Excess Collectivization Deaths 1929–1933: New Demographic Evidence

Abstract

Although many Western scholars believe that 5 million Soviet peasants died as a result of forced collectivization, this inference is not firmly supported by official prewar census statistics. Official statistics suggest that there may have been as many as 9.2 million excess deaths between 1927 and 1939, a figure more than ample to cover hypothesized collectivization fatalities, but Frank Lorimer has argued that half of this discrepancy may be explained by a 27 percent underestimation of the mortality rate in the census of 1926. The possibility that standard Western estimates substantially exaggerate estimated collectivization fatalities therefore cannot be dismissed, even before allowance is made for victims of the famine of 1933-1934, Gulag forced labor, and the terror.The plausibility of the hypothesis that collectivization claimed millions of lives is diminished further by Gosplan's estimate of the Soviet population in 1933, 165.7 million, a figure consistent with demographic trends of the late 1920s. Assuming that Gosplan had access to the relevant data when this estimate was made in 1937, it appears to follow that all excess deaths calculated from the census of 1939 occurred after rather than before 1933.