Political Famines in the USSR and China a Comparative Analysis

Home , 1959 in China, Battle for trade, Dekulakization, Great Chinese Famine, Holodomor, Huang Kecheng

Political Famines in the USSR and China A Comparative Analysis

✣ Andrea Graziosi

This article provides a comparative analysis of two of the twentieth century’s largest political famines, which deeply influenced the history of the two largest Communist states, as well as—albeit indirectly—their posture and behavior in the international arena.1 The time frame is defined by Iosif Stalin’s Great Turning Point (GTP) and Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward (GLF) and the crises they caused, that is, 1928–1934 in the Soviet Union and 1958–1962 in China. However, I have extended the coverage backward to account for what I term the “hidden” five-year plan launched in 1925, which led to the crisis of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the Soviet Union, and the Socialist High Tide (SHT) and its failure in China (1955–1956). I have also extended the chronological hori- zon forward to include at least some of the long-term consequences of these avoidable tragedies, analyzing their impact on subsequent Soviet and Chinese history.2 The article presents an in-depth analysis of the similarities and differences between these two events, offering sufficient detail about each famine to allow for meaningful comparisons. Because comparative studies of the two events are recent and few in number, my contribution is difficult to position among them. As usually happens when a new field is opened, all of the recent comparative studies are useful.3 Readers interested in my view of the much wider,

1. In addition to the 1931–1933 Soviet famine cluster and the Chinese catastrophe of 1958–1962, two other Soviet famines occurred (in 1921–1922, caused at least in part by civil war requisitions; and 1946–1947). To these may be added the famines the Nazis organized during World War II, the famines in Ethiopia in the 1980s and North Korea in the 1990s, and several famines in South Asia. 2. Despite the 30-year gap separating the Soviet famines from the Chinese calamity, the ﬁrst mono- graphs devoted to them appeared at almost the same time. See Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (New York: The Free Press, 1996). 3. Dennis Tao Yang, “China’s Agricultural Crisis and Famine of 1959–1961: A Survey and Com- parison to Soviet Famines,” Comparative Economic Studies, Vol. 50, No. 4 (March 2008), pp. 1–

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and at times unnecessarily harsh, debate on the Soviet famines are referred to a separate article I have devoted to the topic.4 Comparing these famines opens new and at times unexpected vistas, which afford a better grasp of each event in its own speciﬁcity and sheds new light on questions such as Communist leaders’ evolving ideas and attitudes, the cadres’ reactions, the peasantry’s behaviors, and the dynamics of the two countries’ histories. This comparison also has a great deal to say about two of the most important interpretative frameworks that have been applied to the analysis of Soviet and Chinese history: the totalitarian and, lately, the genocidal.5 I formally raise the question in the conclusion, but readers are invited to consider what follows with this perspective in mind.

Similarities

Ideology Ideology was the bridge connecting two leaders and two systems that were in fact very different. They looked at each other across the bridge in an asym- metric relationship in which Mao and China were generally the “imitators,” even though Nikita Khrushchev was initially fascinated by Mao’s GLF. As for the USSR Mao had aspired in the 1950s to imitate the Stalinist system, which in his view seemed to be an unqualified success, codified by victory in the war and superpower status that drew a new veil over a past already covered by official lies created in the 1930s. Mao thus knew little of Stalin’s 1929 GTP.6 In November 1957 in Moscow, while waiting for the cel- ebration of the Bolshevik Revolution’s 40th anniversary, Mao was as ebullient

29; Matthias Middell and Felix Wemheuer, eds., Hunger and Scarcity under State-Socialism (Leipzig: Leipziger Univesitätsverlag, 2012); Felix Wemheuer, Famine Politics in Maoist China and in the Soviet Union (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); and, above all, Lucien Bianco, La récidive: Révolution russe, Révolution chinoise (Paris: Gallimard, 2014). 4. Andrea Graziosi, “The Soviet 1931–1933 Famines and the Ukrainian Holodomor: Is a New In- terpretation Possible, What Would Its Consequences Be?” in Halyna Hryn, ed., Hunger by Design: The Great Ukrainian Famine and Its Soviet Context (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2009), pp. 1–19. 5. Norman Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); and “Reap- praising Mass Terror, Repression, and Responsibility in Stalin’s Regime: Perspectives on Norman Naimark’s Stalin Genocides,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (2012), pp. 149–189. 6. Rumors, however, circulated. One of the documents collected by Zhou Xun includes the following declaration by a party cadre from Sichuan’s Wanxian region: “Our socialist system determined that death is inevitable. In the Soviet Union, in order to build the socialist system, about 30 percent of the population died.” Zhou Xun, The Great Famine in China, 1958–1962: A Documentary History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 22.

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as his Soviet counterpart in celebrating Sputnik 1, and signing an agreement that provided for Soviet assistance to China in building a nuclear bomb. Af- ter Khrushchev boasted before the representatives of the world’s Communist parties that the USSR would overtake the United States in key production sectors within ﬁfteen years by virtue of the Soviet masses’ growing socialist consciousness, Mao announced that China would overtake the United King- dom in the same period. The road leading to the GLF was thus taken. The Soviet and Chinese leaders’ great expectations of the late 1950s are essential for understanding the plunge into utopianism. The extreme form this took in China should not hide the fact that Khrushchev, too, soon ventured into a “small” leap forward. Embodied at ﬁrst by policies such as a renewed assault on religion and an unpopular school reform, it culminated in the pledge of 1961, to build Communism within twenty years—a pledge that later proved a source of great embarrassment for Leonid Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders.7 If Khrushchev was the direct model, however, behind him was the Stalin of the GTP, whom Khrushchev never ceased praising, as proven by the 1956 secret speech in which he extolled Stalin’s pre-1935 choices. Khrushchev himself was a product of the climate of the 1928–1933 revolution from above, a climate determined by leaders of the All-Union Communist Party, or VKP(b), who, from Stalin downward, knew little or nothing about economics and were convinced—to use Mao’s later words—that the right “method” was “to put politics in command.” The belief that willpower could produce miracles thus bound together the Stalin of 1929 and the Mao of 1958, as well as their most important lieutenants, from Sergo Ordzhonikidze to Deng Xiaoping. After reading Konstantin Ostrovityanov’s 1954 textbook on political economy, the preparation of which had started in the 1930s, Mao came to believe, as Stalin had in 1928, that the country’s radical social transformation had to be carried out in favor of the urban proletariat through the imposition of tribute on the countryside.8 The expressions Mao used in 1958, and

7. Michael Schoenhals, Saltationist Socialism: Mao Zedong and the Great Leap Forward, 1958 (Stock- holm: Föreningen för orientaliska studier, 1987); Alfred L. Chan, Mao’s Crusade: Politics and Policy Implementation in China’s Great Leap Forward (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and An- drea Graziosi, L’Urss dal trionfo al degrado, 1945–1991 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008), pp. 221–225. 8. As Nikolai Bukharin explained to Lev Kamenev in July 1928, “Stalin’s line is the following: ‘1) Capitalism grew thanks to colonies, loans, or the exploitation of workers. We don’t have colonies, cannot count on loans, and cannot exploit workers. A tribute imposed on the peasantry is therefore our only foundation. . . . 2) The more socialism grows, the harder will be the resistance to it. . . . 3) If a tribute is needed, and if resistance grows, we need a strong leadership.’ Stalin’s policy leads to civil war—Bukharin concluded—and he will have to suffocate revolts in blood.” See Y. G. Felshtinsky, “Dva epizoda iz istorii vnutripartiinnoi bor’by: Konﬁdentsial’nye besedy Bukharina,” Voprosy istorii, No. 2–3 (1991), pp. 182–203.

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again after the Lushan Conference, concerning “rapid grain procurements, large investments in construction projects, and an early transition to commune ownership,” replicated those used by Stalin prior to the crisis in the spring of 1930.9 Mao’s pronouncements about the peasants’ willingness to pay that tribute, and the supposed improvements in peasants’ and workers’ lives, also resemble Stalin’s 1929 public statements. The main purpose of these policies was to make agriculture pay for the country’s transformation by seizing an ever-increasing amount of agricultural output to feed expanding cities and to procure through exports part of the currency needed to import the requisite agricultural and industrial technology. The mobilization of peasants through forced collectivization would provide the necessary labor. In both countries, these policies were justified by the claim that the rapid socialization of the countryside would cause a jump in productivity—a long-standing tenet of European socialism, which deemed large-scale agriculture inherently superior to small-holder farming. Commu- nist officials thus maintained that resources and labor could be extracted from the villages without damaging the interests of the remaining peasants. Indeed, their lot would improve too, or so the story went. These early similarities were compounded by ideological developments that were the byproducts of the GTP and the GLF. When assumptions about the jump in productivity proved to be wrong and the reverse actually took place as a result of the havoc wrought upon the countryside by the “rev- olutions from above,” recourse to embellishments and outright lies became commonplace. In both countries, the word “famine” was banned first from public discourse and then from inner circles (in the USSR by the later summer of 1932). Even in private exchanges, Soviet and Chinese leaders used euphemisms, such as “natural disasters” or “temporary food difficulties,” and in the USSR after 1953 such language became part of the official discourse on the country’s past. The resort to anodyne codewords seems to have taken root more quickly in China than in the USSR, where, for example, statisticians continued to speak the truth until 1937, when unbridled repression silenced them.10 In both countries the optimistic public utterances contrasted starkly with the rapid development of an ideology for the party leaders’ and cadres’

9. Thomas P. Bernstein, “Mao Zedong and the Famine of 1959–1960: A Study in Willfulness,” The China Quarterly, Vol. 186, No. 1 (June 2006), p. 434. 10. Lucien Bianco, “Communisme et famine: URSS 1931–1933, Chine 1958–1962,” (paper presented at the Journée d’étude INALCO-EHESS “Famines soviétique et chinoise,” October 2013); Bianco, Récidive, pp. 405–480; and Alain Blum, L’Anarchie bureaucratique: Pouvoir et statistique sous Staline (Paris: La Découverte, 2003).

