Non-Soviet Scholarship on the Ukrainian Famine

Soviet functionary, 8,000,000 in Ukraine alone according to what Adam Tawdul had been told by Mykola Skrypnyk and Vsevolod Balitsky. 22

The earliest attempt to determine the demographic consequences of the Famine on the basis of census data was made in 1940, by the influential Russian Emigre economist Sergei Prokopovich. Prokopovich calculated that in the 1933 famine about 9,000,000 lives were lost. 23 In 1946, Frank Lorimer’s thorough study of the Soviet population, conducted under the auspices of the League of Nations, also mentioned the famine of 1933. Lorimer, however, did not attempt to calculate the number of deaths which it had caused. 24 One of the last works published under the auspices of the League of Nations, Lorimer’s work is conservative in its 5.5 million estimate of Soviet “excess mortality”
in 1926-1939. 25

At about the same time, high ranking Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko gave a frank eyewitness account of the Famine in his best-seller, I Chose Freedom. 26 This book became a cause celebre when the author sued a French communist periodical for challenging the book’s authenticity and was awarded the symbolic franc. The book based upon the trial testimony, I Chose Justice, also contained material on the Famine. 27
Kravchenko, however, always adhered to the traditional Russian and Sovietological view that the catastrophe was due to the excesses of collectivization and just happened to focus upon Ukraine and the North Caucasus. Upon arriving in Paris for the trial, he immediately made it clear that he wanted to have nothing to do with those he called “Ukrainian Separatists” and weeded them out as “undesirables” whose testimony he would not use in the trial. 28

One response of the Russian emigration to the Famine was a Russian language booklet, published circa 1947 by Posev in Munich, V. S. Mertsalov’s Tragedy of the Russian Peasantry:

“In 1933 and 1934 the Soviet countryside was struck by famine. The village population of Ukraine, the Central Agricultural Region, the Don, the North Caucasus, and several other of the country’s most fertile regions were literally swollen by famine. The village inhabitants gathered and consumed as food goosefoot, nettles, and tree bark. Cats and dogs were not disdained. On the Don, in Ukraine, and in the Kuban not a few cases of cannibalism were observed… Hungry, ragged Ukrainians crowded Moscow and Leningrad train stations and streets; they had come to the capitals … for bread. Whole families, with little children swathed in rags wandered along the streets of Moscow and Leningrad, begging alms throughout the

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22 Boris Souvarine, Stalin: a Critical Survey of Bolshevism (New York, Longman Green, 1939),
pp. 669-670.
23 S. N. Prokopovich, “The Growth of the Population in the U.S.S.R.,” Quarterly Bulletin of
Soviet-Russian Economics, No. 4, April 1940, p. 110. This figure was repeated in his Histoire
economique de I’URSS (Paris, Portulan, 1952), p. 66.
24 Frank Lorimer, The Population of the Soviet Union: History and Prospects (Geneva, League of
Nations, 1946), p. 121.
25 Ibid, pp. 133-137,231-240.
26 Victor Kravchenko, / Chose Freedom: the Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (Garden
City, New York, Garden City Publishing Co., 1946), pp. 110-131.
27 Idem, I Chose Justice (New York, Scribner’s, 1950), pp. 59-108 passim.
28 Ibid , pp. 29,40.