The Soviet famine of 1930–1933 was a famine in the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine and parts of Russia (Kazakhstan, North Caucasus, Kuban, Volga region, the southern Urals, and western Siberia). Major factors included the forced collectivization of agriculture as a part of the First Five-Year Plan and forced grain procurement from farmers. These factors in conjunction with a massive investment in heavy industry decreased the agricultural workforce. It is estimated that 5.7 to 8.7 million people died from starvation across the Soviet Union. In addition, 50 to 70 million Soviet citizens starved during the famine but ultimately survived.
During this period Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered the kulaks (land-owning proprietors) "to be liquidated as a class". As collectivization expanded, the persecution of the kulaks, ongoing since the Russian Civil War, culminated in a massive campaign of state persecution in 1929–1932, including arrests, deportations, and executions of kulaks. Some kulaks responded with acts of sabotage such as killing their livestock and destroying crops designated for consumption by factory workers. Despite the vast death toll in the early stages, Stalin chose to continue the Five Year Plan and collectivization. By 1934, the Soviet Union had established a base of heavy industry, at the cost of millions of lives.
Some scholars have classified the famines which occurred in Ukraine and Kazakhstan as genocides which were committed by Stalin's government, targeting ethnic Ukrainians and Kazakhs. Others dispute the relevance of any ethnic motivation – as is frequently implied by that term – citing the absence of attested documents explicitly ordering the starvation of any area in the Soviet Union, and instead focus on other factors such as the class dynamics which existed between the kulaks with strong interests in the ownership of private property. These beliefs were in conflict with the ruling Soviet Communist party's tenet which was diametrically opposed to private property. The party's goal of rapid industrialization also played a role in worsening the famine, as the party chose to continue industrial growth rather than remedy the famine. As famine spread throughout the Soviet Union, international media began to cover it, with Gareth Jones being the first Western journalist to report on the devastation.
Public discussion of the famine was banned in the Soviet Union until the glasnost period initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s. In 2008, the Russian State Duma condemned the Soviet regime "that has neglected the lives of people for the achievement of economic and political goals".
The Soviet famine of 1930–1933 was a famine in the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine and parts of Russia (Kazakhstan, North Caucasus, Kuban, Volga region, the southern Urals, and western Siberia). Major factors included the forced collectivization of agriculture as a part of the First Five-Year Plan and forced grain procurement from farmers. These factors in conjunction with a massive investment in heavy industry decreased the agricultural workforce. It is estimated that 5.7 to 8.7 million people died from starvation across the Soviet Union. In addition, 50 to 70 million Soviet citizens starved during the famine but ultimately survived.
During this period Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered the kulaks (land-owning proprietors) "to be liquidated as a class". As collectivization expanded, the persecution of the kulaks, ongoing since the Russian Civil War, culminated in a massive campaign of state persecution in 1929–1932, including arrests, deportations, and executions of kulaks. Some kulaks responded with acts of sabotage such as killing their livestock and destroying crops designated for consumption by factory workers. Despite the vast death toll in the early stages, Stalin chose to continue the Five Year Plan and collectivization. By 1934, the Soviet Union had established a base of heavy industry, at the cost of millions of lives.
Some scholars have classified the famines which occurred in Ukraine and Kazakhstan as genocides which were committed by Stalin's government, targeting ethnic Ukrainians and Kazakhs. Others dispute the relevance of any ethnic motivation – as is frequently implied by that term – citing the absence of attested documents explicitly ordering the starvation of any area in the Soviet Union, and instead focus on other factors such as the class dynamics which existed between the kulaks with strong interests in the ownership of private property. These beliefs were in conflict with the ruling Soviet Communist party's tenet which was diametrically opposed to private property. The party's goal of rapid industrialization also played a role in worsening the famine, as the party chose to continue industrial growth rather than remedy the famine. As famine spread throughout the Soviet Union, international media began to cover it, with Gareth Jones being the first Western journalist to report on the devastation.
Public discussion of the famine was banned in the Soviet Union until the glasnost period initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s. In 2008, the Russian State Duma condemned the Soviet regime "that has neglected the lives of people for the achievement of economic and political goals".
