Famine in the Ukraine

The civilians of the country had to face the famine, a shortage of food, because they were urged to work in farms, but did not have the opportunity to gain profit or food from their hard work. The result of this caused the working-class to not be motivated and forced to continue their work for the country. In the source titled, “Famine Testimony of Tatiana Pawlichka,” it writes “ After the harvest, the villagers tried to go out in the fields to look for the grain left behind by the harvest; the communists would arrest them and shoot them, and send them to Siberia”(Famine Testimony of Tatiana Pawlichka). The author describes how desperate the peasants were in trying to be able to get food from the field and the consequences they had to face. The method used by Stalin to not be seen as an unjust ruler, in and out of the country, is by using propaganda.

In the beginning of 1932, the Soviet government had sharply increased the Ukraine's production quotas in the collectivized farms. This ensured that the people would not be able to meet them. This resulted in an even larger widespread of starvation. In the summer of 1932, Stalin ordered a decree that called for the arrest or execution of any person that was caught taking any amount of grain or food item from their place of work. This led to military blockades stationed around many Ukrainian villages, preventing food from coming in and the starving people from going out in search of food. Soviet guards were brought into the villages to confiscate any hidden grain. Eventually all food from any farmer’s home was taken. When news of the Famine reached the outside world, food supplies were sent from the United States and Britain, however through Stalin, the shipments were denied and new policies from the Soviet Union that denied their part in the famine refused all outside aid were instilled. Stalin refused entry even to journalists, as he feared the media would reveal the Soviet Unions’ crimes against the Ukraine.

During the early 20th century in Russia, the country was a tsarist country which was ruled by Tsar Nicholas II. Russia was a vast country who had one of the largest agriculture producer. During that time Russia rely on agricultural as their national income. This peasant country have a population of approximately 127 million people. The rich were very rich and have a comfortable life while the poor was treated unfairly, many people had died because they don’t have enough food.

These effects however were more severe under Lenin and Stalin as they sought to increase grain production by coercion. While Lenin under War communism used grain requisitioning to forcefully collect peasant surpluses from them Stalin used collectivisation to force peasants to collaborate to produce as much food as possible. Similarly in both cases the peasants refused to conform; knowing that any surplus would be confiscated the peasant produced the barest minimum to feed themselves and their family and even less food was available for Russia. One of the greatest impacts were the famines that occurred in 1921 under Lenin where the grain harvest produced less than half the amount gathered in 1931 and Russia had international help from countries such as the USA. However these impacts were the greatest under Stalin. The amount of bread produced fell from 250.4 (kilograms per head) in 1928 to 214.6 in 1932. The impacts of collectivisation were at its worst in 1932-32 when occurred what many people describe as a self-made national famine. Stalin’s ‘’official silence’’ of the situation meant it wasn’t addressed and thus collectivisation killed between 10-15 million peasants and failed to increase agricultural output. Though a similar devastating famine occurred under

1921 peasant revolts through war communism – grain hoarding – protests for it, major famine- Bolsheviks taking grain. Red

Stalin’s policy priorities were not building a ‘worker’s paradise’ or a classless society, but protecting Russia from war and invasion. In 1928, Stalin launched the first of two ambitious five-year plans to modernize and industrialize the Soviet economy. These programs brought rapid progress – but also significant death and suffering. Stalin’s decision to nationalize agricultural production dispossessed millions of peasants, forcing them from their land to labor on gigantic state-run collective farms. Grain was sold abroad to finance Soviet industrial projects, leading to food shortages and disastrous famines in the mid-1930s. Soviet Russia was dragged into the 20th century, transforming from a backward agrarian empire into a modern industrial superpower – but this came at extraordinary human cost.

Collectivization was peasants being forced to give up their goods to the government. Collectivization started at the end of 1929 by Joseph Stalin. He began collectivization as part of the 5 year plan because he feared the invasion from the Allied countries in the west. He increased industrialization so he could earn more money just in case there was a war. This impacted the peasants of Ukraine because majority of the farmers had their own land it was their only way of income. They became slaves for the government which they now had no way to make money or eat which began famine.

This was an economic plan initiated by the Soviet government. This involved rapidly industrialization by constructing factories to produce goods. Then a collectivization policy was introduced, this forced the peasantry to give up their private farms and combining into larger farmers that are controlled by the government. This “charity” form of government (socialism) turned into tyranny. Anyone who opposed the Soviet government was thrown into the gulags, which was a prison camp system.

