Post-Stalinist Soviet Historiography on the Famine
Even as it is, it is clear that life was extraordinarily difficult for the population. This is obvious, for example, from the production of milk, the sharp decline of which might serve as an indicator of the child mortality situation. In 1933 the production of milk was no greater than in the famine year 1921…
For a long time I have been unable to find figures which would make it possible to judge what actually happened in 1933 concerning the number of the population. In one of the works of the outstanding demographer B. Ts. Urlanis I at last encountered the figures that interested me. In his book Problemy dinamiki naseleniia SSSR (Problems of USSR Population Dynamics) among other topics he addressed his former efforts to project the future population of the country. The scholar analyzed how the birth and death rates of the mid-19206 were projected onto subsequent years as remaining constant, parting company with reality. According to this reckoning the population of the USSR on January 1, 1933 should have been 167.7 million. “The deviation of the projected data from reality,” as B. Ts. Urlanis wrote, “constituted about seven million people.” Then he analyzed how the projection for the first five year plan deviated from reality. The author estimated the population count for the country for April 1 of that same year at 158 million. From these numbers it is clear that in 1933 the population of the country not only failed to increase but, on the contrary, decreased!
And now one can imagine how far it (according to Urlanis ten whole millions) was from Stalin’s figures.
And here is other data, revealing the situation of that time. It is well known that in 1933, even in towns of the European part of the country the birth rate was lower than the death rate.
This, at last explains another puzzle—why at the time of the census they wrote about 170 million. For in 1935 I. V. Stalin spoke of annual population growth as equal to “a whole Finland.” However, the fact that this was not so was quietly admitted. And so it came about that two figures came into play. 168 million for the end of 1933 and 170 million for the beginning of 1937. 71
However, Tol’ts continued, the 1937 census reported a Soviet population of 163.8 million, the census was suppressed, and the officials in charge were arrested as enemies of the people. 72
The 1937 census total was published a quarter of a century earlier, but in a technical journal on statistics—not in a mass circulation weekly—and then with no reference to famine. As to the harvest figures for the early 1930s, it is not at all unlikely that the 1932 harvest was indeed larger than in either 1931 or 1934. In 1931-32 difficulties with the grain crop—officially attributed to drought in the Volga Basin—were admitted, and in 1934 only the release of grain from government stockpiles and lower procurement quotas averted famine. Moreover, no one familiar with the period would claim that the Lower Volga was worse off than Ukraine in 1933. Tol’ts, seems to know even less than we. Still, he at least was able to speak out from an official Soviet forum.
On Christmas Day, Volodymyr Shcherbyts’kyi, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, gave a speech marking the 70th anniversary of the first attempt to create a Soviet Ukrainian government. In the middle of a long survey of Soviet Ukrainian history, there is a passage which represents a modest step forward:
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71 Mark Tol’ts, “Skol’ko zhe nas togda bylo?” (How Many of Us Were There Then?) Ogonek
(Little Flame), 1987, No. 51 (December 19-26), pp. 10-11.
72 Ibid, p. 11.
73 V. Staroskii, “Metodika issledovaniia elementov rosta narodonaseleniia” (The Methodology of Studying Population Growth), Vestnik statistiki (Statistical Herald), 1964, No, 11, p. 11.