Grain is Stalin’s Gold: How the First Communist Nation Starved Millions

From nuclear power to genetically modified seeds, a principal theme of this class is how well-intentioned ideas can result in disaster. I would contend that the entire historical arc of the Soviet Union, born out of the first major peasant-led Marxist revolution, fits this theme and that the Holodomor Genocide in the Ukraine works as an example of this. One of the largest genocides in human history, the Holodomor was a politically-motivated famine that spanned two years in the early 1930s, and killed between seven and twelve million people. The famine was caused by the disruption of traditional Ukrainian agricultural practices in favor of Soviet collectivization, the funneling of the vast majority of the agricultural product out of the Ukraine, and brutal repression of anyone who questioned the Soviet strategies. It is the ultimate tragedy that a political reform aimed at liberating the poor and hungry from oppression turned into a force for evil and genocide of the very same people it aimed to help.

While most scholars contend that the intensity with which Stalin enforced the policies of collectivization was in large part an attempt to snuff out Ukrainian nationalism, and any independence movement that might emerge out of it, the Holodomor genocide was principally a side effect of the Soviet Unions disastrous ideas on how to feed its people, while erasing class divisions in the process. The central aspect of this strategy was the process of collectivization, or the seizing of any and all private property or land and returning it to the peasant class in the form of government ownership. This process was widely unpopular in places like Ukraine, where the Soviet government was an unknown entity and regarded as worse than the current landowner class.

All over the Soviet Union, the process of collectivization was marked by violence, from both landowners and peasant classes who did not know or trust the revolutionary ideas coming out of Moscow. This is in large part a side-effect of how large the Soviet Union, and how many distinct religions and ethnic groups are contained within the behemoth collection of Soviet States. However, there was a far more sinister problem with the process of collectivization, inherent to the process. In the guise of smashing hierarchy, transferring ownership of the land to a central government that called itself a representative of the proletariat only transferred the hierarchy to a single ‘dictator to citizen’ hierarchy, as opposed to the complex hierarchies that had existed in the Soviet States previous. While I will not attempt to defend the harsh repression of the peasant class by landowners in Czarist Russia, it is far superior to the Politburo owning the entire country and pretending that meant the people owned it because this, of course, paved the way for Stalin’s fascism, and culminated in events like Holodomor and policies like the ones that imprisoned millions of innocent men and women in the gulag system.

There is an important lesson in disasters to be learned in studying the monumental failures of communist projects like the Soviet attempt at collectivization, namely to beware of orthodox ideologies that push one-size-fits-all policies and reforms on the world at large. Stalin, and the Soviet Union, committed took away the freedom of millions while preaching revolutionary justice and a more profound form of freedom, resulting in unspeakable atrocities. Worst of all, they excused suffering and violence as simply part of their larger struggle for utopia.

The French philosopher, Albert Camus, wrote in his book the Rebel: “Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction: therefore it destroys freedom. Modern conquerors can kill, but do not seem to be able to create.” Even with the best intentions, it seems that violence and insistence on absolute power dooms a movement. Attempts to use revolutionary violence and absolutist principles like collectivization, in order to shape the world according to one set of beliefs, is destined to fail, and harm millions in the process.