memes

The primary thing to keep in mind here is that nobody denies that a famine occurred. The region was plagued with them for hundreds of years and the socialists were implementing a new method of production that was ultimately experimental and without any historic precedent from which to learn from. The mistakes that were made in its implementation did lead to an avoidable famine had those mistakes not been made. The question at hand is truly just whether this famine was intentional or not. Very little evidence for its intent exists, both in the soviet archives and in any outside evidence.

I strongly recommend reading the Preface to the Revised Edition of The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933 by RW Davies and Wheatcroft, two extremely well regarded academic historians. It is a good insight into how this was regarded as absurd by academia, and has been manufactured for political purposes over time. I will quote some of this preface below:

PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION

Since this book was completed, the Soviet famine of 1931–33 has become an international political issue. Following a number of preliminary declarations and a vigorous campaign among Ukrainians in Canada, in November 2006 a bill approved by the Ukrainian parliament (Verkhovna rada) stated that the famine was ‘an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people’. In the following year a three-day event commemorating the famine in Ukraine was held in its capital, Kiev, and at the same time Yushchenko, the president, called on the Ukrainian parliament to approve ‘a new law criminalising Holodomor denial’ – so far without success.1 Then on May 28, 2008, the Canadian parliament passed a bill that recognised the Holodomor as a genocide and established a Ukrainian Famine and Genocide (‘Holodomor’) Memorial Day. Later in the year, on October 23, 2008, the European parliament, without committing itself to the view of the Ukrainian and Canadian parliament that the famine was an act of genocide, declared it was ‘cynically and cruelly planned by Stalin’s regime in order to force through the Soviet Union’s policy of collectivization of agriculture’. In the following month, on the 75th anniversary of what it described as ‘the famine-genocide in Ukraine’, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress held a widely publicised National Holodomor Awareness Week.

This campaign is reinforced by extremely high estimates of Ukrainian deaths from famine. On November 7, 2003, a statement to the United Nations General Assembly by 25 member-countries declared that ‘the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine (Holodomor) took from 7 million to 10 million innocent lives’. According to Yushchenko, Ukraine ‘lost about ten million people as a direct result of the Holodomor-genocide’. The President of the Ukrainian World Congress insisted in a statement to the United Nations that ‘a seven–ten million estimate appears to present an accurate picture of the number of deaths suffered by the Ukrainian nation from the Great Famine (Holodomor) of 1932–33’.2 In contrast, the Russian government has consistently objected to the Ukrainian view. On April 2, 2008, a statement was approved by the Russian State Duma declaring that there was no evidence that the 1933 famine was an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. The statement condemned the Soviet regime’s ‘disregard for the lives of people in the attainment of economic and political goals’, but also declared that ‘there is no historic evidence that the famine was organized on ethnic grounds’. The official view was endorsed by the Russian archives, and by Russian historians. In 2009 the Russian Federal Archive Agency published a large handsome book reproducing photographically 188 documents from the archives, to be followed by several further volumes.3 In the preface the director of the Russian archives, V. P. Kozlov, criticises the ‘politicisation’ of the famine:

Not even one document has been found confirming the concept of a ‘golodomor-genocide’ in Ukraine, nor even a hint in the documents of ethnic motives for what happened, in Ukraine and elsewhere. Absolutely the whole mass of documents testify that the main enemy of Soviet power at that time was not an enemy based on ethnicity, but an enemy based on class.4

In our own work we, like V. P. Kozlov, have found no evidence that the Soviet authorities undertook a programme of genocide against Ukraine. It is also certain that the statements by Ukrainian politicians and publicists about the deaths from famine in Ukraine are greatly exaggerated. A prominent Ukrainian historian, Stanislas Kul’chitskii, estimated deaths from famine in Ukraine at 3–3.5 million;5 and Ukrainian demographers estimate that excess deaths in Ukraine in the whole period 1926–39 (most of them during the famine) amounted to 31⁄2 million.6 Nevertheless, Ukrainian organisations continue, with some success, to urge Canadian schools to teach as a fact that excess deaths were 10 million during the 1932–33 famine.7 This does not mean that Ukraine did not suffer greatly during the famine. It is certainly the case that most of the famine deaths took place in Ukraine, and that the grain collection campaign was associated with the reversal of the previous policy of Ukrainisation.8 In this context Russian interpretations of the famine differ greatly. At one extreme doughty supporters of the Stalinist regime claim that the famine was an act of nature for which Stalin and the Soviet government were not responsible. Thus in his recent book on the famine a Russian publicist, a certain Sigizmund Mironin, argued that the very poor harvest of 1932 was the main cause of the famine:

Using the articles of M.Tauger and other English-language sources, I seek to prove: 1) there was a very bad harvest in 1932, which led to the famine; 2) the bad harvest was caused by an unusual combination of causes, among which drought played a minimum role, the main role was played by plant diseases, unusually widespread pests, and the lack of grain connected with the drought of 1931, and rain during the sowing and harvesting; 3) the bad harvest led to a severe famine ... 4) the Soviet leadership, and Stalin in particular, did not succeed in receiving information about the scale of the famine; 5) Stalin and the Politburo, as a result of the drought in 1931, did not have grain stocks, but did everything they could to reduce human losses from the famine, and took every measure to prevent famine from recurring.9

This view of the famine is emphatically and justifiably rejected by most Russian historians. We show in the following pages that there were two bad harvests in 1931 and 1932, largely but not wholly a result of natural conditions. But the 1932 harvest was not as bad as Mark Tauger has concluded (see pp. xix–xx below). Stalin was certainly fully informed about the scale of the famine. Moreover, Mironin’s account neglects the obvious fact that the famine was also to a considerable extent a result of the previous actions of Stalin and the Soviet leadership. Mironin’s book is Stalinist apologetics, not history. Unfortunately this approach to the Stalin era is increasingly publicised in contemporary Russia.