.

Stalin and other party members had ordered that kulaks were "to be liquidated as a class" and so they became a target for the state. The richer, land-owning peasants were labeled "kulaks" and were portrayed by the Bolsheviks as class enemies, which culminated in a Soviet campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, and executions of large numbers of the better-off peasants and their families in 1929–1932.

Major contributing factors to the famine include the forced collectivization of agriculture as a part of the Soviet first five-year plan, forced grain procurement, combined with rapid industrialisation, a decreasing agricultural workforce, and several bad droughts. Some scholars have classified the famine in Ukraine and famine in Kazakhstan as genocide committed by Joseph Stalin's government, targeting ethnic Ukrainians and Kazakhs while other critics dispute the relevance of any ethnic motivation, as is frequently implied by that term, and focus instead on the class dynamics between land-owning peasants (kulaks) with strong political interest in private property, and the ruling Communist Party's fundamental tenets which were diametrically opposed to those interests. In addition to the Kazakh famine of 1919–1922, these events saw Kazakhstan lose more than half of its population within 15 years. The famine made Kazakhs a minority in their own republic. Before the famine, around 60% of the republic's population were Kazakhs, but after the famine, only around 38% of the population were Kazakhs.

Gareth Jones was the first Western journalist to report the devastation.

Causes

Unlike the previous famine of 1921–22, Russia's intermittent drought was not severe in the affected areas at this time.

Historian Mark B. Tauger of West Virginia University suggests that the famine was caused by a combination of factors, specifically low harvest due to natural disasters combined with increased demand for food caused by the industrialization and urbanization, and grain exports by the Soviet Union at the same time. The industrialization became a starting mechanism of the famine. Stalin's First Five-Year Plan, adopted by the party in 1928, called for rapid industrialization of the economy, with an emphasis on heavy industry. With the greatest share of investment put into heavy industry, widespread shortages of consumer goods occurred while the urban labor force was also increasing. Collectivization employed at the same time was expected to improve agricultural productivity and produce grain reserves sufficiently large to feed the growing urban labor force. The anticipated surplus was to pay for industrialization. Kulaks who were the wealthier peasants encountered particular hostility from the Stalin regime. About one million kulak households (some five million people) were deported and never heard from again. Forced collectivization of the remaining peasants was often fiercely resisted resulting in a disastrous disruption of agricultural productivity. Forced collectivization helped achieve Stalin's goal of rapid industrialization but it also contributed to a catastrophic famine in 1932–33.

A similar view was presented by Stephen Wheatcroft, who has given more weight to the "ill-conceived policies" of Soviet government and highlighted that while the policy was not targeted at Ukraine specifically, it was Ukraine who suffered most for "demographic reasons". According to Wheatcroft the grain yield for the Soviet Union preceding the famine was a low harvest of between 55 and 60 million tons, yet official statistics mistakenly reported a yield of 68.9 million tons.

Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Professor of History at Michigan State University, states that Ukraine was hit particularly hard by grain quotas which were set at levels which most farms could not produce. The 1933 harvest was poor, coupled with the extremely high quota level, which led to starvation conditions. The shortages were blamed on kulak sabotage, and authorities distributed what supplies were available only in the urban areas. The loss of life in the Ukrainian countryside is estimated at approximately 5 million people.

Law of Spikelets

The "Decree About the Protection of Socialist Property", nicknamed by the farmers the Law of Spikelets, was enacted on August 7, 1932. The purpose of the law was to protect the property of the collective farms. It was nicknamed the Law of Spikelets because it allowed people to be prosecuted for gleaning leftover grain from the fields. There were more than 200,000 people sentenced under this law.

Passports

Starved peasants on a street in Kharkiv, 1933

There was a wave of migration due to starvation and authorities responded by introducing a requirement that passports be used to go between republics and banning travel by rail.

