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By Professor Mark B. Tauger
Associate Professor at West Virginia University
Morgantown, West Virginia
RFE/RL Poland, Belarus and Ukraine Report
Prague, Czech Republic, 25 June 2002, Volume 4, Number 25
(This article by Professor Mark B. Tauger (mark.tauger@mail.wvu.edu), Ph.D.,
associate professor at West Virginia University, responds to the article by
Dr. Taras Kuzio in "RFE/RL Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine Report" of 12 June
2002.)
Dr. Kuzio's article concerns a discussion on H-Net Russia, which began when
in response to a question, I sent in a list of my recent publications
(listed below) and summarized their main points. These points were that the
1933 famine was not limited to Ukraine and resulted from a shortage due to
natural disasters that no other scholars have investigated. Dr. Kuzio's
article distorts this discussion and misrepresents Western scholarship and
my works in particular, which were the main ones at issue but which
apparently almost none of my detractors had read.
Dr. Kuzio claims that Western scholars refuse to compare Soviet and Nazi
crimes, and are Russia-centric. On the first point, he quotes other
scholars' statements that any questioning of the Ukrainian genocide argument
is "immoral and absurd." On the second point, he cites my doubts concerning
Ukrainian memoirs and asserts that no one questions similar accounts of the
Holocaust. He refers to my criticism of Robert Conquest's work and cites
James Mace's dismissal of my work as "baseless statistical circumlocutions"
and "garbage." He asserts that Western scholars ignore Ukrainian sources and
publications, and that the famine left no "memory" in the Russian
consciousness. Here I will briefly respond to these claims.
With respect to memory of the famine in Russia, Dr. Kuzio seems unaware of
such publications as "Tragediya sovetskoi derevni," a massive five-volume
collection of documents published in Russia with the support of the U.S.
National Endowment for the Humanities, which evidences the severity of the
famine in Russia as well as Ukraine, and the imprint of the famine on the
consciousness of all the Soviet peoples. Dr. Kuzio's point is also
problematic because Ukraine is a multinational state, all of whose
citizens -- Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Poles, Tatars, and others -- were
victims of the famine, as documented in recent Ukrainian publications.
Dr. Kuzio is wrong to characterize me as a Russia-centered Western scholar.
I use Ukrainian sources, I have worked in Ukrainian archives, and I have
published a study of the Ukrainian famine of 1928-1929 that the Ukrainian
scholar S.V. Kulchytskyy described as one of the "blank spots" to which Dr.
Kuzio refers. I published this in a collection of articles on Soviet history
in the national republics ("Provincial Landscapes," listed below) by a group
of scholars, and this publication is not unique. Dr. Kuzio's criticism of
U.S. scholarship, therefore, at least as it refers to me, my associates, and
many other Western scholars, is unjustified.
On the question of statistics, James Mace and other advocates of the
genocide argument insist that the famine was "man-made" on the basis of
Soviet official statistics that the total grain harvest in 1932 was 68.9
million tons and testimonies and memoirs from decades after the event that
the harvest was excellent. Their argument therefore rests on the statistical
claim that no genuine food shortage prevailed in the USSR in 1932. If it can
be shown that such a shortage prevailed, this argument has to be rejected.
The official statistics, however, show that the procurements taken from the
1932 harvest were less than the procurements in any other year in the 1930s
(and archival documents show that the data actually overstate the amount
procured). In other words, the rural remainder for the whole USSR in that
year appears larger than any other year in the early 1930s, so there should
not have been a famine by those statistics. Several other scholars noted
this before me, including the Ukrainian emigre scholar Dmytro Solovey. These
are not "baseless statistical circumlocutions" but a fundamental problem in
the evidence, which Conquest, Mace, and other recent Ukrainian scholarship
never mention.
Yet there was a famine, and as the archives document exhaustively, people
were dying of starvation all over the country (see the article by Wheatcroft
in Getty and Manning, "Stalinist Terror," Cambridge University Press 1997).
So that harvest statistic is wrong. As I show, the harvest figure that Mace
and others rely on was a biological yield projection, not harvest data, and
was imposed on Soviet statistics by Stalin in 1933.
