Despite the wealth of factual material Applebaum provides, her arguments about the significance of the 1932-33 famine often ask the reader to accept analytical conclusions on faith. She is fully committed to the narrative that the Holodomor was a deliberately created famine, that it was genocidal, and that it reflected some kind of intrinsic evil in pretty much everything about the Soviet ideology.As Mark Tauger 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.1
She uses many anecdotes, actually too many, compared to the amount of explanation of context. One example:
But the real reason why the cities were less desperate was rationing: workers and bureaucrats received food coupons. These were not available to everybody. According to a 1931 law, all Soviet citizens who worked for the state sector received ration cards. That left out peasants; it also omitted others without formal jobs. In addition, the size of rations was based not only on the importance of the worker, but also of his workplace. Priority went to key industrial regions, and the only one in Ukraine was Donbas. In practice, some 40 per cent of the Ukrainian population therefore received about 80 per cent of the food supplies. (p. 271-2)
But even in describing the situation in the cities, she relies generously on anecdotes (which I assume are well documented) that would be particularly evocative to 21st century consumers who still remember stories about poorly stocked grocery stores in the USSR in the 1980s.
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 idea that an author has provided insufficient context can be a throwaway criticism. But here it is warranted. Particularly to make a serious systematic argument that the Holodomor famine was genocide, the larger context would have to be explicitly taken into an account. Since there was no public or secret program organized for the explicit purpose of target a specific national or ethnic group – as there was in the case of the Holocaust and the Turkish targeting of Armenians for mass killing – making the case that the 1932-33 was a deliberate genocide would also involve explaining why the other overt factors – the assumptions of collectivization, the real (however justifiable) protests and resistance, the real urgency of the industrialization program, and the undeniably threatening international situation – cannot explain the actual development of the policies that wound up in the famine of 1932-33.
Applebaum’s approach in The Red Famine is to largely ignore or simply dismiss those other factors as explanations.
Applebaum’s anti-Communism
Language changes along with historical contexts. Since Applebaum’s account is pointedly anti-Communist, it’s worth recalling that that “anti-Communism” encompasses a broad category of polemical ideas. Even avowed Communists are known to accuse others who understand themselves as such of being anti-Communist. The polemics in which the USSR and Maoist China engaged against each other beginning in the late 1950s involved some of the most intense criticisms against each other’s political theory at practice that one might hope to find.2[1] Both sides found ample material for their dueling narratives.
When Tito’s Communist Yugoslavia split with Soviet foreign policy, they were met with Soviet denunciations of having become a fascist state. We could make an analogy here to the intense polemics between the industrial North and the slaveowning South prior to the American Civil War, each emphasizing the barbarity of the other’s civilizations. The sometime head of the US Communist Party, William Z. Foster, wrote of those arguments in 1954, “Never, in any country, have the sinister workings of capitalism been so thoroughly aired from within.”3[2]
In the literal sense, everyone who was not a specific adherent of a communist ideology or party could be called anti-Communist. But “anti-Communism” took on a narrower meaning of relating to Joseph-McCarthy-style conspiracist obsession with Communism as the root of all evils in the world. Everyone from New Deal liberals to not-insane conservatives to flaming rightwingers would make it clear that they were opposed to Communism as a system. But many of them were also what we could call “anti-anti-communist” in that they wanted to distinguish themselves from rightwing McCarthyism. Liberals were sometimes known to complain that McCarthy and his imitators had “given anti-Communism a bad name.”
Applebaum’s has been justifiably criticized as drawing a false and historically misleading parallel between German Nazism and Soviet Communism that has a multitude of problems as a historical perspective.4[3]
The new film Oppenheimer: The Real Story (2023)5[4] provides a look at some of the nuances of these polemics and how public figures attempted to navigate them in that era.
Conclusion
Applebaum’s Red Famine is an important history of an event that has become a key element of the national(ist) narrative of present-day Ukraine. But it’s packaged with some heavy ideological baggage of which the careful needs to be aware. Especially because the Holodomor-as-genocide narrative has become such a significant part of Ukrainian nationalism and also a general criticism of Western countries directed against Russia.
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: 2023-14-08).
See: Lüthi, Lorenz (2008): The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rozman, Gilbert (1985): A Mirror for Socialism: Soviet Criticisms of China. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Zagoria, Donald (1962): The Sino-Soviet Conflict, 1956-1961. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Foster, William Z. (1954): The Negro People in American History , 204. New York: International Publishers.
Lazare, Daniel (2016): Ernst Nolte’s Revenge. Jacobin 10/18/2016. <https://jacobin.com/2016/10/ernst-nolte-stalin-hitler-fascism-historikerstreit> (Accessed: 2023-23-06).
Oppenheimer: The Real Story. IMDb website. <https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27192512/> (Accessed: 2023-28-07).
Editors (2023): Robert Oppenheimer security hearing. Encyclopedia Britannica 07/24/2023. <https://www.britannica.com/event/J-Robert-Oppenheimer-security-hearing> (Accessed: 2023-14-08).