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internal consumption that instead set a premium on the aggressive assertion of the supremacy of state interests. The use of violence, of food as a weapon, and of hunger as punishment, as well as the devaluation of the peasants’ and workers’ image and status were thus legitimized. Such trends had already surfaced during the “Russian” civil war and the Chinese Communists’ “long march” to power, yet the GTP and the GLF took these features to the extreme. In China, slogans such as “First the center, than the locality; first external [ship- ments], then internal” were already current in 1958, and by 1960 the leaders in charge of feeding the cities and providing goods for export openly stated that the needs of the countryside had to give way to the interests of the state. Twenty-five years before, at the beginning of the 1932–1933 famine, Vyach- eslav Molotov had preached that the state’s interests must always be given priority (“even if we have to face, especially in grain-producing areas, the famine’s ghost...procurementplansmustberespectedatallcost”),andhungerwas a means of letting the peasants know that they must accept collectivization. In China, party secretaries of communes ordered that those unable to work, sick people included, were not to be fed, which was the standard practice of the Soviet Gulag camps and special settlements (until 1934 mostly peopled by persecuted peasants), especially after the Gulag administrator Naftalii Frenkel formalized his “you-eat-as-you-work system.”11 In this light, the often cited and at times real difference between the Soviet and the Chinese parties’ attitudes toward peasants should be qualified. Admit- tedly, the Chinese regime at first had a better relationship with the countryside, against which the Bolsheviks had waged war as early as 1918–1921, after riding a peasant revolution to power.12 Imperial Russia’s peasants thus seized for themselves the land the Chinese peasants often received from the Chi- nese Communist Party (CCP). Although possession of this land proved to be short-lived, its distribution created in China a group of beneficiaries who owed their gains to the party, whose presence in Chinese villages was stronger than in Soviet villages. Moreover, given the scarcity of industrial workers, the Chinese revolution presented itself as a peasant revolution. In Soviet Russia,

11. Tao Yang, “China’s Agricultural Crisis and Famine of 1959–1961”; Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), pp. 134, 302; Nikolai A. Ivnitskii, “Golod 1932–33 godov: Kto vinovat,” in Golod 1932–33 godov (Moscow: RGGU, 1995), p. 59; and Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003). For a critical appraisal of Dikötter’s book, see Anthony Garnaut’s review in China Information, Vol. 27, No. 2 (2013), pp. 223–246. A similar system—Leistungsernährung (performance feeding)— was introduced in Nazi concentration camps. 12. Andrea Graziosi, The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1918–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1996).

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strong anti-peasant elements were embedded in the official discourse from the outset, and Bolshevik central cadres—hardened by the anti-peasant battles of the civil war—were not as sensitive to the villages’ misfortunes as the Chinese cadres often proved to be. Yet the extreme anti-peasant attitudes and policies that prevailed in the USSR in 1929–1933 also obtained in China in 1958–1960. Mao’s statement on the need to distance China from the Soviet idea “of relying on industry alone” must therefore be correctly understood. The Soviet model from which Mao was distancing himself was that of the 1950s, which had emerged from the crisis ignited by the GTP. In 1929, Stalin, too, had proclaimed the need to walk on two legs, to transform agriculture and industry at the same time, and he had preached, as Mao did in the 1950s, that socialist industrialization could not be achieved in isolation from the collective transformation of agriculture. In fact, the addition of breakneck collectivization to industrialization was Stalin’s personal contribution to Soviet development theory, as well as to the tragedies of the early 1930s. Soviet collectivization’s initial stage was also wrapped in strong utopian language, which included attacks against the bourgeois specialists and intelligentsia and the promise to eliminate money. As Oleg Khlevniuk has stressed, Stalin in 1929 put an end to all proposals that kolkhozes and private peasant plots could co- exist for any length of time. Provisions for peasants to keep any land what- soever were adamantly deleted from the draft directives [on collectivization]. Ultimately,‘communes’...wereproclaimedtobethegoalofcollectivization, its ideal form.13 A real difference remained in Mao’s much stronger formal reliance on the active role of the peasant masses, something Stalin had downplayed after the early anti-collectivization revolts in 1930. The strengthening of Stalin’s and Mao’s cults was yet another of the similar ideological developments brought about by the assaults of 1929 and 1958. Both Stalin and Mao searched the imperial past for models (first Peter the Great and later Ivan the Terrible, in Stalin’s case), and—perhaps because of the Twentieth Party’s Congress’s criticism of the practice—Mao was even more explicit in defending his cult, stating that worshipping the leader was right because it meant worshipping the truth he embodied. Chinese leaders such as Lin Biao became professional sycophants, just as Soviet officials in earlier decades had effusively praised Stalin as the “most modest” man in the

13. Oleg V. Chlevnjuk, “Stalin e la carestia sovietica dei primi anni Trenta,” Storica, No. 32 (2005), pp. 27–40.

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world. The afﬁnities were such that already in 1959 Mikhail Suslov, the Soviet ofﬁcial overseeing ideological affairs, pointed out that the “atmosphere in China,” where Mao “has come to believe in his own infallibility ...isremi- niscent of the atmosphere that existed in our country during the last years of life of I. V. Stalin.” Suslov could have easily extended the parallel to the years following the launch of the GTP,introduced by the former Trotskyite Georgii Pyatakov’s feudal homage to the new despot.14

The Role and the Transformation of Planning The role and the transformation of planning during the two great socialist offensives provide another important analogy between the two countries. At least in the USSR until 1927–1928, planning was conceived in traditional economic terms as an instrument of harmonious growth that balanced revenues and expenditures. Then came the big push from above. As Khlevniuk writes, the ambitious economic growth targets for the coming ﬁve years that were adopted in April 1929 were almost immediately rejected as too modest. Tar- gets were increased by 50 percent, and then doubled, and tripled. The Five Year Plan was changed to a Four and even Three Year Plan. . . . “In ten years at most we must make good the distance that separates us from the advanced capitalist countries. . . . There are no fortresses that Bolsheviks cannot capture,” Stalin exhorted.15 For example, production targets for the new steel mill of Magnitogorsk were repeatedly increased in just a few months. The expenses involved were offset by entering miraculous jumps in labor productivity, ascribed to the workers’ socialist consciousness, in the plan’s revenue sheet. This practice was repeated in all economic ﬁelds, agriculture included. Yet instead of producing a “tribute” and raising productivity, dekulakization and collectivization sapped the countryside’s productive capacity.16 Expenditures soon exceeded revenues,

14. “A New Cult of Personality: Suslov’s Secret Report on Mao, Khrushchev, and Sino-Soviet Tensions, December 1959,” CWIHP Bulletin, No. 8–9 (Winter 1996/1997), pp. 244, 248; Georgii L. Pyatakov, “Za rukovodstvo,” Pravda, 23 December 1929; and Klaus Heller and Jan Plamper, eds., Personality Cults in Stalinism (Göttingen: V&R, 2004). 15. O. V. Khlevniuk, Stalin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), p. 113. He is quoting I. V. Stalin, “Speech Delivered at the First All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Indus- try,” 4 February 1931, in I. V. Stalin, Works, Vol. 13 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), p. 43. 16. James R. Millar, “Mass Collectivization and the Contribution of Soviet Agriculture to the First Five-Year Plan: A Review Article,” Slavic Review, Vol. 33, No. 4 (1974), pp. 750–766. Millar syn- thetizes a point made earlier by Boris Brutskus and Naum Jasny.

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and by the beginning of 1930 the country had entered a severe economic crisis. In 1958 China embarked on the same journey, with even greater fervor and greater naïveté. As Frank Dikötter writes, “ever greater output targets were assigned to factories, foundries and power plants all over China. . . . As the national targets were ceaselessly revised upwards at Party meetings, the whole system of defined or desired targets created an orgy of inflation all the way down to the village.” Soon, Great Britain was to be overtaken in seven years, not fifteen, and the drive to build “backyard furnaces” everywhere in order to smelt work tools and cooking wares into useless ingots made the situation even worse than it had been in the USSR, where the leaders of industrialization at least continued to look at U.S. and German best practices.17 Fearing retribution and seeking honors and promotions, Soviet and Chi- nese cadres reacted to the pressure from above by amplifying rather than reducing imbalances. Overzealousness thus compounded the crisis provoked by the center’s behavior, and the Chinese and Soviet governments introduced through planning “a systemic risk: as decisions became centralized, any policy failure would have nationwide consequences”; consequences that were bound to be worse in China with its larger population and lower per-capita income.18 In the crisis thus provoked, “planning” did not just “disappear” from the plan, as Moshe Lewin observed. Rather, the plan transformed itself into something else; that is, into a tool by which the state and its leaders (often meaning the despots at the helm) imposed their will and priorities on the country and determined distribution amid the conditions of extreme scarcity they had created. The economic balance was formally preserved, but because real revenues could not meet expenditures, the latter were “hierarchized.” The expenditures that were least important for the state did not receive real resources, and thus remained only on paper. Defense, steel mills, and big cities continued to receive at least something, and villages, provincial centers, textile mills, pension funds, marginal regions, and so on were left with close to nothing. The same applied to consumption.19

17. Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine,p.36. 18. Li Wei and Dennis Tao Yang, “The Great Leap Forward: Anatomy of a Central Planning Disaster,” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 113, No. 4 (2005), pp. 840–877; and Boris Brutskus, Economic Planning in Soviet Russia (London: Routledge, 1935). 19. Moshe Lewin, “The Disappearance of Planning in the Plan,” Slavic Review, Vol. 32, No. 2 (1973), pp. 271–287; Eugène Zaleski, Planning for Economic Growth in the Soviet Union, 1918–1932 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Eugène Zaleski, Stalinist Planning for Economic

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Dynamics In the USSR as in China, assaults, crises, and retreats followed by yet more offensives succeeded each other amid striking similarities and key differences. In both countries the first big all-out offensives of 1929 and 1958 were preceded by minor ones and represented attempts to solve the problems the latter had created. These “minor” assaults were the great investment plan approved by Soviet industrial leaders in 1925 and the SHT of 1955–1956 in China. The former made a crucial contribution to the destabilization of the NEP in 1926–1927, bringing the country to the verge of an economic crisis whose causes and consequences economists such as Kondrat’ev and Yurovskii analyze with great perception.20 The crisis was aggravated at the beginning of 1928 by Stalin’s decision to impose a tribute on the countryside, where peasants were refusing to sell their produce to the state at greatly lowered prices. After some initial success, the situation rapidly deteriorated because of growing peasant resistance, which Stalin decided to counter with an all-out assault, the GTP,which in his view would also give the state the funds needed to finance its overambitious and growing industrial plans. In China, as in the USSR of the late NEP, peasants started to suffer after the imposition of the state monopoly on grain in 1953. Soon the pressure to extract as much grain as possible at unprofitable prices increased. By 1955, peasant letters recounted suffering and suicides, hidden food, and slaughtered animals, as they did in the USSR after 1927. In the spring of 1956, the growth of economic disequilibria and pockets of requisition-caused famine convinced Zhou Enlai and planners like Chen Yun that the SHT had to be stopped along with the radical collectivization policies, whose opponents were strengthened by Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. In June, even the People’s Daily criticized the previous offensive, to the dismay of Mao, who was already convinced that any criticism of Stalin was a challenge to his own position. This belief was con- firmed in September by the Eighth Party Congress, which decided to remove the reference to “Mao Zedong Thought” from the CCP Statute and to stress instead the importance of collective leadership.21

Growth, 1933–1952 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); and Andrea Graziosi, L’Urss di Lenin e Stalin, 1914–1945 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007), pp. 248, 292, 304. 20. Andrea Graziosi, “‘Building the First System of State Industry in History’: Pyatakov’s VSNKh and the Crisis of the NEP, 1923–1926,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, Vol. 32, No. 4 (1991), pp. 55–96; and Yurii M. Goland, Krizisy, razrushivshie NEP: Valyutnoe regulirovanie v period NEPa (Moscow: Nachala, 1998). 21. Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, p. 8; Frank Dikötter, The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chi- nese Revolution, 1945–1957 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the

