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Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933, Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 1506, University of Pittsburgh, 2001.

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Abstract

Paper presents new and overlooked evidence showing that the Soviet famine of 1931-1933 (often incorrectly reduced to a Ukrainian famine) resulted from crop failures caused by drought in 1931 and heavy rainfall and associated plant infestations in 1932, and that the Soviet government did not understand the 1932 events.
... In the central chernozem area, which differs little from Ukraine in terms of climate and As the last excerpt notes, Ukraine is not the only part of the former Soviet Union with chernozem, nor was it the only Soviet Republic to suffer from famine in the early 1930s-even if, Karszo-Siedlewski notes, the requisitions policies were especially "rapacious" there and in the Northern Caucasus. Some scholars have thus been troubled by the historiographic separation of the Ukrainian "Holodomor" from the broader Soviet famine of 1931-1933, which was especially severe in Kazakhstan, and also plagued the black earth belts of southern Russia (Tauger 1991(Tauger , 2001Davies & Wheatcroft 2004). ...
... In the central chernozem area, which differs little from Ukraine in terms of climate and As the last excerpt notes, Ukraine is not the only part of the former Soviet Union with chernozem, nor was it the only Soviet Republic to suffer from famine in the early 1930s-even if, Karszo-Siedlewski notes, the requisitions policies were especially "rapacious" there and in the Northern Caucasus. Some scholars have thus been troubled by the historiographic separation of the Ukrainian "Holodomor" from the broader Soviet famine of 1931-1933, which was especially severe in Kazakhstan, and also plagued the black earth belts of southern Russia (Tauger 1991(Tauger , 2001Davies & Wheatcroft 2004). ...
... Much of the early scholarship on the 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine tended to emphasize either its environmental causes, and relatedly, the pan-Soviet nature of its effects (Tauger 1991 and2001, most notably), or its political ones, and relatedly, its disproportionate impact on ethnic Ukrainian communities (Conquest 1986;Graziosi 1996;Snyder 2007). However, more recent work has exhibited more nuance on the periodization of the famine(s), the question of ethnic targeting and/or genocide, and also employed a wider variety of archival sources (Graziosi 2005 is particularly thoughtful on all of these counts 43 , and notably manages a discussion of "genocide" that sensitively account for deaths that occurred after the famine "officially" ended. ...
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Afterlives and Other Lives is an ethnography of Ukraine on the eve of the Maidan Revolution, and during the first several months following its climax, as the country descended into war (autumn 2012–autumn 2014). Grounded in a study of former collective farming communities, this dissertation demonstrates that many of the ideals of the Maidan movement—national sovereignty; government accountability; equality before the law; freedom of movement across borders; increased opportunity at home—not only reverberated in the countryside, but were deeply implicated in agrarian experience to begin with. This dissertation shows how two powerful semiotic processes, iconicity and interdiscursivity, made linkages between certain rural things and particular political commitments or social types feel intuitive beyond the villages, propelling specific readings of the past, assessments of the present, and expectations for the future. Mapping how soil became tied to narratives of economic potential, and land deeds to dreams of “rule of law”, how invasive beetles were equated with separatists, and sunflowers with victims of a plane crash, the chapters cohere in a narrative of how Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution came to be, and why the violence that has erupted from it has been so difficult to contain. This project, while focused on Ukraine, responds to the anthropological imperative to study how certain perspectives on the social world come to feel natural, legitimate, or inevitable. In tracing how some people, histories, and landscapes become cast as native, desirable, or heroic, while others are neglected, dismissed, or undermined, it speaks to more widespread struggles over historical memory and national identity. Finally, this dissertation offers insight into how the frontiers of war, and the afterlives they generate, are ever expanding, and unexpected.
... Altri autori (Tauger 2001;Cheng 2012), infatti, non hanno considerato l'Holodomor come un genocidio di iniziativa sovietica del popolo ucraino e hanno rigetta-to questa interpretazione sostenendo piuttosto che la carestia sia stato il risultato dall'eccesiva accelerazione con cui si volle attuare la collettivizzazione in Ucraina. Se, infatti, nel giugno del 1928 solo il 3,8 percento delle aziende agricole ucraine erano collettivizzate, questa percentuale salì all'8,5 nel giugno 1929, al 16 nell'ottobre 1929 fino ad arrivare al 45 nel maggio 1930 (Naumenko 2017). ...
... Le cattive condizioni metereologiche dell'inverno del 1932, inoltre, danneggiarono la produzione di grano e peggiorarono il disastro che si scatenò negli anni a seguire (Tauger 2001). Una delle caratteristiche più peculiari della carestia del 1932-34 è costituita dalla circostanza che i leader sovietici si adoperarono per nascondere tale disastro, non solo in Ucraina dove fu particolarmente drammatico, ma con riguardo all'intera carestia che coinvolse la quasi totalità del territorio dell'URSS. ...
