The 20th century has been a century of political famines, that is, famines directly—and at times willfully—caused by human policies, in warFootnote 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 Reference Vincent1985; Shirinian Reference Shirinian2017; Danilov and Shanin Reference Danilov and Shanin1994, 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 Reference Dikötter2011; Wemheuer Reference Wemheuer2014; Bianco 2014; Graziosi Reference Graziosi2017b). 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 (Heerten and Moses Reference Heerten and Moses2014; Kiernan Reference Kiernan1996; Tiner and Rice Reference Tiner and Rice2016; Dawit Reference Dawit1989; Human Rights Watch 1991; de Waal Reference de Waal2018).

Enforced starvation thus was a major component of the genocides and the mass categorical violence that marked the past century, its conflicts, and its ideologically driven transformative projects and regeneration programs and plans, reflecting notions of the supremacy of a nation, race, ideology, class, or religion. And while international justice has been slow in recognizing the conscious use of hunger—so much that it does not directly figure in the list of crimes against humanity compiled in the 1990s—there have been attempts at conceptualizing it. The most useful is possibly that advanced by David Marcus (Reference Marcus2003), who distinguishes second-degree faminogenic behavior, whose mens rea is recklessness, from first-degree famine crime, which is characterized by intent. In the former, famine is the direct but unintended consequence of policies that a government continues to pursue despite learning that it is causing mass starvation. In the latter, famine is the intended result of governmental action. Marcus also identifies faminogenic behaviors of third and fourth degrees, the former distinguished by the indifference of an authoritarian government toward popular suffering, the latter by the incompetence of a corrupt one (Marcus Reference Marcus2003; see also Hutter Reference Hutter2015).

These distinctions are real and important. However, as it has been rightly noted, “instances of first-degree famine crimes within larger second-degree famines” (de Waal Reference de Waal2018, 106) are common, and the Soviet famines of 1930–1933 provide ample evidence of this, as indicated by the Kazakh 1931–1933 tragedy and the 1932–1933 Ukrainian Holodomor. Understood from this perspective, these Soviet famines occupy a crucial, exemplar position within the larger context of human-provoked famine to which they properly belong. Besides clearly illustrating the different kinds of faminogenic behavior, they represent the first instance of a “family” of political famines—those ignited in peacetime by communism’s inspired political transformative projects of peasant-based societies—of which the Chinese 1958–1962 catastrophe was later to provide the most glaring example (Graziosi and Sysyn Reference Graziosi and Sysyn2016). Yet scholars started to seriously study the Soviet 1930–1933 famines only in the 1980s, after decades of denial and marginalization, and only recently have they fully entered the scholarly debate (Applebaum Reference Applebaum2017; The Contemporary European History Editorial Team 2018). It is thus possible to claim that the failure to properly take into account their importance and exemplary role has seriously impaired our understanding of 20th century’s dynamics.

The use of the plural—famines—is necessary, and not only because the famines of the early 1930s are a link in the chain that extends from the Soviet famines of 1919–1922 to those of 1946–1947, tied respectively to the civil war and to World War II and its aftermath (Sorokin Reference Sorokin, Smith and Sorokin1975; Fisher Reference Fisher1927; Patenaude Reference Patenaude2002; Veselova, Marochko, and Movchan 2000; Zima 1996; Ellman Reference Ellman2000; Caşu Reference Caşu2014). The 1930–1933 famines, though part of the more general Soviet hard times ignited by Stalin’s 1929 “Great Turning Point” and thus sharing many common traits, are also specific events, with unique characteristics.

As I have written elsewhere (Graziosi Reference Graziosi2018), the 1930–1933 Soviet famines include at least two catastrophic famines (more than one million victims) and five “great” famines (more than 100,000 victims). The first was that caused by dekulakization: over the course of three years, more than 200,000 people died—either on their way to the kulak “special settlements” or once they arrived—from starvation that was the direct consequence of Moscow’s political decision (Viola Reference Viola2007; Martin Reference Martin1998). Then came the Kazakh famine of 1931–1933: approximately 1.5 million deaths were the result of a specific state decision to provide the Slavic cities with meat rations after the disaster that another state policy, collectivization, inflicted upon the Soviet (Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, and so on) countryside, whose livestock was almost wiped out. Since Kazakhs, from whom that meat was brutally taken, were non-Slavic nomads inhabiting lands conquered by the Russian empire, this specific famine bears the marks of the most brutal “colonial model” imaginable (Pianciola Reference Pianciola2004; Kindler Reference Kindler and Klohr2018; Cameron Reference Cameron2018).

