Anne Applebaum's "Red Famine" book (3 of 12)
What was the famine/Holodomor of 1932-33 in Ukraine? (Part 3)
The expropriation of kulaks’ (farmers deemed to be wealthy) property, and the deportation of many of them - many died or were executed after deportation - removed of lot of those we might think of as natural leaders of resistance to collectivization. But there was significant popular resistance, understandably so.
The resistance to collectivization and especially to the extreme government requisitions was widespread but scarcely systematic, at least not on a large scale. The Soviet government blamed resistance on kulaks and interpreted it in terms of class struggle. That was real. But there was also plenty of resistance from peasant farmers who didn’t meet the most expansive definition of a kulak.
And peasant revolts are notoriously messy.
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.
Here it may be helpful to consider what the innovative American economist Thorstein Veblen was writing about American farmers in the early 1920s.1[1] Veblen had a sympathetic but jaded view of farmers’ political activism. He saw them working in a system that functioned by “individual self-help and cupidity [greed],” an approach he viewed as “characteristic of the English-speaking colonial enterprise.” For Veblen, “self-help” was a term for seeking individual advantage in a thoroughly competitive, including by looking for opportunities to cheat. Or at least to cut corners. It was a similar concept to the now more familiar “rugged individualism.”
But he argued that this outlook had been a chronic problem for farmers attempting to organize themselves collectively:
Except transiently and provisionally, and with doubtful effect, this farm population has nowhere and at no time been actuated by a spirit of community interest in dealing with any of their material concerns. Their community spirit, in material concerns, has been quite notably scant and precarious, in spite of the fact that they have long been exposed to material circumstances of a wide-sweeping uniformity, such as should have engendered a spirit of community interest and made for collective enterprise, and such as could have made any effectual collective enterprise greatly remunerative to all concerned. But they still stand sturdily by the timeworn make-believe that they still are individually self-sufficient masterless men, and through good report and evil report they have remained Independent Farmers, as between themselves, which is all that is left of their independence, - Each for himself, etc.
Veblen observes drily that “the results have not all been to the gain of the farmers.” And he continues with an observation that has some significant for understanding the peasants in the Soviet Union to collectivization – which American farmers were experiencing a less rapid and radical form:
Their self-help and cupidity have left them at the mercy of any organisation that is capable of mass action and a steady purpose. So they have, in the economic respect - and incidentally in the civil and political respect - fallen under the dominion of those massive business interests that move obscurely in the background of the market and buy and sell and dispose of the farm products and the farmers' votes and opinions very much on their own terms and at their ease. [my emphasis]
The situation of American farmers was by no means identical to those in Ukraine. Although life was often tough for most American farmers. For sharecroppers both black and white in the US South, their normal lives were beyond tough. Elsewhere in the same book, Veblen describes the farm population of “Soviet Russia” as “the most nearly neolithic population of peasant farmers” then in existence.2
It’s important to see the major elements at work in the collectivization of Soviet agriculture: the economic theory, the context of Russian industrialization, the need for foreign currency reserves, the Marxist political theory of the Soviet government including its view of class conflict, the political structure, and the lessons taken from the period of the Civil War and War Communism. Even if one assumes deeply malicious and even murderous intent on the part of the Soviet government - the perspective that Applebaum takes - those are all still essential parts of the mix that created the conditions of 1932-33.
Because it’s not unusual to get descriptions of the famine formulated like this one from Britannica Online:
The famine was a direct assault on the Ukrainian peasantry, which had stubbornly continued to resist collectivization; indirectly, it was an attack on the Ukrainian village, which traditionally had been a key element of Ukrainian national culture. Its deliberate nature is underscored by the fact that no physical basis for famine existed in Ukraine.3 [my emphasis]
Presumably, “no physical basis for famine” means that Ukraine was producing enough food to feed the residents of the area. But that doesn’t make much sense in this context. Ukrainian farming was not a strictly subsistence economy. It was a major agricultural area and provided food for other parts of the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire before that and for international exports.
That account continues directly:
The Ukrainian grain harvest of 1932 had resulted in below-average yields (in part because of the chaos wreaked by the collectivization campaign), but it was more than sufficient to sustain the population. Nevertheless, Soviet authorities set requisition quotas for Ukraine at an impossibly high level. Brigades of special agents were dispatched to Ukraine to assist in procurement, and homes were routinely searched and foodstuffs confiscated. At the same time, a law was passed in August 1932 making the theft of socialist property a capital crime, leading to scenes in which peasants faced the firing squad for stealing as little as a sack of wheat from state storehouses. The rural population was left with insufficient food to feed itself. The ensuing starvation grew to a massive scale by the spring of 1933, but Moscow refused to provide relief. In fact, the Soviet Union exported more than a million tons of grain to the West during this period.” [my emphasis]
Unfortunately for some of the historical narratives about the Holodomor, it really was a more complicated event than some Russians deciding they were going to starve a bunch of Ukrainians. It is certainly valid to look at whether the requisition quotas were deliberately punitive and whether the central government’s response to the famine was adequate. (On that last point, it clearly was not.)
Applebaum is so focused on arguing that the mass starvation was a deliberate and genocidal action and that everything about Soviet ideology was irredeemably evil that she fails to give adequate weight to the fact that governments can and do screw up, sometimes on a large scale. Especially when attempting something as unprecedented and difficult as the rapid collectivization of agricultural on such a large scale. It would be hard to argue that the level of death and suffering was justified. And presumably few people today would make such an argument. The contemporaneous defenses of the famine were more focused on denying its reality or emphasizing the resistance to collectivization that was attributed to kulaks and foreign influences.
Veblen, Thorstein (1923): Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times, 129-141, 251-253.New York: Viking Press, Inc.
Veblen, Ibid., 252.
Zasenko, Oleksa Eliseyovich et. al. (2023): Ukraine. Encyclopedia Britannica, 8 Jul. 2023, <https://www.britannica.com/place/Ukraine> (Accessed 2023-08-07).