The Statistics of Despair: Soviet Union Famines in the early 1930s and the mid-1940s
Paximadas, Konstantinos
This dissertation was written as part of the MA in Black Sea Cultural Studies at the International Hellenic University. It examines with a statistical emphasis the two famines Soviet Union went though in the early 30s and mid-40s: the first, running from late 1930 to 1934 in some locations, the second in 1946-1947, just after WWII end. It sees the 1930s famine as a complex phenomenon, running intertwined with world-changing modernistic social-transformation enterprises of gigantic proportions, i.e. the collectivization of agricultural property in tandem with -and for the ultimate success of-, the industrialization of an agricultural country practically -in historical-time terms-, overnight, and with dekulakisation, the thorough, sweeping purge of the so-assumed, loosely defined, class-enemies of said transformations. It presents its unfolding various episodes, from the urban food-crises of 1928-33 and the extensive famine in soviet Kazakhstan, to the main killer rural famine of 1932-33 affecting mainly Ukraine but also the RSFSR Volga regions and the Kuban-river North Caucasus ones. It examines the various facets of these inter-linked tragedies and it endeavors to link them to the agricultural picture-in-numbers of the contemporary USSR, in terms of production, consumption and grain stocks, while it provides some statistical definitions/explanations of the problematics of quantifying those statistics. It then moves on to the largely unknown famine that `end-bracketed` WWII affecting Moldova, Ukraine, Belorussia and parts of RSFSR. There too, and after providing some short historical-context notes, it examines these famines particulars with an added given emphasis in the disputed role of grain stocks and their use (or non use) in coping with famines. The paper ends attempting to classify these phenomena using Amartya Sen’s ‘entitlement approach’ thus, indirectly locating the reasons and drawing some conclusions on why they happened and if they could have been avoided, an extremely controversial issue as it pertains inseparably on the politics of the period