Soviet internal passports (identity cards) were introduced on 27 December 1932 to deal with the exodus of peasants from the countryside. Individuals not having such a document could not leave their homes on pain of administrative penalties, such as internment in Gulag labor camps. The rural population had no right to freely keep passports and thus could not leave their villages without approval. The power to issue passports rested with the head of the kolkhoz, and identity documents were kept by the administration of the collective farms. This measure stayed in place until 1974.

The lack of passports could not completely stop peasants' leaving the countryside, but only a small percentage of those who illegally infiltrated into cities could improve their lot. Unable to find work or possibly buy or beg a little bread, farmers died in the streets of Kharkiv, Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava, Vinnytsia, and other major cities of Ukraine.

Reactions

The Russian part of the inscription says "At this place will be a monument to famine victims of the years 1931–1933". In the center of Almaty, Kazakhstan. The upper half is in Kazakh language.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on 17 May 2010 near Memorial to the Holodomor Victims in Kyiv.

The famine of 1932–1933 was officially denied, so any discourse on this issue was classified as criminal "anti-Soviet propaganda" until Perestroika. The results of the 1937 census were kept secret as they revealed the demographic losses attributable to the Great Famine.

Some well-known journalists, most notably Walter Duranty of The New York Times, downplayed the famine and its death toll. In 1932, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence for his coverage of the Soviet Union's first five-year plan and thus, he was considered the most expert Western journalist to cover the famine. In the article "Russians Hungry, But Not Starving", he responded to an account of starvation in Ukraine and, while acknowledging that there was widespread malnutrition in certain areas of the USSR (including parts of the North Caucasus and Lower Volga), generally disagreed with the scale of the starvation and claimed that there was no famine. Duranty's coverage led directly to Franklin Roosevelt officially recognizing the Soviet Union in 1933 and thus revoked the United States' official recognition of an independent Ukraine. A similar position was taken by the French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, who toured the territory of Ukraine during his stay in the Soviet Union. Other Western journalists, however, did report on the famine at the time, including Malcolm Muggeridge and Gareth Jones, who both severely criticised Duranty's account and were later banned from returning to the Soviet Union.

As a child, Mikhail Gorbachev experienced the Soviet famine in Stavropol, Russia. He recalled in a memoir that "In that terrible year [in 1933] nearly half the population of my native village, Privolnoye, starved to death, including two sisters and one brother of my father."

George Orwell's Animal Farm was inspired by Gareth Jones's articles about the Great Famine of 1932–1933.

Members of the international community have denounced the USSR government for the events of the years 1932–1933. However, the classification of the Ukrainian famine as a genocide is a subject of debate. A comprehensive criticism is presented by Michael Ellman in the article "Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932–33 Revisited" published in the journal Europe-Asia Studies. The author refers to the UN Convention which specifies that genocide is the destruction 'in whole or in part' of a national group, "any acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". The reasons for the famine are claimed to have been rooted in the industrialization and widespread collectivization of farms that involved escalating taxes, grain-delivery quotas, and dispossession of all property. The latter was met with resistance that was answered by “imposition of ever higher delivery quotas and confiscation of foodstuffs.” As people were left with insufficient amount of food after the procurement, the famine occurred. Therefore, the famine occurred largely due to the policies that favored the goals of collectivization and industrialization rather than the deliberate attempt to destroy the Kazakhs or Ukrainians as a people.

In Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum argues that the UN definition of genocide is overly narrow, due to the USSR's influence on the Genocide Convention. Instead of a broad definition that would have included the Soviet crimes against kulaks and Ukrainians, genocide "came to mean the physical elimination of an entire ethnic group, in a manner similar to the Holocaust. The Holodomor does not meet that criterion ... This is hardly surprising, given that the Soviet Union itself helped shape the language precisely in order to prevent Soviet crimes, including the Holodomor, from being classified as 'genocide'". Applebaum thus concludes:

The accumulation of evidence means that it matters less, nowadays, whether the 1932–3 famine is called a genocide, a crime against humanity, or simply an act of mass terror. Whatever the definition, it was a horrific assault, carried out by a government against its own people ... That the famine happened, that it was deliberate, and that it was part of a political plan to undermine Ukrainian identity is becoming more widely accepted, in Ukraine as well as in the West, whether or not an international court confirms it.

