Famines in the Soviet Union

Soviet Eurasia suffered multiple famines before the 1950s. However post 1960s they secured food security for most of its existence.

Russian Famines

Roughly 95% of the people from Eastern Europe (mostly within the Russian empire) were poor peasant farmers who owned no land but paid high rents to the country's landlords who made up the middle/upper class. These Pomeshiks were rich, privileged and had no problems withholding grain-stocks if necessary. Russian peasants lived in villages cut off from the rest of the world. The villages were not much more than a typical third world collection of single room log cabins built with no pegs or nails or any tools other than a hatchet, possessing dirt floors and moss in the cracks of the logs. They would usually be lining a main road or near a stream. These villages are where illiterate peasants lived and worked as indentured servants, farming the land to keep some food on the table and as payment of rent to wealthy landlords. When land grants were made originally to these Russian lords, they were huge. The grantees came into possession of a huge chunk of land and whatever was on it, including towns and villages. The people became serfs, including the townspeople. The shopkeeper or blacksmith was a serf and paying rent or labour to a master on the same basis as a peasant serf. He was not free to move, or to go out of business, but he could start another, and occasionally a town serf would prosper. Some were given special privileges by whoever owned the land and would enforce their rule locally.

Town serfs were emancipated before the peasants; the peasants were freed in 1860, but on terms that worsened their living standards and security. The state bought 80% of their land from their landlord and sold it to them on a long-term mortgage. Since they considered it theirs already, this was no windfall. Around the middle of the 1800s, the British abandoned protectionist import barriers to grain, the Corn Laws, which gave southern Russia access to an export market. This created an opportunity for southern Russia to export, and they began growing wheat and other cereal grains. The serfs who had originally worked half the landlord's holding for him and half for themselves had often paid cash rent instead of labour and worked the whole holding for themselves. Now there was a new incentive in the mix and landlords reversed the terms. Serfs lost the produce from the extra land but still had to work it. Whatever entries into the cash economy they had contrived such as planting cash crops like flax frequently had to be abandoned.

Russian peasants had one other alternative to a miserable life of tenant farming. They could move to the city to find work in one of the many miserable factories that were springing up all over Russia, becoming proletariat. By Official Russian law workers couldn't be forced to work more than 11 ½ hours in a day (already a huge amount), but most factory bosses ignored this and the Czarist police were easily bribed to look the other way. Wages were very low, a few rubles for a months work. The factories were dirty, dark, and dangerous. Workers were given free housing but the conditions of these barracks were so terrible that they made a New York City tenement from 1890 look like a room at the Ritz. Each room was nothing more than a long, empty warehouse where each family stayed in a room divided by a piece of cloth. Each “room” was only large enough to fit a bunk bed that often touched the one next to it, (compare that to communals that at the least had proper rooms and were in themselves created ONLY because Czarist Russia did not provide any proper houses for the people).

The Russian Empire's peak production levels were in 1913 and the top estimate put it at roughly 1/5 of America's production prior to WW 1 (and even less as soon as the war began). The majority of these factories used outdated and inferior equipment and did not actually produce many indigenous products despite the many inventors and inventions popping up over Russia during the 18th and 19th century. For example, the top line new Battle-cruisers and Battleships that were to be the future of the Russian navy had almost all of its systems and products made over-seas because the Russian industry had no ability to provide an alternative. Several of these ships of the line were almost completely made over-seas in German, American and British Ship-yards. At the end of WW 1 and the Civil war, Russia's production levels were about 0 because almost all the factories had been destroyed and what few remained were outdated and lacked the trained cadres required to man them.

In Russia the concept of famine was as normal as the 4 seasons, it was something that happened every 5–15 years or so and ravaged the country. The lack of education also meant a lack of doctors, which meant that despite the many medical innovations of the few Russian Doctors there were, not many were put into practice during the Czarist regime and instead people relied on folk remedies to get by. But folk remedies won't do much for Dysentry, especially when there is no food. When yet another famine began during WW-1 this became the straw that broke the camels back and the result was massive protests, the reaction to which was the Czar ordering the army to fire on the unarmed and peaceful protest. This became the reason for the coup that over-threw the Czar, by the liberal-democratic party headed by Kerensky. However, because he did not end the war as promised, nor change the situation he quickly grew unpopular, culminating in the October Revolution. Lenin quickly made peace with Germany, re-drawing the border at the Curzon line, which gave away the territories of Poland and the Baltic states to the German Empire. Germany turned around and continued to fight France and Britain and the newly arrived USA until 1918. In the meantime, Lenin and the Bolsheviks established a War-Communism government, while they fought with the White Guard. However, after WW-1 ended, Britain, France, Germany, the US, Japan and multiple other countries began the Intervention, sending in thousands of troops to back up White Guard generals such as Denikin to try and crush the Bolsheviks and divide Russia as they had done with China. The Eventually the Worker-Peasant Red Army defeated the intervention and these countries retracted their troops, white guard officers evacuating with them. Aside from other smaller wars and battles fought on the soviet borders, by December 30, 1922, when the Soviet Union formed, the fighting had ended. But now they had a new problem. In 1921 (right before Soviet Union is officially established) a new wave of starvation ran across Europe including Germany, Switzerland, France and Austria as well as the territories of the former Russian Empire. This was the result of the war, and in Russia, a continuation of the famine that began in 1914. From this time period come the famous Hearst/Walker photographs later attributed to the 1932 famine.