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In the spring of 1957, having been unnerved by the anti-Communist revolts that took place in Poland and Hungary in 1956, Mao launched, against the advice of some of his aides, the Hundred Flowers campaign, which invited people to express their opinion of the regime openly. Mao was hoping that the “enemies” of the CCP would “expose their true faces.” The outpouring of criticism convinced Mao to put an end to the campaign and to charge Deng with launching an anti-rightist offensive comparable to that initiated by Stalin in 1928–1929 against the party’s “Right”: trade unionists, intellectuals, economic planners, and so on. According to Thomas Bernstein, approximately 500,000 cadres and intellectuals suspected of opposing Mao’s policies were then persecuted for “rightist” opinions such as maintaining that the SHT had turned peasants into “beasts of burden,” with girls and women pulling “plows and harrows.”22 In both countries, therefore, the great offensives followed the failure of previous lesser campaigns and were preceded by harsh purges of moderates both within and outside the party. Stalin, Mao, and their close followers launched these new, grand policies in a state of exaltation, making clear that “leftism and subjectivism” were not to be punished. Stalin announced the GTP a few months after the approval of the most drastic version of the First Five Year Plan. Mao’s GLF arrived on wings of the “greater, faster, better, and more economical” slogan, launched in October 1957. A few months later, at the beginning of the new year, the People’s Daily devised the motto “Go all out and aim high.” In China, as in the USSR earlier, vast numbers of peasants were soon working in yards with appalling labor conditions. Labor legislation simply did not apply. For So- viet shock workers (udarniki), labor had to be a matter of glory, and Chinese workers were beaten if they forgot that “three years of hard work” would bring them “ten thousand years of happiness.”23

Cultural Revolution,Vol.1,Contradictions among the People, 1956–1957 (New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press, 1974–1997); Lyudmyla Hrynevych, Khronika kolektyvizatsii ta Holodomoru v Ukraïni, 1927–1933 (Kyiv: Krytyka, 2008–2012); Isabelle Thireau, “Quand la violence contribue à la famine: Témoignages adressés à l’administration des lettres et des visites, 1958–1962” (paper presented at the Journée d’étude INALCO-EHESS “Famines soviétique et chinoise,” October 2013); and Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao’s Personal Physician (London: Chatto & Win- dus, 1994), pp. 182–184. 22. Khlevniuk, Master of the House, pt. 1; Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, p. 23; and Bernstein, “Mao Zedong and the Famine of 1959–1960.” 23. Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 (London: Penguin, 2012), pp. 87–111; Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, pp. 15, 26; and Andrea Graziosi, “Stalin’s Antiworker ‘Work- erism’: 1924–1931,” in A New Peculiar State: Explorations in Soviet History, 1917–1937 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), pp. 179–222.

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However, both the GTP and the GLF soon generated crises deeper and more traumatic than those they had been intended to resolve. The crises were followed by retreats that seemed to reintroduce elements of rationality into the system. In the USSR in March 1930, peasant revolts forced Stalin to moderate the collectivization drive and to criticize “leftist” cadres for applying the very policies he had conceived. Inﬂation, the collapse of accounting, the scarcity of currency, and the chaos reigning in the country and in the yards were confronted in June 1930 at the Sixteenth VKP(b) Congress, which reintroduced at least some realism into economic policies. In the following months, however, a good harvest and the belief that the battle with the peasants had been won convinced Stalin and his circle that a new offensive could be launched. This new campaign, ﬁnanced mostly through German loans, had at its core a large but more systematic industrial investment drive, and it embodied the transformation of planning into a tool of rationing and hierarchization. The Soviet state, therefore, pursued its assault, but not on all fronts. The peasants, however, had not yet resigned themselves to the “new serfdom” (as they called collectivization in political police reports), and the damage done to agriculture was far greater than the Stalinists thought. By the spring of 1932, workers’ unrest over the collapse of real wages and local famines in traditionally rich, grain-producing areas such as Ukraine sig- naled that procurements had reached a ceiling. So too had the Soviet capacity to export—and thus to repay loans and to import machinery and technology. Meanwhile, Ukrainian party leaders started to protest against a policy they had supported in 1929 on the grounds that it would help them “conquer” their Russian-speaking cities through the rapid urbanization of masses of Ukrainian peasants. In these conditions, in the summer of 1932, Stalin launched a retreat much more serious than the one of 1930 and that in June also included measures to ease the conditions of famine-stricken areas and to stop urbanization, to which the cleansing of cities and reductions in their populations were later added. Many major projects and imports were halted, the number of people on rations was reduced, and the state concentrated its efforts and resources only on top priority projects and areas. In the fall, however, while the search for stability continued with great determination, as shown by the introduction of internal passports, a decision was taken to use hunger to tame the villages and force them to accept collectivization. Hunger was also and especially used, together with harsh repressive policies targeting intellectuals, language, culture, and national Communist leaders, to solve the Ukrainian “problem” and eliminate the threats it posed.

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Meanwhile, in Kazakhstan, a tragedy largely determined by the 1930 decision to use the Kazakh herds to feed Slavic cities ran its course.24 In China, pockets of famine began to appear in the spring of 1958 in a countryside weakened by the mass removal of farmers dispatched to work on irrigation projects and by the abolition of the small peasant holdings (which had been introduced in emulation of the Soviet model). In parts of the country, hunger grew worse over the summer, when mass beatings started to become the normal way to squeeze grain out of peasant families. Yet Mao did not retreat, unlike Stalin’s temporary retreats in 1930 and 1932. Instead, Mao continued to push forward. In early August he told an amazed Khrushchev, who was well aware of the country’s difﬁculties, that China had so much rice that “we no longer know what to do with it” and that what worried him was surplus not scarcity. A few weeks later, to heighten the tension and promote mass mobilization (as Stalin had done with the 1927 “war scare”), Mao ordered the bombing of Quemoy. Soon afterward he criticized Stalin’s material incentives system—put in place to remedy the 1930–1932 crisis—claiming that China’s grain surplus would bring free food to everybody through the recently created communes. The country, Mao said, was entering Communism. The good 1958 grain harvest, much like the Soviet one of 1930, fueled these delusions, which were multiplied by wild estimates of the harvest’s size; estimates that Mao trusted and were later criticized as the “wind of exaggeration.” Over-reporting—a ubiquitous phenomenon in the USSR as well—thus reached extraordinary proportions in China. A respectable 200 million-ton harvest was extolled as having passed the 400 million-ton mark, waste ceased to be a problem, procurements were revised upward, and massive amounts

24. Kaidar S. Aldazhumanov et al., eds., Nasil’stvennaya kollektivizatsiya i golod v Kazakhstane v 1931– 33 gg (Almaty: Fond XXI vek, 1998); Viktor P. Danilov and Alexis Berelowitch, eds., Sovetskaya derevnya glazami VChK-OGPU-NKVD,Vol.3,1930–1933 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2001); Yurii I. Shapo- val and Valerii Vasil’ev, Komandiry velykoho holodu: Poïzdky V. Molotova i L. Kahanovycha v Ukraïnu ta na Pivnichnyi Kavkaz, 1932–33 rr. (Kiev: Heneza, 2001); Terry Martin, An Afﬁrmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Viktor V. Kondrashin and D’Ann Penner, Golod: 1932–33 v sovetskoi derevne (na ma- teriale Povolzhya, Dona i Kubani) (Samara-Penza, Russia: n.p., 2002); Robert W. Davies et al., eds., The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 1931–1936 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Robert W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933 (Bas- ingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2004); Stanislav V. Kul’chyts’kyi, Golod 1932–1933 rr. v Ukraїni yak genotsyd (Kyiv: Nash Chas, 2008); Niccolò Pianciola, Stalinismo di frontiera: Colonizzazione agricola, sterminio dei nomadi e costruzione statale in Asia centrale, 1905–1936 (Rome: Viella, 2009); Bohdan Klid and Alexander J. Motyl, eds., The Holodomor Reader: A Sourcebook (Toronto: CIUS Press, 2012); Andrea Graziosi, Lubomyr A. Hajda, and Halyna Hryn, eds., After the Holodomore: The Enduring Impact of the Great Famine on Ukraine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2013); and An- drea Graziosi, “The Uses of Hunger: Stalin’s Solution of the Peasant and National Questions in Soviet Ukraine, 1932 to 1933,” in Declan Curran, Lubomyr Luciuk, and Andrew G. Newby, eds., Famines in European Economic History (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 73–94.

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of resources were diverted to industry. When peasants, who knew the reality, started to resist procurements in the fall, party leaders could not understand why and spoke of the “need to fight against the peasants. . . . There is something ideologically wrong with you if you are afraid of coercion.” Even future reformist CCP leaders like Zhao Ziyang insisted that problems with procurements derived from local cadres who were supposedly underreporting to conceal the resources at their disposal and to favor peasants.25 Meanwhile, news of deaths in the countryside multiplied, followed in the late fall by economic problems caused by the assault launched at the beginning of the year. Many of those deaths were caused by exhaustion, so much so that Mao himself intervened to denounce the practice of “subjecting peasants to exhausting labor without adequate food supply and rest.” He also stressed that it was a mistake to “assign tasks that are too heavy” and that neglect of recreation was a nationwide problem that had to be faced by giving equal weight to work and recreation.26 In December, food started to run out. In some localities, public dining halls stopped serving meals, and peasants started to flee the countryside, and at least some of the highest leaders began to understand that “many reports of bumper harvests in 1958 had been false.” In the first months of 1959, local famines became widespread as a result of the state’s push to extract resources for the cities and for export. At the beginning of February, Mao spoke of five million cases of edema due to neglect of recreation and at the end of the month, the Zhengzhou conference, which can be compared to Stalin’s retreats in the springs of 1930 and 1932, decided to scale back the pace of the GLF. Mao himself criticized his previous choices: “we overreached and were adventurist in a big way,” he said, adding that he now supported “conservatism. I stand on the side of right deviation. I am against egalitarianism and left adventurism. I now represent 500 million peasants and 10 million local cadres.” Given the excess of procurements, he added, he could understand why peasants had concealed some of their resources in order to survive, and he threatened to side with them against the party and the cadres who seized their grain. At the end of April, after stating that 25 million peasants were threatened with starvation, Mao recommended that the CCP “pay attention only to reality, [and] speak the truth,” while allowing the five “leftist winds”

25. Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, p. 63; Bianco, “Communisme et famine”; and Zhou Xun, Great Famine in China, pp. 1–16. 26. Bernstein, “Mao Zedong and the Famine of 1959–1960.”

