\u2018Red Famine: Stalin\u2019s War on Ukraine\u2019, Anne Applebaum<\/a> describes how Russia\u2019s Communist leadership used food\u2014or in this case a lack of food\u2014for political ends. She describes how, across the Soviet Union, 5 million people died of starvation during the great famine of 1931 to 1934, of which 3.9 million in Ukraine. The famine was largely politically induced.<\/p>\nMs Applebaum writes that the Russian Empire had been struggling with food supplies since the outbreak of the First World War. When war broke out the Imperial government had centralised and nationalised the country’s food distribution system, eliminating middlemen and traders. By doing so they created administrative chaos and severe food shortages.<\/p>\n
When the Bolsheviks seized power they quickly realised that the fate of the revolution depended on their ability to \u2018reliably supply the proletariat and the army with bread\u2019. But instead of relaxing the food distribution system, they tightened it further. Lenin in particular denounced traders as ideological enemies, writing,<\/p>\n
\u2018The peasant must choose free trade in grain \u2013 which means speculation in grain, freedom of the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer and starve; the return of the absolute landowners and the capitalists; and the severing of the union of peasants and workers \u2013 or delivery of grain surpluses to the state at fixed prices.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\nOf course Lenin gave the peasants no choice: he forced them to sell their grain to the state at fixed prices.<\/p>\n
It was a policy that Stalin later copied, taking it to extreme lengths.\u00a0 In 1928 he launched the government\u2019s first \u2018Five Year Plan\u2019, an economic programme that mandated a massive 20 percent increase in industrial production. At a party plenum he told party members that \u2018\u2026for hundreds of years England squeezed the juice out of all of its colonies, from every continent, and thus injected extra investment into its industry<\/em>\u2019. He argued that without colonies the only way the USSR could achieve its goals was through the exploitation of the country\u2019s peasants.<\/p>\nAs Ms Applebaum writes, Stalin \u2018had determined that the peasantry would have to be sacrificed in order to industrialise the USSR, and he was prepared to force millions off their land.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\nRussia had had a long tradition of communal agriculture, and prior to the revolution the majority of Russian peasants had held land jointly in rural communities. Ukraine had no such tradition; most of the land was owned and farmed by individual peasants.<\/p>\n
The Soviet government arbitrarily divided peasants into three categories: \u2018kulaks\u2019, or wealthy peasants; \u2018seredniaks\u2019, or middle peasants; and \u2018bedniaks\u2019, or poor peasants. The author writes that \u2018very quickly, (the kulaks) became one of the most important Bolshevik scapegoats, the group blamed most often for the failure of Bolshevik agriculture and food distribution<\/em>.\u2019 They were arrested, deported or killed, their grain and their animals confiscated and their land \u2018collectivised\u2019.<\/p>\nStalin believed that collectivisation and the elimination of the kulaks would lead to greater efficiency and increased output, while at the same time convert the peasantry into \u2018proletarianised\u2019 wage labourers.<\/p>\n
He believed that the political and economic future of the Soviet Union lay in industrialisation. Politically, he believed that wage labourers could be \u2018controlled\u2019 more easily than peasants. Economically, he felt that the only way a country could grow was through industrialisation\u2014and that that could only be achieved by redeploying the surplus, both in labour and food, from the countryside to the cities.<\/p>\n
He used brute force and mass murder to try to achieve these aims, while deliberately setting high prices for industrially produced goods and low prices for agriculturally produced goods.<\/p>\n
The state would fine peasants who could not deliver grain, charging them up to five times its worth. Those who could not or would not pay had their property confiscated.<\/p>\n
it wasn’t just the rich peasants that were under attack. The government issued orders to arrest ‘the most prominent grain procurement agents and most inveterate grain merchants…who are disrupting set procurement and market prices.’ Trading grain became a crime.<\/p>\n
In the end, his policies led, as Mikhail Gorbachev later admitted, to a new form of serfdom. They also led to a collapse in agricultural production, mass murder and mass starvation.<\/p>\n
Food has always been used as a weapon. Even in recent history, unscrupulous leaders have used food, famine and starvation as a weapon, supplying food to their supporters and denying it to perceived enemies.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, most classical economists still share Stalin’s view that industrialisation is the key to a country\u2019s economic development, and that cheap food is an important policy tool in achieving that objective. Cheap food forces farmers to become more efficient, while at the same time freeing up labourers to work in the factories where \u2018real wealth can be generated\u2019. Cheap food also transfers wealth from rural to urban areas, \u2018subsidizing\u2019 the wages of workers in the cities.<\/p>\n
In her book Ms Applebaum clearly shows that famines are not necessarily the result of bad weather, nor cheap food necessarily an accident of market forces.<\/p>\n
\u00a9 Commodity Conversations \u00ae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In her book \u2018Red Famine: Stalin\u2019s War on Ukraine\u2019, Anne Applebaum describes how Russia\u2019s Communist leadership used food\u2014or in this case a lack of food\u2014for political ends. She describes how, across the Soviet Union, 5 million people died of starvation during the great famine of 1931 to 1934, of which 3.9 million in Ukraine. The … <\/p>\n
Continue reading “Food and famine”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9fIT3-BF","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commodityconversations.com\/wordpress2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commodityconversations.com\/wordpress2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commodityconversations.com\/wordpress2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commodityconversations.com\/wordpress2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commodityconversations.com\/wordpress2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2335"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/commodityconversations.com\/wordpress2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2400,"href":"https:\/\/commodityconversations.com\/wordpress2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2335\/revisions\/2400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commodityconversations.com\/wordpress2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commodityconversations.com\/wordpress2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commodityconversations.com\/wordpress2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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