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Revision as of 08:23, 10 September 2005
The Russian famine of 1921, which began in the early spring of that year, and lasted through 1922, was a true famine: hunger so severe that it was doubtful that seed-grain would be sown rather than eaten. At one point, relief agencies had to give grain to the railroad staff to get their supplies moved. Russia was experiencing one of her intermittent droughts, but there had been droughts before.
George F. Kennan attributes responsibility for the famine to the doctrinaire mismanagement of the Bolsheviks, and to the six and a half years of war Russia had suffered without break. The last phases of the First World War in the East were fought inside Imperial Russia. Modern war strains any economy; but for much of the period, Russia had been cut off, not only from trade with the Central Powers, but, with the closing of the Dardanelles, from the rest of the world. The end of grain export would at least have meant full granaries, if it were not for the peculation and corruption of Imperial Russia.
All sides in the Russian Civil Wars of 1918-20 - the Bolsheviks, the Whites, the Anarchists, the seceding nationalities - provisioned themselves by the ancient method of "living off the land": they seized food from those who grew it, gave it to their armies and supporters, and denied it to their enemies. The Bolshevik efficiency at this is confirmed by their recently uncovered records; it doubtless contributed to their victory. This led peasants to drastically reduce their crop production. In retaliation, Lenin ordered the seizure of the food peasants had grown for their own subsistence and their seed grain. The American Relief Association, which Herbert Hoover had formed to help the starvation of WWI, offered assistance to Lenin in 1919, on condition that they have full say over the Russian railway network and hand out food impartially to all; Lenin refused this as interference in Russian internal affairs.
This famine, the Kronstadt rebellion, and the failure of a German general strike convinced Lenin to reverse his policy at home and abroad. He decreed the New Economic Policy on March 15, 1921; it also helped produce an opening to the West. Lenin allowed relief organizations to bring aid, this time; fortunately war relief was no longer required in Western Europe, and the A.R.A. had an organization set up in Poland, relieving the Polish famine which had begun in the winter of 1919-20. The famine continued through 1922; the American Relief Association fed ten million people, and presumably was what kept most of them alive.
The Bolsheviks permitted the relief agencies to continue distributing free food in 1923, while they sold grain abroad. The net effect, since grain is fungible, was that they received money for nothing from capitalist philanthropy. When this was discovered, foreign relief organizations suspended the aid. Lenin's first heart attack was in the spring of 1922, and he had aphasia in 1923; the extent of his responsibility for the grain sales is therefore unclear. However, exploiting gullible capitalists would have accorded with his expressed policies.
François Furet estimated there were five million deaths in the famine; for comparison, the worst crop failure of late tsarist Russia, in 1892, caused 375,000 to 400,000 deaths . Of course, that was in a time of peace and order; there had not been war throughout Russia before.
Some anti-Communist rhetoric declaims that Lenin was responsible for, and desired the famine; for example, this website, which misstates even the years of the famine. If Lenin had intended mass murder, he missed an obvious opportunity to increase his kill: he failed to keep the A.R.A. out, which he had done two years before when the Bolsheviks were in a worse military and political position.
See also
References
Kennan, George Frost: Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin. Boston (1961) Particularly pp.141-150, 168, 179-185.
Fromkin, David: Peace to End All Peace (1989 hc) p.360 (on Czarist corruption and the closure of the Dardanelles)
François Furet: Passing of an Illusion. (1999 tr. of 1995 orig.) on total deaths.
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