Déni, connaissance, responsabilité: le régime stalinien et la grande famine ukrainienne de 1932–3

Abstract

The great 1932–3 famine in Ukraine and Kuban, considered a major disaster in twentieth-century European history, is starting to be recognised as the opening act of a terrible cycle of violence against the populations of a vast area in the heart of Europe, perpetrated by the two great totalitarian regimes that were Nazism and Stalinism. As James Mace, the pioneer in studying this famine, has written, the Ukrainian famine was a ‘man-made famine’. It was the consequence of an extreme political violence – the forced collectivisation of rural areas. The Stalinist regime exhibited a total indifference to human suffering. Famine was just ‘collateral damage’ of modernisation introduced by collectivisation. Beyond the total denial of famine by Stalinist authorities, this article raises the double question of its knowledge and its responsibility, using new sources. How far can the chain of decision-making that led to the famine and its aggravation be reconstructed? What did the executives of the Party know about what was happening in starving rural areas? Which argumentation and which explanatory strategy were they developing in their correspondence to deal with the reality they were denying?