Abstract
Reviewed by: Matthias Middell, Leipzig University, Germany
The Holodomor Research Centre and Education Consortium at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (University of Alberta), that sponsored the conference in 2014 in which this volume has its origin, is devoted both to research and the strengthening of collective memory of one of the most horrible periods in the history of Ukraine, with millions of victims. The Holodomor was, however, not the only famine in the twentieth century and thus invites comparative research. International historiography has undertaken such comparisons for over twenty years now and some of the results are presented in a bibliography at the end of this volume.
The worst famines happened under socialist regimes, mainly during the 1920s and 1930s in various regions of Stalin’s Soviet Union and in the 1950s and 1960s in Mao’s China. Nikolas Werth from Science Po in Paris presents in his contribution the many reasons for and features of food shortage, hunger and famine in the USSR within the period 1928–1933 when Stalin enforced campaigns against peasants and tried to get as much out of the countryside as possible to build a basis for the speeding up of heavy industrialization. Sarah Cameron (University of Maryland, College Park) in her contribution discusses the case of Kazakhastan, while Zhou Xun (University of Essex) and Lucien Bianco (Paris) focus on the China of the Great Leap Forward period. Niccolò Pianciola (Lingnan University Hong Kong) and Andrea Graziosi (University of Naples) debate, by taking up some of the issues presented in the introduction of the editors, the similarities and differences between the Soviet and the Chinese cases.
Compared to the promise of socialist regimes to provide welfare to the so-far underprivileged, the extreme death toll during the periods of famine under investigation is shocking to everyone and there is no cause that can justify the millions of victims, be it the subsequent victory over foreign enemies or the successful defence of power positions occupied by revolutionaries who presented themselves as advocates of the people. For a very long time both the Soviet and the Chinese regimes had good reason not to allow public discussion about these cruel moments in the history of socialism. It is no wonder that the Communist Parties and their authoritarian leaders were roundly accused of being guilty of neglecting the people’s interest. The hypothesis raised in this debate – in particular with regard to the Ukrainian case – concerns the intentionality involved. Was it a sort of mass murder with the intention to hinder the emancipation of nations under the Soviet regime? This turns the Holodomor as a central element of collective memory of Ukrainian nationalists into a clear opposition between Russians and Ukrainians right from the beginning.
Research by economic historians comes to other conclusions, underlining the complexity of the situation. The Soviet famine has been seen in this perspective rather as a consequence of the deep crisis during and just after the civil war, the over-optimistic calculation of possible resources for steering a sudden course towards industrialization after a few years of exceptionally good harvests, and the lack of trustworthy communication between the local level and the top of the political establishment, as for example Steven Wheatcroft has argued in various books and articles. This does not mean that there was no kind of ‘criminal neglect’ at work during the crisis when the Soviet leadership was confronted with the dramatic outcome of its enforced transformation towards industrialization, but the argument is made that the crisis was, under these conditions, practically unavoidable and that at the peak of the catastrophe there was also no quick way out of it. The lack of political capacity (of economic elites or the state or both) to counterbalance the interplay of catastrophic harvests and social structures that made large parts of the population vulnerable to such reappearances of the Malthusian trap puts the Soviet famines somehow in line with many other periods of hunger and starvation reaching right into the twentieth century. This is not to excuse anything that happened under socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and East Asia, but it invites us not to take the discourse of the all-mighty political regime that communist parties preferred over any acknowledgment of their own failure in tackling the problems of underdevelopment. When putting the famines in that perspective we see that both the USSR and China had a previous economic collapse and revolutionary change in power relations as well as massive demographic growth to deal with. It has therefore been argued that the humanitarian tragedies caused by the massive interventions in agriculture by both regimes were followed by periods where food supply was improved and the efficiency of agriculture increased.
The main question is therefore obviously in which kind of perspective we see these dramatic events. One can focus on the short-term consequences and see mainly the complete failure of the regime in securing enough to eat for everyone in the country, or one can bring a longer-term perspective to the picture and argue for the impossibility for any regime in the short-term to cut the Gordian knot of an accumulation of structural problems.
This obviously depends also on how the memory of the humanitarian tragedy is managed. In both cases the regimes tried to reject any politicization of the earlier famines. But exile scholarship, such as for example Ukrainian Studies in Canada, very actively promoted the world of the victims and in the case of the USSR enforced national memories that became even more important at the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Holodomor became a sort of lieu de mémoire for Ukrainians and supported separation. The case of China is different. Here the tragedy remains part of the Chinese memory and has so far not been mobilized against the national unity of the country.
The book under review invites more comparative research and reflection upon the use of comparison in historiographical research and can only be welcomed as a reminder that the history of socialism in the twentieth century has to be seen more from a global perspective.