Mao and Stalin's policies starved millions?

[Skyhilist]

This is basically taught as a fact in my school.

I've heard some talk on here both defending it and saying it's wrong or a distortion.

Could people who agree with this or don't agree with this please briefly an in layman's terms explain why this position is or is not a distortion of Mao and Stalin's policies.

I've always thought of the numbers as likely exaggerations but don't really have much proof either way and am curious to hear why or why not their policies should be seen as having led to all these deaths.

Thanks

[Skyhilist]

Also on an unrelated note why are Mao and Che the only leftist who is usually called by his first name and has a tendency named after his first name?

[Fourth Internationalist]

The real number that died under Stalin is about 2 million. Still brutal but not the 10 - 20 million that many claim. Even though it's less deaths than under capitalism during the same time period, etc, 'socialism' is somehow worse than capitalism. Odd, isn't it?
Edit: Also, the Ukrainian famine is often attributed to Stalin. In reality, it had more to do with actions of the Kulaks and much less with policy issues (it wasnt a perfect policy of course).

[Fourth Internationalist]

Also on an unrelated note why is Mao the only leftist who is usually called by his first name and has a tendency named after his first name?

I *think* Mao is the family name. Same with the Kims. Anyways, i forgot abut him in my previous post, so i'd recomend this:
http://monthlyreview.org/commentary/did-mao-really-kill-millions-in-the-great-leap-forward

[Nevsky]

Well, the biggest problem with the liberal understanding of the famines is the propagandistic distortion - lies originally invented by eastern-european fascists - that the famine was "man made". Starvation supposedly became a murderous tool for genocide carried out by socialist regimes. That type of historian usually attributes the "hunger holocaust" either to the very nature of "evil communist system" or to the individual "bad guys" Stalin and Mao. Both versions are obviously flawed and far from the truth. Both leaders were not sadists, neither of them enjoyed starving people; and capitalists blaming communism for having created famines are hypocritical beyond belief as free market capitalism still directly causes hunger, starvation and worse in all the parts of the world which the civilized west needs to exploit for maintaining its high living standards.

[Tim Cornelis]

Yes, both' policies lead to the starvation of millions. Demographic studies using the Soviet archives (made public with the fall of the USSR) put the number of victims of the Holodmor at 3,500,000. Official government statistics put the number of the Great Chinese Famine at 15 million, though mainstream academic estimates range from ca. 20 to 40 million.
It was not intentional, it was incompetence, and thus the Holodomor was not genocide. The Great chinese Famine was caused by a multitude of reasons, both man and natural, generally these are seen as:
1. Drought and floodings at the same time
2. Kill a Sparrow Campaign resulted in grasshopper plague
3. Mao wanted the become the world's number 1 steel producer so peasants were forced into steel manufacturing jobs.
4. The Chinese government adopted psuedo-scientific theories by a Soviet biologist leading to a drop in agricultural production
5. Bureaucratic mismanagement of resources.

The number of aggregated deaths under Stalin was estimated to be 20 million in the 1970s, but using the Soviet archives made public ca. 1990 we can put the number around 6-8 million.

As for Che and Mao, Che is not hist first name (which is Ernesto) it's a nickname and in China the last name comes first, so Mao is his last name and Zedong his first:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBGFbCPt8DQ#t=3m00s

[Skyhilist]

Ahh silly mistake I knew that about Che although I didn't know last names come first in China.

What was it exactly that led to the Holodmor?

[Old Bolshie]

What was it exactly that led to the Holodmor?

The desire to break the peasantry and force them into collectivization. It happens that the peasantry of USSR was mostly located in Ukraine and that is why mostly Ukrainians died in the famine. It was not a genocide as people from other regions also died in high numbers.

[Captain Ahab]

Official government statistics put the number of the Great Chinese Famine at 15 million, though mainstream academic estimates range from ca. 20 to 40 million.

I'm skeptical of the Dengist governments official statistics since its main goal was to discredit Mao and his policies as much as possible.
Paul Cockshott also posted a critique of Mainstream Academic Estimates which I will repost here: http://www.macroscan.net/pdfs/rep_hun.pdf

I find it curious that if famine could kill so many people in China we didn't see a massive dip in population after the Great Leap Forward.

[Vanilla]

The real number that died under Stalin is about 2 million. Still brutal but not the 10 - 20 million that many claim. Even though it's less deaths than under capitalism during the same time period, etc, 'socialism' is somehow worse than capitalism. Odd, isn't it?
Edit: Also, the Ukrainian famine is often attributed to Stalin. In reality, it had more to do with actions of the Kulaks and much less with policy issues (it wasnt a perfect policy of course).