1920s

Soviet agriculture experienced crop failures from 1927 to 1929, resulting in a grain crisis. Once the UkSSR’s crop failure became evident, officials identified grain procurements from the new 1928 harvest as the primary source of relief supplies for the crop-failure regions. Those living in regions with better harvests had contracted to provide more than 131,200 tons of grain by August 25th, and the state had promised them higher prices and paid them in advance, but by September 1st only 16,400 tons of seed had been shipped. In October, the committee, anticipating a deficiency in the UkSSR of 500,000 tons of food grains, proposed that somebody send more consumer goods to regions with good harvests to encourage grain sales and considered asking for additional supplies from the RSFSR. In the end, grain procurements in the UkSSR in 1928–1929 declined greatly from previous years, totalling 1.59 million tons. Only about one-tenth of this (171,389 tons) was sent outside of the UkSSR. The UkSSR received from other republics more than 320,000 tons of grain, in other words, nearly twice as much as the republic ‘exported’, and was authorised to use (from both internal and imported sources) some 520,000 tons of grain as seed, about two-thirds of total seed loans for the entire Soviet Union.

1930s

In early 1920s the recently proclaimed Soviet Union, having gotten past the worst of the famine, was anxious to restore and build up its industry. What little of it existed under the Czar had been totally destroyed after WW-I and the Russian Civil War (1918–1921). They needed machinery and new technology to create an industrial base from which production could kick off of. The Czarist empire had left behind practically nothing - The trans-siberian railway was a rickety, 1-way structure that had to be rebuilt from scratch, the industrial sectors were working with worn out machinery and the lack of refineries made the huge resources of the USSR useless to it. They needed to buy almost everything from foreign countries as they did not have time or money to spend on wholly indigenous production. In the beginning the Soviet government was able to offer to the international market only three items: grain, minerals and gold. In 1922, at the Genoa Conference the new Gold Exchange Standard was introduced. Since the end of 1922 the Soviet Union was issuing the golden chervonets – a new Soviet currency fully covered by the golden reserves and convertible to gold. In 1923 the Soviet chervonets was one of the most stable and secured currencies of the world. It represented a clear and present danger for emerging financial epicentre – the United States of America. In 1924 the Soviet chervonets was replaced by a softer rouble without golden equivalent. This diminished the menace to the US dollar and British pound. In return Soviet Union was recognized by the UK, France, Norway, Austria, Greece, Sweden, Denmark, China, Japan, Mexico and other capitalist countries.

In 1925 the Soviet leadership decided to accelerate industrialization of the country because, although they had surpassed Tsarist Russia in industrial output (superseding the production of 1913), they were nowhere near any of the previously mentioned countries in terms of development. However this was not something the West liked and in 1925 a so-called "golden blockade" was imposed on the USSR: the Western powers refused to accept gold as payment for industrial equipment they delivered to Russia. They demanded that the Soviet government pay for the equipment in timber, oil and grain. These sanctions were not removed the following years. In 1929 the US bankers lack of regulation initiated the Great Depression, ushering in a period of international currency instability. In 1931 Germany and Austria failed to repay the foreign debt and stop exchanging marks into gold, thus abolishing Gold Exchange Standard. By the autumn 1931 the UK suspended the gold exchange as well. This seems unrelated until the further actions that followed are taken into account. With this economic crisis at hand it would be the logical and natural move to lift the golden blockade of Soviet Union at that time, thus allowing Soviet gold to relieve the suffocating Western economies. But the decision taken was the absolute reverse, not only did they leave the gold blockade of the USSR in force, but also imposed a severe trade embargo on the majority of Soviet export. Such embargoes were further introduced throughout the 30s such as on April 17, 1933, when the British government introduced embargo: Russian Goods (Import Prohibition) Act 1933.

In the early 1930s a series of food crises affected major agricultural countries, the one in the UkSSR being an outright famine:

[…] the USSR experienced an unusual environmental disaster in 1932: extremely wet and humid weather that gave rise to severe plant disease infestations, especially rust. Ukraine had double or triple the normal rainfall in 1932. Both the weather conditions and the rust spread from Eastern Europe, as plant pathologists at the time documented. Soviet plant pathologists in particular estimated that rust and other fungal diseases reduced the potential harvest in 1932 by almost nine million tons, which is the largest documented harvest loss from any single cause in Soviet history.

