Рецензия на книгу В.Кондрашина "Голод 1932-1933 годов: Трагедия русской деревни" (РОССПЭН, 2008) на страницах "Slavic Review" (№2, 2010).
Golod 1932-1933 godov: Tragediia rissiiskoi derevni. By V.Kondrashin. Moscow. Rossiiskaia politicheskaia entsiklopediia (ROSSPEN), 2008. 519 pp. Appendixes. Notes. Biographz. Hard bound.
Viktor Kondrashin°s outstanding book places him firmly at the head of Russia students of the famine and deserves translation into English. His study deals with the effect of the famine throughout the USSR and considers in detail both central policy and its effect on the peasants. The most impressive original research in this work examines the lower and central Volga regions, an area on which he has already published a monograph jointly with d,Ann R.Penner, Golod: 1932-1933 v sovetskoi derevne (na materialakh Povolzh,ia, Dona I Kubani): Monografia (2002). His work in the archives embraces both the state and former party archives in Moscow and a vast range of local archives, including those of 65 registration offices covering 62 rural districts of the Volga regions. An extensive questionnaire answered by 617 survivors of the famine in the Volga and southern Urals region is an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of the famine. The book draws extensively on peasant experiences revealed by the famine. The book draws extensively on peasant experiences revealed by the questionnaire (though it unfortunately does not include a quantitative or systematic analysis of its results). Kondrashin discusses the ways in which the traditional peasant community sought to cope with famine and concludes that its breakdown as a result of collectivization contributed to the intensity of the famine. Peasant replies to the questionnaire show that mortality was higher among young children and old people, and amond men rather than women, and a survey of 102 rural settlements in the Volga and southern Urals “revealed no case of deaths of chairs of kolkhozy and village soviets, and of members of the communist party” (233-35).
Kondrashins general conclusion is that “the basis of the tragedy of 1932-1933 in the Soviet countryside … was the policy of collectivization by force and of compulsory grain collections pursued by the Stalinist regime” (239). At one point he goes further and accepts the view of his colleague and mentor Viktor Danilov that this was an “organized famine “ (376-77) on the grounds that the limits placed on peasant movements early in 1933 made it impossible for them to escape from starvation. This assessment seems to me to be incompatible with his undoubtedly correct conclusion that the famine was not deliberately caused by the Bolshevik leaders but an unintended consequence of their actions.
Although Kondrashin condemns the policies of Stalin and his associates as responsible for the famine, he does not treat their behavior as unique. He argues instead that the famine of 1932-33 strongly resembles the nineteenth-century famines in the colonial world: “colonial policy and the policy of the Stalinists… had in common the extraction from the countryside of a high proportion of agricultural production, usually at the price of reducing the food situation of the peasants or maintaining it at a low level” (338-39).
Kondrashin also argues that the imperialists pursued their policies for economic profit, whereas Soviet policies were in part a response to the danger of foreign attack and had the merit that, unlike imperialist policies, they sought to educate the peasants and promote agricultural development. These aspects of Stalinist policy also lead Kondrashin to reject Danilovs view that the famine was “social genocide” (379) directed against the peasants as a whole. But he condemns both the imperialists and the Stalinists for their shared belief in their own superiority to the lazy, ignorant, and backward peasants.
Kondrashin – and this book – have played a major role in the bitter dispute between the Ukrainian and Russian governments, and some of their historians, about the general significance of the famine in Ukraine. The Ukrainians claim that the famine was “an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people,” whereas Kondrashin arguest that “it is scientifically more accurate and politically more far-sighted to characterize the famine of 1932-33 as ocuurring in the Soviet countryside, not exclusively in Ukraine” (248). His final words in this illuminating book reprove the dominant Ukrainian view in the context of rejection of Stalinism: “Stalinist golodomor is a sad demonstration of what political decisions can lead to when they have not been properly thought out and rely only on the strength of state power, not on the support of the majority of the people… The tragedy of 1932-1933 should not divide but unify the peoples” (380).
R.W. Davies
University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
BOOK REVIEWS // SLAVIC REVIEW №2, 2010
