Chapter 1

cattle and the disappearing grain, the newly organised kolkhozy, caught in the zagotovki dutches, lacked both experience and interest in doing a proper job for ensuring the next crop.

Moreover, as if the cup was not yet full enough, the Government, fascinated by its heavy industry targets and mindless of minimal precautions, embarked upon an ambitious grain exportation policy. During the N.E.P, only relatively modest amounts were exported, but in 1930 a massive 4.8 million tons, and the next year another huge 5.2 million tons, were shipped abroad. This turned out to be folly. In the Spring of 1932 the situation in the countryside was so bad that the Government even had to import some grain, though it was a trickle which could not do much to alleviate the situation. Prestige was probably the reason why more was not imported to help out the starving. 99

Until recently, this was about as good a brief summary of what took place as one could find in Sovietological literature. It is not, however, the whole picture. Lewin omitted any mention of the fact that Stalin and Molotov had officially acknowledged the difficulties arising from drought in the Volga Basin during the 1931-1932 crop year. He also ignored the fact that they had loosened somewhat the reins of repression in the countryside. Also interesting is the fact that Lewin has been quoted as denouncing subsequent work as something that should not be pursued:

“This is crap, rubbish,” said Moshe Lewin (of Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow)… “I am an anti-Stalinist, but I don’t see how this campaign adds to our knowledge. Its adding horrors, adding horrors, until it becomes a pathology” 100

As Robert Conquest has rightly pointed out, Lewin’s position seems to be “not that it didn’t happen, but that I ought not write about it: odd for a scholar.” 101

An attempt to place Russian and Soviet famines in a historical and geographical context appeared in 1976. This was an article by William Dando, “Man-Made Famines: Some Geographical Insights from an Exploratory Study of a Millennium of Russian Famines.” On the basis of secondary historical literature, Dando argued that since A-D. 971, the time of the earliest recorded famine on the territory of what is now the USSR, most famines there had been man-made. 102 By this, he did not mean that they were intentional, merely that they stemmed from social factors such as transportation breakdowns, cultural factors, overpopulation, and sometimes political errors or designs. On the famine of 1933, he noted merely that various observers had attributed it “largely to the loss of individual initiative and the unexampled pauperization of the peasants by collectivization.” 103

The next significant work on the topic was an article on the Soviet historiography of collectivization, written by Poland’s leading historian of Ukrainian Communism, Janusz Radziejowski. This was a survey of some of the more important Soviet

……………………….

99 Ibid, pp.294-296.

100 As quoted by Jeff Coplon, “In Search of a Soviet Holocaust: a 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right,” Village Voice, XXXIII:2, January 12,1988, p. 31.

101 Village Voice, XXXIII:5, February 2,1988, p. 4.