Food Shortages, Hunger, and Famines in the USSR, 1928-33

Authors

  • Nicolas Werth Institut d'histoire du temps présent, Centre national de la recherche scientifique

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21226/T26C7N

Abstract

This paper examines policies implemented in stages from 1928 and the multi-causal phenomena that resulted in the deaths of some 6.5 to 7 million people, the majority in Ukraine and the Kuban as well as Kazakhstan, during the man-made Soviet famines of the early 1930s. These famines took on distinctively separate trajectories after the autumn of 1932 when Stalin singled out Ukraine, the largest grain-producing region of the USSR. The Kazakh famine resulted from the devastation of the traditional nomadic Kazakh economy in a misguided effort to make that region a main source of meat for the Soviet Union. Other regions—notably the Middle Volga and Central Chernozem Regions—also suffered. These events were largely driven by Soviet attempts to make the countryside a domestic colony that would provide food resources for the country’s accelerated industrialization. This is particularly evident in the manner Soviet authorities rationed and distributed food.

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Published

2016-09-10