Part 1 of the article on the Soviet famine of 1932-33 traced its causes to environmental factors leading to a poor harvest which did not produce enough grain to feed the entire population. While there were other contributing factors — crop disease infestations, shortage of labor to harvest the fields and of horses to do the plowing and soil exhaustion reducing fertility — Ukrainian nationalists (who later fought on the Nazi side in World War II) spread the myth that the Soviet government deliberately cut off grain to the Ukraine, causing the famine. There was absolutely no evidence supporting this. The Soviet government reduced grain exports and diverted supplies to the famine-stricken areas, trying to distribute what grain was available in an egalitarian manner but this did not meet the overall need (see CHALLENGE 3/26).
The Question of Grain Exports
Like the pre-revolutionary Czarist regimes, the Soviet government exported grain. Contracts were signed in advance, which created the dilemma. Professor Mark Tauger of West Virginia University has spent the past two decades studying Russian famines and the famine of 1932-33. He describes the situation with grain exports as follows:
The low 1931 harvest and reallocations of grain to famine areas forced the regime to curtail grain exports from 5.2 million tons in 1931 to 1.73 million in 1932; they declined to 1.68 million in 1933. Grain exported in 1932 and 1933 could have fed many people and reduced the famine: The 354,000 tons exported during the first half of 1933, for example, could have provided nearly 2 million people with daily rations of l kilogram for six months. Yet these exports were less than half of the 750,000 tons exported in the first half of 1932. …[A]vailable evidence indicates that further reductions or cessation of Soviet exports could have had serious consequences. Grain prices fell in world markets and turned the terms of trade against the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, its indebtedness rose and its potential ability to pay declined, causing western bankers and officials to consider seizure of Soviet property abroad and denial of future credits in case of Soviet default. Failure to export thus would have threatened the fulfillment of its industrialization plans and, according to some observers, the stability of the regime.
While the USSR was exporting it was also allocating much more grain to seed and famine relief. Tauger documents the fact that the Central Committee allocated more than half a million tons to Ukraine and the North Caucasus in February, and more than half a million tons to Ukraine alone by April 1933. The government also accumulated some three million tons in reserves during this period and then allocated 2 million tons from that to famine relief. Soviet archival sources indicate that the regime returned five million tons of grain from procurements back to villages throughout the USSR in the first half of 1933. All of these amounts greatly exceed the amount exported in this period.
However, there was simply not enough food to feed the whole population, even if all exports had been stopped instead of just drastically curtailed, as they were. According to Tauger:
…[E]ven a complete cessation of exports would not have been enough to prevent famine. This situation makes it difficult to accept the interpretation of the famine as the result of the 1932 grain procurements and as a conscious act of genocide. The harvest of 1932 essentially made a famine inevitable.
Grain delivery targets (procurement quotas) were drastically reduced multiple times for both collective and individual farmers in order to share the scarcity. Some was returned to the villages. It is these collection efforts, often carried out in a very harsh way, that are highlighted by promoters of the “intentionalist” interpretation as evidence of callousness and indifference to peasants’ lives or even of intent to punish or kill.
Feed 40 Million People in the Cities
Meanwhile the government used these procurements to feed 40 million people in the cities and industrial sites who were also starving, further evidence that the harvest was small. In May 1932 the Soviet government legalized the private trade in grain. But very little grain was sold this way in 1932-1933. This too is a further indication of a small 1932 harvest. (Tauger 1991, 72-74)
About 10 percent of the population of Ukraine died from the famine or associated diseases. But 90 percent survived, the vast majority of whom were peasants, army men of peasant background or workers of peasant origin. The surviving peasants had to work very hard, under conditions of insufficient food, to sow and bring in the 1933 harvest. They did so with significant aid from the Soviet government.
A smaller population, reduced in size by deaths, weakened by hunger, with fewer draught animals, was nevertheless able to produce a successful harvest in 1933 and put an end to the famine. This is yet more evidence that the 1932 harvest had been a catastrophically poor one. (Tauger 2004)
Government aid amounted to five million tons of food distributed as relief, including to Ukraine, beginning as early as February 7, 1933; the provision of tractors and other equipment distributed especially to Ukraine; “a network of several thousand political departments in the machine-tractor stations which contributed greatly to the successful harvest in 1933” (Tauger 2012b); and other measures, including special commissions on sowing and harvesting to manage work and distribute seed and food aid.
Some anticommunist “experts” have adopted the Ukrainian nationalists’ “intentional” interpretation — the “Holodomor” myth. They claim the Soviet government cut the Ukraine off completely, making no effort to relieve the famine. They ignore environmental factors — which were in fact the primary causes — and fail to mention the Soviet government’s large-scale relief campaign which, together with their own hard work under the most difficult conditions, enabled the peasants to produce a large harvest in 1933. In Tauger’s judgment:
[T]he general point [is that] the famine was caused by natural factors and that the government helped the peasants produce a larger harvest the next year and end the famine.
The so-called “Holodomor” or “deliberate” and “man-made” famine interpretation is not simply mistaken on some important points. Its proponents misrepresent history by omitting evidence that would undermine their interpretation. It is not history but political propaganda disguised as history.
Other writers like R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft adopt an interpretation similar to that of the Russian government. They attribute the famine to several causes, with collectivization being a very important, if not the most important cause. In their opinion environmental factors played only a secondary role. Those who take this view believe the Soviet government could have saved many, perhaps millions, of lives if collectivization had not been undertaken at all, and mitigated if the Soviet government had not handled the famine in a “brutal” manner.
As shown in the last article, this hypothesis, too, is mistaken. Environmental factors caused the famine. Collectivization, the role of the Soviet government in organizing and managing agriculture and seizing and redistributing the grain that did exist, plus the hard work of hungry peasants, brought in a successful harvest in 1933 and ended the famine.