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The article aims at questioning if food can be used as a geopolitical tool, specifically with regard to those policies implemented by the Russian government against Ukraine. The authors intend to show the existence in the Russian geopolitical tradition of a persistent factor, that is using food to pursuit national interests, as revealed dur- ing the study of the Soviet Union’s and the Russian Federation’s political history. Furthermore, the analysis enlightens how other international actors occur and influence the production, consumption and protection of the right to food, resulting in severe consequences on the international food supply governance. To this end, the ultimate goal of the authors is to shed a light on food security and how it represents a violated right internationally, due to the adoption of restrictive economic policies, which limit the access to the feeding of involved populations. Thus, despite the existence of inter- national agencies and organizations whose mission is population food security, this is still difficult to achieve, especially in the poorest regions of the world.
... Altri autori (Tauger 2001;Cheng 2012), infatti, non hanno considerato l'Holodomor come un genocidio di iniziativa sovietica del popolo ucraino e hanno rigetta-to questa interpretazione sostenendo piuttosto che la carestia sia stato il risultato dall'eccesiva accelerazione con cui si volle attuare la collettivizzazione in Ucraina. Se, infatti, nel giugno del 1928 solo il 3,8 percento delle aziende agricole ucraine erano collettivizzate, questa percentuale salì all'8,5 nel giugno 1929, al 16 nell'ottobre 1929 fino ad arrivare al 45 nel maggio 1930 (Naumenko 2017). ...
... Le cattive condizioni metereologiche dell'inverno del 1932, inoltre, danneggiarono la produzione di grano e peggiorarono il disastro che si scatenò negli anni a seguire (Tauger 2001). Una delle caratteristiche più peculiari della carestia del 1932-34 è costituita dalla circostanza che i leader sovietici si adoperarono per nascondere tale disastro, non solo in Ucraina dove fu particolarmente drammatico, ma con riguardo all'intera carestia che coinvolse la quasi totalità del territorio dell'URSS. ...
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L’articolo indaga l’uso del cibo come strumento di pressione geopolitica, con particolare riferimento alle politiche attuate dalla Russia nei confronti dell’Ucrai-na. Il contributo ipotizza e ricostruisce l’esistenza nella tradizione politica russa di una linea di continuità tra passato e presente con riguardo all’atteggiamento dell’Unio-ne Sovietica (URSS) prima e della Federazione Russa poi, nell’utilizzare il cibo per il perseguimento degli interessi geopolitici della nazione. Come si cerca di evidenziare, si tratta di una pratica geopolitica perseguita anche da altri attori internazionali che, attraverso politiche economiche limitanti l’accesso al cibo, produce serie conseguenze sulla governance internazionale dell’alimentazione. Dunque, malgrado l’esistenza di agenzie e organizzazioni internazionali che agiscono nel tentativo di garantirne il rispetto, la tutela della sicurezza alimentare mondiale rimane un obiettivo ancora difficile da raggiungere, soprattutto nelle regioni più povere del mondo.
... The famine was, however, a part of a broader Soviet famine in 1931-1934(in Ukraine until 1934 there were famines nearly every ten years) and was due not just to difficulties associated with (re)collectivization but also to Western economic sanctions and trade boycotts designed to weaken and sabotage the Soviet economy and environmentally-generated small harvests. In any case western Ukraine itself was not a part of the Soviet Union until 1939 (Tauger 2001;Anton 2020). ...
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... 14 See, however, Tauger (2001) and Davies and Wheatcroft (2004, pp. 113, 422-6 An added problem was that as a result of the harsh weather the typical laborer was employed only part-time. ...
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Owing to the repressive nature of the USSR’s Communist regime, the role of the government has stood at the center of nearly every investigation of famine in the Soviet Union. More specifically, in seeking to isolate the causes of hunger, scholars often begin with the assumption that Soviet government policies served as the root cause of famine. From the very start, Bolshevik power depended on the ability to secure grain from the countryside, and the state’s requisitioning policies contributed to the famine in 1921–22.3 This emphasis on state responsibility for famine is most glaring in the historiography of the Soviet famine of 1932–33, the best known and most thoroughly studied Soviet-era famine. Adherents of a more publicly visible current of the historiography of this tragedy argue that Stalin and his entourage organized the famine to crush peasant resistance to the collectivization of agriculture and to weed out Ukrainian nationalism. Some of the advocates of this position go as far as to label the crisis “the Ukrainian famine-genocide,” asserting that the state set as its goal the destruction of the Ukrainian people.4 This view requires revision in light of new findings, but it has nonetheless shaped the popular image of the famine of 1932–33 and has been reflected in official American government documents.5
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