Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine
story by controling the Western press. Lastly, he mentioned the treatment of the Famine by the Soviet writer Ivan Stadniuk93. A year later Dalrymple supplemented his original article with a number of additional references, most notably the above-cited account by Dr. William Horsley Gantt 94.
Dalrymple’s work was extremely influential in the field of Soviet studies, and after its appearance it was virtually impossible for any reputable scholar in the field to deny or minimize the fact that a famine had taken place in the early 1930s at the cost of millions of lives. His causal explanation for the Famine, relying on economic imperatives and the desire to punish and complete the collectivization of a recalcitrant peasantry, became standard, as did his figure of 5.5 million victims, based solely on averaging the figures found in various accounts. Virtually no official Soviet sources were used. Yet, it is to Dalrymple’s credit that the Famine was rescued from relative obscurity. Dalrymple collected as many scraps of information about the Famine as he could find and published them in a format easily available to scholars. In so doing, he performed a valuable service, and for two decades his article was considered the standard work on the topic.
Only in 1968 was the first serious effort made to gauge foreign response to the Famine. In that year Roman Serbyn wrote an article based on published British Foreign Office documents, Parliamentary debates, and the press. Serbyn demonstrated that at least in Great Britain both the government and newspaper readers knew that the Famine was purely artificial, affected only certain parts of the Soviet Union, and that it “was seen as a weapon against … the peasants and the non-Russians.” 95
In 1969 Alec Nove, Great Britain’s leading economic historian of the Soviet Union first published An Economic History of the U.S.S.R., which devoted five pages to the economic crisis of 1932-1933. Nove saw the promulgation of the law of August 7, 1932 on socialist property as evidence that Stalin considered himself at war with the peasantry:
Even Stalin did not do such things without good reason. The fact that such laws were passed in peacetime show that he, at least, knew he was at war. His letter to Sholokhov, which Khrushchev cited thirty years later, showed what he thought. 96
Stalin’s reasoning, Nove continued, was that the peasants were making a “war of starvation” against the Soviet state. He gave the outline of the story as follows:
The essential problem was all too simple. Harvests were poor. The peasants were demoralized. Collective farms were inefficient, the horses slaughtered or starving, tractors as yet too few and poorly maintained, transport facilities inadequate, the retail distribution system (especially in rural areas) utterly disorganized by an overprecipitate abolition of private trade. Soviet sources speak of appallingly low standards of husbandry… Very high exports in 1930 and 1931 depleted
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93 Ibid., pp. 279-281.
94 Idem, “The Soviet Famine of 1932-1934: Some Further References,” Soviet Studies, XVI:4, April 1965, pp. 471-474.
95 R. Serbyn, “British Public Opinion and the Famine in Ukraine,* The New Review: a Journal of East European History, Vni:3, September 1968, pp. 89-101. Quotation from p. 93.
96 Alec Nove, An Economic History of the U.S.S.R. (Baltimore, Penguin, 1972), p. 176.