Anne Applebaum's "Red Famine" book (2 of 12)
What was the famine/Holodomor of 1932-33 in Ukraine? (Part 2)
This is one of a series of posts about some of the issues raised by Anne Applebaum’s book Red Famine (2017) on the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 in the context of competing national narratives in present-day eastern Europe. The first post can be found at this link.
Anne Applebaum’s account of the 1932-33 famine is a scholarly and informative documentation of the facts of the event. It also has a definite polemical edge that supports what is an overly narrow ideological evaluation of the horrible occurrence. Shella Fitzpatrick in a review of Red Famine explains:
In the version that has become popular since it declared independence, Stalin’s murderous impulse was directed specifically against Ukrainians. Holodomor, the Ukrainian word for the famine, is understood in contemporary Ukraine not just as a national tragedy but as an act of genocide on the part of the Soviet Union/Russia. As such it has become a staple part of the national myth-making of the new Ukrainian state.1 [my emphasis]
The famine of 1932-33 coincided with the Soviet policy of collectivizing agriculture. Since Ukraine was and is a huge agricultural center, it became the primary focus of the policy. It took place in the context of an intensive industrialization drive in the Soviet Union. (More on the international context in a later post.)
Wolf Ladejinsky (1899-1975) was an agricultural economist from who fled Ukraine in 1921. The Political Science Quarterly published a long, two-part analysis of the Soviet collectivization in 1934 which provides a contemporary look at the situation.2 He analyzed the idea of collective farms in the context of the particular Marxist assumptions of the Soviet government. He describes there how the Soviet government and Communist Party saw the way the collective farms should work.[2] (The name for a collective farm was a “kolkhoz.”)
Collectivization was a key part of the larger political and economic project of the Soviet government. As Ladejinsky wrote, “The Communists view the organization of the collective farms not only as a means of raising large crops, but also as a major move toward building socialism in the village and in the Soviet Union as a whole.” Jump-starting farm mechanization and applying better scientific methods to agricultural were also part of the goals. He cites Soviet figures showing that as of 1928: “The percentage of farms collectivized was 1.7, representing 1.6 per cent of the total population and 1.2 per cent of the total cultivated area.” So a drive for massive collectivization of farms really was a massive undertaking.
This did involve a major amount of coercion. During the period of War Communism (1918-1921), there was a period of forced collectivization in which many peasants were required to leave their individual plots and participate in state-directed collective farms. This policy was largely abandoned after 1921, but served as an early trial for the mass collectivization that took place years later.
The wealthier farmers were known as “kulaks,” which the Communists (rightly) viewed as the ruling class in the rural areas. As Ladejinsky described it in 1934:
The keynote of this period of collectivization was the relentless war waged lby the Communists against the well-to-do section of the village. Stalin's speech dealing with the agrarian policy of Soviet Russia sounded the battle-cry. "Now ", he said, "we have a sufficiently strong material base for an attack against 'kulakism ', to break down its opposition and to liquidate the kulaks as a class." [3]
Wealth is relative to context. The property of people who counted as part of the kulak class in most Ukrainian villages were not comparable to American plantation owners. But they were the dominant class in those areas. During the process of collectivization, the category of “kulak” wasn’t strictly defined by a particular level of wealth and seems to have become wider as popular resistance emerged. The Soviet government coded this resistance as a kulak-led subversive movement.
The process did involve direct violence, force, deportation and deaths. But the “liquidation” of the kulaks in the official statements referred to the liquidation of the kulaks as a class. The victims of the mass famine were not primarily kulaks. As Ladejinsky put it in 1934:
The keynote of this period of collectivization was the relentless war waged by the Communists against the well-to-do section of the village. Stalin's speech dealing with the agrarian policy of Soviet Russia sounded the battle-cry. "Now ", he said, "we have a sufficiently strong material base for an attack against 'kulakism ', to break down its opposition and to liquidate the kulaks as a class." …
This course did not stem from political considerations alone. The considerable economic power concentrated in the hands of the well-to-do peasants counted heavily in the course of action decided upon by the Bolshevik leaders. The confiscation of kulak property became a means of strengthening the material base of the collectives.3
The collectivization process in both the War Communism period and the later period involved the mass requisition of grain by the central government. And the draconian requisitions were the proximate cause of the food shortage in the sections of Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Moldova that were hit so hard by it.
Fitzpatrick, Shella (2017): Red Famine by Anne Applebaum review – did Stalin deliberately let Ukraine starve? The Guardian 08/25/2017, <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/25/red-famine-stalins-war-on-ukraine-anne-applebaum-review> (Accessed: 2023-09-08).
Ladejinsky, Wolf (1934): Collectivization of Agriculture in the Soviet Union I. Political Science Quarterly 49:1, 1-43. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2143326> (Accessed: 2023-09-07).
Collectivization of Agriculture in the Soviet Union II. Political Science Quarterly 49:2, 207-252. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2142883> Accessed: 2023-09-07).
Ladejinsky I, op. cit., 29.