Scholarly views
Causes
Unlike the Russian famine of 1921–1922, Russia's intermittent drought was not severe in the affected areas at this time. Despite this, historian Stephen G. Wheatcroft says "there were two bad harvests in 1931 and 1932, largely but not wholly a result of natural conditions", within the Soviet Union. The most important natural factor in the Kazakh famine of 1930–1933 was the Zhut from 1927 to 1928, which was a period of extreme cold in which cattle were starved and were also unable to graze. Historian Mark Tauger of West Virginia University suggests that the famine was caused by a combination of factors, specifically low harvest due to natural disasters combined with increased demand for food caused by the urbanization and industrialization in the Soviet Union, and grain exports by the state at the same time. In regard to exports, Michael Ellman states that the 1932–33 grain exports amounted to 1.8 million tonnes, which would have been enough to feed 5 million people for one year.
According to archival research which was published by the United States Library of Congress in June 1992, the industrialization became a starting mechanism of the famine. Stalin's first five-year plan, adopted by the party in 1928, called for rapid industrialization of the economy. With the greatest share of investment put into heavy industry, widespread shortages of consumer goods occurred while the urban labour force was also increasing. Collectivization employed at the same time was expected to improve agricultural productivity and produce grain reserves sufficiently large to feed the growing urban labour force. The anticipated surplus was to pay for industrialization. Kulaks who were the wealthier peasants encountered particular hostility from the Stalin regime. About one million kulak households (1,803,392 people according to Soviet archival data) were liquidated by the Soviet Union. The kulaks had their property confiscated and were executed, imprisoned in the Gulag, or deported to penal labour camps in neighboring lands in a process called dekulakization. Forced collectivization of the remaining peasants was often fiercely resisted resulting in a disastrous disruption of agricultural productivity. Forced collectivization helped achieve Stalin's goal of rapid industrialization, but it also contributed to a catastrophic famine in 1932–1933.
According to some scholars, collectivization in the Soviet Union and other policies by the Soviet state were the primary contributors to famine mortality (52% of excess deaths), and some evidence shows that ethnic Ukrainians and Germans were discriminated against. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Professor of History at Michigan State University, states that Ukraine was hit particularly hard by grain quotas which were set at levels which most farms could not produce. According to a Centre for Economic Policy Research paper published in 2021 by Andrei Markevich, Natalya Naumenko, and Nancy Qian, regions with higher Ukrainian population shares were struck harder with centrally planned policies corresponding to famine, and Ukrainian populated areas were given lower amounts of tractors which, the paper argues, demonstrates that ethnic discrimination across the board was centrally planned, ultimately concluding that 92% of famine deaths in Ukraine alone along with 77% of famine deaths in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus combined can be explained by systematic bias against Ukrainians.
The collectivization and high procurement quota explanation for the famine is somewhat called into question by the fact that the oblasts of Ukraine with the highest losses were Kyiv and Kharkiv, which produced far lower amounts of grain than other sections of the country. A potential explanation for this is that Kharkiv and Kyiv fulfilled and overfulfilled their grain procurements in 1930, which led to their procurement quotas being doubled in 1931, compared to the national average increase in procurement rate of 9%. In contrast, the Odesa Oblast and some raions of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast had their procurement quotas decreased. According to Nataliia Levchuk of the Ptoukha Institute of Demography and Social Studies, "the distribution of the largely increased 1931 grain quotas in Kharkiv and Kyiv oblasts by raion was very uneven and unjustified because it was done disproportionally to the percentage of wheat sown area and their potential grain capacity." Oleh Wolowyna comments that peasant resistance and the ensuing repression of said resistance was a critical factor for the famine in Ukraine and parts of Russia populated by national minorities like Germans and Ukrainians allegedly tainted by "fascism and bourgeois nationalism" according to Soviet authorities.
