Soviet and Chinese Famines in Historical Perspective (original) (raw)

The 1947 Soviet famine and the

2016

This paper presents an analysis of the economics of the 1947 Soviet famine, using data from recently declassified archives. It is argued that the best estimate that can currently be given of the number of excess deaths is the range 1•0-1•5 million. The demographic loss was greater. During the famine, surplus stocks in the hands of the state seem to have been sufficient to have fed all those who died of starvation. The famine was a FAD 2 (preventable food availability decline) famine, which occurred because a drought caused a bad harvest and hence reduced food availability, but, had the priorities of the government been different, there might have been no famine (or a much smaller one) despite the drought. The selection of victims can be understood in terms of the entitlement approach.

Political Famines in the USSR and China: A Comparative Analysis

Journal of Cold War Studies, 2017

This article provides a comparative analysis of two of the twentieth century's largest political famines, which deeply influenced the history of the two largest Communist states, as well as-albeit indirectly-their posture and behavior in the international arena. 1 The time frame is defined by Iosif Stalin's Great Turning Point (GTP) and Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward (GLF) and the crises they caused, that is, 1928-1934 in the Soviet Union and 1958-1962 in China. However, I have extended the coverage backward to account for what I term the "hidden" five-year plan launched in 1925, which led to the crisis of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the Soviet Union, and the Socialist High Tide (SHT) and its failure in China (1955-1956). I have also extended the chronological horizon forward to include at least some of the long-term consequences of these avoidable tragedies, analyzing their impact on subsequent Soviet and Chinese history. 2 The article presents an in-depth analysis of the similarities and differences between these two events, offering sufficient detail about each famine to allow for meaningful comparisons. Because comparative studies of the two events are recent and few in number, my contribution is difficult to position among them. As usually happens when a new field is opened, all of the recent comparative studies are useful. 3 Readers interested in my view of the much wider,

Introduction to the Special Issue on the Soviet Famines of 1930-1933

Nationalities Papers, 2020

The 20th century has been a century of political famines, that is, famines directly-and at times willfully-caused by human policies, in war 1 and in peacetime. Scores of millions starved to death in times during which there was enough food to feed everyone and the means to transport it where needed. The conscious use of hunger to punish, repress, or eliminate specific groups was inaugurated by the German empire against the Herero and Nama in Namibia in 1904-1908, and reached its first acme in World War I with the Armenian genocide, in which starvation played an important role. However, the British strategy against the Central European empires and the German submarine war were also based on the strategy of starving the enemy into surrender. Hunger was used by the Bolsheviks to quell the great peasant insurrections of 1919-1921 (Vincent 1985; Shirinian 2017; Danilov and Shanin 1994, documents nos. 174 and 198). Political famines, including intentional, specifically targeted starvation, continued in the following decades, first reaching a peak in Europe with the Soviet famines examined in this issue, then during World War II, when they also affected Bengal or Vietnam, and in its aftermath. They culminated in the catastrophic famine ignited by Mao's Great Leap Forward (Dikötter 2011; Wemheuer 2014; Bianco 2014; Graziosi 2017b). The strangling of Biafra in 1968, the Khmer Rouge's use of hunger in Cambodia in the 1970s, and the famine caused by the Derg's policies in Ethiopia at the beginning of the following decade were other major instances of human-provoked mass starvation. After the 1990s, while not disappearing, the use of enforced starvation started to decrease both in number and intensity (

Famine Demography - An Introduction

2001

Most dictionary definitions of ‘famine’ equate it with food scarcity and widespread hunger. They tend to remain silent on the demographic aspects, although the extra mortality caused by famines offers one easy and obvious gauge for ranking famines. By this reckoning, for example, the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s was the greatest in nineteenth-century Europe. By the same token

Stalin's and Mao's Famines: Similarities and Differences

This essay addresses the similarities and differences between the cluster of Soviet famines in 1931-33 and the great Chinese famine of 1958-1962. The similarities include: Ideology; planning; the dynamics of the famines; the relationship among harvest, state procurements and peasant behaviour; the role of local cadres; life and death in the villages; the situation in the cities vis-à-vis the countryside, and the production of an official lie for the outside world. Differences involve the following: Dekulakization; peasant resistance and anti-peasant mass violence; communes versus sovkhozes and kolkhozes; common mess halls; small peasant holdings; famine and nationality; mortality peaks; the role of the party and that of Mao versus Stalin's; the way out of the crises, and the legacies of these two famines; memory; sources and historiography.