What is your source for the 2 million deaths statistic? I'm not saying I don't trust you, I just want to see the source because I'm curious about the same things as the op

[Tim Cornelis]

I'm skeptical of the Dengist governments official statistics since its main goal was to discredit Mao and his policies as much as possible.
Paul Cockshott also posted a critique of Mainstream Academic Estimates which I will repost here: http://www.macroscan.net/pdfs/rep_hun.pdf

I find it curious that if famine could kill so many people in China we didn't see a massive dip in population after the Great Leap Forward.

I've heard Raymond Lotta make the same claim, I don't know if it's true though. Still, even the most 'optimistic' estimates of Maoists are in the millions.


What is your source for the 2 million deaths statistic? I'm not saying I don't trust you, I just want to see the source because I'm curious about the same things as the op

Two million is nonsense. The three primary 'policies' that accumulated most deaths are the gulags, the famine, and the purge. The Soviet archives reveal the following numbers:

1. Famine: 3,200,000
2. Gulags: 1,258,537
3. Purge: 681,692

Citing wikipedia (all claims are sourced):

According to the declassified Soviet archives, during 1937 and 1938, the NKVD detained 1,548,366 victims, of whom 681,692 were shot - an average of 1,000 executions a day The Great Purge wiki-page


One modern calculation that uses demographic data, including that recently available from Soviet archives, narrows the losses to about 3.2 million or, allowing for the lack of precise data, 3 million to 3.5 million. Holodomor wiki-page


According to a 1993 study of archival Soviet data, a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953.[6] However, taking into account that it was common practice to release prisoners who were either suffering from incurable diseases or on the point of death,[13][14] the actual Gulag death toll was somewhat higher, amounting to 1,258,537 in 1934-53, or 1.6 million deaths during the whole period from 1929 to 1953. Gulgal wiki-page

The number of casualties under Stalin would be 5,000,000. However in addition to these campaigns there were numerous other campaigns, e.g. against Polish population, that killed, if I remember correctly, 50-100,000. From 1945-1950 there were also 500,000 to 3 million Germans killed post World War, many of whom by the Soviet Union.

[Fourth Internationalist]

What is your source for the 2 million deaths statistic? I'm not saying I don't trust you, I just want to see the source because I'm curious about the same things as the op

2 - 3 million i got from some Troskyist organization website article. It might have been CWI i'm not sure though.

[Red Nightmare]

Also on an unrelated note why are Mao and Che the only leftist who is usually called by his first name and has a tendency named after his first name?

In Chinese the last name is written first so "Mao" is actually his last name and "Tse-Tung" is his first name.

[33_PERCENT_GOD]

Our blindness to the results of systemic violence is perhaps most clearly perceptible in debates about communist crimes. Responsibility for communist crimes is easy to allocate: we are dealing with subjective evil, with agents who did wrong. We can even identify the ideological sources of the crimes- totalitarian ideology, the Communist Manifesto, Roussseau, even Plato. But when one draws attention to the millions who died as a result from capitalist globalization, from the tragedy of Mexico in the 16th century through to the Belgian Congo holocaust a century ago, responsibility is largely denied. All this seems just to have happened as the result of an "objective" process, which nobody planned, and for which there was no "Capitalist Manifesto."

-Slavoj Zizek, Violence

[Bardo]

The special attention paid to the millions who perished via famine in socialist countries opposed to non-socialist countries doesn't resonate with me. It's selective analysis of history. If one is going to condemn the entirety of communist thought because so many died in China or Russia as a result of famine, even though both parts of the globe had experienced similar death tolls before socialism was even considered, one must also condemn the entirety of western imperialist thought as millions were simultaneously starving to death in non-socialist India and in Africa.

[Skyhilist]

The special attention paid to the millions who perished via famine in socialist countries opposed to non-socialist countries doesn't resonate with me. It's selective analysis of history. If one is going to condemn the entirety of communist thought because so many died in China or Russia as a result of famine, even though both parts of the globe had experienced similar death tolls before socialism was even considered, one must also condemn the entirety of western imperialist thought as millions were simultaneously starving to death in non-socialist India and in Africa.

True but communists must still learn from past failures if they want to be successful in the future, which often time begins with recognizing something is a failure (e.g. bureaucracy that was supposed to 'get the job done' and feed everybody). Doesn't diminish the capitalist failures that overshadow socialism's own failures, but we've still gotta recognize when something's been done wrong so it's not done again in the future.

[Bardo]

^True. It's just important to point out that famine isn't exclusive to socialist regions of the era. It's a common argument, but is extremely selective analysis. Obviously this isn't an inherent defense of any regime in particular, just a note that socialism didn't invent famine in countries that had experienced it for centuries.

