Failed Harvest and the Confiscation of Grain
Among the many tragedies surrounding the Great Famine is that it had been predicted, years in advance. Objective observers, witnessing collectivization’s early trial runs in the late 1920s and early 1930s, sounded the alarm about the expected chaos and turmoil, and the negative impact on the harvests and the distribution networks that took produce from the fields to consumers. As early as 1930, academics and advisers to the authorities in the Ukrainian SSR predicted that famine was inevitable if collectivization was continued at its current pace. They were roundly ignored.
A key factor was the Soviet authorites’ decision to ignore the incentives driving the peasants. Collectivization sought to increase the grain available to feed the steadily growing industrial population in the cities, while paying the peasants a state-mandated pittance for their work, unrelated to the true market price of their produce. However, the peasants, knowing that would not personally benefit from the increased agricultural output, had little incentive to go along. Many viewed collectivization as a “second serfdom”, particularly since they were forced into the collective farms against their will, and did not have the right to leave and seek employment elsewhere without the authorities’ permission – permission that was often denied.
At first, the peasants protested peacefully, writing letters to the authorities, but when they were ignored, violence broke out, with some villagers lynching the local enforcers of collectivization. Others turned to sabotage, including the burning of crops or slaughtering the livestock that was about to get seized from them and handed over to the collective farms. Stalin responded to the peasantry’s defiance with typical brutality and deployed the machinery of the Soviet state to crush and bring them to heel – especially the prosperous kulaks, who were deemed to be the most intransigent opponents of collectivization.
In 1932, the chaos and turmoil of collectivization resulted in a Ukrainian grain harvest whose yields were significantly below average: Soviet authorities got a hold of only 4.3 million tons, as opposed to 7.2 million tons a year earlier. Food rations were drastically cut in the cities, where many starved that winter. The famine had begun, and it was about to get far, far, worse. To channel the urban industrial workers’ ire away from Stalin’s government, a propaganda campaign was whipped up, blaming the food shortages on counterrevolutionary peasants. Agitprop movies and news articles accused the peasants of hiding the harvested grain and potatoes in order to produce an artificial shortage, then cash in on the higher prices, even if it cost the lives of starving urban workers.
The propaganda campaign succeeded in riling up the industrial workers, and before long, the urban proletariat was hopping mad at the peasants, blaming them for their hunger pangs. When the authorities organized them into special brigades and columns to go into the countryside to help confiscate grain, the workers were in no mood to listen to the peasants’ protestations of poor harvests and the lack of grain to meet the set quotas.