On the Human Costs of Collectivization in the Soviet Union

Abstract

ACCELERATED INDUSTRIALIZATION, increased appropriation of grain from the peasants, forced collectivization, liquidation of the kulaks, production declines, and hunger are the main links in a chain of events that led to the famine of 193233 in the Soviet Union and to millions of deaths. Almost daily, new information is added to our knowledge of that tragic period; however, its political, economic, and social history is now probably completely known in its main lines. The demography of those years is also assuming a more precise profile as new data are retrieved from the archives, including the results of the 1937 census, which had been suppressed by Stalin. In this article I shall try to refine the estimates of the human losses suffered by the Soviet population in that period. Numbers have often been improperly used to underline ideological points of view, as if imputing 5, 10, or 15 million additional deaths to the policies of forced industrialization, collectivization, and the liquidation of rich peasants would alter the nature of the political responsibility of Stalin's regime. After a brief account of the political and economic events leading up to the disaster of 1932-33, I try to delimit the range of plausible estimates of excess deaths in the 1927-36 decade, taking into account the 1926 and 1937 census results and realistic estimates of fertility and mortality. I also present data on the structure of excess mortality and review evidence on cause of death and geographic distribution, among other characteristics of the 1932-33 epidemic. In the final section of the article, I discuss those aspects of the policy that transformed a colossal attempt at economic reorganization into a tragedy. I draw parallels with a similar catastrophe of our times-the 1959-61 famine in China following the Great Leap Forward. In particular, I shall discuss the hypothesis that the forced collectivization and dislocation of millions of people; the weakening of traditional mutual support networks; the destruction of elementary buffers such as private stocks and private plots, are all elements that weakened the resilience of the population in the face of the stress provoked by the famine, increasing fatalities.