The Soviet Famine of 1932
"Holodomor"
*Alexander Dallin of Stanford (the father of modern Sovietology): "There is no evidence it was intentionally directed against Ukrainians, that would be totally out of keeping with what we know -- it makes no sense."Moshe Lewin of the University of Pennsylvania: "This is crap, rubbish. I am an anti-Stalinist, but I don't see how this [Holodomor] campaign adds to our knowledge. It's adding horrors, adding horrors, until it becomes a pathology."Lynne Viola of SUNY- Binghamton (the first US historian to examine Moscow's Central State Archive): "I absolutely reject it. Why in god's name would this paranoid government consciously produce a famine when they were terrified of war [with Germany]?"
Leader of the ULM (Ukrainian Nationalists) admitting to the opposition contributing to causing the famine of 1932:“Ever since general collectivisation was proclaimed, Ukrainia has not ceased to evince the most stubborn opposition… The forms taken by her resistance have greatly varied. At first there were mass disturbances in the Kolkhozy [collective farms], or else the Communist officials and their agents were killed; but later a system of passive resistance was favored, which aimed at the systematic frustration of the Bolshevik plans for sowing and gathering the harvest… The opposition of the Ukrainian population caused the failure of the grain-storing plan of 1931 and, still more so, that of 1932. The catastrophe of 1932 was the hardest blow that the Soviet Ukrainia had felt since the famine of 1921-22. Whole tracts were left unsown. In addition, when the crop was being gathered last year, it happened that in many areas, especially in the south, 20, 40, and even 50 percent was left in the fields and was either not collected at all or was ruined in threshing” (Mazepa 342-43).Mazepa, Isaac. “Ukrainia under Bolshevist Rule.” The Slavonic and East-European Review, vol. 12, no. 35, 1934.
“In view of the importance of grain stocks to understanding the famine, we have searched Russian archives for evidence of Soviet planned and actual grain stocks in the early 1930s. Our main sources were the Politburo protocols, including the osobye papki ("special files," the highest secrecy level), and the papers of the agricultural collections committee Komzag, of the committee on commodity funds, and of Sovnarkom. The Sovnarkom records include telegrams and correspondence of V.V. Kuibyshev, who was head of Gosplan, head of Komzag and the committee on reserves, and one of the deputy chairs of Sovnarkom at that time. We have not obtained access to the Politburo working papers in the Presidential Archive, to the files of the committee on reserves or to the relevant files in military archives. But we have found enough information to be confident that [Robert Conquest’s] very high figure for grain stocks is wrong and that Stalin did not have under his control huge amounts of grain which could easily have been used to eliminate the famine” (Davies, et al. 643).Davies, Robert W., et al. “Stalin, Grain Stocks and the Famine of 1932-1933.” Slavic Review, vol. 54, no. 3, 1995, doi:10.2307/2501740.
“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 criminalizing Holodomor denial’ – so far without success. 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’.…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; 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.…Western commentators and historians long debated whether the famine was man-made. They differ in their assessments of the extent to which Soviet policy was responsible for the famine and the extent to which Terror was consciously used by the state. In response to the first edition of our book Robert Conquest, the most widely cited advocate of the view that the famine was man-made, has clarified his position on this matter and has clearly stated that although he thinks that the famine was caused by the Bolsheviks, who engaged in criminally terroristic measures, he nevertheless does not think that it was consciously intended.…Danilov and Zelenin concurred that Stalin did not want or anticipate a famine, but they characterized it as an ‘organized famine’, while also describing Stalin’s actions as being ‘fully or not fully conscious’. We think that this is a misleading way of looking at the problem. We do not think it appropriate to describe the unintended consequences of a policy as ‘organized’ by the policy-makers. Russian historians sometimes call the famine ‘rukotvornyi’ – man-made – on the grounds that it was ultimately a result of the forcible collectivisation of agriculture, and that is more defensible. But in our opinion they and Conquest underestimate the role of climate and other natural causes in producing the bad harvests of 1931 and 1932, and are mistaken in believing that the 1932 harvest was an average harvest rather than a poor one. The two successive bad harvests in 1931 and 1932, partly resulting from the previous policies of the Soviet leadership, meant that by the spring of 1932 there was an absolute shortage of grain, which became more severe in the ensuing twelve months. This was a central feature of a general crisis in 1932–33. The Soviet leaders were faced with major problems throughout the economy, which led to another chain of ‘mutually connected and mutually dependent Stalin actions’, parallel with that described by Danilov and Zelenin.”Davis, R.W. and Wheatcroft, S.G. The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. (preface to revised edition)