Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2002 11:15 AM
Subject: Re: Ukrainian Famine: QUERY


This is in response to Lesia Chernihivska's note about the book of German
letters and the reference to what she termed the "Ukrainian Famine" of the
early 1930s.

I would just like to point out that I and a number of other scholars have
shown conclusively that the famine of 1931-1933 was by no means limited to
Ukraine, was not a "man-made" or artificial famine in the sense that she and
other devotees of the Ukrainian famine argument assert, and was not a
genocide in any conventional sense of the term.  We have likewise shown that
Mr. Conquest's book on the famine is replete with errors and inconsistencies
and does not deserve to be considered a classic, but rather another
expression of the Cold War.

I would recommend to Ms. Chernihivska the following publications regarding
the 1931-1933 famine and some other famines as well.  I will begin with my
own because I believe that these most directly relate to her question.

Mark B. Tauger, "The 1932 Harvest and the Soviet Famine of 1932-1933,"
Slavic Review v. 50 no. 1, Spring 1991, 70-89, and my exchanges of letters
with Robert Conquest over this article, Slavic Review v. 51 no. 1, 192-194
and v. 53 no. 1, 318-319.
Tauger, Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of
1931-1933, Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 1506,
June 2001.
These two articles show that the famine resulted directly from a famine
harvest, a harvest that was much smaller than officially acknowledged, and
that this small harvest was in turn the result of a complex of natural
disasters that [with one small exception] no previous scholars have ever
discussed or even mentioned.  The foot notes in the Carl Beck Paper contain
extensive citations from primary sources as well as Western and Soviet
secondary works, among others by D'Ann Penner and Stephen Wheatcroft and R.
W. Davies that further substantiate these points and I urge interested
readers to examine those works as well.

An additional study on the issues of harvests and statistics from a
comparative standpoint is Tauger, Statistical Falsification in the Soviet
Union:  A Comparative Case Study of Projections, Biases, and Trust.  The
Donald W. Treadgold Papers in Russian, East European, and Central Asian
Studies, no. 34, August 2001.

An additional study on the issue of shortages is R. W. Davies, S. G.
Wheatcroft, and Tauger, "Soviet Grain Stocks and the Famine of 1932-1933,"
Slavic Review v. 54 no. 3, Fall 1995, 642-657.

Tauger, "Grain Crisis or Famine?  The Ukrainian State Commission for Aid to
Crop Failure Vicitims and the Ukrainian Famine of 1928-1929," in Donald
Raleigh, ed., Provincial Landscapes:  Local Dimensions of Soviet Power, U
Pitt Press, 2001.   This article discusses a real Ukrainian famine that has
never been mentioned in any Western study and only peripherally in one or
two post-Soviet Ukrainian works.

R. W. Davies reviewed Conquest's book Harvest of Sorrow in the journal
Detente, 9/10 (1987), 44-45.

Finally a large group of Western, Russian, and Asian scholars are publishing
a vast collection of formerly secret Soviet documents entitled Tragediia
Sovetskoi Derevni, which contains extensive evidence that this was a
Soviet-wide famine.  Three volumes have so far appeared, published by
Rosspen, and they are obtainable through Russian-language distributors like
Panorama of Russia and the Russian Publication Service.

Mark B. Tauger   mark.tauger@mail.wvu.edu
Associate Professor, Dept. of History
West Virginia University
Morgantown WV 26506-6303


2)
From: Grover Furr [mailto:gfurr@blake.montclair.edu]
Sent: Monday, April 15, 2002 12:09 PM
Conquest's book was sharply criticized by many Soviet scholars when it was
published. The works footnoted in it show that it is _not_ a reliable
source.
A number of scholars have shown that the famine was _not_ "man-made", and
extended far beyond the Ukraine.

The best research on the Famine is by Prof. Mark Tauger. He has published
several articles and monographs on the subject, including articles in
_Slavic Review_ in 1991 and, together with Davies and Wheatcroft, in 1995 as
well.

His major monograph is a year old now: _Natural Disaster and Human Actions
in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933_, Carl Beck Papers No. 1506. It's
extremely thorough. Every serious student of this famine  must study this
excellent work.

Tauger also has an excellent, and short, readable essay in the German
collection of essays critiquing the much-criticized "Black Book of
Communism". That collection is:

_'Roter Holocaust?' Kritik des Schwartzbuchs des Kommunismus_. Hamburg:
Konkret Literatur Verlag, 1998.

Tauger's essay, "War die Hungersnot in der Ukraine intendiert?" -- a
question he answers firmly in the negative -- points to a comparison with a
famine in the French empire in Africa in 1931-31 which, in contrast to that
in the USSR, really _was_ man-made. His reference is to an article in Revue
francaise d'Histoire d'Outre-Mer. I've obtained and read this article.

This journal is held by several American libraries. But if anyone would like
a copy, email me privately and I'll arrange to get you one.

I can't recall offhand whether Tauger specifically mentions it, but another
famine, even more devastating and certainly "man-made", was that in Bengal
in 1943-44. Professor Gideon Polya of Australia has written on this famine,
as have Amartya Sen and others. One place to start is an article by Polya at
the following web address:

http://bioserve.latrobe.edu.au/about/gmp/gmp_famn.html

The existence of these other man-made famines in the colonial empires of
France and Great Britain are not widely discussed or even known, while that
in the USSR is not only widely discussed, but erroneously said to be
"man-made." No doubt this one-sidedness can be attributed to the deleterious
effect of the Cold War upon scholarship.

Sincerely,

Grover Furr
Montclair State University

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