Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine

prevented the spread of epidemics being spread to the cities. Yet, this makes his revelations all the more devastating. The Five Year Plan had led to “a gradual reduction in the standard of living, culminating in the great epidemic and famine of 1932-3.” He saw three causes for its occurrence, none of them having anything to do with crop failure:

“The total of the harvests of 1930-3 was hardly below the harvest of three average years, although there was one bad year. However, a great famine occurred throughout Russia and Siberia, though chiefly in the Ukraine, owing to (1) the policy of the Government to conserve food for the Red Army under fear of a conflict with Japan and Germany, (2) to export more than it could afford in order to purchase heavy machinery and maintain its credit abroad, (3) its internal policy with the peasants.” 14

Whether or not one describes the situation in Russia in 1932-1933 as famine or general impoverishment is less important than the fact that it was worst in Ukraine and—though Gantt did not say so-the North Caucasus. More important than specific causes (Germany and the USSR were actually on rather good terms in 1932-1933) is that they all stem from government policy. This is also evident from the following:

“During this period the cities were kept supplied with food by requisitions from the country, so that the exact opposite prevailed from the conditions of the 1920-21 famine where the city population made excursions into the countryside and returned with sacks of potatoes and corn. The following is indicative of the situation: One peasant asks another, “What is the difference between Bolshevism and Communism?” “Bolshevism,” he replies, “is when there is no food in the cities, and Communism is when there is no food in the country.”15

Gantt also confirmed that all the horrors of starvation, familiar from 1920-1922, had reemerged. He cited Soviet public health officials estimating mortality as high as fifteen million, the highest figure reported in any of the literature. In his view, what had taken place was a civil war between the authorities and the peasants:

“The fact that the U.S.S.R, has, especially during the Five Year Plan, considered itself on a war basis—not only with the outside world.., but also with the peasant—accounts for the second great famine and the epidemics during the Soviet regime, as well as for the difficulty of collecting any information that could reveal the economic condition of the country to its enemies. Publication of unfavourable facts was prohibited just as it was in the warring nations during the Great War. Foreign correspondents living in Moscow were discouraged or prohibited from touring outside the large cities when the famine and epidemics were at their height, so that the world did not realize the gravity of the situation until a year or more afterwards. Famine and epidemics were officially denied. Information had, therefore, to be collected by word of mouth as in the olden days of the early Tsars when the chroniclers wrote their accounts.”16

As a result, he continued, there had been an epidemic of typhus which had taken millions of lives. Yet, “Accounts of the disease were prohibited, not only from the

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14 W. Horsley Gantt, “A Medical Review of Soviet Russia: Results of the First Five Year Plan.” The British Medical Journal, July 4,1936, p. 19.

15Ibid.

16 Ibid.