The Soviet general famine, which affected the whole country after 1930 (Kondrashin Reference Kondrashin2008), was a direct, if undesired, consequence of state policies of dekulakization, collectivization, and requisition-like procurements. This general famine hit most but not all of the Soviet territory: Transcaucasia suffered comparatively less, as did sensitive border regions, crucial industrial areas, and large cities that the regime protected via rationing, out of political considerations (Osokina Reference Osokina1993; Reference Osokina, Transchel, Transchel and Bucher2001).

The decision, arrived at over the summer and fall of 1932, to answer the crisis by reversing the moderate turn adopted before the summer and by resorting to starvation as a tool to subdue the peasantry, and in particular to tame Ukraine, its peasantry and its national-communists, brought about the Holodomor, with its approximately 3.5 million deaths, peaking in the spring and early summer of 1933.

The Northern Caucasus famine of late 1932–1933, with its hundreds of thousands of victims, was very similar to the contemporary Ukrainian one. Even though it hit the entire countryside, it, too, singled out specific groups that the regime had long seen as enemies, the Cossacks in general and the Kuban Ukrainian Cossacks in particular. Similar mechanisms operated in the Tsentral’no-chernozemnaia region, where the fourth great famine took place. Its peasantry had been the protagonists of one of the civil war’s largest anti-Bolshevik uprising (the Antonovshchina), and starvation hit hardest in the Ukrainian majority districts bordering with Ukraine (Kondrashin and Penner Reference Kondrashin and Penner2002). The case of the Volga-German Republic is the least studied one, also because of its suppression in 1941. We know, however, of the conflictual relations Mennonite colonists had with the Bolshevik regime from the civil war up to the mass flight to Canada at the beginning of collectivization (Sinner Reference Sinner2000; Vossler Reference Vossler2001; Schmaltz and Sinner Reference Schmaltz and Sinner2002). In her essay in this issue, Nataliia Levchuk reminds us of the extraordinarily high mortality rates that affected the republic in 1932–1933 (Levchuk et al., this special issue).

Keeping in mind the general context while distinguishing each specific famine is thus essential to understanding the Soviet famines and Soviet history in the 1930s—and to putting an end to the previous, fruitless polemics (Getty Reference Getty2018, is an illustration of the blind alley into which a lack of understanding of the importance to distinguish may lead). Furthermore, as argued by James Richter’s essay, the legacy of these specific tragedies was such that without taking them into consideration it is difficult to grasp the dynamic of subsequent Soviet and post-Soviet history (Graziosi Reference Graziosi and Hryn2009; Graziosi, Hajda, and Hryn Reference Graziosi, Hajda and Hryn2013; Graziosi Reference Graziosi2015a; Richter, this special issue). I am also convinced that a proper understanding of these famines opens up new perspectives on the Cold War and on the popular opposition to the Communist project, especially but not solely in countries hosting large immigrant communities from Central-Eastern Europe.

The essays that comprise this issue rely upon—and continue—the historiographical “revolution” sparked by the partial, but far from irrelevant, opening of the former Soviet archives after 1991, a revolution in which many of their authors participated. Among its fruits are fundamental collections, such as the political police reports on the countryside (Danilov and Berelowitch Reference Danilov and Berelowitch2001); the Stalin-Kaganovich correspondence (Davies and Khlevniuk Reference Davies, Oleg Khlevniuk, Kosheleva, Larisa and Shabad2003); the first general study of the Soviet famine (Davies and Wheatcroft, Reference Davies and Wheatcroft2004); the documents pertaining to Vyacheslav Molotov’s and Lazar Kaganovich’s missions to Ukraine and the Northern Caucasus in 1932–1933 (Shapoval and Vasil’ev 2001); Terry Martin’s analysis of the national question in the USSR in 1923–1939 (Martin Reference Martin2001); the French investigation of the Ukrainian demographic catastrophe (Meslé and Vallin, Reference Meslé and Vallin2003); or the many volumes edited or written by Stanislav Kulchytsky (Kulchytsky Reference Kulchytsky and Kinsella2018). The breakthroughs these works represent, and which the essays in this issue build upon, are easily gauged by comparing what we know now with the information conveyed by Western diplomatic sources of the 1930s, on which Paolo Fonzi’s article offers an interesting review (Fonzi, this special issue). Not that these sources are to be undervalued: if contrasted with the reticence and the misery of the pre-1980s scholarship, their richness stands out, as does that included in the documentation soon produced by victims and diaspora communities (Ukrainian Association Reference Oreletsky and Prychodko1955). Yet the great strides made in recent decades are unmistakable.

