Sent: Wednesday, May 01, 2002 1:44 AM
Subject: Re: Ukrainian Famine

I am not a specialist on the Ukrainian famine but I am familiar with the
recent research by several scholars on the matter, and think rather a lot of
the deep and broad research that Mark Tauger has conducted over many years.

That familiarity leads me to believe that there are no simple answers to
this.  A "man-made" famine is not the same as a deliberate or
"terror-famine".  A famine originally caused by crop failure and aggravated
by poor policies is "man aggravated" but only partially "man-made".  Why in
this field do we always insist on absolutes, especially categorical, binary
and polemical ones?  True/false.  Good/evil.  Crop failure/Man made.
Reminds me of the Stalinist approach.

Many questions have ambiguous answers.

> 1    Why was the Ukraine sealed off by the Soviet authorities?

Not necessarily to punish Ukrainians.  It was also done to prevent starving
people from flocking into non-famine areas, putting pressure on scarce food
supplies there, and thereby turning a regional disaster into a universal
one.  This was also the original reason for the internal passport system,
which was adopted in the first instance to prevent the movement of hungry
and desperate people and, with them, the spread of famine.

> 2    Why were foreign journalists, even Stalin apologists like Duranty,
> refused access to the famine areas?

For the same reason that US journalists are no longer allowed into US combat
zones (Gulf War, Afghanistan) since Vietnam.  No regime is anxious to take
the chance on bad press if they can control the situation otherwise.

> 3    Why was aid from other countries refused?

Obviously to deny the "imperialists" a chance to trumpet the failure of
socialism.  Certainly politics triumphed over humanitarianism.  Moreover, in
the growing paranoia of the times (and based on experience in the Civil War)
the regime believed that spies came along with relief administration.

> 4    Why do I read and hear stories of families who tried to take supplies
> from other regions to help their extended families through the period
having
> all foodstuffs confiscated as they crossed back into the famine regions?

The regime believed, reasonably I think, that speculators were trying to
take advantage of the disaster by buying up food in non-famine (but
nevertheless food-short) regions, moving it to Ukraine, and reselling it at
a higher price.  In true Bolshevik fashion, there was no nuanced approach to
this, no distinguishing between families and speculators, and everybody was
stopped.

As with point 1 above, regimes facing famine typically try to contain the
disaster geographically.  This is not the same as intending to punish the
victims.

> 5    If it was a harvest failure, why was the burden of that failure not
> simply shared across the Soviet Union?

It was.  No region had a lot of food in 1932-33.  Food was short and
expensive everywhere.  Everybody was hungry.

With the above suggestions, I do not mean to make excuses or apologies for
the Stalinists.  Their conduct in this was erratic, incompetent, and cruel
and millions of people suffered unimaginably and died as a result.    But it
is too simple to explain everything with a "Bolsheviks were just evil
people" explanation more suitable to children than scholars.

It was more complex than that.  Although the situation was aggravated in
some ways by Bolshevik mistakes, their attempts to contain the famine, once
it started, were not entirely stupid, nor were they necessarily gratuitously
cruel.  The Stalinists did, by the way, eventually cut grain exports and
did, by the way, send food relief to Ukraine and other areas.  It was too
little too late, but there is no evidence (aside from constantly repeated
assertions by some writers) that this was a deliberately inflicted
"terror-famine."

Finally,

> To deny the Jewish genocide quite rightly brings opprobrium. Surely to
deny
> the terror famine of 1932-33 ought to provoke the same response.

This is a position that I personally find grotesque, insulting and at least
shallow.  Nobody is denying the famine or the huge scale of suffering, (as
holocaust-deniers do), least of all Tauger and other researchers who have
spent much of their careers trying to bring this tragedy to light and give
us a factual account of it.  Admittedly, what he and other scholars do is
different from the work of journalists and polemicists who indiscriminately
collect horror stories and layer them between repetitive statements about
evil, piling it all up and calling it history.

A factual, careful account of horror in no way makes it less horrible.

________________________________________
J. Arch Getty
Professor of History, UCLA
getty@ucla.edu
________________________________________

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