their peak in the summer of 1922 encompassed at most two-thirds of famine victims, despite substantial imports. The ARA imported some 740,000 tons of food; the Bolshevik government supplied more than one million tons of grain.
The famine weakened armed resistance to the Bolshevik regime, and some argue that this was intentionally manipulated. It also, however, delayed national economic recovery for at least two years. The fact that Vladimir Lenin and other Soviet leaders agreed (however ambivalently) to foreign relief indicated a fundamental shift in their attitude toward the peasants and their orientation toward priFAMINE OF 1932-1933 vate production. This shift was reflected in the New Economic Policy of 1921, which legalized free trade and abolished the requisition policies of the Civil War and in the regime’s food imports during famines in 1924 and 1928. The 1921 famine also convinced Soviet leaders that Soviet agriculture needed significant modernization, which underlay the decision to collectivize agriculture nine years later. See also: AMERICAN RELIEF ADMINISTRATION; FAMINE OF 1891-1892; FAMINE OF 1932-1933; FAMINE OF 1946
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Edmondson, Charles M. (1977). “The Politics of Hunger: The Soviet Response to Famine, 1921.” Soviet Studies XXIX (4):506-518. Patenaude, Bertrand M. (2002). The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
The famine began in the winter of 1931 and 1932, peaked between the fall of 1932 and the summer of 1933, and subsided with the 1933 harvest. Mortality was highest in rural areas of Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the central and southern Volga Basin, but increased in most rural and even urban areas.
The famine affected all of Soviet society. Not only peasants, but also industrial workers and other townspeople desperately sought to supplement their inadequate food rations. Officials and managers responsible for production, transport, and distribution faced disastrous labor conditions from the subsistence crisis. The OGPU (Soviet security police), grain procurement agencies, and Soviet leaders, in their efforts to obtain grain and other supplies from the villages at all costs, minimized or ignored the pleas and starving conditions of the peasants.
The causes of the famine are disputed. The conventional view, that it was a human-made famine imposed by Joseph Stalin on Ukraine and certain other regions to suppress nationalist opposition, has been challenged. Conclusive new evidence shows that the harvests of 1931 and especially 1932 were much smaller than claimed by the Soviet government or later memoir and eyewitness accounts, that they were reduced by natural disasters, and that famine mortality was not limited to specific national regions or even to rural areas. New sources also show that the regime had inadequate reserves yet provided peasants limited famine relief, including relief from imported sources, in addition to supplying more than forty million people in towns, the army, and others on the rationing system in 1932-1933.
The famine developed in the wake of collectivization campaigns in 1930 and 1931 that reorganized most villages into collective or state farms. By this means the regime sought to increase food production and procurement to feed towns and industrial sites, which were growing rapidly because of the First Five-Year Plan and were dependent on government rationing systems, and to export in order to earn hard currency for purchases of producer goods. Collectivization allowed procurement agencies to obtain substantially more grain from the villages than during the 1920s, even considering what the peasants would have sold voluntarily. This left many peasants short of food as early as 1930. A drought in 1931 in the Volga region, Ukraine, the Urals, Siberia, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere reduced the harvest drastically. Yet the authorities procured more from this harvest than from that of 1930 (22.8 million tons vs. 22.1 million tons), often taking the last reserves from many farms. Peasants were left in desperate circumstances, and their mortality increased. Hundreds of thousands fled the drought regions seeking food.
Soviet leaders acknowledged the drought and returned grain to farms for food and seed. They introduced new labor organization rules in the collective farms to reduce evasion of responsibility for farm work. Laws in May 1932 legalized private trade in food products in an effort to increase production and improve urban food supplies. Unfortunately, 1932 was worse than 1931. Weakened by starvation and often resentful of procurements and collectivization, some peasants worked poorly or not at all. The new labor system encountered confusion and resistance and often had little effect. Crops were planted later than in previous years and with less seed. A complex of natural disasters- drought, heavy rains, infestations, soil exhaustion- drastically reduced the harvest. Yet agricultural and statistical authorities minimized or overlooked these problems and projected output matching or even exceeding that of 1931.
FAMINE OF 1946
The harvest shortfall became evident early: July procurements were only 470,000 tons compared to 950,000 tons in July 1931. Statistical and OGPU reports convinced Stalin and other Soviet leaders that the 1932 harvest was normal and that procurements collapsed because peasants withheld grain from procurements to sell on the free market at astronomical prices and because local officials mismanaged procurements. The leadership changed its approach from incentives to extreme coercion in procurements and distribution. One part of this shift was the decree of August 7 that imposed harsh penalties for “theft of socialist property.” In the following year, in the Russian republic alone, more than 200,000 people were arrested and more than 8,000 executed under this law. Simultaneously, the authorities conducted an intensive procurement campaign that lasted into the spring of 1933 in some regions. Procurement agents came from towns almost as famished as the villages, and their desperation led them to irrational actions they found difficult to explain in memoirs written later. They dug up peasants’ yards to find concealed hoards, though the amounts they found were miniscule; they took prepared meals away from peasants. Starving peasants (and to a lesser extent townspeople) tried to survive on surrogates, and some resorted to cannibalism.
The authorities repeatedly reduced procurement quotas, ultimately obtaining fifteen percent less grain from the 1932 harvest (18.5 million tons) than from the 1931 harvest, but at a much greater cost in life and disruption. Even with reduced procurements, the small harvest left practically nothing to be sold on the market. By January 1933, most of the USSR was in a state of famine, and millions of peasants and townspeople fled their homes seeking subsistence. The Politburo attempted to control this situation by establishing an internal passport system, by directives to prevent starving peasants from fleeing the main agricultural regions and return to their farms those who had fled, and by establishing political departments in the state farms and machine-tractor stations to remove opposition officials and improve work organization.
The regime allocated much more food for relief and seed from the 1932 harvest, 5.7 million tons, than it had from the 1931 harvest, with rations doled out to peasants in return for their work. Still, farm work in the spring and summer of 1933 proceeded under desperate conditions, and many peasants died of starvation or related diseases while working. Moreover, the regime exported more than 300,000 tons of grain during the first half of 1933 to meet contractual commitments and cover loan payments. Purchasing countries received diplomatic reports about the famine but did not raise the issue and continued imports at dumping-level prices. Soviet officials at all levels denied the famine publicly, refused aid from foreign organizations, and tried to concealed the famine from foreign visitors.
Improved agricultural conditions and desperate work by all concerned led to a substantially greater harvest in 1933 that ended the famine in most areas by the fall of 1933. Estimates of mortality range from five million to eight million lives, mostly peasants but also townspeople and others, yet government aid in supplies, equipment, and organizational measures helped agriculture to recover and produce large harvests soon after the famine. This tragedy could have been substantially mitigated had Soviet leaders been less distrustful of and hostile toward the peasants, more skeptical of their own personnel and knowledge, and more open to outside aid. See also: AGRICULTURE; FAMINE OF 1891-1892; FAMINE OF 1921-1922
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Conquest, Robert. (1986). Harvest of Sorrow. New York: Oxford University Press. Osokina, Elena. (2000). Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia. Ar-monk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Tauger, Mark. (2001). “Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933.” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 1506. Pittsburgh: Center for Russian and East European Studies, University