[GuyinCognito]

Yes, both' policies lead to the starvation of millions. Demographic studies using the Soviet archives (made public with the fall of the USSR) put the number of victims of the Holodmor at 3,500,000. Official government statistics put the number of the Great Chinese Famine at 15 million, though mainstream academic estimates range from ca. 20 to 40 million.
It was not intentional, it was incompetence, and thus the Holodomor was not genocide. The Great chinese Famine was caused by a multitude of reasons, both man and natural, generally these are seen as:
1. Drought and floodings at the same time
2. Kill a Sparrow Campaign resulted in grasshopper plague
3. Mao wanted the become the world's number 1 steel producer so peasants were forced into steel manufacturing jobs.
4. The Chinese government adopted psuedo-scientific theories by a Soviet biologist leading to a drop in agricultural production
5. Bureaucratic mismanagement of resources.

The number of aggregated deaths under Stalin was estimated to be 20 million in the 1970s, but using the Soviet archives made public ca. 1990 we can put the number around 6-8 million.



I agree with a lot of your assessment but it should be noted that Lenin was against collectivization and instead implemented the new economic policy to help the USSR to recover from the disaster of world war 1 and the civil wars.

When Lenin died Stalin quickly reversed the policy and created "collectivization" which was an utter disaster. Blaming "rich peasents" (such a stupid notion) for the majority of the deaths is utter nonsense.

During such time Stalin promoted quacks like Lysenko who knew nothing about biology or agriculture. His claims in his form of pseudo science called lysenkoism set back the soviet union and china for decades. Since all the best minds that went against him where denounced and sent to camps or shot.

His theories and his agitation against other proven theories about agriculture probably caused hundreds of thousands of additional deaths in the USSR and China

[Invader Zim]

The real number that died under Stalin is about 2 million. Still brutal but not the 10 - 20 million that many claim. Even though it's less deaths than under capitalism during the same time period, etc, 'socialism' is somehow worse than capitalism. Odd, isn't it?
Edit: Also, the Ukrainian famine is often attributed to Stalin. In reality, it had more to do with actions of the Kulaks and much less with policy issues (it wasnt a perfect policy of course).

The first part of this post is broadly accurate, the stuff about Kulaks does not add up. See Comrade Om's lengthy dismissals of this notion here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/stalin-thread-all-t100814/index.html?p=1356546#post1356546

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

I'm certainly no fan of either Mao or Stalin. But the comrades are quite correct in pointing out that famines have happened on a regular basis since time immemorial -- and only when a Communist government is in power to we see it blamed directly on the state. I think it is fair to say that neither Mao nor Stalin managed agricultural policy well and certainly exacerbated the famines. Particularly in the USSR, with Staln's panicked and frantic move to collectivize, agricultural production was depressed for quite a few years -- livestock production did not recover until the mid-50s. Collectivization was not done well, but something had to be done or there would have been a famine in the cities as the peasantry withheld their grain. This happened for two years running before Stalin did a 180 degree turn from the Duumvirate's pro-peasant policies.

As for Mao, the "great leap forward," was a fiasco, but famine was not caused by this, rather by a long period of drought. I mean China has had how many periods of famine in the past couple of centuries?

And it is the height of hypocrisy of bourgeois pundits and historians to decry the death of millions at the hand of "socialism." What about the 50 million that died during WWII? or the 25 million that died during WWI? They somehow don't count? Hell, the US killed over 2 million Vietnamese in a twelve year period. What about those deaths?

So beware those that criticize Stalin and Mao from the right. They are class enemies.

[Fourth Internationalist]

The first part of this post is broadly accurate, the stuff about Kulaks does not add up. See Comrade Om's lengthy dismissals of this notion here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/stalin-thread-all-t100814/index.html?p=1356546#post1356546

What stuff about the Kulaks specifically?

[ComradeOm]

Let's do this quickly. Estimates vary between 5.5-8.5 million dead in the Soviet famines of the early 1930s. This includes almost 1.5 million dead in the largely forgotten Kazakh famine. It wasn't kulaks or freak weather or 'routine' famine or genocide. Yes, adverse weather was a factor but it was failed Soviet agricultural policies (and shocking crisis management) that turned a poor harvest into a catastrophic famine.

The best, and most detailed, work you can read in English is Davies and Wheatcroft's Years of Hunger


What stuff about the Kulaks specifically?This (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1761699&postcount=18) is probably more useful on the specific issue of kulaks

[The Intransigent Faction]

The numbers are definitely skewed and there are half-truths and double-standards rampant in bourgeois historical accounts.

Nevertheless, it is a fact that, whatever you think of it, many people died as a result of policies of torture, slave labour in prison camps, and outright execution, with or often without an official seal of approval from above.

There are two problems with this "argument", though.

1. Stalin did not kill millions. Mao did not kill millions. There were a hell of a lot more than two individuals in both countries, and no matter how much power they had, to suggest they are solely and/or directly responsible for everything that happened is a "great man theory of history". Any communist understands that a social structure depends one way or another on the mass of people, and without all the KGB agents, prison guards, etc. who supported Stalin, it would not have been possible. It would seem odd to extend direct responsibility for each death as far to the top as Stalin, especially since plenty of them were just the result of guards or other prisoners taking the initiative to be extra brutal.