Mark Tauger criticizes Natalya Naumenko's work as being based on: "major historical inaccuracies and falsehoods, omissions of essential evidence contained in her sources or easily available, and substantial misunderstandings of certain key topics". For example, Naumenko ignores Tauger's findings of 8.94 million tons of the harvest that had been lost to fungal disease, reductions in grain procurement to Ukraine including a 650,000 tons reduction in grain procurements ordered by Stalin, and that from Tauger's findings, which are contrary to Naumenko's paper's claims, the "per-capita grain procurements in Ukraine were less, often significantly less, than the per-capita procurements from the five other main grain-producing regions in the USSR in 1932". However, other scholars argue that in other years preceding the famine this was not the case. For example, Stanislav Kulchytsky claims Ukraine produced more grain in 1930 than the Central Black Earth Oblast, middle and lower Volga regions, and North Caucasus all together, which had never been done before, and on average gave 4.7 quintals of grain from every sown hectare to the state—a record-breaking index of marketability—but was unable to fulfill the grain quota for 1930 until May 1931. Ukraine produced a similar amount of grain in 1931, but by the late spring of 1932 "many districts were left with no reserves of produce or fodder at all". Ultimately Tauger states: "if the regime had not taken even that smaller amount grain from Ukrainian villages, the famine could have been greatly reduced or even eliminated" however (in his words) "if the regime had left that grain in Ukraine, then other parts of the USSR would have been even more deprived of food than they were, including Ukrainian cities and industrial sites, and the overall effect would still have been a major famine, even worse in 'non-Ukrainian' regions." In contrast to Naumenko's paper's claims, the higher Ukrainian collectivization rates, in Tauger's opinion, indicate a pro-Ukrainian bias in Soviet policies rather than an anti-Ukrainian one: "[Soviet authorities] did not see collectivization as 'discrimination' against Ukrainians; they saw it as a reflection of—in the leaders' view—Ukraine's relatively more advanced farming skills that made Ukraine better prepared for collectivization (Davies 1980a, 166, 187–188; Tauger 2006a)."
Naumenko responded to some of Tauger's criticisms in another paper. Naumenko criticizes Tauger's view of the efficacy of collective farms arguing Tauger's view goes against the consensus, she also states that the tenfold difference in death toll between the 1932-1933 Soviet famine and the Russian famine of 1891–1892 can only be explained by government policies, and that the infestations of pests and plant disease suggested by Tauger as a cause of the famine must also correspond such infestations to rates of collectivization due to deaths by area corresponding to this due Naumenko's findings that: "on average, if you compare two regions with similar pre-famine characteristics, one with zero collectivization rate and another with a 100 percent collectivization rate, the more collectivized region's 1933 mortality rate increases by 58 per thousand relative to its 1927–1928 mortality rate". Naumenko believes the disagreement between her and Tauger is due to a "gulf in training and methods between quantitative fields like political science and economics and qualitative fields like history" noting that Tauger makes no comments on one of her paper's results section.
Tauger made a counter-reply to this reply by Naumenko. Tauger argues in his counter reply that Naumenko's attempt to correspond collectivization rates to famine mortality fails because "there was no single level of collectivization anywhere in the USSR in 1930, especially in the Ukrainian Republic" and that "since collectivization changed significantly by 1932–1933, any connection between 1930 and 1933 omits those changes and is therefore invalid". Tauger also criticizes Naumenko's ignoring of statistics Tauger's presented where "in her reply she completely ignored the quantitative data [Tauger] presented in [his] article" in which she against the evidence "denied that any famines took place in the later 1920s". To counter Naumenko's claim that collectivization explains the famine Tauger argues ( in his words) how agro-environmental disasters better explain the regional discrepancies: "[Naumenko's] calculations again omit any consideration of the agro-environmental disasters that harmed farm production in 1932. In her appendices, Table C3, she does the same calculation with collectivization data from 1932, which she argues shows a closer correlation between collectivization and famine mortality (Naumenko 2021b, 33). Yet, as I showed, those agroenvironmental disasters were much worse in the regions with higher collectivization—especially Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the Volga River basin (and also in Kazakhstan)—than elsewhere in the USSR. As I documented in my article and other publications, these were regions that had a history of environmental disasters that caused crop failures and famines repeatedly in Russian history." Tauger notes: "[Naumenko's] assumption that collectivization subjected peasants to higher procurements, but in 1932 in Ukraine this was clearly not the case" as "grain procurements both total and per-capita were much lower in Ukraine than anywhere else in the USSR in 1932".