Lesa Melnyczuk Morgan concludes her in-depth study, 'Remember the peasantry: A study of genocide, famine, and the Stalinist Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine, 1932–33' by stating that the "Holodomor was clearly an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people by Stalin’s Soviet regime."

At least three of Gorbachev's ethnic Russian relatives were victims of the 1932–33 famine in the Stavropol region

West Virginia University historian Mark Tauger, in his review of Applebaum's book Red Famine, says the book "leaves out too much important information, has false claims on key points, and draws unjustified conclusions on important issues based on incomplete use of sources", and argues that causes of the famine are more complex:

While this review article does not allow for a full discussion of the issue of genocide and Stalin’s responsibility, we can at least note certain conclusions from the sources presented here. Stalin and other leaders made concessions to Ukraine in procurements and were clearly trying to balance the subsistence needs of Ukraine and other regions, especially people in towns and industrial sites who could not access the surrogate foods that some peasants relied on to survive (see for example Applebaum ch. 12). Soviet leaders did not understand the 1932 crop failure: they thought that peasants were withholding food to drive up prices on the private market, as some of them had in 1928. They worried about the Japanese take-over of Manchuria in 1931–1932 and the Nazi victory in Germany in early 1933, and feared nationalist groups in Poland and Austria could inspire a nationalist rebellion in Ukraine. Faced with these “threats,” Soviet leaders were reluctant to make the USSR appear weak by admitting the famine and importing a lot of food, both of which they had done repeatedly earlier. The famine and the Soviets’ insufficient relief can be attributed to crop failure, and to leaders’ incompetence and paranoia regarding foreign threats and peasant speculators: a retaliatory version of the moral economy.

Errors and possible falsifications

There are publications, the accuracy of which is disputed. One example of this is the Ukraine mortality map published in USA in 1988. The map shows the southwestern districts of the Odessa region as a part of the Ukrainian SSR, which were part of Romania in 1930s, and at the same time, it does not show the Moldavian ASSR that was a part of the Ukrainian SSR at that time.

A big notoriety was gained by a story that took place in 2006 under President Yushchenko: in the Sevastopol Holodomor Museum were exhibited photographs, which allegedly showed the victims of the famine in Ukraine, but later it turned out that the pictures were taken during the famine in the Russian Volga region in the early 1920s and in the United States during the Great Depression. These photos also appeared on the website of the President of Ukraine. After the outbreak of the scandal, the exhibition was closed, and the press structure of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), from whose archives the pictures were allegedly removed, recognized the incident as "an isolated incident and an annoying misunderstanding.

The publication of these photographs continues up to this day. For example, “The origins of evil. The Secret of Communism "and IPV News USA. The original source of this photo is from the Album of Illustrations «La famine en Russie», published in Geneva in 1922 in French and Russian.

Also, it is worth noting that many estimates of the numbers of hunger victims, especially unprofessional or biased ones, are based on a superficial comparison of the census data of the 1926th and 1937-39th years, without taking into account migration, mixing and assimilation, which played a very significant role. Comparison of the relevant data shows, in particular, a decrease in the number of Ukrainians and Kazakhs during the intercensal period and throughout whole USSR, and a very large, almost abnormal, increase of the number of Russians. Hence, we can conclude that behind the changes in the numbers of ethnic groups, in addition to hunger, there were assimilation and active mixing of the population. Mixed marriages were very common in USSR, it was not a segregation society at any point. Moreover (just as it is happening now in many former parts of the USSR), in the early 20s, during the "nativization", many non-titular residents of the soviet republics, and especially half-breeds, could enroll in the titular ethnic groups, which had a certain influence on the data of USSR Population Census 1926. In the 30s, when on the scale of the whole Union, and especially in some republics, had started a tendency towards Russification, the descendants of numerous mixed marriages started to be included into the Russian ethnos (including many children from mixed families where there were no Russian parents), which had influenced the data of 1939 census. Thus, without taking into account a huge number of mixed marriages and high mobility of the population between parts of USSR, associated with various "construction projects of communism", it is impossible to accurately estimate the number of hunger victims.

