New Demographic Evidence on Collectivization Deaths: A Rejoinder to Stephen Wheatcroft

Abstract

Most Western scholars agree that Soviet Union experienced a significant number of excess deaths during 1930s which are attributable to forced collectivization from 1929 to 1932, famine of 1933-34, Gulag forced labor, and terror. Until comparatively recently, however, official data required for a reliable estimate of magnitude and incidence of these excess fatalities have been unavailable. In May 1984 I reported that new evidence had been released which shed considerable light on one aspect of this important problem: forced collectivization between 1929 and 1932.1 The evidence took two forms: a revised natality series for 1930s, and a previously unpublished population statistic for 1933, both provided by distinguished Soviet demographer Boris Urlanis.2 On basis of this information, previously published Soviet vital statistics, and 1926/27 census data, two alternative estimates of excess deaths attributable to forced collectivization were computed.3 The first, derived without adjustment from these Soviet statistics and computed using method employed by Frank Lorimer in his classic League of Nations study, The Population of Soviet Union: History and Prospects (1946), indicated that Soviet Union sustained 5.8 million excess fatalities from January 1, 1929 to January 1, 1933 that were attributable to forced collectivization. The second estimate, which took into account possibility that official, census-based mortality rate for 1927 may have understated real rate, yielded a lower figure, 5.1 million. These findings led me to conclude that approximately 5 million excess deaths attributed by Murray Feshbach to the liquidation of kulaks and forced land collectivization in early thirties was well founded and broadly substantiated by Urlanis's data.4 As claimed previously, I believe this is a very powerful, if admittedly restricted, result. It does not settle further issues of famine-related excess deaths in 1933/34 and of excess fatalities imputable to Gulag forced labor and