I obtained the archival annual reports from the collective farms themselves,
including those from more than 40 percent of the collective farms in Ukraine
(the remainder of the farms did not complete and submit annual reports,
apparently because of the crisis). These data show that the 1932 harvest was
at least one-third below the official figures. These are data from the
farms, including Ukrainian farms, data gathered and prepared by Ukrainian
peasants and other villagers at the time that the famine took place.
I also show that even these data, which imply in Ukraine a harvest of less
than 5 million tons instead of the 8 million-ton official figure, overstate
what must have been a famine harvest. I show that these annual-report data
are the only reliable data on Soviet grain production in the 1930s, and that
peasants used them to resist outside officials' demanding high procurements
based on Soviet biological yields.
So while Mace stands by Stalin's false statistics, backed up with memoirs
written decades later, to argue that a small harvest did not occur, my
evidence (which Mace calls "garbage") -- desperately put forward by
Ukrainians and other peasants themselves, which Soviet leaders received and
rejected -- documents incontrovertibly that the country had a famine
harvest. This is why I question Ukrainian memoir accounts. Their insistence
on the false assertion that the harvest was good undermines their
credibility.
It is also a general principle of evidence that contemporaneous evidence
concerning an event is considerably more reliable than reports decades after
the event: The memoir and testimony sources on the famine date from the
1950s to the 1980s and later. Substantial critical literatures in history
and psychology have demonstrated the problems of memoirs and oral history,
which contrary to Dr. Kuzio's claim have been applied extensively to the
literature of Holocaust memoirs and testimonies.
The evidence that I have published and other evidence, including recent
Ukrainian document collections, show that the famine developed out of a
shortage and pervaded the Soviet Union, and that the regime organized a
massive program of rationing and relief in towns and in villages, including
in Ukraine, but simply did not have enough food. This is why the Soviet
famine, an immense crisis and tragedy of the Soviet economy, was not in the
same category as the Nazis' mass murders, which had no agricultural or other
economic basis.
This evidence also explains why it is false to describe me and other Western
scholars as "deniers" of the famine. There is nothing "immoral" or "absurd"
about this evidence, which comes directly from Ukrainians and other
villagers at the time, and it is in no way comparable to a denial of the
Holocaust.
Mace, Krawchenko, and Kuzio responded to careful research that tests
received interpretations, certainly accepted scholarly practice, with
derogatory comments, misrepresentations, and moral condemnations, without
apparently having read all of the publications they attacked. Perhaps this
is why they have encountered some opposition to their views in the United
States. This kind of ad hominem attack only makes it more difficult to get
at the truth behind the tragedies in Soviet history.
Mark B. Tauger, "The 1932 Harvest and the Soviet Famine of 1932-1933,"
Slavic Review v. 50 No. 1, Spring 1991;
Tauger, R.W. Davies, and S. G. Wheatcroft, "Stalin, Grain Stocks, and the
Famine of 1932-1933," Slavic Review v. 54 No. 3, Fall 1995;
Tauger, "Natural Disaster and Human Action in the Soviet Famine of
1931-1933," The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies,
University of Pittsburgh, No. 1506, 2001 (65pp); (412) 648 9881
Tauger, "Statistical Falsification in the Soviet Union: A Comparative Case
Study of Projections, Biases, and Trust," The Donald Treadgold Papers in
Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies, University of Washington,
No. 34, 2001 (82pp); (206) 221 6348
Tauger, "Grain Crisis or Famine? The Ukrainian State Commission for Aid to
Crop Failure Victims and the Ukrainian Famine of 1928-1929," in Donald
Raleigh, ed., "Provincial Landscapes: Local Dimensions of Soviet Power,"
1917-1953, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001.
By Professor Mark B. Tauger, Associate Professor at West Virginia
University, Morgantown, West Virginia
RFE/RL Poland, Belarus and Ukraine Report
Prague, Czech Republic, 25 June 2002, Volume 4, Number 25
http://www.rferl.org/pbureport/2002/06/25-250602.html
FOR PERSONAL AND ACADEMIC USE ONLY
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