Estimation of the loss of life

• The 2004 book The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–33 by R.W. Davies and S.G. Wheatcroft, gives an estimate of 5.5 to 6.5 million deaths.
• Encyclopædia Britannica estimates that 6 to 8 million people died from hunger in the Soviet Union during this period, of whom 4 to 5 million were Ukrainians. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "Some 4 to 5 million died in Ukraine, and another 2 to 3 million in the North Caucasus and the Lower Volga area."
• Robert Conquest estimated at least 7 million peasants' deaths from hunger in the European part of the Soviet Union in 1932–33 (5 million in Ukraine, 1 million in the North Caucasus, and 1 million elsewhere), and an additional 1 million deaths from hunger as a result of collectivization in Kazakh ASSR.
• Another study, by Michael Ellman using data given by Davies and Wheatcroft, estimates "‘about eight and a half million’ victims of famine and repression", combined, in the period 1930–33.
• In his 2010 book Stalin's Genocides, Norman Naimark estimates that 3 to 5 million Ukrainians died in the famine.
• In 2008, Russian state Duma issued a statement about the famine, stating that within territories of Povolzhe, Central Black Earth Region, Northern Caucasus, Ural, Crimea, Western Siberia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus the estimated death toll is about 7 million people.

See also

• Droughts and famines in Russia and the Soviet Union
• Holodomor, Ukraine's portion of the 1932–33 famine
• Holodomor genocide question
• Kazakh famine of 1932–33, Kazakhstan's portion of the 1932–33 famine
• Mass killings under communist regimes
• Russian famine of 1921

Sources

• Davies, RW; Wheatcroft, SG (2004), The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–33; Harrison, Davies, Wheatcroft 2004 (PDF) (review), UK: Warwick.
• Ellman, Michael (June 2007), "Stalin and the Soviet Famine of 1932–33 Revisited" (PDF), Europe-Asia Studies, 59 (4): 663–93, doi:10.1080/09668130701291899, S2CID 53655536.
• Finn, Peter (April 27, 2008), "Aftermath of a Soviet Famine", The Washington Post.
• Kuromiya, Hiroaki (June 2008), "The Soviet Famine of 1932–1933 Reconsidered", Europe-Asia Studies, 60 (4): 663–75, doi:10.1080/09668130801999912, S2CID 143876370.
• Kindler, Robert, Stalin's Nomads. Power and Famine in Kazakhstan, Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2018.
• Luciuk, Lubomyr Y, ed, Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine in Soviet Ukraine, Kingston, Kashtan Press, 2008
• Markoff, A (1933), Famine in USSR.
• Snyder, Timothy (2010). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. London: The Bodley Head. ISBN 978-0-224-08141-2.
• Thorson, Carla (May 5, 2003), The Soviet Famine of 1931–33: Politically Motivated or Ecological Disaster?, UCLA International Institute.
• Wheatcroft, SG (April 1990), "More light on the scale of repression and excess mortality in the Soviet Union in the 1930s" (PDF), Soviet Studies, 42 (2): 355–367, doi:10.1080/09668139008411872.
• Kondrashin, Viktor, ed. (2009), Famine in the Soviet Union 1929–1934 (PDF) (slide stack), Katz, Nikita B transl. docs.; Dolgova, Alexandra transl. note from compilers; Glizchinskaya, Natalia design, RU: Russian Archives, archived from the original (PDF) on 2009-03-19.