Demography, which so prominently figures in many of this issue’s essays, provides a good example of such strides: compared to what we used to know and what we now know about other famines in Asia or in Africa, the data we now have on Ukraine, Russia, and even Kazakhstan are of extraordinary quality. In fact, their precision (which of course can and will be improved upon), already allows us to draw important interpretive conclusions, as do Oleh Wolowyna and his co-authors in analyzing the dramatic, and differentiated, upsurge in mortality of the first half of 1933 (Wolownya et al., this special issue. Some of these findings were anticipated in Rudnytskyi et al. Reference Rudnytskyi, Levchuk, Wolowyna, Shevchuk and Kovbasiuk2015; Wolowyna et al. Reference Wolowyna, Plokhy, Levchuk, Rudnytskyi, Shevchuk and Kovbasiuk2016). For instance, the fact that mortality concentrated in the Kyiv and Kharkiv regions, which were not the most important in terms of grain production, clearly indicates that—contrary to what was once believed—the grain question was not the sole or even the main consideration behind requisitions. And the variation in mortality rates among Ukrainian, Russian, and Volga German regions provides much to consider, as do those relating to border regions, or the concentration of mortality in the Ukrainian populated administrative subdivisions of the Northern Caucasus, a pattern confirmed by the Tsentral’no-chernozemnaia region (Esikova, Reference Esikovan.d.).

It would have been interesting, and appropriate, to extend the comparison to Kazakhstan, then a Russian autonomous republic (with all the consequences this implies for the assessment of mortality data at the Soviet Republican level), and one may hope this will soon be done. Meanwhile, Omelian Rudnytskyi and his collaborators have exploited the accumulation of available information to compare the 1921–1923 famine in Ukraine with the Holodomor (Rudnytskyi et al., this special issue.) The results are intriguing, yet perhaps too much stress is put on essential similarities. There are indeed similarities, but, in my view, the differences are essential. In fact, if one puts too much emphasis on the role of politics in the 1921–1923 famine, one runs the risk of “banalizing” the Holodomor. Politics did play a crucial role in the use of hunger to repress “brigandage,” that is, the remnants of the great peasant revolts of previous years, and it did so especially in the fight against the Orthodox Church. It may be surmised that Stalin learned much about the political use of hunger from Lenin’s decision to use the 1922 famine to crush “with wild and pitiless energy” the church and the opposition (Pipes Reference Pipes and Fitzpatrick1996, 152). Nonetheless, unlike the Holodomor, the 1921–1923 famine in Ukraine does not appear to have been only, or essentially a “terror famine,” and the arguments proffered to prove an all-Ukrainian target as in 1932–1933 are not fully convincing.

Evgeny Krinko, Aleksandr Skorik, and Alla Shadrina, who have produced some of the best research on the Russian famines on a regional scale, extend this chronological comparison to the Northern Caucasus, one of the epicenters of starvation and political repression during the civil war, in 1921–1922, and in the early 1930s (Krinko et al., this special issue). In this case, too, it was the presence of a specific group, the Cossacks, that contributed to the unleashing of an especially high dose of mass categorical violence, which was soon combined with an extreme use of hunger (and deportation). And this famine was also used as a weapon against the Orthodox Church.

Victoria Khiterer’s path-breaking article extends the analysis to the large Jewish urban population of Kyiv and how it confronted the famine (Khiterer, this special issue.) This is a particularly interesting line of inquiry, for while hunger had an impact upon all groups, it affected each group differently. Moreover, each groups’ members were affected differently depending on their residence and their importance to the state. For instance, Jews living in large cities or important industrial centers, whose story Khiterer tells, suffered much less than did those residing in smaller shtetls. In fact, the latter had lived off their relations, albeit complex and difficult, with Ukrainian villages that were being maimed and even destroyed by the combination of dekulakization, collectivization, and the Holodomor. Such policies, aggravated by Moscow’s early 1932 decision to greatly reduce the amount of food allotted to minor, nonindustrial towns, thus lowering the rations of their inhabitants, had the secondary effect of ruining shtetls already hit by the anti-New Economic Policy and antireligious policies of the late 1920s.