2. I'd say most valid criticisms of the Soviet/Chinese systems respectively would be based on the "vanguardist" distortion of Marxist theory. Even Anti-Revisionists, who support a vanguard party, generally recognize it was flawed given that certain interests got enough of a foothold to carry out a transition to liberal capitalism. The problem with criticizing the Soviet, Chinese, or any state-capitalist/deformed workers' state/'socialist' system, or whatever he heck you wanna call it, on the basis of systematic starvation and murder is that it has happened on a much greater scale due to Western liberal capitalism. So if the presumption is that "System A killed more than System B" is an argument for System B, then their own argument goes against them. Of course I say screw both systems, but whatever.

[Delenda Carthago]

Instead of having bullshit talks with people that use wikipedia as a source, I suggest you read something more valid. Like this (http://history.wvu.edu/faculty/current-faculty/mark-b-tauger/soviet-agriculture-and-famines).

[Fourth Internationalist]

Here is a piece that I will post here if anyone is interested:

Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform

Grover Furr

Part 1:
http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html

Part 2:
http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr2.html

[Rooiakker]

Famine under capitalism is invisible. A "Market Problem". People ***** and moan about too many people on food stamps and don't give 2 shits about the people begging on the street. (Probably spend it all on booze.)

[ComradeOm]

Here is a piece that I will post here if anyone is interested:

Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform

Grover FurrYes, because the best source that you could read on the famines is a Stalinist apologia written by someone with no academic credentials in the field of question. That's much better than Wikipedia or proper sources :glare:

[Edit: For those genuinely interested in Stalin's 'struggle for democratic reform' (as they say, LOL) the topic is covered properly in Getty's 'State and Society Under Stalin: Constitutions and Elections in the 1930s'. Needless to say, Getty ends up stressing that, far from being bludgeoned into submission by a sullen party, "neither of these lines could have existed without Stalin's support or approval, and neither line ever challenged his authority. Once he made a choice, the decision was final"]


1. Stalin did not kill millions. Mao did not kill millionsThat's being pedantic. Nobody believes that Stalin or Mao personally went around the countryside and sowing weeds in fields or slaughtering livestock. In this context 'Stalin/Mao' is acceptable shorthand for 'the Stalinist/Maoist regime or elite'. This is based on the understanding, probably truer for the USSR than China, that Stalin/Mao sat at the apex of the state apparatus and had a direct hand in directing policy.

There is, to use an example from above, no question that Stalin was intimately involved in the setting of 'area sown' targets in the USSR. These were Politburo level discussions that called for increasing levels of sowing during the harvest. Now Stalin may not have personally travelled the country lowering the quality of the sowing or advocating the abandonment of crop rotation but these were the, rational and predictable, outcomes of a policy that he had agreed, signed-off on and instructed the state to follow.

This is particularly important given your assertion that "plenty of them were just the result of guards or other prisoners taking the initiative to be extra brutal". In many, many cases (such as the socialisation of livestock, the shock of collectivisation, the entire mass purges etc) the pattern that emerges is of a policy that Stalin signs off going horribly wrong and then Stalin himself covering his arse by claiming 'excesses' in the implementation.

So the reality is that Stalin was the driving force in the Stalinist elite (hence the name, really) that decided policy. The horrific consequences to these policies (approx ten million dead between 1927 and 1941) were not due to implementation but their flawed nature.


Collectivization was not done well, but something had to be done or there would have been a famine in the cities as the peasantry withheld their grain. This happened for two years running before Stalin did a 180 degree turn from the Duumvirate's pro-peasant policies. The breakdown of the NEP was the direct result of failed agricultural policies. The grain crisis was entirely man-made. What else would you expect when the state reduced prices on grain (while raising them on technical crops) while at the same time failing to increase the flow of manufactured goods to the countryside.

Whether or not the NEP was viable in the long-term is another discussion entirely but there was no immediate reason, other than state bungling, as to why it should have collapsed in the late 1920s.

[Fourth Internationalist]

Yes, because the best source that you could read on the famines is a Stalinist apologia written by someone with no academic credentials in the field of question. That's much better than Wikipedia or proper sources*

I never said it was the best source. However, it is an interesting read to those interested in the subject. (There wasn't much about the famines in the piece anyways, it was more about other things he did)

[Paul Cockshott]

True but communists must still learn from past failures if they want to be successful in the future, which often time begins with recognizing something is a failure (e.g. bureaucracy that was supposed to 'get the job done' and feed everybody). Doesn't diminish the capitalist failures that overshadow socialism's own failures, but we've still gotta recognize when something's been done wrong so it's not done again in the future.
The point about the demographic article that I published is that the peak Chinese death rates during the Great Leap Forward were only the same as the normal death rate in India during the 1960s. But it is Mao who is demonised not Nehru! If one year of death rate at 25 per thousand was an atrocity, what were two decades at that rate in Congress ruled India?