— Mark Tauger,

This was followed by severe drought.

Anticommunist sabotage also had an influence. While collectivization might have influenced the famine, its extent remains disputed, but is likely that inappropriate procurement targets also contributed to the crisis.

The Soviets responded to the famine by sending food aid and reducing food quotas and food exports. Despite their efforts, modern analysis indicates that 1.8–2.5 million people still perished, which corresponds to the Soviet estimate of 2.4 million.

Kulaks

In 1920 when the NEP was implemented and the Soviet Union moved from War-Communism, to a temporary stage where a free market existed, the much feared consequences of the market became evident. Despite the previous land reform, nearly 3 million peasants, were quickly once again without land, because the kulaks had driven them bankrupt and then bought their land cheaply. This resulted in 10 or 11 percent of the population (kulaks) owning so much land (and also horses and machinery) compared to the rest of the peasant population that they produced 56% of the marketed food. The kulaks were not a creation of the NEP however, they existed a class for a while under the Russian Empire, a petty bourgeoisie in contrast to the pomeshik lords. These Kulaks would often decide if the towns under their control would get food or not. Kulak speculation on the food market caused another shortage already in 1927 when the marketed share of grain was only one third of the pre-war years despite production exceeding pre-war figures. This ineffectiveness was what initiated the idea of collectivization, with Lenin writing down the basic idea before his death and Stalin putting down the plans and implementing them in the first 5-year plan. Among the many actions of the collectivization program was the confiscation of farm land and the machinery and livestock that was on it (private property, NOT personal property). Some of the Kulaks, angered and resentful, rather than integrate into society as an average worker (who frankly lived in conditions far better than under Tsarist times), decided to take action. They burnt crops and slaughtered livestock, those with machinery broke it if they could. In addition to their vandalism and arson they murdered government officials and peasants siding with them, there are even some (unconfirmed) accounts of them poisoning water supplies.

“Their [kulak] opposition took the initial form of slaughtering their cattle and horses in preference to having them collectivized. The result was a grievous blow to Soviet agriculture, for most of the cattle and horses were owned by the kulaks. Between 1928 and 1933 the number of horses in the USSR declined from almost 30,000,000 to less than 15,000,000; of horned cattle from 70,000,000 (including 31,000,0000 cows) to 38,000,000 (including 20,000,000 cows); of sheep and goats from 147,000,000 to 50,000,000; and of hogs from 20,000,000 to 12,000,000. Soviet rural economy had not recovered from this staggering loss by 1941. […] Some [kulaks] murdered officials, set the torch to the property of the collectives, and even burned their own crops and seed grain. More refused to sow or reap, perhaps on the assumption that the authorities would make concessions and would in any case feed them.” - Russia Since 1917, Four Decades Of Soviet Politics by Frederick L. Schuman

The high casualty figures for the famine of 1932-1933 were in part due to resistance and sabotage efforts of kulaks, ordinary peasants, on top of the Soviet government continuing to export grain from Ukraine because it was not immediately apparent a famine was taking place, which local officials were saying at first that it was either exaggerated or not occurring at all due to them wanting to downplay reports of famine conditions; partially exacerbating such in the process, which were due to the officials seeking to fulfill quotas. Furthermore, the deaths are in part due to the United Kingdom and various other nations rejecting the gold-backed currency of the USSR and demanding grain instead for what little trade was between them.

Holodomor

The term Holodomor refers to a popular conspiracy theory that the famine of 1932–1933, rather than being accidental, was an atrocity that the Soviets consciously orchestrated. However, there is simply not enough evidence to support the accusations of mass murder. Most antisocialists deny that it is a conspiracy theory, but sometimes concede that it differs from the Holocaust in that the intent in regards to the Holodomor to kill cannot be clearly demonstrated and that the planning must have been more ‘covert’ or ‘secret’, which suggests that their theory is mostly based on guesswork. Among historians it is debated to which extent natural factors were exacerbated by Soviet policy, instead of whether this famine was intentional or genocidal. Ukrainian famine conditions varied from place to place, and it remains largely unclear on the famine's scale.

Those in favor of the famine‐genocide conspiracy theory have yet to establish a clear motive behind why it was enacted, either; proposed reasons vary from classicide to ethnocide to politicide. Professor Dallin of Stanford University stated:

There is no evidence it was intentionally directed against Ukrainians. [T]hat would be totally out of keeping with what we know — it makes no sense.

— Alexander Dallin,

Professor Lewin of the University of Pennsylvania:

This is crap, rubbish. […] I am an anti-Stalinist, but I don’t see how this [genocide] campaign adds to our knowledge. It’s adding horrors, adding horrors, until it becomes a pathology.