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(of Communism, commandism, blind directives of production, exaggeration, and privilege seeking by cadres) to come under attack.27 Then came the CCP’s Lushan conference of 1959, which can be compared to the frantic Soviet meetings and exchanges of the summer of 1932, when Stalin conducted an extraordinary correspondence with Lazar Kaganovich, and early fall of 1932. At this point the comparison of the two countries’ paths breaks down. In the USSR a decision was taken to push ahead with stabilization, and hunger was selectively used as a means of crushing the peasantry and bringing Ukraine to heel. By contrast, at Lushan in July-August 1959, Mao formally convened 150 cadres to address the crisis provoked by the GLF. He initially wanted them to speak freely, and they were under the impression that the conference had been convened to confirm the moderate turn of the spring. Mao thus sat in silence in one or the other of the groups in which the conference had been divided, listening to a mounting wave of criticism about starvation, bogus production figures, and cadre abuses. The criticism soon exceeded the level Mao found acceptable. Peng Dehuai, the defense minister who had already criticized Mao’s lifestyle and cult of personality, claimed that the GLF’s losses were greater than its achievements and that putting politics in command and ignoring economic laws had been a “voluntaristic” mistake, a case of petite-bourgeois fanaticism.28 He also openly implicated Mao in the disaster but argued that all the leaders were responsible for it, and he did not call for Mao’s resignation. Mao retorted that the ratio was nine achievements to one failure, and interpreted a private letter Peng had sent to him on 14 July as a challenge to his authority, even if this was not Peng’s intention. Mao circulated the letter among the conference participants and summoned trusted leaders from Beijing. After a break in the proceedings, many of those present sided with Mao, but some of the highest-ranking CCP cadres such as Huang Kecheng (the army’s chief of staff), Zhou Xiaozhu (Hunan’s first secretary), and Zhang Wentian (the deputy minister of foreign affairs), took Peng’s side, claiming that the ratio was in fact nine failures to one achievement. Such a development would have been unthinkable in Moscow in 1932. Former “right-wing” cadres such as Martemyan Ryutin may have discussed killing Stalin, but no

27. Joseph A. William, The Critique of Ultra-Leftism in China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984); Bernstein, “Mao Zedong and the Famine of 1959–1960”; Felix Wemheuer, “Dealing with Responsibility for the Great Leap Famine in the People’s Republic of China,” The China Quarterly, Vol. 201 (March 2010), pp. 176–194; Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine; and Wemheuer, Famine Politics. 28. Jürgen Domes, Peng Te-huai: The Man and the Image (London: Hurst, 1984); and Frederick C. Teiwes, “Review: Peng Dehuai and Mao Zedong,” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs,No.16 (July 1986), pp. 81–98.

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member of the VKP(b) Politburo would have dared to express an anti-Stalinist opinion (the exception being possibly the Ukrainian Hryhorij Petrovskyj, see below).29 On 15 July an official letter from Gansu, where a moderate was temporarily filling in for his Maoist boss, who had gone to Lushan, stated that thousands were dying in the province and more than 1.5 million were suffering from starvation, supposedly the result of extremism. At the same time Khrushchev, while visiting Poland in July 1959, termed the communes a folly. Feeling threatened, Mao struck at Peng and his allies, whom he was able to crush with the support of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. On 11 August, after some of Mao’s critics had already repented, the Chinese leader again attacked Peng with violence and vulgarity (“I fucked your mother for 40 days”) similar to that used by Stalin in private against his former comrades in 1936–1938. The opponents were found guilty of conspiracy, and Lin Biao obtained Peng’s ministry (years later the Red Guards maintained that he had written in his diary that the GLF “was based on fantasy, and a total mess”).30 Soon afterward, contrary to what happened in the USSR in 1933— when Ukrainian peasants were starved to death by the millions, the Ukrainian Communist Party was thoroughly purged, but economic policies followed a moderate course—China was launched into a new, bigger adventure. Mao announced a target of 300 million tons for the harvest (which in fact did not exceed the 170 million-ton mark) and a target of 20–22 million tons for steel production. No one dared criticize the 1958 mistakes. By early 1960 a new great leap was officially under way, while in the villages special detachments squeezed the peasants. Mao’s desire to defend his power against what he believed to be an attempt to make him responsible for a crisis he himself had at first acknowledged but was now denying thus opened the way for a gigantic catastrophe, with deaths reaching the tens of millions.

Crops, State Procurements, and Exports Soviet and Chinese data highlight the close parallels in the growing pressure applied by the state on peasants to extract the tribute their supreme leaders thought was needed to make their leaps forward possible. Requisitions grew,

29. Sobhanlal Datta Gupta, ed., The Ryutin Platform: Stalin and the Crisis of Proletarian Dictatorship: Platform of the “Union of Marxists-Leninists” (Kolkata: Seribaan, 2010). The hypothesis of a “Kirov opposition” in the USSR has been debunked in Khlevniuk, Master of the House. 30. Yang Jisheng, Tombstone, pp. 350–393; Li Zhisui, Private Life of Chairman Mao, pp. 310–317; Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, pp. 90–99; and Bianco, Récidive, pp. 211–214.

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harvests were dramatically reduced by the damage the state’s policies inflicted on the countryside, and grain exports boomed in the most difficult years. Because China’s population was more than four times larger than that of the Soviet Union, China had a much smaller harvest per capita. The food balance of the country and its villages was therefore much more fragile, which at least partially accounts for the far greater magnitude of the Chinese disaster. As for weather conditions, the Soviet Union experienced no major droughts in 1930–1933. China, however, was locally affected by poor weather in 1959 and 1960, but not on a scale likely to cause widespread hunger. Thus, even allowing that climate may have played a minor role in the Chinese case, both famines can be termed “man-made.”31 In both countries, excessive requisitions were justified by overestimations of the actual harvest. In the USSR, the method of measuring grain “in the field” generated a systemic upward bias, so that planned procurements ended up seizing a much larger quota of the available grain than was officially stated. In China, overestimation reached its height in 1958, when the CCP boasted of a harvest twice as large as that of the previous year (in 1979 the figure was revised downward by half). In both countries, the burden imposed by procurements on the villages (in 1960, Chinese peasants were left with 212 kilograms of grain per person, compared with the 295 kilograms they had relied on for a very meager existence in 1957) soon sparked turmoil that was blamed on the peasants’ natural conservatism, ignorance, and treachery, which induced them to hide part of the harvest. In both the USSR and China, leaders justified their choices by resorting to extreme statist ideologies. Requisitions focused on grain-producing areas, where the state knew it could obtain more. Political famines were therefore paradoxically concentrated in traditionally richer areas, where food had rarely been a problem. In China the underdevelopment of the transportation network added an important variable: the state took not only where there was more to take but also where infrastructure allowed the booty to be transported away. In the USSR the most important grain-producing area was Ukraine (a few other

31. Mark B. Tauger’s hypothesis that climate played a central role in the Soviet famine of 1932–1933— see his “The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933,” Slavic Review, Vol. 50, No. 1 (April 1991), pp. 70–89—has been rebutted by Stephen G. Wheatcroft, “Towards Explaining the Soviet Famine of 1931–1933: Political and Natural Factors In Perspective,” Food and Foodways, Vol. 12, No. 2–3 (2004), pp. 107–136; and Davies and Weathcroft, Years of Hunger. Bernstein’s thesis (in “Mao Zedong and the Famine of 1959–1960”) that bad climate played a role in China is not supported by works such as Y. Y. Kueh, Agricultural Instability in China, 1931–1991: Weather, Technology, and Institutions (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995); and Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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non-Russian regions, such as the Kuban and the German Volga Republic, were also important), and the resulting focus on Ukraine had devastating ef- fects on the relationships between Moscow and the local Communists. Both the USSR and China had reserves of grain—in 1933, for example, Soviet reserves averaged around 1.4 million tons—but leaders in both countries refused to use reserves to aid the stricken areas except on selected occasions and for selected purposes, such as facilitating the springtime planting of seeds or supplying important industrial and mining centers in rural areas or key border regions. In the USSR, for example, Ukrainian border oblasts suffered much less than internal areas because of the regime’s security and propaganda concerns. The same was true in China, where districts adjacent to state borders were only slightly affected.32 Even though the reserves were not huge, they could have prevented hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of deaths if they had been used. The use of reserves, however, was never contemplated, especially in 1933 (when famine in Ukraine was used as an operational tool) and in 1960 (when it was impossible to admit the catastrophe generated by the choices made at Lushan). Both regimes also denied that famines were occurring. They thus rejected of- fers of help from abroad and developed sophisticated strategies, and lies, to make the world believe that the famines simply did not exist. In the spring of 1961 Mao refused Khrushchev’s offer of help (Chinese sources report the Soviet leader as saying “he had every sympathy for China’s predicament, all the more so because Ukraine had suffered a terrible famine in 1946”). After the Soviet withdrawal of experts, China insisted on repaying Soviet loans re- gardless of cost and did not stop providing aid to Third World countries in which it hoped to exercise inﬂuence.33 The pressure on foreign currency generated by the launching of the GTP and the GLF also gave rise to a similarity in the policies devised to procure that currency. These policies ranged from the forcing of food exports even in times of famine (see Table 1), to the “mining” of the population’s gold and hard currency reserves and the squeezing of diaspora communities. If “capitalist” countries (especially Germany after 1930) were the main markets for Soviet exports, China’s trade focused on the Communist bloc, the USSR above all (although the German Democratic Republic also played an important role).

32. Anthony Garnaut, “The Geography of the Great Leap Famine,” Modern China,Vol.40,No.3 (2014), pp. 315–348. Andrey Shlyakhter ﬁrst called my attention to the much lower mortality rates in Ukraine’s border regions, whose supplies Moscow decided to guarantee. 33. Graziosi, “Uses of Hunger,” p. 247; Wemheuer, “Dealing with Responsibility”; and Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, p. 113.

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Ta b l e 1 . Harvests, Procurements, and Grain Exports. USSR, 1923–1933 and China, 1957–1962 Procurements Harvest (percent of Procurements Grain Exports Years (million tons) the harvest) (million tons) (million tons)

USSR China USSR China USSR China USSR China USSR China

1928 1957 73.8 195 14.7 24.6 10.7 48 0.28 1.9 1929 1958 71.7 200 22.4 29.4 16.6 58.7 0.17 3.3 1930 1959 73–77 170 28.7–30.2 39.7 22.1 67.4 4.8 4.7 1931 1960 57–65 144 35.1–40 35.6 22.8 51 5.2 1 1932 1961 55–60 148 30.8–33.6 27.4 18.5 40.4 1.73 0* 1933 1962 70–77 160 29.5–32.4 23.8 22.7 38.1 1.68 0*

*China started importing large quantities of grain in 1960–1961. Sources:RobertW.Daviesetal.,eds.,The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 285; Robert W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); An- drea Graziosi, L’Urss di Lenin e Stalin, 1914–1945 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007); Moshe Lewin, “Taking Grain: Soviet Policies of Agricultural Procurements before the War” (1974), in The Making of the Soviet System (New York: The Free Press, 1985), pp. 142–177; and Felix Wemheuer, Famine Politics in Maoist China and in the Soviet Union (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). The association of these data with mortality is discussed later in the article.

