Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine
However, her portrayal of the latter is tempered by details of their growing disillusionment in the later stages of the campaign.6 Viola has also pointed out elsewhere that the peasant opposition to collectivization, often led by women and dubbed bab’i bunty (women’s riots) in Soviet discourse, actually constituted a politically conscious, effective, and organized defense of peasant interests.

In addition to “mainstream” Sovietology, Ukrainian scholarship conducted outside the Soviet Union has gone its own way, making a contribution too often ignored. Ukrainian historiography is more closely related to East European than to Russian roots. It has shared most of the same strengths and weaknesses of say, exile Polish, Czech, or Slovak scholarship. Non-Soviet Ukrainians who dedicate themselves to the history of their nation tend to be motivated, above all, by a deep love of their people, culture, and national past Occasionally, national pride has stood in the way of an objective portrayal, but this is hardly a characteristic unique to any single people. Still, the very fact that the bias operating in some Ukrainian historiography is so very different from that of Sovietology makes it all the more valuable in a field where objectivity is the ultimate end.

Serious students of Soviet agriculture have long known that a famine occurred in the early 1930s. In the interwar period, the leadership in European studies of the Soviet Union first fell to Ostforschung (Eastern Studies) in Weimar Germany. The leading journal in this field was Osteuropa (Eastern Europe), edited for many years by Otto Hoetsch. This journal reported that a famine was taking place even before the newspapers picked up the story when its August 1932 issue carried an article by Otto Auhagen, former German agricultural attache in Moscow. Auhagen wrote:

“Famine in the full sense of the word rages in large sections of Ukraine, the Lower Volga Region, Western Siberia, and Kazakhstan. Reports come from many hunger areas that people in their great extremity are eating the cadavers of horses; because of this, in the Volga German Republic many have been infected with disease.” 8

This was written when the Famine was just beginning and before the 1932 harvest had even been collected. It indicates that those on the leading edge of Soviet studies were informed of the situation from its very beginnings. Auhagen’s successor, Otto Schiller, also discussed the developing “crisis in Soviet agriculture” but seems to have stopped short of telling the worst of it.9 Nonetheless, the Soviets

…………………………….

6 Lynne Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization
(New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987).
7 Idem., “Bab’i bunty and Peasant Women’s Protest during Collectivization,” Soviet Studies XLV
1986, p. 42.
8 Otto Auhagen, “Wulschaftslage der Sowjetunion im Sommer 1932″ (Economic Conditions in the
USSR in the Summer of 1932), Osteuropa (Eastern Europe), VII, August 1932, p. 645.
9 Otto Schiller, “Die Krise dor sozialistischen Landwirtschaft in der Sowjetunion” (The Crisis of
Socialist Agriculture in the Soviet Union), Berichte uber Landwirtschaft (Review of Agriculture) 1933 No. 7. Not available to us.