Regarding Kazakhstan, which should always be considered when discussing the Soviet famines of 1930–1933, we now know that state priorities, such as feeding large Slavic cities, not utopic projects like denomadization, determined its nomads’ terrible suffering (Pianciola Reference Pianciola2014). Niccolò Pianciola’s research confirms this indirectly through an original comparative angle that shows how nomads who escaped the Bolshevik state’s eyes because their herds were difficult to reach and impossible to transport survived almost unscathed what for their close “cousins” became times of unspeakable misery (Pianciola, this special issue). In this case, too, state choices, and their strictures, proved crucial, and Moscow’s direct responsibility looks undeniable.

James Richter ventures into the fiercely contested field of “memory,” that is, of the evolving political discourse about the Holodomor and the asharshylyk (famine), zhasandy asharshylyk (artificial famine), Holodomor (appropriating the Ukrainian term), or the “Goloshchëkin genocide” (this being a misnomer), as the Kazakh tragedy, which still has to find its name, is called (Richter, this special issue). He does so by bringing common sense and equilibrium into a debate that often does not particularly care for either, and by rightly pointing out the differences in the timing of such memory’s elaboration. The differences are in fact striking, yet what is now known of the asharshylyk would amply suffice to promote a “memory” campaign based on the interpretation of the event as genocide. The fact that this has not been openly done points, therefore, to yet other differences that still await investigation.

The essays included in this issue, which are representative of the best scholarship today produced on the Soviet famines of the early 1930s, also confirm the importance of following a multi-causal approach. Political and economic considerations and interests; ideology; the national factor; the presence of transportation infrastructure; the perceptions of the center and the actions of local perpetrators (of whose striking inhumanity some of these papers tell us); and the agency of local leaders who tried to oppose the coming disaster, peasant resistance, and the victims’ behavior: all these played a role (Mukherjee Reference Mukherjee2015; Garnaut Reference Garnaut2014).

However, all of the essays stress the crucial role played by the state, and in particular by a state and a leading group used to dealing with the population through a category-based approach tied to both class and nationality. This approach was certainly rooted in Marxism—a Marxism that, via Lenin and Stalin, had internalized the importance of the nation (Graziosi Reference Graziosi, Pons and Smith2017a)—but was exacerbated by the civil war experience and the acute perception of ruling over a hostile population in a country surrounded by enemies. The USSR of the late 1920s was, in fact, the perfect seedbed for the political use of starvation in peacetime, especially if economic difficulties (that were, in reality, the consequence of wrong-headed political decisions) could be ideologically read or presented as the results of hostile machinations.

The priority of state and political decisions is confirmed by the crucial role played by rationing, that is, by the public food distribution system operated on the basis of state priorities (Osokina Reference Osokina1993), in both granting the possibility to survive to certain groups (such as those in the party-military-state apparatus, inhabitants of large cities, workers in heavy industry) and aggravating the position of particular regions and groups, such as Kazakh nomads, Ukrainian peasants, Cossacks, Mennonite colonists, and residents of small towns. In fact, modern rationing systems have always been based upon state priorities—for example, in World War I Germany, across Europe in World War II, in Bangladesh in the 1970s (de Waal Reference de Waal2018, 96–97)—and the quality and kind of these priorities provide intriguing insights on each state’s “philosophy.”

The relative urban privileges of 1930–1933 (relative because the urban standard of living, too, sharply declined and because smaller towns suffered directly and considerably from hunger, especially after the early 1932 reform of rationing) contrast with the situation in 1921–1923, when cities suffered as much as—and at times more than—did villages, as is “natural” in hungry years. This contrast is in itself a further indication that, in spite of some undeniable similarities, the two sets of famines were different. Though certainly present and important also in 1921–1923, as in the suffering of large Russian cities in 1918–1919 (Sorokin Reference Sorokin, Smith and Sorokin1975), politics did not then play the crucial role it had in the 1930–1933 famines, whose nature was essentially political.

A crucial component of this political and ideological nature was the amazing contempt in which the party-state and its leaders and cadres held peasants and nomads, whom they commonly treated as nonhumans (Graziosi Reference Graziosi1996). Starvation was openly used and presented as a Pavlovian tool to teach them how to behave, revealing an extraordinary dose of urban-intellectual “racism,” which featured also in the apparently peasantophile depictions of happy peasants and their folklore. The predilection for these “folkloric” depictions bring us to the crucial tie Stalin soon established (and formally theorized already in the 1920s) between the peasant and the national question. Understanding this tie helps us in turn understand the almost constant coincidence—signaled by many of this issue’s essays—between the highest mortality rates and the regions inhabited by peasants of non-Russian nationality or belonging to a specific group, such as Ukrainians, Volga Germans, Kazakh nomads, and Cossacks. These areas were in fact subjected to a double pressure, and at least in the Ukrainian case Stalin explicitly resorted to a two-pronged approach (anti-peasant and anti-Ukrainian) to eradicate the “material basis” and the cultural-political “superstructure” (he was after all thinking in Marxist terms) of Ukrainian “bad” nationalism (Graziosi Reference Graziosi, Curran, Luciuk and Newby2015b; Yefimenko Reference Yefimenko, Flier and Graziosi2017; Shapoval Reference Shapoval, Flier and Graziosi2017).