Both countries exported food and raw materials and took out loans to buy the equipment and technology they needed, and both did everything possible to repay their loans, even ahead of schedule—as Mao did in the early 1960s after momentarily halting the export of food at the end of 1960. In the Soviet Union, a network of special stores (Torgsin) was created at the beginning of the 1930s to sell food against payment in gold and valuta, thus extracting the reserves of a starving population, which was also encour- aged to ask for support from overseas relatives in order to obtain the means necessary to purchase goods at the Torgsin stores. In China a system was devised whereby the Chinese diaspora could buy food coupons in foreign currency at Hong Kong banks and then send them to their relatives on the mainland. The difference was that many of the “Russians” living abroad were actually Jews, Mennonites, or Ukrainians, so that in this area the national question played a role it did not have in China.34

34. Yang, “China’s Agricultural Crisis”; Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, p. 76; and Elena A. Osokina, Zoloto dlya industrializatsii: Torgsin (Moscow: Rosspen, 2009).

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The mechanisms and realities of taking grain from the villages were also quite similar. In both countries, a key role was played by special detachments that resorted to mass violence in their house-to-house searches for hidden grain. Especially in the months following the harvest, the countryside became a grisly battleﬁeld for grain, the details of which both Stalin and Mao knew, as proven by the reports they received. These battles, marked by unbridled state violence, reached their peak in the USSR after the 1932 harvest and in China in 1959 (i.e., after the Lushan conference).35

Initial Peasant Reactions Soviet and Chinese peasants reacted similarly to the extraction of the tribute and to forced collectivization. In both countries they reduced the extent of sown areas. In Soviet Ukraine the planting dropped from 15.9 million hectares in 1930 to less than 10 million in 1932, and in China from 134 million hectares in 1957 to 116 million in 1959 (physical exhaustion was also a factor, as were the regimes’ mistakes). The peasants also chose to slaughter their animals rather than hand them over to kolkhozes or communes (“What you eat is yours, what you do not is anyone’s”). In the USSR even Stalin was forced to admit that the country had lost a large part of its livestock, a loss that reached catastrophic proportions in Kazakhstan, where the 36 million head of 1929 had been reduced to less than 5 million head by 1934. In China draft animals diminished from 84 to 69 million from 1957 to 1961, and Hunan, which boasted 11 million pigs in 1957, was left with less than 3.5 million in 1961.36 Above all, those who could—primarily young males—ﬂed to cities and industrial centers. Of the approximately 23 million Soviet peasants who left the countryside for the cities in 1926–1939, almost 10 million did so in 1930–1932. In 1957–1960, China’s urban population ballooned from 99 million to 130 million. In 1958 alone, 15–16 million peasants ﬂed the countryside, and from 1957 to 1960 the rural workforce lost approximately 33 million laborers. Wei Li and Dennis Tao Yang have calculated that rural labor dropped from 193 million in 1957 to 155 million in 1958—when backyard

35. Danilov and Berelowitch, eds., Sovetskaya derevnya,Vol.3,1930–1933; Nicolas Werth, L’État soviétique contre les paysans: Rapports secrets de la police politique (Paris: Tallandier, 2011); Dikötter: Mao’s Great Famine, p. 69; and Zhou Xun, Great Famine in China, 1958–1962. 36. Niccolò Pianciola, “Famine in the Steppe: The Collectivization of Agriculture and the Kazakh Herdsmen, 1928–34,” Cahiers du monde russe, Vol. 45, Nos. 1–2 (2004), pp. 137–192; Pianciola, Stalinismo di frontiera; Yang, “China’s Agricultural Crisis”; and Dikötter: Mao’s Great Famine, p. 141.

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iron furnaces and hydraulic projects also contributed to the loss—and then jumped back to 197 million in 1961.37 Peasants and nomads also reacted by fleeing—abroad if possible. Many Mennonite colonists were able to leave the USSR after causing a scandal in 1929 in Moscow, and in 1930 Ukrainian and Belarusian peasants moved across the not-yet-sealed borders into Poland and Romania. Then in 1931– 1933, more than 1 million Kazakhs fled to other Soviet republics or to Xin- jiang in neighboring China. Thirty years later, many of them left for Soviet Central Asia—overwhelming the Chinese checkpoints—when hunger struck there in 1958–1962 (in the spring of the latter year, Beijing’s decision to impose Chinese citizenship caused a final, mass exodus that lasted until the following spring and involved more than 100,000 persons). Chinese peasants also crossed or tried to cross over to Vietnam, Burma, and Laos.38 Fewer workers (now poorly fed and dissatisfied) and fewer animals caused a drop in productivity, and therefore in procurements, which the Soviet and the Chinese states similarly countered by resorting to even harsher repression.

Reactions of Party Cadres In both the USSR and China, party cadres displayed or developed a variety of attitudes and behaviors. At different times and for different reasons, many of them sided with the peasants. Others were complicit in, and even eager execu- tioners of, state orders and proﬁted from the situation by abusing their power in classic rent-seeking behavior. The center harshly repressed those who sided with the peasants, while maintaining an ambivalent attitude toward those who engaged in rent-seeking. Moderate Soviet and Chinese cadres were purged immediately before the launching of the GTP and the GLF. Three or so years later—that is, at the end

37. Graziosi, Urss di Lenin e Stalin, p. 315; Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, p. 61; Felix Wemheuer, “Feed the Cities by Starving the Countryside: Rural-Urban Relation in the Chinese Great Leap For- ward, 1958–1962” (paper presented at the Journée d’étude INALCO-EHESS “Famines soviétique et chinoise,” October 2013); Li and Yang, “Great Leap Forward.” 38. Colin Neufeldt, “The Flight to Moscow, 1929: An Act of Mennonite Civil Disobedience?” Preserv- ings, Vol. 19 (December 2001), pp. 35–47; Andrea Graziosi, “Collectivisation, révoltes paysannes et politiques gouvernementales à travers les rapports du GPU d’Ukraine de février–mars 1930,” Cahiers du monde russe, Vol. 35, No. 3 (1994), pp. 437–632; Alberto Basciani, “From Collectivization to the Great Famine: Eyewitness Statements on the Holodomor by Refugees from the Ukrainian SSSR, 1930–1933,” Holodomor Studies, Vol. 3 (2011), pp. 1–27; S. Cameron, “The Kazakh Famine of 1930– 1933: Current Research and New Directions” (paper presented at the “Communism and Hunger: The Ukrainian, Chinese, Kazakh and Soviet Famines in Comparative Perspective,” conference, Toronto, September 2014); Pianciola, Stalinismo di frontiera, pp. 397–422; and Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, p. 238.

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of 1932 in the USSR (especially in Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the Volga regions); and in 1959–1960 in China—many of those who had sided with the peasants, often because they, too, were distressed by conditions, were subjected to an even more vicious purge. In the USSR thousands were sentenced to death, often—as in Ukraine—under the accusation of populism (narodnichestvo), because they refused to execute Moscow’s orders or dared to feed starving peasants instead of handing all grain to the state. In 1959–1960 in China, many cadres “colluded with the farmers,” covered up “collective theft, subterfuge and deception,” and “quietly distributed grain to the farmers.” Millions were labeled, or purged, as right-wing opportunists because the early 1959 retreat had convinced them that the GLF had been a mistake and that the country’s problems had been created by the folly of the party center, without whose initiative “the wind of communism would not have blown.” Only a harsh campaign of anti-rightist repression could eradicate such beliefs. Thus, after Lushan, Mao stressed the need to intensify the class struggle against upper-middle-class peasants and the cadres who defended their interests.39 In both countries the repression of moderates opened the way for the production/selection of cadres able and willing to apply violence in fulfill- ing the center’s commands. Some were at first genuine enthusiasts, but many more were motivated by the extraordinary powers they came to enjoy over rural society, by the wish to be promoted, by personal cruelty and depravity, or by a fear of repression and a desire to conform. As Wemheuer was told in China, and as Soviet memoirs confirm, “at that time a cadre was like an emperor” presiding over life and death. Control over food and work assignments guaranteed almost unlimited power, which many cadres used also to procure women, and in China the power of local CCP committees was further en- hanced by their ties to the local branches of the political police, which in the Soviet Union were under stricter central control.40 At the same time, these “bad” cadres soon learned, in both the USSR and China, that a “struggle” could be unleashed against them as well. The scapegoating of local cadres for their “excesses” was standard practice when the center needed to save face. Stalin first resorted to this tactic on a massive scale in early 1930, mostly to remedy the disastrous relations collectivization had brought about between Moscow and the villages. Stalin again relied on scapegoating in the persecution of “saboteurs,” a process that culminated in the

39. Shapoval and Vasil’ev, Komandiry velykoho holodu; and Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, pp. 211–212. 40. Victor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom (New York: Scribner’s, 1946); and Lev Kopelev, The Education of a True Believer (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).

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show trials of 1936–1938. Mao did likewise in early 1959 when he blamed the excesses of local cadres for the catastrophe caused by the GLF that he had launched, and complained of being surrounded by lies (“When there is pressure from the top, there will be lies from the bottom”), as if lies and “excesses” were not the normal outcome of such pressure. Scapegoating became even more common at the beginning of 1961, when the real magnitude of the tragedy caused by the post-Lushan assault became evident. Sensing that he might lose at least some of his power, Mao intensiﬁed the persecution of cadres who had done precisely what he had asked them to do.41

Life and Death in the Countryside Once the party-state affirmed, through massive recourse to violence, its sway over the countryside, peasants in both countries tried to cope with oppression and misery by resorting to survival techniques that included the entire gamut of the “weapons of the weak.” The exodus to cities or supposedly better-off areas within each country also continued. This migration, however, was transformed by the tragic food situation of 1932–1933 in the USSR (and 1931–1932 in Kazakhstan) and in post-1959 China, when hunger became the primary driver. Moreover, in contrast to what happened before 1932, the Soviet state efficiently halted the exodus by reintroducing internal passports and denying them to peasants. Especially but not solely in Ukraine, drastic measures were also adopted to prevent starving peasants from buying train tickets and entering cities and to return them forcibly to certain death in the villages. In China, where internal passports were already in force, migration was less aggressively confronted, and cities were not systematically cordoned off (this was also a consequence of the post-Lushan decision to revive the GLF). In the first four months of 1960 alone, for instance, more than 170,000 farmers fleeing their villages were found ticketless on board Beijing-bound trains— something unthinkable in the USSR in 1933, when only a few peasants were able to reach the cities, often to die on the sidewalk. In China, too, however, “party committees established check points with armed militia at every bus station and crossroad to prevent the villagers from escaping.” Custody and repatriation stations were set up, and the sale of train tickets to peasants was forbidden. Patrols fired at people trying to swim across the Yangtze River to Nanking. In 1930 on the border between the USSR and Romania, frontier

