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Deliberate famine in Russia

Malcolm Muggeridge
Saturday March 25, 1933
The Guardian

Living in Moscow and listening to statements of doctrine and of policy, you forget that the lives of a hundred and sixty millions of people, mostly peasants, are profoundly affected by discussions and resolutions that seem, as abstract as the proceedings of a provincial debating society.
"We must collectivise agriculture", or "We must root out kulaks". But what is going on in the remote villages? I set out to discover it in the North Caucasus.

A little market town in the Kuban district. There were soldiers everywhere - well fed, and the civilian population was obviously starving. I mean starving in its absolute sense; not undernourished, but having had for weeks next to nothing to eat. Later I found out there had been no bread at all in the place for three months.
The famine is an organised one. The proletariat, represented by the G.P.U. (State Political Police) and the military, has utterly routed its enemies amongst the peasantry who tried to hide a little of their produce to feed themselves. The worst of the class war is that it never stops. First individual kulaks shot and exiled; then groups of peasants; then whole villages. It is literally true that whole villages have been exiled.
About 60% of the peasantry and 80% of the land were brought into collective farms, tractors to replace horses, elevators to replace barns. The Communist directors were sometimes incompetent or corrupt; the agronomes were in many cases a failure. Horses, for lack of fodder, died off much faster than tractors were manufactured, and the tractors were mishandled and broken. Collectivisation was a failure. The immediate result was a falling off in the yield of agriculture. Last year this became acute. It was necessary for the Government's agents to take nearly everything that was edible.
There took place a new outburst of repression. Shebboldaev, party secretary for the North Caucasus, said in a speech: "At the present moment, when what remains of the kulaks are trying to organise sabotage, every slacker must be deported. That is true justice. You may say that before we exiled individual kulaks, and that now it concerns whole stanitza [villages] and whole collective farms. If these are enemies they must be treated as kulaks'.
It is this "true justice" that has helped greatly to reduce the North Caucasus to its present condition.

Deliberate famine in Russia

Malcolm Muggeridge
Saturday March 25, 1933
The Guardian

Living in Moscow and listening to statements of doctrine and of policy, you forget that the lives of a hundred and sixty millions of people, mostly peasants, are profoundly affected by discussions and resolutions that seem, as abstract as the proceedings of a provincial debating society.
"We must collectivise agriculture", or "We must root out kulaks". But what is going on in the remote villages? I set out to discover it in the North Caucasus.
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A little market town in the Kuban district. There were soldiers everywhere - well fed, and the civilian population was obviously starving. I mean starving in its absolute sense; not undernourished, but having had for weeks next to nothing to eat. Later I found out there had been no bread at all in the place for three months.
The famine is an organised one. The proletariat, represented by the G.P.U. (State Political Police) and the military, has utterly routed its enemies amongst the peasantry who tried to hide a little of their produce to feed themselves. The worst of the class war is that it never stops. First individual kulaks shot and exiled; then groups of peasants; then whole villages. It is literally true that whole villages have been exiled.
About 60% of the peasantry and 80% of the land were brought into collective farms, tractors to replace horses, elevators to replace barns. The Communist directors were sometimes incompetent or corrupt; the agronomes were in many cases a failure. Horses, for lack of fodder, died off much faster than tractors were manufactured, and the tractors were mishandled and broken. Collectivisation was a failure. The immediate result was a falling off in the yield of agriculture. Last year this became acute. It was necessary for the Government's agents to take nearly everything that was edible.
There took place a new outburst of repression. Shebboldaev, party secretary for the North Caucasus, said in a speech: "At the present moment, when what remains of the kulaks are trying to organise sabotage, every slacker must be deported. That is true justice. You may say that before we exiled individual kulaks, and that now it concerns whole stanitza [villages] and whole collective farms. If these are enemies they must be treated as kulaks'.
It is this "true justice" that has helped greatly to reduce the North Caucasus to its present condition.

very interesting post about the Boyars and the Kulaks and are you saying this is the root of the Chechyan problem?

No but now you mention it!

I'm sure you noticed that the article was written in 1933 The attack on the private farm history in my opinion was to destroy the Kulak middle class farm owners and prevent counter revolution. The policy in that regard seems to have worked

I believe that the Ukraine suffered badly from the effects of collectivisation. Didn't Stalin Deport many of the Chechnya's they would have course suffered like the Ukrainians as Chechnya was a farming state.

It was obvious that Stalin's 'misdemeanours' were well known in the west and conveniently forgotten when Uncle Joe was all the rage.

Arnie

PS My spelling device spells Chechyan different from you could it be wrong!!!!

Was this not a result of the first Five Year Plan - the switch from agriculture to industry - which involved a massive shift in the population or 'dejulakisation'?

People were moved to gulags where they provided the labour for Stalin's industrialisation programme. Most of these were in Siberia where many of the raw materials were to be found. The Politburo's estimate of between five and six million people forcibly removed is believed to be quite low and more than likely double that figure. This mass relocation and disruption to the food supply was the main cause for the starvation you have described

Perhaps the most notorious gulag camp was at Kolyman, there temperatures fell to minus 45 degrees Centigrade, where they mined gold for export to the west and later uranium with hardly any protection from the radiation.

Yes, 2 million Chechens were deported, of whom 80,00 died in 1944. They were only allowed to return home after Stalin died. 1 million Volga Germans were also deported, no one knows what happened to most of them.

And what of the response from the rest of the world? At first it was humanitarian, but it soon emerged that the biggest danger was an economic threat posed by the use of 'slave labour' and cheap goods.

The Gulags last for many years until they were eventually closed down in 1987 by Gorbachev, whose grandfather had been an inmate.

Stalin's aberration was his paranoia about 'enemies of the state and the pursuit of social and economic transformation.' Stalins legacy was that he was responsible for twice as many deaths as Hitler. So much for good old Uncle Joe!!

I believe the British deported their citizens a long time before the Russians, ref my article on the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

Jimbert - You must have been one of the last then!! We can even arrange for you to be repatriated, completely free of charge, to Scunthorpe, or Hull, you can bring your favourite sheep.

Hate to see you get lonely.

But there is no comparison between British convicts sent to America up to 1776 and Australia thereafter and the mass exile of populations in the USSR under Stalin. The former were judical(?!) punishments the latter acts of political paranoia

The main reason for sending convicts to Australia was more than simply punishment. It was to populate a newly discovered country with British people to prevent it from being colonized by the French, Dutch or Portuguese. Very clever when you think about it. You rid the country of undesirables and gained a vast new colony at very little expense.

Was it not also that we had started to send some to America, and realised hoiw hideously perverted they were becoming due to American republican taste, and one of the conditions the Americans begged from us when we accepted their surrender was we would send our convicts elsewhere, because Americans couldn't match their intellectual and physical superiority.

A little known fact that has mostly escaped the notice of historians.

What is wrong with Russia? It seem to take one very small step forward and 200 huge leaps backwards.

I get the impression the Russian people are only happy when they're ruled by an iron fist and being oppressed. They seem to respect strong, even tyrannical government above anything else.

My father was born in 1917. What a wasted opportunity.

My father was born in 1915, and your point is?

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