My research on Soviet farm labor policies and actual peasant practices and my reading of this literature, however, has made me skeptical of the argument for labor resistance as the exclusive or even dominant cause of the low harvests and famine in the early 1930s. First, while some peasants were so resentful of collectivization and procurements that they attempted to sabotage the farms, for peasant resistance to have been sufficient to cause the low 1932 harvest an extremely large number of peasants would have had to act this way, that is, to have avoided work and attempted to destroy the harvest. In other words, the argument asserts that the majority of peasants attempted to deprive their families and fellow villagers of sufficient food to last until the next harvest. This interpretation, therefore, requires us to believe that most peasants acted against their own and their neighbors’ self-interest. This viewpoint is difficult to accept both on general human terms and particularly when applied to peasants in Russia and Ukraine. The great majority of these peasants had lived for centuries in corporate villages that had instilled certain basic cooperative values, and the kolkhosi perpetuated basic features of these villages.
Second, the argument is reductionist because it attempts to explain everything that happened in this crisis by human actions, specifically by the conflict between the Soviet government and the peasants, with an emphasis on peasant resistance as a kind of heroic struggle against the oppressive regime. Such reductionism is problematic because it does not account for actions that do not fit the pattern of resistance, that took place outside the nexus of resistance. If the situation had been as conflictual as this interpretation implies, if the great majority of peasants did little or no farm work and performed the work they did do neglectfully and poorly out of spite, then the harvest in 1932 would not have been even 50,000,000 tons but practically nothing.
…losses from rust and smut in 1932 reached approximately 9 million tons, 13% of the official harvest figure and nearly 20% of the lowest archival harvest estimate. It should also be noted that while these estimates are approximate, they are also the only concrete estimates, based on any even remotely scientific evidence, of overall 1932 grain harvest losses from any environmental or human factors available in any published or archival sources that I have been able to find.
- Tauger, Mark. Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933 Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2001
… the slaughter of cattle and the feasting went on–there was no way of stopping it. Animals were killed because no fodder was left or because they had become diseased from neglect; and even the bednyaks who, having joined the kolkhozes, had every interest in preserving their wealth, went on dissipating it and stuffing their own long-starved stomachs. Then followed the long and dreadful fast: the farms were left without horses and without seed for the sowing; the kolkhozniki of the Ukraine and of European Russia rushed to central Asia to buy horses, and, having returned empty-handed, harnessed the few remaining cows and oxen to the ploughs; and in 1931 and 1932 vast tracts of land remained untilled and the furrows were strewn with the bodies of starved muzhiks. The smallholder perished as he had lived, in pathetic helplessness and barbarism; and his final defeat was moral as well as economic and political.
- Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963
How far this famine was “man-made” in the sense that Stalin and his government deliberately provoked it by wholesale collectivization is another story. Evidence gathered on the spot showed that the lack of efficiency of the peasants themselves was partly to blame, that in some regions crop prospects were bright enough before the harvest but that harvesting was shockingly mismanaged; vast quantities of grain were hidden or simply wasted, because collection and distribution of foodstuffs disintegrated in the prevailing chaos. On the other hand, it can fairly be argued that the authorities were responsible because they had not foreseen the muddle and mess and taken steps beforehand to correct it. The proof of this is that things took a marked turn for the better in the following year, when the Communist Party set its hand, almost literally, to the plow….
Yet it is interesting to note that Stalin did directly and specifically assume responsibility for what had occurred. In a speech of January 11, 1933, to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, he said: “…. Why blame the peasants?… For we are at the helm; we are in command of the instruments of the state; it is our mission to lead the collective farms; and we must bear the whole of the responsibility for the work in the rural districts.”
Duranty, Walter. Stalin & Co. New York: W. Sloane Associates, 1949, p. 78-79
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