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

The point about the demographic article that I published is that the peak Chinese death rates during the Great Leap Forward were only the same as the normal death rate in India during the 1960s. But it is Mao who is demonised not Nehru! If one year of death rate at 25 per thousand was an atrocity, what were two decades at that rate in Congress ruled India?
Excellent point, comrade. And an answer to anyone that denies the progressive nature of the Chinese Revolution. India and China were roughly in the same boat in 1949. Capitalist India has not done nearly as well as China, even though China has been held back by a parasitic bureaucracy. The data scream that a planned collectivized economy is superior to capitalism.

As for the concerns about how many million died during which famine -- it is certainly worth some discussion, but not really the key point. The 20th century was rife with incidents that caused mass death and destruction. You wind up missing the forest for the trees.

[GuyinCognito]

And you and most other people defended the famines in the USSR and china are using Tu-queque type arguments to deflect and pathetically deny the blame.

The fact is that lenin's new economic policy produced grain surpluses. Stalin's collectivization in which in grain of wheat belonged to the state caused massive famines in the countryside in order to export it internationally and to cities so that he could industrialize faster.

Now the famine was just the ukraine but went as far as the central asian republics. Since Stalin loved to break down any and all peoples with his policy of russification.

I mean those areas all had famines but there where trains running, food was still being grown, Stalin and all of moscow where eating well.

[Paul Cockshott]

And you and most other people defended the famines in the USSR and china are using Tu-queque type arguments to deflect and pathetically deny the blame.

.

No I am not. The point about China is that the communist government massively increased life expectancy there and over the entire period substantially improved grain availability. There were couple of years of bad harvests in a country that had known famines for centuries, and during those years the death rate rose to what was the norm for India, a country at the same level of development in the late 40s when the independent Indian state and the PRC were founded. So what you are calling a 'famine' was not something that would count as even anything abnormal in India. It is a measure of the tremendous achievement of the communist government over the whole period since the founding of the PRC that this brief regression to the status quo ante should so stand out.

Subsequently the policy 'storing grain to prepare against war and natural disaster' has protected China from falling back into hunger.

[GoddessCleoLover]

I endorse the posts of Comrade Om. IMO Stalin and Mao bear responsibility for the ensuing famines as they were the captains of the ship, as it were.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

And you and most other people defended the famines in the USSR and china are using Tu-queque type arguments to deflect and pathetically deny the blame.

The fact is that lenin's new economic policy produced grain surpluses. Stalin's collectivization in which in grain of wheat belonged to the state caused massive famines in the countryside in order to export it internationally and to cities so that he could industrialize faster.

Now the famine was just the ukraine but went as far as the central asian republics. Since Stalin loved to break down any and all peoples with his policy of russification.

I mean those areas all had famines but there where trains running, food was still being grown, Stalin and all of moscow where eating well.
You omit the fact that in 1927 and 1928, there were excellent harvests in the USSR, but because the peasants were withholding grain, the cities were threatened with starvation. Stalin's method of collectivization certainly was a fiasco -- although there was a real crisis going on. The policies of NEP had reached an absolute dead end -- precisely because industry was lagging far behind agriculture -- there were no manufactured goods available to buy with the proceeds of the surplus grain -- so the peasants withheld it.

[Geiseric]

I agree with a lot of your assessment but it should be noted that Lenin was against collectivization and instead implemented the new economic policy to help the USSR to recover from the disaster of world war 1 and the civil wars.

When Lenin died Stalin quickly reversed the policy and created "collectivization" which was an utter disaster. Blaming "rich peasents" (such a stupid notion) for the majority of the deaths is utter nonsense.

During such time Stalin promoted quacks like Lysenko who knew nothing about biology or agriculture. His claims in his form of pseudo science called lysenkoism set back the soviet union and china for decades. Since all the best minds that went against him where denounced and sent to camps or shot.

His theories and his agitation against other proven theories about agriculture probably caused hundreds of thousands of additional deaths in the USSR and China



Quite the opposite. War communism was basically the same thing as collectivization. The NEP was a backward step used to appease rich peasants who were content with starving moscow and petrograd.