41. Wemheuer, “Dealing with Responsibility.”

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troops shot at peasants trying to reach Romania across the Danube. Every- where beggars and migrants were abused, robbed, or sexually exploited, with many peasant women prostituting themselves in Chinese cities.42 As usual, typhus and other diseases (including plague in Central Asia) accompanied starvation. However, with the partial exception of Kazakhstan in 1931–1933, both governments proved able to contain the epidemics. Hunger thus killed many more people than disease did, especially when, as in Ukraine, extreme requisitioning ensured that famine would act swiftly, eliminating millions in a few weeks. Under these conditions, families suffered formidable stress and broke up. Men generally left on their own, and women—who proved more resistant— often had to bear the brunt of an increasingly desperate situation. Parents abandoned their children as in the “Hop-o’-My-Thumb” fairytale, and or- phans had to fend for themselves. The number of abandoned children soared, but—contrary to what happened in the USSR in the 1920s—we lack reliable statistics over time. This is in part because these children were considered—for example, by Stalin and his associates—as nuisances to be eliminated, including by mass shooting.43 At the peak of the famine, people ate anything to survive: animals of every kind, roots, grass, bark, even soil. Procuring food became the paramount ac- tivity, and stealing—from the state, from neighbors, from family members— became the norm amid the general collapse of moral standards. Following Primo Levi, Frank Dikötter has therefore recommended great caution in speaking of the “weapons of the weak” in such extraordinary times. When the famine became unbearably acute, these “weapons” pitted “erstwhile neighbors, friends and relatives against each other” and threatened the survival of the weakest. It thus seems more correct to speak in such circumstances of

42. Gijs Kessler, “The Passport System and State Control over Population Flows in the Soviet Union,” Cahiers du monde russe, Vol. 42, No. 2–4 (2001), pp. 477–504; David Shearer, “Elements Near and Alien: Passportization, Policing, and Identity in the Stalinist State, 1933–1953,” Journal of Modern History, Vol. 76, No. 4 (December 2004), pp. 835–881; Klid and Motyl, Holodomor Reader,p. 254; Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, pp. 233–237; and Wemheuer, “Feed the Cities by Starving the Countryside.” 43. Nicholas Voinov, The Waif (New York: Pantheon: 1955); Vladimir Zenzinov, Deserted: The Story of the Children Abandoned in Soviet Russia (Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1975); Dorena Caroli, L’enfance abandonnée et délinquante dans la Russie soviétique: 1917–1937 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004); Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, pp. 250–252; and Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Dekulakization to the Great Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 123. In Perrault’s fairytale the parents, who are no longer able to support their children, plan to abandon them. Hop-o’- My-Thumb, overhearing their conversation, collects small white pebbles from a river, which he uses to mark a trail that enables him to lead his brothers back home. The second time, however, he uses breadcrumbs instead, which the birds eat, opening the way to further adventures.

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“survival techniques” that, by the way, were also practiced by minor cadres. These survival techniques again became “weapons” used mainly against the state only after the situation had stabilized.44 In the direst months, cannibalism made frequent appearances, in both ru- mor and reality. At least in the USSR there were investigations and trials. Eat- ing corpses and selling meat cut from them without declaring its provenance were apparently standard practices. Killing to eat was a much rarer event, as it had been in the Soviet Russian famine of 1921–1922 when, according to U.S. relief workers, a distinction was drawn between trupoedstvo (eating corpses) and lyudoestvo (eating human beings). In China, children were sold, but we do not know whether practices used during ancient famines, such as the yi zi er shi (exchange of children in order to eat them), described by Lu Xun, were revived. Self-cannibalism was instead the usual mode of death, with the brain feeding on the rest of the body until essential muscles such as the heart could no longer bear the depredation.45 The psychological and behavioral legacy of the famines raises huge questions that scholars of both countries have only started to address. In the USSR, for instance, alcoholism proliferated, in part because the state used village stores to push cheap vodka as a way to raise cash. In light of Levi’s reﬂec- tions, it is also legitimate to ask—as Segei Maksudov and Robert Thaxton have, though they provide different answers—what the consequences were of surviving in a world in which moral standards had collapsed.46

44. Primo Levi, I sommersi e i salvati (Turin: Einaudi, 1986); Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, pp. 211– 213; Pitirim Sorokin, Hunger as a Factor in Human Affairs (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1975); and Zhou Xun, Great Famine in China, 1958–1962, pp. 114–141. 45. Andrea Graziosi, ed., Lettere da Kharkov (Torino: Einaudi, 1991); OGPU SSSR, “O lyudoedstve i ubiistvakh c tsel’yu lyudoedstva,” 31 March 1933, Istmat, http://istmat.info/node/29777; Bertrand Patenaude, The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Zhou Xun, Forgotten Voices of Mao’s Great Famine, 1958–1962: An Oral History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 258–260; Becker, Hungry Ghosts, pp. 211–219; Yang Jisheng, Tombstone, pp. 40–46, 278–304; Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, pp. 320–323; Zhou Xun, Great Famine in China, 1958–1962, pp. 59–71; Bianco, “Commu- nisme et famine”; and Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman and Other Stories (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990). 46. Julie Hessler, A Social History of Soviet Trade, 1917–1953 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer- sity Press, 2004); Sergei Maksudov, “Dehumanization: The Change in the Moral and Ethical Con- sciousness of Soviet Citizens as a Result of Collectivization and Famine,” in Graziosi et al., eds., After the Holodomor, pp. 123–148; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Robert Thaxton, Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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Cities versus Villages The GTP and the GLF caused sudden surges in the urban population and the working classes, fueled by the mostly male rural exodus. This imposed strict constraints on the two countries’ leaders, who found themselves needing—in times of crisis—more grain to feed a growing urban population that posed a political threat to the survival of the regime. Fear of worker unrest, made real by the Ivanovo strikes against the collapse of real wages in the spring of 1932, or the Henan agitations at the beginning of 1961, strengthened the two systems’ resolve to guarantee urban and worker rations at least partly, thereby satisfying, at least minimally, the legally protected right to a certain amount of food (a right the planning system had granted to urban residents).47 At the end of 1960, for instance, Chinese leaders authorized the importation of grain to stabilize the situation in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Liaoning, whose tranquility the regime wanted to secure. Despite Soviet rhetoric about the alliance between workers and peasants and the even stronger Chinese pro-peasant official discourse, a similar rigid social hierarchization of consumption soon took shape behind the socialist façade. Central party and state cadres, loyal elite intellectuals, the political police, the army, the technological elite, and key sectors of the working classes occupied the top layers of the hierarchy, followed by intelligentsia, local cadres, urban workers and employees (with those in major centers enjoying better conditions), and their dependents. Peasants, considered to be self-supplying, were left off a pyramid whose lowest level included prison camp inmates, and the peasants did not receive rations even in principle.48 A cadre- and urban-biased rationing system thus constituted an important feature common to the two countries. In both the USSR in 1932 and China in 1961, when the situation became extremely tense even in major cities, decisions were taken to protect high-ranking cadres and other strata considered vital to the regime’s survival. Local cadres, often left to fend for themselves, then increased the pressure on the population they controlled. The tools employed to keep the officially provided-for part of the population separate from the rest were also similar in the two countries. At the end of 1932, the USSR reintroduced the internal passports that had been abolished in 1917, but granted them only to conveniently filtered urban residents (e.g.,

47. Jeffrey J. Rossman, Worker Resistance under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 48. Elena A. Osokina, Ierarkhiya potrebleniya: O zhizni lyudei v usloviyakh stalinskogo snabzheniya, 1928–1935 gg (Moscow: MGOU, 1993).

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people sentenced in the past, even for petty crimes, were refused the docu- ment), discriminating against rural inhabitants. In China, the Hukou system, though built on Chinese traditions, had been reconfigured to incorporate major features of the Soviet internal passport system. Introduced in 1951 for city dwellers and in 1955 for villagers, it divided the population into urban (jumin)andrural(nongmin) residents, a status that was matrilineally trans- mitted and difficult to change.49 However, a basic difference emerged because of the different timing in the introduction of passports. In the Soviet Union most of the peasants who had moved to the cities before the fall of 1932 were granted a passport (and therefore urban residency) unless they belonged to one of the categories listed in the secret prikaz that established who was to be removed from the cities at the moment of their filtering in order to make those cities secure for the regime. In China the Hukou was already in place when the urban population boomed. Thus, as a rule, the millions who moved to cities after the launch of the GLF could not register as urban residents. Many still tried to do so because urban registration involved the right to a ration, but relatively few succeeded. The majority thus remained in a gray area, and the firms that employed them disregarded the passport laws so that they could comply with state policies calling for maximum increases in production. During the small “retreat” in early 1959, hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant workers were relatively easily returned to the villages. Then, when the leaders decided in 1961 to fight the famine by also emptying the cities, Chen Yun could rapidly resettle approximately 20 million members of this “black population.”50 Because of state supply priorities, urban standards of living in both the USSR and China were much superior to rural subsistence—dramatically so at the peak of the famine. This urban-biased distribution played a role in determining the variations in death rates, which depended on the relative weights of the urban and rural populations in each province. This does not mean, however, that wealth was transferred from the countryside to the cities, as students of both the Soviet and Chinese experience have maintained. Even though the position of urban residents vis-à-vis rural ones improved during the GTP and the GLF, it did so only in relative terms. In absolute terms, Soviet and Chi- nese workers experienced a dramatic fall in real wages and living and working

49. Nathalie Moine, “Passeportisation, statistique des migrations et contrôle de l’identité sociale,” Cahiers du monde russe, Vol. 38, No. 4 (1997), pp. 587–599; Kessler, “The Passport System and State Control over Population Flows”; Shearer, “Elements Near and Alien”; and Nicolas Werth, Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 50. Wemheuer, Famine Politics, p. 230; Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, pp. 230–238; and Yang Jisheng, Tombstone, pp. 443–445.

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conditions, and they died of hunger and exhaustion, albeit not as frequently and uncontrollably as villagers. Memoirs about life in Soviet cities in the early 1930s underscore that from 1927 to 1933 the workers’ consumption of milk, eggs, butter, meat, and fats fell by 75–90 percent. Similarly, by 1961 a large part of the Beijing workforce suffered from famine edema. In both countries, then, urban inhabitants did not escape appalling hardship.51 Under both Stalin and Mao, no mass deaths by starvation took place in the cities, especially the major ones. (As Gijs Kessler has shown, the situation in the USSR dramatically worsened beyond the 100-kilometer radius of relative privilege around key urban centers.) Still, although urban misery was much to be preferred to rural starvation, one should not conclude that urban residents were spared the consequences of the GTP and the GLF.52

The Successful Production of an Official Lie for the Outside World Both the USSR and China enlisted foreign journalists to build and defend ofﬁcial lies concealing the famines. Both regimes exploited the visits of foreign dignitaries to strengthen those lies. The Soviet Union’s reliance on The New York Times correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Duranty to deny the existence of a famine that was privately acknowledged by Duranty himself, and to belittle the reputation of Western journalists who reported on it accurately, can be compared to Mao’s decision to invite C. P. Snow to Bei- jing in 1960. Snow, whom Mao believed to be an agent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency but also a “friend of China,” was supposed to disprove the stories circulating in the West about a famine in China, which he enthu- siastically did. Similarly, Moscow’s use of Edouard Herriot’s visit to Ukraine in August 1933 (during which he compared the famine-stricken republic to a garden in bloom) is strongly reminiscent of the use made by Mao of François Mitterrand’s stay in Beijing in 1961.53 Both efforts to whitewash the famines enjoyed considerable success, as testiﬁed by books such as Soviet Communism: A New Civilization (1938), in

51. Nicolas Werth, “Food Shortages, Hunger and Famines in the USSR, 1928–1933” (paper presented at the “Communism and Hunger: The Ukrainian, Chinese, Kazakh and Soviet Famines in Comparative Perspective” conference, Toronto, September 2014). 52. Gijs Kessler, “The Peasant and the Town: Rural-Urban Migration in the Soviet Union, 1929– 1940,” Ph.D. Diss., European University Institute, Fiesole, Italy, 2001. 53. Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (New York: Harcourt, 1937); Ray Gamache, Gareth Jones: Eyewitness to the Holodomor (Cardiff, UK: Welsh Academic Press, 2013); Jacques Steinberg, “Times Should Lose Pulitzer from 30’s, Consultant to Paper Says,” The New York Times, 23 October 2003; and Edgar Snow, The Other Side of the River: Red China Today (New York: Random House, 1962).

