Denying the terror famine: was the 1933 Ukrainian famine the result of a failed policy - or was it the policy itself?

National Review, May 25, 1992 by Arch Puddington

IT IS a tribute to the efficiency of Soviet totalitarianism that the 1933 Ukrainian famine escaped serious scholarly inquiry for over fifty years, for the famine was one of the century's great political crimes. Millions died; how many, we can't be sure, but some Soviet sources endorse the estimate of seven million advanced by Robert Conquest in his brilliant study, The Harvest of Sorrow. And the famine did not derive from bad weather, plant blight, or some other natural cause, but was engineered by Stalin for fundamentally political reasons.

Two credible theories concerning those reasons have been advanced. The first, and more charitable toward Stalin, sees the famine as an unanticipated consequence of the regime's campaign for near-total collectivization--although it admits that Stalin persisted in the campaign even after learning of its toll on the peasantry. Which leaves him responsible for millions of deaths, but not for genocide.

The second theory accuses Stalin of deliberately using the famine to crush the Ukrainian people, to suppress its culture, annihilate its independent-minded peasantry, and destroy its will to resist Soviet domination--mass killing in the service of an anti-human and ultimately irrational idea. This is the theory Conquest endorses; he sees the famine as similar in nature to Hitlefts Holocaust against the Jews.

While it is certainly the case that peasants in Russia and Kazakhstan suffered terribly during the collectivization drive, Ukrainian deaths seem proportionately higher. Furthermore, the idea that Stalin used collectivization as a weapon against Ukrainian national aspirations can hardly be dismissed as far-fetched, given what we know about Stalin's obsessive concern with national restiveness.

Yet while most critics greeted Conquest's Harvest of Sorrow with praise, a segment of the Sovietology fraternity reacted with fury, and for several years carried on something resembling an orchestrated campaign to discredit both Conquest's study and a documentary film about the famine that was shown on public television in Canada and the United States.

There was, to begin with, the official Soviet position, summed up in 1986-- as the age of glasnost was dawning-- by Yuri Bogayevsky, first secretary of the Soviet Union's embassy in Canada. According to Bogayevsky, the principal culprits were not Stalin and his acolytes but rather the "kulaks," or wealthy peasants, who resisted collectivization and in the process "murdered about ten thousand Communist Party activists, farm leaders, and reform sympathizers--the most able and skillful farmers."

Now this bit of absurdity contains inaccuracies in practically every phrase, from the use of the term "kulaks"---a fraudulent concept concocted by Lenin to justify class warfare in the countryside--to the notion that those favoring collectivization were "the most able and skillful farmers." Nevertheless, the official Soviet version found an echo on the American Left. Jeff Coplon, a journalist who undertook something of a crusade against Conquest's book, wrote in The Village Voice that collectivization was an "epochal change in the mode of production," and seemed to equate the deaths of a few thousand agents of Communist expropriation with the murder of millions of peasants whose only crime was an unwillingness to surrender their small plot of land.

Others attacked Conquest with what in boxing terminology would be called crowding tactics, smothering his theories with numbers, numbers, and more numbers. The controversial Sovietologist Jerry Hough, for example, placed the number killed during the purges in the thousands, a rather considerable difference from the twenty million or so estimated by such diverse figures as Conquest, Stephen F. Cohen, and Marxist dissident Roy Medvedev. The difference between these estimates goes straight to the heart of Soviet legitimacy. After all, a regime which killed in the thousands, while guilty of substantial evil, can point to many historical precedents; on the other hand, one which destroyed millions of its own citizens clearly ranks with Hitler or Pol Pot.

The Shadow of the Swastika

THE MAJOR charge against the idea of the terror-famine, however, has nothing to do with statistics and everything to do with a view of Ukrainian nationalists as infected by the fascist impulse. Sometimes murmured sotto voce and sometimes declared outright is the notion that Ukrainian (or Estonian, Latvian, Byelorussian, etc.) claims of injury at Communist hands are fraudulent, that the idea of a terror famine was concocted by shadowy forces bent on deflecting attention from a dark past. Thus Jeff Coplon calls the terror-famine theory a "fraud" and speaks of a "Ukrainian nationalist lobby straining to cloak its own history of Nazi collaboration." Similarly, J. Arch Getty sniffs that Conquest's ideas are "not generally accepted by non-partisan scholars outside the circle of exiled nationalists" and asserts that Conquest's book smacked of the "longstanding political agendas of emigre groups."