[ComradeOm]

You omit the fact that in 1927 and 1928, there were excellent harvests in the USSR, but because the peasants were withholding grain, the cities were threatened with starvation. Stalin's method of collectivization certainly was a fiasco -- although there was a real crisis going on. The policies of NEP had reached an absolute dead end -- precisely because industry was lagging far behind agriculture -- there were no manufactured goods available to buy with the proceeds of the surplus grain -- so the peasants withheld it.Again, the NEP broke down because there was not the political will to sustain it. The key causes for the grain crises was poor pricing policy that failed to provide the peasants with an incentive to grow gain. Hence the necessity of short-circuiting economic measures and move directly to 'administrative actions'; ie compelling the peasants to produce against the their interests

Even the best argument for an abandonment of the NEP (ie that the economic revival of the 1920s had taken place using pre-war capital stock) can be overstated: according to Carr and Davies (Foundations of a Planned Economy) some 10% of the USSR's fixed capital stock still remained un-utilised in 1926. What was holding industry back wasn't the NEP but, to the contrary, the inability of the primary sector (ie agriculture and mining) to provide the necessary raw materials

And what the next few years saw, in a nutshell, was industry racing so far ahead of an already backwards agricultural sector that the whole edifice almost toppled over entirely

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

Again, the NEP broke down because there was not the political will to sustain it. The key causes for the grain crises was poor pricing policy that failed to provide the peasants with an incentive to grow gain. Hence the necessity of short-circuiting economic measures and move directly to 'administrative actions'; ie compelling the peasants to produce against the their interests

Even the best argument for an abandonment of the NEP (ie that the economic revival of the 1920s had taken place using pre-war capital stock) can be overstated: according to Carr and Davies (Foundations of a Planned Economy) some 10% of the USSR's fixed capital stock still remained un-utilised in 1926. What was holding industry back wasn't the NEP but, to the contrary, the inability of the primary sector (ie agriculture and mining) to provide the necessary raw materials

And what the next few years saw, in a nutshell, was industry racing so far ahead of an already backwards agricultural sector that the whole edifice almost toppled over entirely
That is not the way I understand what happened in the twenties in the USSR. Is the Carr and Davies available online? That 10% of the capital stock was unused, does not necessarily mean that lagging agriculture was the issue. Mining is generally understood, btw, to be an industry. And of course, you omit the main political issue with continuing a policy that favored the peasantry, especially the better-off peasantry. The more economic power they had, the more precarious were the economic and social foundations of the USSR. The peasants couldn't buy anything much with the monies being given to them. They withheld the grain. The NEP was introduced to keep the soviet economy from collapsing. It had fulfilled its role. What, in your estimation, could have been gained by its continuation ad infinitum?

[ComradeOm]

That is not the way I understand what happened in the twenties in the USSR. Is the Carr and Davies available online?No. It's a book


That 10% of the capital stock was unused, does not necessarily mean that lagging agriculture was the issueThat's not the point. At that point the economy was not being held back by industry. Capacity, ie the need for massive capital investment in industry, was not the issue

[Edit: And the reason for stressing this is that when Stalin stood up before the Fourteenth Party Congress in Dec 1925 he explicitly spelt out the need to move from economic restoration (vosstanovlenie) to reconstruction (rekonstruktsiya). This was the primary driver for increased capital expenditure, which would pressurise agricultural policies]


Mining is generally understood, btw, to be an industryAnd coal and oil were two of the few industries that saw sustained investment throughout the 1920s


What, in your estimation, could have been gained by its continuation ad infinitum?I'm not saying that the NEP could or should have continued indefinitely. What I am saying is that it did not have to end in 1927-28. That was a crisis of the Soviet government's own making. Suggesting that Stalin's hand was forced in this matter is false

And of course the end of the NEP did not necessarily involve the mad Stalinist rush into the abyss

[Bronco]

Quite the opposite. War communism was basically the same thing as collectivization. The NEP was a backward step used to appease rich peasants who were content with starving moscow and petrograd.

Yeah cos it's not like the grain seizures were absolutely crippling to the peasantry, it was a time of great prosperity for them and they just wanted to starve the cities for fun

[GuyinCognito]

"rich peasants" in a centrally planned state run economy. The whole premise of "rich peasants" was to start agitation and justification on killing in mass the actual workers who where the best farmers who had increased grain production in the soviet union under the polices under Lenin.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

No. It's a book

That's not the point. At that point the economy was not being held back by industry. Capacity, ie the need for massive capital investment in industry, was not the issue

[Edit: And the reason for stressing this is that when Stalin stood up before the Fourteenth Party Congress in Dec 1925 he explicitly spelt out the need to move from economic restoration (vosstanovlenie) to reconstruction (rekonstruktsiya). This was the primary driver for increased capital expenditure, which would pressurise agricultural policies]

And coal and oil were two of the few industries that saw sustained investment throughout the 1920s

I'm not saying that the NEP could or should have continued indefinitely. What I am saying is that it did not have to end in 1927-28. That was a crisis of the Soviet government's own making. Suggesting that Stalin's hand was forced in this matter is false

