Anne Applebaum's "Red Famine" book (9 of 12): Historical and Geopolitical context: 1923-1933
The larger (1917-1933) international situation
Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin in this presentation gives a decent factual overview of the USSR’s geopolitical situation during this period and how Stalin and the Soviet leadership understood it.1
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.
He also gives a useful take on the controversy over “socialism in one country,” which was nominally a major cause of the split with Leon Trostsky. Kotkin notes, however, that the original meaning of the notion was a very pragmatic one: no new, richer socialist country like Germany was coming on the scene in the immediate future. And the Soviets recognized that they would have to build socialism essentially on their own.
There was some significant cooperation between Weimar Germany and the USSR, both of them having the status in the 1920s as losers from the peace agreements at the end of the First World War and pariah nations. (The TV series Babylon Berlin deals with themes based on the German-Soviet connection during that time.)
Soviet foreign policy had both coldly pragmatic aspects as well as particular theoretical frameworks in which the leadership operated. As Kotkin explains, the external situation in the 1920s and 1930s involved avoiding a coalition of the Western capitalist powers including Germany against the USSR, and also military conflicts with Japan. As he observes, it was actually the potential military threat from Japan that was the most urgent driver of military preparedness in the 1920s.
The USSR even fought a small but real war with China in 1929 over the Chinese Eastern Railway.2
The need for rapid industrialization and building up the Soviet military capacity was seen as essential by the Soviet leadership. And here it’s important to know, whatever the shortcomings and sins of that particular government may have been during that period, a Tsarist government or a liberal-democratic republic or a rightwing military dictatorship would have found themselves compelled to focus on similar priorities.
As Serhii Plokhy explains:
The Soviet leadership deemed the industrialization and collectivization programs, coupled with the Cultural Revolution-a set of policies designed to train a new generation of cadres to replace the old managerial and bureaucratic class-the best means of ensuring the survival of the communist regime in a hostile capitalist environment. The three programs were key elements of the Bolshevik plan for transforming a traditional agricultural society into a modern industrial power, with the proletariat [working class] replacing the peasantry as the dominant class. Throughout the 1920s, Soviet leaders argued about the pace at which to implement their vision. It became clear early on chat they could fund industrialization only from within - the West was not eager to finance a country bent on world revolution - and the only internal source for the so-called socialist accumulation of capital was agriculture, in other words, the peasantry. Stalin had initially advocated "natural," evolutionary industrialization but then shifted position to insist on faster economic and social transformation.3[3]
The Soviet Union did have the distinction of being a socialist country, which saw itself as representing a competing economic and social system to capitalism. And the capitalist nations saw it in the same way. And the ruling Communist Party was head of the Communist International, an association of Communist parties around the world who looked to the Soviet Party as their political leader. A non-socialist government in Moscow wouldn’t necessarily have the same risk of a coalition of capitalist countries seeking to overthrow it.
But it would be a highly selective reading of the historical situation to see those factors as simply excuses for whatever the Soviet leadership decided to do for whatever combination of nefarious reasons.
While it is mentioned on several occasions, usually in reference to past Ukrainian experience and accounts of the Holodomor, Applebaum does not define it in relation to the regime’s motivations. This aspect is relevant to understanding Stalin’s offensive: there was a genuine fear among the Bolsheviks that Polish national ambitions could pose a threat to the Soviet Union’s territorial integrity. This only served to further increase Stalin’s paranoia with regards to hidden enemies, convincing him that there was a need for a cleansing of Ukraine. Nonetheless, Red Famine is certainly a very useful addition to the existing historiography, offering a gripping account of the disaster befalling the Ukrainian nation in the early 1930s.
Rose Deller also argues that Applebaum neglects the very practical concern the Soviet government had about Poland as a national security threat:
One issue that could have been better explored is the Polish element to Stalin’s paranoia. While it is mentioned on several occasions, usually in reference to past Ukrainian experience and accounts of the Holodomor, Applebaum does not define it in relation to the regime’s motivations. This aspect is relevant to understanding Stalin’s offensive: there was a genuine fear among the Bolsheviks that Polish national ambitions could pose a threat to the Soviet Union’s territorial integrity. This only served to further increase Stalin’s paranoia with regards to hidden enemies, convincing him that there was a need for a cleansing of Ukraine. Nonetheless, Red Famine is certainly a very useful addition to the existing historiography, offering a gripping account of the disaster befalling the Ukrainian nation in the early 1930s.4 [my emphasis]
Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941. American Historical Association YouTube channel 4/05/2018. (Accessed: 2023-21-07).
Walker, Michael (2017): The 1929 Sino-Soviet War: The War Nobody Knew. Lawrence. University Press of Kansas.
Plokhy, Serhii (2021): The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, 246. New York: Basic Books.
Deller, Rose (2018): Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum. LSE Review of Books 05/09/2018. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2018/05/09/book-review-red-famine-stalins-war-on-ukraine-by-anne-applebaum/ (Accessed: 2023-06-08).