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which Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb extolled the glorious outcome of the Soviet experiment without mentioning starvation; and Amartya Sen’s Poverty and Famines (1981), a study of the 1943–1944 Bengali famine that unfavor- ably compares India to Communist states—“for example China”—that had supposedly put an end to starvation (Sen did eventually acknowledge the Chi- nese famine, and the analytical tools he developed have been put to good use by students of that famine).54

The Many Minor Affinities The list of minor affinities is a long one. They can be grouped under three headings: (1) those depending on the administrative nature of the two systems; (2) those resulting from the GTP’s and the GLF’s nature and pace; and (3) those tied to the mentalities and ideologies of the despots and their immediate collaborators, who shared a simplistic and aggressive approach and were attracted by the idea of taming nature by waging war against it. In the first category is a shared passion for regulations, rations, norms, standards, and stipulations of what to produce, achieve, or distribute, which resulted in the elaboration of precise plans, targets, quotas, and so on. In both countries, however, behind this façade of bureaucratic order lay a fantastic but very real world in which queuing, the trading of favors and gifts, the role of personal contacts and social connections, bribes, and sheer violence determined who obtained what and how much. This world was dominated by scarcity and thus by the need, in the case of peasants, to make do in every possible way to survive; in the case of the lower and middle cadres, to obtain a better position or a better job; and, in the case of industrial managers, to procure necessary raw materials or spare parts. Firms developed similar networks of traveling representatives, on whom their very lives came to depend, and all institutions were inhabited by “dead souls”—that is, fictitious people created by not reporting departures or deaths. The real rations to which they were (or had been) entitled could then be traded, distributed as incentives, or used for illegal hiring of extra personnel in moments of need.55

54. Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization (Boston: Charles Scrib- ner’s Sons, 1938); Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 7; and Li and Yang, “Great Leap Forward.” 55. Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, pp. 197–198; Alena V. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking, and Informal Exchanges (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Fedor Belov, The History of a Soviet Collective Farm (New York: Praeger, 1955).

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These phenomena were most salient at the peak of the crises, when all sorts of regulations—including those relating to labor safety and health— became de facto void, even though anyone could at any moment be accused of disregarding them. In Soviet industrial yards, as in China’s great hydraulic construction sites, work hours were not limited, and former peasants were exploited to death because—it was said—their enthusiasm for building socialism knew no bounds. The quality of the information that circulated in the two countries was similarly affected. Fed with lies whose production they had favored by de- manding the impossible, top leaders had great difficulty seeing reality and taking effective decisions. They thus became extremely suspicious and asked the political police—who themselves were a great producer of lies—to uncover the false claims of untrustworthy local leaders. Rumors proliferated beneath the surface of official propaganda. In the early 1930s, Soviet peasants imag- ined that a pope-led crusade was being organized to save them, and in 1959– 1960 Chinese peasants expected the return of Chiang Kai-shek. Similarly in China, wild cults and beliefs, fueled by mass deaths, circulated throughout the countryside. The scale and pace of the two onslaughts gave rise to phenomena like shock work; the emergence of little Stalins or little Maos to whom special tasks were entrusted or who clamored for the center’s attention by “explod- ing” already impossible targets and then using all the powers at their disposal to fulfill them; and the collapse of the transportation system. Urban mass destruction took place both in the capitals—where historic buildings and old neighborhoods were devastated—and in minor centers, with villages again paying the highest price. Thousands of churches and scores of thousands of kulak houses were pillaged in the USSR, and in the Chinese countryside the destruction of peasant housing reached enormous proportions (Liu Shaoqi wrote to Mao that in their native Hunan roughly 40 percent of all houses had been destroyed).56 The rush ahead caused huge waste, which was compounded by waste generated by the chaos that soon prevailed in both countries: expensive imported machinery rusted in Soviet yards; kitchen hardware and agricultural tools were melted to no practical use in Chinese backyard furnaces; and grain rotted in

56. Anatole Kopp, Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning, 1917–1935 (New York: Braziller, 1970); and Vladimir Papernyi, Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002). The damage wrought to rural housing and churches during collectivization is well documented in OGPU reports; Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space (London: Reaktion, 2005); and Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine,pp. 38–39, 168–169.

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ﬁelds that nobody harvested or in railway silos that trains did not reach on time. Poorly prepared or stored food caused frequent cases of mass poison- ing. The depletion of hard currency in the USSR in 1932 and the break- down of the Soviet-Chinese relationship in 1960 resulted in mass exoduses of foreign specialists and workers needed to start the new factories, leaving both economies heavily damaged. Ignorance and the determination to impose one’s own will on nature led to the adoption of bogus solutions, from Troﬁm Lysenko’s teachings in the USSR to close and deep planting in China, often inspired by the desire to take misguided Soviet ideas to even greater extremes. The grandiose Chinese hydraulic projects of 1958 caused ecological devastation similar to that which the unregulated, massive harvesting of timber had provoked in the Soviet Union of the early 1930s.57

Differences

Dekulakization Stalin’s GTP began with an assault launched in January 1930 against more than a million “kulak” families; that is, against the core of the peasant world (real kulaks had been liquidated during the civil war, often by peasants themselves). Having decided to resume the anti-peasant war conducted in 1918– 1921 and brieﬂy interrupted by the NEP compromise, the regime planned a mass operation to undermine the expected peasant resistance by exterminat- ing village elites. Scores of thousands of peasants were shot, and almost 2.5 million deported in 1930–1933 alone. In China, the functional counterpart of the Soviet upper village stra- tum had been dispossessed and often killed, together with the majority of the landlords, during the land reform campaigns of 1947–1948 and 1950– 1952. The upper rural groups had thus been crushed before the SHT, which engulfed the villages in yet another wave of repression. Hence, there was no need for a mass anti-kulak operation or for a war against the countryside, something the pro-peasant ideology of the Chinese regime would have made difﬁcult.

57. Karl I. Albrecht, Der verratene Sozialismus, zehn Jahre als hoher Staatsbeamter in der Sowjetunion (Berlin: Nibelungen-verlag, 1939); Murray Feshbach, EcocideintheUSSR:HealthandNatureunder Siege (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, pp. 174–188; and Yang Jisheng, Tombstone, pp. 71–74.

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The absence of a preemptive anti-peasant strike in China points to the main difference in the way the two regimes dealt with their peasant populations, especially but not solely in their formative years.58

Peasant Resistance The nature and intensity of peasant resistance were quite different in the two countries—a difference connected to the two regimes’ relationships with their respective peasant populations in earlier years. In 1918–1920, Soviet peasants, nomads, and “peasant nations” fielded large units against the new Bolshevik state, which they deeply distrusted, and this experience was the background of the new round of confrontation in 1930–1933. Despite dekulakization and the ruthless disarmament of Soviet villages in 1922–1928, residents of these villages were still able to raise massive resistance against collectivization. In early 1930 this resistance—which was especially intense in the non-Russian republics from the Caucasus to Central Asia to Ukraine, but also occurred in traditional areas of peasant rebellion like the Volga region—seemed capable of putting the survival of the regime at stake, as it had in 1920–1921. In 1930, Moscow temporarily lost control over a large swath of Ukraine’s western borderlands, reviving in Stalin’s mind the fear generated in 1919 by the combination of internal revolts and external intervention and forcing him to call the March 1930 retreat. The battle resumed in subsequent years, reaching its peak during procurements at harvest time. As the VKP(b) Politburo’s special file (osobaya papka) shows, even in the spring of 1933, when hunger was threatening peasant existence, revolts still flared up, and peasant leaders had to be shot. Only mass starvation and death subdued Soviet villages, thus opening the way to Stalin’s victory. In China, peasant resistance was not entirely absent: peasants did oppose the SHT, but in 1956 more than 96 percent of Chinese peasants already belonged to kolkhoz-like collective farms, which they had been forced to enter in previous years. CCP leaders therefore could embark on the great offensive without having to force peasants to swallow a system they did not accept. Peasants also resisted entering communes after the launch of the GLF. As in the USSR, albeit on a smaller scale, they killed their animals, reduced their work effort, wrote angry letters to their sons in the army, and, at the peak of the famine, raided state granaries and food convoys. Again as in the USSR,

58. Bianco, Récidive; Moshe Lewin, “Who Was the Soviet Kulak,” in The Making of the Soviet System (New York: Free Press, 1985), pp. 121–141; Graziosi, Great Soviet Peasant War; Nikolai A. Ivnitskii, Kollektivizatsiya i raskulachivanie (Moscow: Magistr, 1996); and Dikötter, Tragedy of Liberation.

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the state brutally countered these actions. According to Bianco, however, the “weapons of the weak” were the Chinese peasants’ preferred instruments, so that the scale and intensity of peasant opposition (but not of “national” opposition, as shown by the Xinjiang rebellion) seem to have been decidedly smaller in China than in the USSR.59 Another reason for this difference is that in Ukraine peasant and national resistance fueled and reinforced each other along with Moscow’s fears (repression was thus conducted along both national and grain procurement lines), whereas in China socialist construction and the GLF generated intense national opposition but only in areas that were not as crucial for the state’s survival as Ukraine was for the Soviet regime. Uighurs in Xinjiang, for instance, resisted the attempt to alter their society that the GLF represented, as well as the assimilationist policies implicit in it. But their agricultural production was not what the state was aiming at. The great Tibetan uprising of 1959 arose in the context of the hostility sparked in 1956 by collectivization in the Kham and Amdo regions. Yet the great rebellion that started in Lhasa in March 1959 had less to do with the GLF and requisitions than with political, national, and religious factors.60

Anti-Peasant Mass Violence In the USSR, more than 20,000 official death sentences, mostly involving “kulaks,” were carried out in 1930 alone, more than ten times as many as in previous years. The figure, which does not involve the “unofficial” shootings that were frequent until 1934, is reported to have decreased to 10,000 in 1931 and to 3,000 in 1932. Other sources, however, report that, in just the four months following the August 1932 decree against rural theft, more than 4,000 peasants were sentenced to death on the basis of that single law. Millions more were deported, and the Soviet Gulag system, which also included labor colonies and forced labor settlements, acquired its basic features

59. Graziosi, GreatSovietPeasantWar; Danilov and Berelowitch, eds., Sovetskaya derevnya,Vol.3, 1930–1933;Werth,État soviétique contre les paysans; Isabelle Ohayon, La sédentarisation des Kazakhs dans l’URSS de Staline: Collectivisation et changement social, 1928–1945 (Paris: Maisonneuve, 2006); Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants; Bianco, “Communisme et famine”; Yang Jisheng, Tombstone, pp. 465–482; Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, pp. 208–214; and Li and Yang, “Great Leap Forward.” 60. Tom A. Grunfeld, The Making of Modern Tibet (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1996); and Wemheuer, Famine Politics, pp. 157–174. According to Garnaut, “the multiethnic borderlands of China including Tibet, much of Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia, appear to have been spared the worst of the famine.” Garnaut, “The Geography of the Great Leap Famine,” p. 337. The Ukrainian and the Tibetan cases are therefore very different, and comparisons are problematic.