And of course the end of the NEP did not necessarily involve the mad Stalinist rush into the abyss
Yes, but Stalin was making no such move in 1925 -- at that time it was just verbiage. He was following Bukharin's Rich Peasant program until he did a 180 degree turn toward collectivization and increased industrial production. The crisis that originated in 1927 and 1928 was predicted many years earlier by the LO.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say the economy was not being held back by industrial production. Do you mean that the GDP was growing nicely up until that point? I think it is hard to argue against the fact that the USSR needed to grow industrially to protect itself from the imperialist powers. And that if they were going to have any kind of balance with the peasantry, they would need to provide industrial goods for the peasant to purchase. The withholding of grain was precisely because of this. Even if the peasants received excellent prices for the grain, there wasn't a lot to buy with the profits. So they withheld their grain.

Stalin was not forced to do what he did. But he was in an extremely tight spot. And subtlety was never a strong suit;)1 of his. Something fairly drastic was needed in 1928. But I agree that Stalin's version of "solving" the crisis, created other, unnecessary crises and I make no excuses for it.

[ComradeOm]

Yes, but Stalin was making no such move in 1925 -- at that time it was just verbiage. He was following Bukharin's Rich Peasant program until he did a 180 degree turn toward collectivization and increased industrial productionEh, no. Everyone favoured "increased industrial production" and everyone wanted it sooner rather than later. The disagreements were around how to achieve this, which ultimately boiled down to where to invest. And investment was happening: far from being merely words, 1925-26 was the first year in which capital investment matched the average annual investment of the last pre-revolution decade. The noise around the Fourteenth Congress was how to further increase this and how fast they should do so

That's the context around the grain crisis and the Soviet government's cack handed response to it


I'm not sure what you mean when you say the economy was not being held back by industrial production.What I'm saying is the economic background to the grain crises was not a lack of factories or industrial capacity. The capacity was there, albeit nearing its limits. What was limiting industrial production was the availability of materials from the agricultural sector. Cloth production suffered, for example, due to a lack of wool and not an absence of textile factories

Now everyone was worried about raising this hard (ie capital stock) ceiling but in reality it was the soft (ie material) constraints that was hampering the economy. The latter would have to be raised eventually, and would require a massive capital influx, but it was not the immediate necessity that Stalin supposed


Even if the peasants received excellent prices for the grain, there wasn't a lot to buy with the profits. So they withheld their grain.There were a number of ways to extract surplus grain from the countryside. Manufactured goods were the most effective... but then in a flash of brilliance the Soviets actually reduced the retail prices of industrial goods in 1926-27. The goods famine, as so often in Soviet history, was at least partly the product of poor pricing policy

So the peasantry were getting lower prices for their grain at the same time as newly cheap(er) manufactured goods flew off the shelves. If they even made it to the countryside in the first place. And people wonder why the state had trouble purchasing grain...


Stalin was not forced to do what he did. But he was in an extremely tight spot. And subtlety was never a strong suit;)1 of his. Something fairly drastic was needed in 1928. But I agree that Stalin's version of "solving" the crisis, created other, unnecessary crises and I make no excuses for it.I don't pretend for a minute that the Soviet government was in an enviable position in 1927-28 or that there weren't difficult decisions to be made in the long-term. But there is no reason why the NEP could not have continued to function, with the appropriate pricing policies, for at least another few years. There was nothing in it that was inherently broken and the grain crises were not inevitable. It was a political decision, and economic mismanagement, that led to its abandonment in the late 1920s

Now it was probably the right decision to break with the NEP but the manner in which it occurred, with pricing disasters leading the government into a hasty course of repression, was avoidable. Particularly since the crisis, and resultant Ural-Siberian method, came to typify the Soviet approach to planning: mad burst of planning, then crisis, then panicked repression, then repeat

[Geiseric]

Not necessarily. 60 percent of the grain was held by 1 percent of peasants in 1925 when the first grain withdrawals happened. Those were kulaks.

[ComradeOm]

Not necessarily. 60 percent of the grain was held by 1 percent of peasants in 1925 when the first grain withdrawals happened. Those were kulaks.That's not the case. In 1926-27 6% of the grain was obtained from state/collective farms, 20% from those classified as kulaks and the remaining 74% from middle and poor peasants. (Carr and Davies again)

Even the logic isn't entirely correct: on average kulaks tended to market almost twice as much of their produce compared to the other peasant categories (20% vs 11%). Which was where Bukharin was coming from

[Paul Cockshott]

Speaking of Furr Om wrote
Yes, because the best source that you could read on the famines is a Stalinist apologia written by someone with no academic credentials in the field of question. That's much better than Wikipedia or proper sources

Furr is certainly a an appologist for Stalin and he is a professor of English not of Russian History, but he does seem to read the language and do research on original documents of the period.

