[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

DID STALIN DELIBERATELY LET UKRAINE STARVE?  
[[link removed]]


 

Sheila Fitzpatrick
August 25, 2017
The Guardian
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ A vivid account exposes the myths of the catastrophic Ukrainian
famine of 1932-3. _

,

 

_Red Famine
Stalin's War on Ukraine_
Anne Applebaum
Anchor
ISBN: 9780804170888

The terrible famine of 1932-3 hit all the major Soviet grain-growing
regions, but Ukraine worst of all. It was not the result of adverse
climatic conditions but a product of government policies. This is, in
fact, the case with many famines, as Amartya Sen
[[link removed]]
pointed out in his classic study, _Poverty and Famines_ (1981), though
the deaths generally occur because of administrative mismanagement and
incompetence rather than an intention to murder millions of peasants.
The Soviet example is unusual in that Stalin is often accused of
having exactly that intention.

The famine
[[link removed]]followed
agricultural collectivisation at the end of the 1920s, a formally
voluntary process that was in fact coercive in its implementation.
Along with forced-pace industrialisation, it was part of a package of
breakthrough modernisation policies launched by Stalin in the first
phase of his leadership. Industrial growth needed to be financed by
grain exports, which collectivisation was supposed to facilitate
through compulsory state procurements and non-negotiable prices. The
problem was how to get the grain out of the countryside. The state did
not know how much grain the peasants actually had, but suspected
(correctly) that much was being hidden. An intense tussle between the
state’s agents and peasants over grain deliveries ensued.

That is a brief version of the rational account of collectivisation,
but there was an irrational side as well. The Soviet leaders had
worked themselves and the population into a frenzy of anxiety about
imminent attack from foreign capitalist powers. In Soviet
Marxist-Leninist thinking, “class enemies” within the Soviet Union
were likely to welcome such an invasion; and such class enemies
included “kulaks”, the most prosperous peasants in the villages.
Thus collectivisation went hand in glove with a drive against kulaks,
or peasants labelled as such, who were liable to expropriation and
deportation into the depths of the USSR. Resistance to
collectivisation was understood as “kulak sabotage”.
Stalin harped on this theme, particularly as relations with peasants
deteriorated and procurement problems intensified. Ukrainian
officials, including senior ones, tried to tell him that it was no
longer a matter of peasants concealing grain: they actually had none,
not even for their own survival through the winter and the spring
sowing. But Stalin was sceptical on principle of bureaucrats who came
with sob stories to explain their own failure to meet targets and
discounted the warnings. Angry and paranoid after his wife killed
herself in November 1932, he preferred to see the procurement
shortfall as the result of sabotage. So there was no let-up in state
pressure through the winter of 1932-3, and peasants fleeing the hungry
villages were shut out of the cities. Stalin eased up the pressure in
the spring of 1933, but it was too late to avert the famine.

This brings us back to the question of intention. In my 1994 book
_Stalin’s Peasants_, I argued that what Stalin wanted was not to
kill millions (a course with obvious economic disadvantages) but
rather to get as much grain out of them as possible – the problem
being that nobody knew how much it was possible to get without
starving them to death and ruining the next harvest. But that was an
argument about the Soviet Union as a whole. If you look at those
regions against which Stalin had particular animus, notably Ukraine
[[link removed]] (with its border location
and his paranoia about Polish spies) and the Russian North Caucasus
(with its politically suspect Cossack farmers), the picture could be
different. Certainly Ukrainians think so. In the version that has
become popular since it declared independence, Stalin’s murderous
impulse was directed specifically against Ukrainians. _Holodomor_, the
Ukrainian word for the famine, is understood in contemporary Ukraine
not just as a national tragedy but as an act of genocide on the part
of the Soviet Union/Russia. As such it has become a staple part of the
national myth-making of the new Ukrainian state.

Anne Applebaum’s book takes her into this politically contentious
territory, and her subtitle, “Stalin’s War on Ukraine”, may set
off some alarm bells. An American journalist who has also worked in
Britain (her husband, Radosław Sikorski
[[link removed]], served as
Polish minister for defence and for foreign affairs, and played a
major role in sorting out the Maidan crisis in Ukraine in 2014, and
advocated tough sanctions against Russia), Applebaum has been active
as a political commentator highly critical of Russia and Putin’s
regime. Her first book, _Gulag: A History_, won her a Pulitzer prize
in 2004 but few friends among western Soviet historians, since she
explained in her introduction that, as an undergraduate at Yale in the
1980s, she had decided not to join their ranks once she found out they
allegedly had to curry favour with the Soviet authorities to get visas
and archival access, a suggestion many saw as a slur on their
professional integrity. Her remarks in the same introduction on the
world’s failure to recognise Soviet atrocities as being on a par
with those of Nazi Germany struck an anachronistic note. Currently she
is a professor in practice at the LSE’s Institute of Global Affairs
specialising in 21st century propaganda and disinformation, a subject
she knows from both sides, having been involved in the mid-1990s in
the Spectator’s exposé of Guardian journalist Richard Gott for KGB
connections and, in 2014, and having been herself targeted by what she
describes as a Russian social media “smear” campaign.

Guardian readers may be inclined to approach a new book on Soviet
atrocities by Applebaum warily. But in many ways it is a welcome
surprise. Like her _Gulag_ – which, if you held your nose through
the introduction, turned out to be a good read, reasonably argued and
thoroughly researched – _Red Famine_ is a superior work of popular
history. She still doesn’t like western academic Soviet historians
much, but at least she mainly avoids gratuitous snideness and cites
their work in her bibliography (although my _Stalin’s Peasants_ is
not included, but that is probably an oversight). Whereas in _Gulag_
she tended to be grudging about her towering precursor, Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, whose _Gulag Archipelago _was the pioneering work in the
1970s, in _Red Famine_ she is appropriately respectful of Robert
Conquest (his _The Harvest of Sorrow_ came out in 1986).

Applebaum has, of course, more material at her disposal than Conquest
had, including large numbers of Ukrainian famine memoirs. Many of
these are published by the Ukrainian Institute of National
Remembrance, which has an obvious political agenda, but she is by no
means offering an uncritical “Ukrainian” account of the famine.
Though sympathetic to the sentiments behind it, she ultimately
doesn’t buy the Ukrainian argument that _Holodomor_ was an act of
genocide. Her estimate of famine losses in Ukraine – 4.5 million
people – reflects current scholarship. Her take on Stalin’s
intentions comes closer than I would to seeing him as specifically out
to kill Ukrainians, but this is a legitimate difference of
interpretation. For scholars, the most interesting part of the book
will be the two excellent historiographical chapters in which she
teases out the political and scholarly impulses tending to minimise
the famine in Soviet times (“The Cover-Up”) and does the same for
post-Soviet Ukrainian exploitation of the issue (“The Holodomor in
History and Memory”).

The book has one odd quirk, namely its citation practice. As far as I
can see, Applebaum has not worked in archives for this book (although
she did for _Gulag_). Her footnotes are bulging with archival
citations, however, because every time she quotes something from a
secondary source that has an archival reference, she gives that as
well – and then lists all these archives among the primary sources
in her bibliography. This is not normal scholarly practice, though
graduate students sometimes do it for effect before they learn better.
But given that she was writing a popular history on a topic on which
there is an abundance of recently published documents, memoirs and
scholarly studies, there was no need for her to do original archival
work in order to produce, as she has done, a vivid and informative
account of the Ukrainian famine.
 
 

* Soviet Union
[[link removed]]
* Ukraine
[[link removed]]
* famine
[[link removed]]
* Stalin
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]