Open AccessFood Shortages, Hunger, and Famines in the USSR, 1928-33
Author(s) -
Nicolas Werth
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
east/west
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2292-7956
DOI - 10.21226/t26c7n
Subject(s) - kazakh , famine , soviet union , industrialisation , food shortage , economic shortage , development economics , requisition , political science , geography , economics , politics , law , government (linguistics) , biology , ecology , philosophy , linguistics , archaeology
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.