You have to be cautious about saying that you will only pay attention to somebody if they are an academic in the appropriate department of a university. Political views can be an obstacle to entry into certain professions. Outright support for the USSR would have been an impediment for somebody wanting to join a Soviet Studies department as a staff member during the cold war.

You find that Marxist political economy, for example, can be a bar nowadays to progression in the Economics profession, so that not all people who write on the subject are in economics departments. Geographers, may be more likely to write on the subject than economists.

If you go back to classical marxist theorists, including Marx himself, few of them were formally part of the disciplines they wrote on. The only early writer who still remains prominent who was trained in political economy that I can think of is Luxemburg.

[ComradeOm]

Furr is certainly a an appologist for Stalin and he is a professor of English not of Russian History, but he does seem to read the language and do research on original documents of the periodWhich he uses to conclude that the Soviet Union did not invade Poland (http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/mlg09/did_ussr_invade_poland.html). The man knows what he's talking about


Political views can be an obstacle to entry into certain professions. Outright support for the USSR would have been an impediment for somebody wanting to join a Soviet Studies department as a staff member during the cold warOf the two historians that I referenced in the above post, Carr was famously a Marxist while Davies was a member of the CPGB. Both have made immense contributions to the field of Soviet history and have been recognised by their peers for such. It's outright Soviet apologism that is not conductive to a career in history... but then it's got nothing to do with history

[Paul Cockshott]

That is an interesting link you gave to a page of his about Poland in 1939, arguments I had not heard before. What do you make of the details of his argument?

[ComradeOm]

Guess. If you need a hint, my comments are in the linked thread

[The Intransigent Faction]

That's being pedantic. Nobody believes that Stalin or Mao personally went around the countryside and sowing weeds in fields or slaughtering livestock. In this context 'Stalin/Mao' is acceptable shorthand for 'the Stalinist/Maoist regime or elite'. This is based on the understanding, probably truer for the USSR than China, that Stalin/Mao sat at the apex of the state apparatus and had a direct hand in directing policy.

Not really. It's important in any Marxist analysis to point out that the flaw was in the system itself, not its leader. This goes beyond semantics to a proper understanding of history. There are absolutely people who believe that "If the leaders had been different it would have been fine."


There is, to use an example from above, no question that Stalin was intimately involved in the setting of 'area sown' targets in the USSR. These were Politburo level discussions that called for increasing levels of sowing during the harvest. Now Stalin may not have personally travelled the country lowering the quality of the sowing or advocating the abandonment of crop rotation but these were the, rational and predictable, outcomes of a policy that he had agreed, signed-off on and instructed the state to follow.

This is particularly important given your assertion that "plenty of them were just the result of guards or other prisoners taking the initiative to be extra brutal". In many, many cases (such as the socialisation of livestock, the shock of collectivisation, the entire mass purges etc) the pattern that emerges is of a policy that Stalin signs off going horribly wrong and then Stalin himself covering his arse by claiming 'excesses' in the implementation.

So the reality is that Stalin was the driving force in the Stalinist elite (hence the name, really) that decided policy. The horrific consequences to these policies (approx ten million dead between 1927 and 1941) were not due to implementation but their flawed nature.

The breakdown of the NEP was the direct result of failed agricultural policies. The grain crisis was entirely man-made. What else would you expect when the state reduced prices on grain (while raising them on technical crops) while at the same time failing to increase the flow of manufactured goods to the countryside.

Whether or not the NEP was viable in the long-term is another discussion entirely but there was no immediate reason, other than state bungling, as to why it should have collapsed in the late 1920s.

I don't question your facts, I simply refuse to agree that one individual is to blame for the entire famine, no matter how powerful. As for my "assertion" that many deaths resulted from the brutality of guards beyond what was officially ordered from above or the behavior of other prisoners---that's not intended in any way to say that Stalin had no part in any of it, after all it was his directive to build the White Sea Canal, for instance, if I'm not mistaken. To point at Stalin and excuse the guards and others of their part in the brutality of the system is to paint an idealistic version of history, though.

Again, go ahead and say it was entirely manmade. What do you think capitalist famine is? That's not an excuse for it, but it shows that it is systemic, not the fault of one single person.

This misses the entire point of my post, though---that we can debate numbers or who bungled what, but I've never seen any real productive discussion come out of that in terms of what makes a properly run socialist society. Better to explain why the class structure in these failed experiments (whether since 1917, 1929, 1953, or whatever one claims) led to their downfall. That's what's missing from an 'analysis' that said "Stalin killed millions".

It's not being pedantic, it's a reminder of something that gets lost in a narrow analysis that focuses far, far too much on one man.

If you feel the need to paint me as an apologist or something just for saying that "Stalin did it" is an oversimplification of history, well...I can't stop you.

[Comrade Adolf Hitler]

If you guys are still here, the Collectivization and Great Leap Forward caused millions to die.