The Soviet famines were thus simultaneously both peasant and national events. They may also be read as colonial ones. In the late 1920s, openly drawing upon Evgeny Preobrazhensky’s theories, Stalin did openly speak (within leadership circles) of the possibility—even the necessity—of treating the countryside as an “internal colony” (Felshtinsky Reference Felshtinsky1991). And as the essays of this volume and the most recent literature on Kazakhstan make clear, the Kazakh famine can unquestionably be read as a prototypical colonial famine in which millions died because an alien and distant actor preyed upon local food to satisfy its own requirements. Recently, the possibility of interpreting the Ukrainian famine also as a colonial phenomenon has been widely discussed (Holodomor Research and Education Consortium 2017), but if colonial elements are certainly there, the story of the relationships between the Soviet center and Ukraine (and other republics) suggests the need for an approach that grasps the nature of the Soviet famines by recognizing their colonial features without losing sight of ideologically produced Soviet peculiarities.

These famines differed also in the ways they killed their victims, another signal of their distinct nature. We know that, as a rule, the major causes of excess deaths in almost all famines were epidemics of communicable diseases. This also was at least partially (the public health system was marginally effective in Central Asia, too) the case in Kazakhstan, where even bubonic plague resurfaced: once deprived of their herds, nomads were left to their own devices, and many migrated both within and without Soviet borders, thus giving epidemics the time to develop. In 1932–1933 Ukraine, most peasants, forcibly confined to plundered villages, died directly from hunger over a relatively short amount of time, signaling the conscious use of starvation as a punitive and transformative tool.

In fact, what we know about starving to death confirms the picture drawn by demographers in this issue’s “Ukrainian” articles. If, as Alex de Waal writes, “it takes about two months for a healthy adult to die of outright starvation” (Reference de Waal2018, 21), the extraordinary requisitions of early 1933 coupled with the controls upon peasant movements introduced in the same weeks (a fundamental difference with both 1921–1923 Ukraine and 1931–1932 Kazakhstan), forced Ukrainian peasants to feed off the little they had been able to hide plus what natural resources they could find on the land and in the forests and rivers. It might then be presumed that by February or March, both sources were exhausted, which is consistent with the extraordinary mortality rates of April–June. We also know that in most famines women proved to have what de Waal has termed a “female mortality advantage” (2018, 50), embodied in their higher survival rates. These essays, however, seem to suggest that in Ukraine things were different, perhaps also because of the young men’s mass flights from the villages soon after collectivization, and thus before the Holodomor.

The data presented in the essays about excess deaths, their type, and their concentration consistently point to a policy aiming at starving to death in 1933 Ukraine a sizeable part of the rural population. This is the context to keep in mind when analyzing the controversial question of the food assistance that Moscow extended also to the Ukrainian countryside on at least two occasions: in the late spring of 1932 and in the early spring of 1933. In the former case, it possibly was food aid in the usual meaning of the term, and it helped stave off an incipient famine, reducing the number of its victims. In the latter case, its coincidence with the growth, and then the peaking, of mortality rates suggests that it was a selective tool used by the state to secure the production of grain, generally assured by the grain-producing regions located in the south of the republic. It was thus most probably what would be now called “manipulation of relief” that the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court lists among war crimes.

Finally, what do the famines analyzed in these essays tell us about the nature of the Soviet socialist transformative project? In their light, can one analyze it just in terms of “modernization,” as it is often done? The starving of millions, and the ways in which it came about, suggest that by using the term “modernization” we downplay the essential ideological component of that project and fail to recognize both the victims’ suffering and the perpetrators’ ideas and intentions.

If a “modernity” was also produced, it was one of a very special kind, guided by ideas about social and economic structures and their transformation that included the belief that peasants, and their small holdings in particular, were obstacles to be forcibly removed on the way to socialism. It is a belief that explains why the communist transformative project originated many of the 20th century’s largest political famines—so much so that one might claim that, while it is true that it was not the sole producer of those tragedies, it certainly was the cause of these political famines’ larger subgroup of “communist famines,” distinguished by very specific features.