How much was Communist ideology and particularly the Soviet Marxist understanding of the social role of peasants a major cause of the 1932-33 famine?
Here Applebaum’s argument is largely correct, though she takes it for granted that this influence was entirely malicious.
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.
The collectivization of agriculture was certainly an idea the Communist government thought was desirable based on its ideology and its understanding of economics through a Marxist lens.
Mark Tauger in a review of Red Famine observes:
In this crisis that the Soviet regime decided to collectivize Soviet agriculture. Applebaum cites Stalin’s references to mechanized agriculture but dismisses them as a “Soviet cult of science” (87-89), not considering that Soviet leaders and planners were trying to emulate American farming, which was even more mechanized and scientifically based. She does not consider that repeated crop failures, which she mentioned, could have persuaded Soviet leaders that Soviet peasant farming needed to be modernized. Rather, she attributes the decision to collectivize agriculture to the 1928 Central Committee plenums that allegedly concluded that peasants had to be “squeezed” and “sacrificed” for industry (90-91). Yet modernizing agriculture was a central issue in those plenums. She never mentions that in 1929, the Soviets established VASKhNiL, the central agricultural research academy, under the leadership of the great biologist Nikolai Vavilov, who did not seek to “squeeze” the peasants. [my emphasis]1
I discussed earlier in this series how the actual results of the collectivization fell considerably short of expectations. But the need to modernize agriculture in the Soviet Union was indeed urgent.
In Thorstein Veblen’s description which I also quoted in an earlier post, he may have overstated the case in claiming that the USSR at that time (1923) “the most nearly neolithic population of peasant farmers” then in existence. But the urgent need for agricultural modernization was not some will-o-the-wisp fantasy of out-of-touch Marxist dreamers. It was real and generally recognized inside and outside of the country.
Ukrainian nationalism
The concerns of the Soviet leadership about Ukrainian nationalism that Applebaum stresses were real. And they were also influenced by the general Marxist-Leninist perspective of the Soviet regime.
The security concerns of the Soviet Union over Ukraine were intimately connected with the USSR's confrontation with capitalist countries. But concerns about Polish interference and even territorial ambitions in Ukraine were not imaginary, though paranoid evaluations of real threats are always possible. Any government in Moscow - Communist or otherwise - that controlled Ukraine as part of its territory would have been very aware of such concerns. Józef Piłsudski, the leader of Poland, had actively participated in anti-Soviet military action in what was called the Russo-Polish War of 1919–20.
The Ukrainian-nationalist social-democrat Symon Petlyura and his forces had joined in the Polish war against the USSR. Soviet polemics against the Ukrainian resistance to collectivization in the 1930s were often laced with references to "Petlyurites." Whatever foreign interference may have played a role in Ukraine during the period of the famine, it was marginal to the actual peasant resistance during the collectivization in the 1930s.
But Moscow’s views of Ukrainian nationalism varied over the entire life of the Soviet Union. Ukrainian was formally one of the member republics of the Soviet Union. The Soviet brand of Marxist ideology recognized the validity of national claims but subordinated them to the priority of the class struggle and the world revolution as they envisioned it. This meant that at times Moscow encouraged more national consciousness and promotion of national culture traditions in Ukraine and of the Ukrainian language. At other times, they discouraged it.
As Michael Ellman notes, “Stalin himself changed his view of national policy in 1930-31. It evolved from a criticism of Great Russian chauvinism to a Russian nationalist position. Hence, Applebaum argues that the famine was a conscious attack on Ukraine partly inspired by Russian nationalist ideas.”2
During the 1932-33 period, the central government had abandoned its earlier policy of “Ukrainization” (promoting Ukrainian distinctiveness) to one of strongly discouraging it.
As Ellman observes, "The crucial point of [Applebaum’s] interpretation is that the famine was a result of a deliberate policy aimed at destroying Ukrainian national sentiment and those who embodied or propagated it."3
But her argument in Red Famine doesn’t provide a convincing argument for that categorical interpretation.
And Ellman also states:
[W]hereas we have the document signed by Stalin (and his henchmen) approving the Katyn massacre and the documents ordering the terror of 1937-38, we do not have an analogous document ordering the starvation of millions of Ukrainians in 1932-33. In addition, the Ukrainians were not the only victims of starvation in the early 1930s. Badly hit were the Kazakhs, about 1.4 million of whom died, about 36 percent of their population. Many Russians also starved. Where Ukrainian historians and those who sympathize with them mainly see a specifically Ukrainian tragedy, Kazakh historians see a Kazakh tragedy, and Russian historians see a tragedy of the peoples of the USSR. Applebaum’s interpretation, while understandable and possible, lacks the irrefutable documentary proof which exists for Katyn and the terror of 1937-38. [my emphasis]
Tauger, Mark (2018): Review of Anne Applebaum’s “Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine”. History News Network 07/01/2018. <https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/169438> (Accessed: 2023-04-09).
Ellman, Michael (2018): Ellman on Applebaum, 'Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine'. H-Diplo April 2018. <https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/reviews/1713560/ellman-applebaum-red-famine-stalins-war-ukraine> (Accessed: 2023-23-06).
Ellman, Michael (2018): op. cit.