The Soviet famine of 1932–33 affected the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union, leading to the deaths of millions in those areas and severe food insecurity throughout the USSR. These areas included Ukraine, Northern Caucasus, Volga Region and Kazakhstan,[1] the South Urals, and West Siberia.[2][3] The subset of the famine within the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic is called Holodomor or hungry mass-death. Unlike the 1921 famine in the Russian SFSR, information about the famine of 1932–33 was suppressed by the Soviet authorities until perestroika and Glasnost, the political and economic reforms which ended the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. The governments forced collectivization of agriculture is considered a main reason for the famine, as it caused chaos in the countryside. This included the destruction of peasant activists possessions, the selling and killing of horses for fear they would be seized, and farmers refraining from field work. Authorities blamed the agitation on the kulaks (rich peasants) and kolkhozs (collectivized farmers), and accused them of sabotage. The authorities wrongly expected that production would increase as a result of agricultural collectivization, because of plans for exporting agricultural products based on attempts to industrialize. Central authorities maintained that the collapse was caused by peasants hiding their grain crops, despite repeated requests from local authorities that their quota be decreased. As a consequence, local activists led searches for hidden stores of grain; this caused seizure of seed corn that should have been used for sowing the next years crop and the loss of the stocks needed to feed peasant families. The Law of Spikelets For those who stayed in the countryside, often the only place where any food could be found was on collective farms, but the peasants were forbidden to eat their own crops. The Decree About the Protection of Socialist Property – nicknamed by the farmers the Law of Spikelets – was enacted on August 7, 1932. Under the Decree, political police and party officials were allowed to confiscate unlimited amounts of grain from peasant households. Thus, taking food – even a handful of rotting grain or produce – was considered theft of socialist property. The estimates of the death toll by scholars varied greatly. Recent research has narrowed the estimates to between 1.8 and 5 million, with modern consensus for a likely total of 3–3.5 million. According to the decision of Kyiv Appellation Court, the demographic losses due to the famine amounted to 10 million, with 3.9 million famine deaths, and a 6.1 million birth deficit Scholars disagree on the relative importance of natural factors and bad economic policies as causes of the famine and the degree to which the destruction of the Ukrainian peasantry was premeditated on the part of Joseph Stalin. Some scholars and politicians using the word Holodomor emphasize the man-made aspects of the famine, arguing that it was genocide; some consider the resultant loss of life comparable to the Holocaust. They argue that the Soviet policies were an attack on the rise of Ukrainian nationalism and therefore fall under the legal definition of genocide.
Posted on: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 21:00:36 +0000
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