— Moshe Lewin,

Professor Viola of the University of Toronto:

I absolutely reject it. […] Why in god’s name would this paranoid government consciously produce a famine when they were terrified of war [with Germany]?

— Lynne Viola,

Even the late Robert Conquest eventually renounced the famine‐genocide conspiracy theory. M. Tauger, Professor of History at West Virginia University (reviewing work by Stephen Wheatcroft and R.W. Davies) has this to say:

Popular media and most historians for decades have described the great famine that struck most of the USSR in the early 1930s as “man-made,” very often even a “genocide” that Stalin perpetrated intentionally against Ukrainians and sometimes other national groups to destroy them as nations. […] This perspective, however, is wrong. The famine that took place was not limited to Ukraine or even to rural areas of the USSR, it was not fundamentally or exclusively man-made, and it was far from the intention of Stalin and others in the Soviet leadership to create such as disaster. A small but growing literature relying on new archival documents and a critical approach to other sources has shown the flaws in the “genocide” or “intentionalist” interpretation of the famine and has developed an alternative interpretation.

It should be noted that this does not excuse the Soviet administration from any and all responsibility for the suffering that took place; one could accuse the government of insufficiently rapid response, and note that initial reports were often downplayed to avoid rocking the boat. But it is clear that the famine was not deliberate, was not a genocide, and (to quote Professor Tauger) "was not fundamentally or exclusively man-made."

There were a lot of factors contributing to the deaths at the time, including natural causes such as poor weather and a lack of cooperation from kulaks, one part of which was grain hoarding. Some of the casualties of this famine were because the kulaks withheld their grain supplies during a time of nationwide crisis, in defiance of Soviet authority. Besides selling the grain for high prices, many kulaks also refused to work, or outright destroyed their crops in an attempt to assert their independence. More broadly however, there were many non-Ukrainian casualties at the end of it all, with famines being present in many places outside of Ukraine, and even within Ukraine many non-Ukrainian areas were affected. There is also an absence of proper motives in killing the populace that accounts largely for the production of grain for the country, especially given the push for industrialization.

The Holodomor narrative is pushed as an attempt to discredit the USSR and ultimately socialism. However, this particular famine was just at its time the latest in Russia's history. Prior to industrialization, Russia had routine famines, although the USSR had none after 1947 following the completion of collectivization. It should be kept in mind that the USSR and the US, or any other developed capitalist country, have not started on the same footing, with the USSR inheriting a land that was much less developed and materially insecure.

As for the notion that the famine was engineered to deal with a troublesome ethnic group, this was not the practice in the USSR. Internal deportation, not famines, were used to combat nationalist rebels. Plenty of people were moved around in the Soviet Union to prevent uprisings and maintain stability, but they were not killed in a wholesale manner – for one, that would needlessly shrink the Soviet labor pool which at the time they desperately needed for industrialization. The famine extended to other areas beyond Ukraine too. The vast majority of Ukrainians were on board with Soviet policies and so a genocide against them would not have improved stability, nor served for any other benefit.

The notion of the “Ukrainian genocide” is rather poorly substantiated and does not hold up to scrutiny, and is generally not accepted by historians of Soviet history, including anti-communist ones such as Robert Conquest and Orlando Figes, among other mainstream Soviet historians such as Sheila Fitzpatrick, Moshe Lewin, Terry Martin, and J. Arch Getty. The Holodomor is not even nowhere nearly as recognized as widely as the Holocaust is; not to say that this confirms its falsehood but rather that it indicates its weakness as a claim. While the Holocaust has been found to be a legitimate crime by an international tribunal, only twenty-six countries recognize the Holodomor, and rather, those which do recognize it are ones that have diplomatic and internal reasons for doing so, such as doing securing business with Ukraine or placating a significant Ukrainian diaspora. The Soviet Union is gone, and modern Russia is rather comfortable with talking negatively of it, so the argument that the Holodomor is not recognized because countries do not want to insult Russia is operating on a rather tenuous basis.

Some other holes in the Holodomor narrative include the fact that korenizatsiya within Ukraine continued, as well as the existence of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic as a political entity. There is also the lack of closing down Ukrainian-language press and universities, the lack of demonization of Ukrainians, and the coincidence of the supposed genocide ending right as collectivization was finished, rather than continuing onwards.

1940s

There was a famine during the Great Patriotic War, with some aftershocks a few years later. This would be the conclusion of famines in the Soviet Union. The biggest event relating to this would be a drought in 1963 which triggered some panic slaughtering of livestock, however which posed no risk of famine. The final famine of 1946-1947 prompted The Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature which helped reduce the possibility and impact of famines

External links

• The Melbourne Gateway to Research on Soviet History