Holodomor occurred during 1932-1933, but corrupt events and poor leadership led up to the famine and starvation. Vladimir Lenin, who ruled the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924, declared Ukraine as an independent nation. Sadly, the new country’s government was very unstable and could not withstand. So, the country became a part of the Soviet Union once again. As a result of getting a taste of independence, a new pride and patriotism rose among the Ukrainians along with a political elite group. Joseph Stalin, who rose to power in 1924, saw that this wave of nationalism in Ukraine as a threat. So Stalin set up a new form of economic production called collectivism. Collectivism is where individual farmers were

The Ukraine took years to recover, and there are still groups who do not accept the famine as a genocide. Most communists say the cause of the obviously arranged famine on bad harvesting seasons. Russia also refuses to recognise Holodomor as a genocide, as there was also starvation in a few other areas, so they claim the Ukraine was not directly targeted. However, most of the world considers it as a genocide. The United States of America, Poland, Peru, Paraguay, Mexico, Lithuania, Latvia, Italy, Hungary, Georgia, Ecuador, Estonia, Colombia, Canada, Brazil, and Australia call Holodomor a genocide, while Vatican, Slovakia, Spain,Czech Republic, Chile, Balearic Islands, and Argentina acknowledge it as a coordinated act of famine. The Parliament of Ukraine created a law that recognises Holodomor as an act of carnage against the people, made denial of it in public illegal, and made November 26th Holodomor commemoration day after declaring independence from the Soviet Union in

As a part of this Five Year Plan the Soviet leaders conducted a massive reorganization of privately owned farms into collective (state-owned) farms and imposed high crop requisition allocations. It was the sale of the crop yields that was to pay for industrialization and independent farmers were forced to give up their private land to the state along with their livestock and equipment, without compensation. These independent farmers became workers of the collective farm, and they would only be paid if the “collective farm” (Sazonova, 2007) met the standardized

Between the years of 1932 and 1933, an estimated 4 to 5 million Ukrainians perished in a famine unprecedented during peacetime. Called the Holodomor, Ukrainian for ‘death by hunger’, the famine fits into a number of other famines that occurred simultaneously in the Soviet Union including but not limited to Kazakhstan, the north caucuses, and the Urals. The famines were a consequence of Stalin’s first 5 year plan, which called for mass collectivization and nationalization of industry with the intention of ushering forth rapid industrialization. Industrialization was prioritized in order to bring the Soviet Union in line with Marx’s dialectal history, according to which worldwide Communist Revolution can only be spearheaded by

The genocide in the USSR is connected with the policies of social engineering carried out under Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union in the late 1920s against the Kludks. Kludks are farmers or peasants that were referred to as vampires by the previous leader Lenin. On January 1990 communist party of Ukraine adopted a policy. Stalin felt that Ukrainian nationalism through religion and culture could overpower the people's loyalty to the USSR (Soviet par. 2). Later the law of “Five Ear of grain” was put into act, anyone who was caught stealing would be shot or imposed for stealing from the “socialist party” (par. 3). Quotas for grains were raised and blockades were formed around villages blocking any imports or exports leaving the villages

Adding to the deplorable oppression borne by the proletariat during the Five Year Plans, Stalin introduced a collectivisation campaign which not only sparked a persecution of kulaks, but also induced a widespread famine. The Stalin government’s compulsory agricultural policy was largely a failure with regard to its goals. Beginning in 1929, all farms were to be collectivised, with the aim of improving agricultural output and hence, industrialisation. The USSR’s initial system of farming was inefficient, but the introduction of fertilisation and tractors modernised agricultural techniques, increasing the nation’s capacity for production, supporting Historian Jamieson’s statement. However, the policy was catastrophic due to the mass movement of peasant resistance that saw farmers defiantly burning crops and slaughtering livestock, regarding the campaign as a violation of their freedom. By 1933, agricultural production fell dramatically; grain by 17 million tonnes and cows and pigs by a total of 23 million, to below what it was in 1913 (Downey, 1989, p. 19). This

The Soviet economy heavily depended on its agricultural sector. From 1929 onwards Stalin began the enforced system of state and collective farms, known as sovkhozy and kolkhozy respectively. These collectivized farms ‘soon proved both impracticable and too costly’ (Davies 1980). A number of factors contributed to the level of inefficiency of the Soviet collectivized system throughout its history, and this essay will discuss these factors and ultimately comment on the key factors responsible for these inefficiencies. Primarily, this essay will concentrate on, the poor treatment of peasants who worked on the collective farms, and the impacts this treatment had on their incentives to produce. Throughout this essay there will be a strong focus on the labour market as the main cause of inefficiencies, along with the inability of the Soviet Union to correctly manage the sizeable farms. I will show that these two factors working in union strongly support the argument of why agriculture was considered to be such an inefficient sector of the Soviet Economy. There are other factors which also contribute to these inefficiency problems, they will be touched upon, but only briefly. Despite the pressures put on the agricultural industry to thrive and the movement toward a more machine based production process, it became evident that large deficiencies existed within the industry.