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after and because of dekulakization. Until 1935 the Gulag system was mostly inhabited by repressed peasants who, after the great waves connected to dekulakization, entered it because of their resistance to procurements or to the new collective system, or because they were being punished for alleged food theft (the extremely harsh decree punishing such theft even with death was written by Stalin in the summer of 1932 and sparked the last recorded opposition to his directives in the VKP-b Politburo, probably vented by Petrovskyj).61 The Soviet countryside thus became the realm of “special detachments” and a theater of terrible anti-peasant violence organized by the political police, who duly reported the crackdown to authorities. Soviet peasants were flogged, locked naked in granaries in sub-zero temperatures, tortured with red-hot irons, left to die in the cold, and subjected to other gruesome torments.62 In China, too, peasants soon became the main source of the huge expan- sion of the Laogai prison camp system during the GLF, at both the national and the local level, with large communes often opening their own camps for recalcitrant villagers. As in the USSR, harsh anti-rural theft laws were passed, although Mao modeled them not on Stalin’s 1932 decree but on the draconian laws passed in the USSR during the 1946–1947 famine, which sent millions of peasants and workers to the Gulag.63 The number of official shootings (according to Dikötter) was lower in 1959 and 1960, amounting to approximately 4,000–4,500 per year. Yet, especially in some regions of China, the anti-peasant violence, in both quan- tity and quality, reached levels much higher than in the Soviet case, thus transforming a similar pattern into a major difference. Demonstrating the irrelevance in this context of the official pro-peasant ideology, Chinese local cadres submitted peasants to extreme forms of torture and humiliation. The letters to the authorities, chronologically arranged by Isabelle Thireau, show the growth of this anti-peasant violence in the Shanxi countryside after 1957, and in Henan beatings and torture became “aspects of daily life at the struggle meetings” called to enforce the GLF.64

61. Khlevniuk, History of the Gulag; and Davies and Khlevniuk, eds., Stalin-Kaganovich Correspon- dence, pp. 134, 256 of the Russian edition. 62. Sholokhov to Stalin, 4 April 1933, in M. A. Sholokhov, Pisatel’ i vozhd’: Perepiska M. A. Sholokhova sI.V.Stalinym(Moscow: Raritet, 1997); Danilov and Berelowitch, eds., Sovetskaya derevnya,Vol.3; Werth, État soviétique contre les paysans;Graziosi,Great Soviet Peasant War, pp. 50–51; and Urss di Lenin e Stalin, p. 333. 63. Jean-Luc Domenach, Chine: L’archipel oublié (Paris: Fayard, 1992); Bianco, Récidive, pp. 343–403; and Graziosi, Urss dal trionfo al degrado, pp. 67, 74–75. 64. Thireau, “Quand la violence contribue à la famine.”

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During the anti-rightist campaign, peasants were worked to death and pushed into suicide, even as local CCP cadres compared them to dogs obey- ing only those who beat them. Then, after Lushan, an extraordinary explo- sion of violence and torture occurred. The general, but not sole, goal was to extract grain. Later official inquiries with titles such as “How and Why Cadres Beat People” indicate that violence was also used as “a routine tool of control,” with party secretaries personally beating scores of people to death. Peasants were mutilated: their noses, ears, or fingers severed; their lips stitched together; their skin scalded with hot water. They were also forced to torture their own children and parents, to kneel on burning charcoal, or to eat their own excrement. Some were buried alive. The only possible parallel with the Soviet experience is with the tortures inflicted on arrestees during the Great Terror of 1937–1938 and during Stalin’s final years in power. Dikötter estimates that 6–8 percent of all the victims of the Chinese famine (i.e., at least 2 million people) were directly “tortured to death or sum- marily killed” by cadres and the militias. The figure has been contested, but it is at least partly corroborated by 1960–1961 official Chinese reports. In 1960, for instance, an inquiry conducted in Xinyang (Henan), maintained that in the province the famine had caused the death of 1 million people, 67,000 of whom were killed in mass beatings carried out by local militias, a phenomenon with no comparison in the USSR.65

Soviet Kolkhozes versus Chinese Communes Soviet kolkhozes of the early 1930s, which on average comprised fewer than one hundred families, were much smaller than the Chinese communes that arose in 1958. The former also featured a much lower level of collectivization, could not embark on large-scale projects, and did not have local militias or prisons. Though despised by peasants, kolkhozes were not “mini-states” directly oppressing them. Rather, they were state devices for seizing grain, which left some room for peasant self-organization, both at the family level (especially after small peasant holdings were introduced in 1935) and at the collective level. The larger sovkhozes were state farms, whose dependents enjoyed, at least in theory, the status of industrial workers and were therefore entitled to rations, salaries, and passports. In China, kolkhoz-like units similar to the Soviet ones of the early 1950s, which were decidedly larger than those of the early 1930s, existed before the

65. Yang Jisheng, Tombstone, pp. 29–32, 47; Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, pp. 288, 297, 300; and Zhou Xun, Great Famine in China, 1958–1962, pp. 17–42.

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launching of the GLF. The massive 1957 water-conservancy campaign, which required huge numbers of laborers, resulted in a push for the unification of those units into much larger ones. Communes comprising an average of 5,000 households (with some reaching 20,000) finally emerged. When the prototype appeared in the fall of 1957, the People’s Daily hailed its capacity to organize and command labor, exalting the militarization of the workforce as the key to success. In a way, therefore, at the root of the communes were the “labor armies” of the socialist tradition from Wilhelm Weitling to Leon Trotsky in 1919–1920. As Chen Boda, Mao’s ghostwriter, wrote in Red Flag,theywereto represent the constitutive elements of a “nation in arms” formed by “farmers armed as militias, all welded into giant communes.”66 The first official commune, the Weixing (Sputnik), was founded in Henan in the spring and summer of 1958. Mao’s doctor recalls in his memoirs the excitement with which Mao announced to him in August the merger in his native Hunan Province of many cooperatives into just one people’s commune (a term he much liked), an extraordinary event that possibly represented the bridge to Communism that Stalin had been unable to find. Mao was actually demonstrating his ignorance of the many failed attempts since 1918 to organize communes in the Soviet countryside. These failures had convinced Stalin that it was impossible to force the passage to Communism, as he stated in Economic Problems of Socialism (1952) and also made clear through his sar- castic treatment of Khrushchev’s postwar plans to bring Soviet agriculture to a “superior” level.67 Over the next few months, more than 26,000 communes, organizing millions of households, were established. Peasants who resisted entering them— because joining meant losing the right to their smallholdings as well as to their family life—were treated brutally. Even though they resented the melting of their kitchen utensils in backyard furnaces (so they could no longer cook for themselves), some were attracted by the common mess halls, which at the beginning provided sufficient food. In some areas, gangs of fanatics set fire to peasants’ homes as they shouted, “Destroy Straw Huts in an Evening, Erect Residential Areas in Three Days, Build Communism in One Hundred Days!” Many communes also stopped paying for labor, and peasants were attached to large work brigades organized

66. Stephen Louw, “In the Shadow of the Pharaohs: The Militarization of Labour Debate and Clas- sical Marxist Theory,” Economy and Society, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2000), pp. 239–263; and Chen Boda in Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine,p.48. 67. Yang Jisheng, Tombstone, pp. 156–173; Li Zhisui, Private Life of Chairman Mao, p. 263; and Andrea Graziosi, “The Impact of Holodomor Studies on the Understanding of the USSR,” East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2015), p. 61.

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along military lines. In the meantime, the hugely increased size of economic units, which expanded from an average of 22 households in 1954 and 176 in 1957 to 2675 in 1958 (it fell back to 41 in 1962), caused a drastic decline in the incentive to work and in personal responsibility.68

Common Mess Halls Common mess halls were rare in the Soviet Union, where peasant families kept control over the little food left to them. In China, however, 2.65 million such halls had been established by the fall of 1958. By one calculation they fed, a year later, perhaps as many as 400 million rural inhabitants (even though, as Yang Jisheng notes, they were heavily criticized in the late spring of 1959, and some were even shut down for a few weeks, only to reopen later in the year). Food waste resulting from the poor organization of the mess halls, the irresponsible behaviors they fostered, and the incitement to consume by a leader who believed in a miraculous harvest (Mao invited peasants to “eat more, even five meals a day is fine”), thus played a much bigger role in China, heightening the severity of the famine. The participation rate of peasants in communal kitchens reached an average of 64.7 percent, but ranged from 16.7 to 97.6 percent across provinces. Significantly, the provinces with the highest participation rates (Hunan, 97.6 percent; Sichuan, 96.7; Yunnan, 96.5; Guizhou, 92.6; Guangxi, 91; and An- hui, 90.5) were among those hit hardest by the famine. Some scholars have consequently surmised that the mess halls performed a crucial role. Oth- ers, however, have questioned this thesis, citing the fact that the frequency of communal kitchens was an indication of the extremism of local leaders, this being the key variable in determining the scale of suffering. Whatever the case may be, the impossibility of organizing and controlling one’s food consumption at the family or individual level certainly increased the misery of Chinese peasants, adding a burden that Soviet ones did not have to carry.69

68. Yang, “China’s Agricultural Crisis and Famine of 1959–1961,” p. 8. 69. Li and Yang, “Great Leap Forward,” p. 856; Yang, “China’s Agricultural Crisis and Famine of 1959–1961,” p. 12; Gene Hsin Chang and Guanzhong James Wen, “Communal Dining and the Chinese Famine of 1958–1961,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol. 46, No. 1 (1997), pp. 1–34; Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, p. 54; Wemheuer, “Feed the Cities by Starving the Country- side”; Yang Jisheng, Tombstone, pp. 174–196; and James L. Watson, “Feeding the Revolution: Public Mess Halls and Coercive Commensality in Maoist China,” in Everett Zhang et al., eds., Governance of Life in Chinese Moral Experience (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 33–46.

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Small Peasant Holdings The Lichnoe Podsobnoe Khozyaistvo (LPKh), or ziliudi in Chinese (but which peasants called “save life soil,” jiuming di), were another crucial difference. In the USSR they were introduced in 1935—that is, after the famine—when Stalin acknowledged that collective fields must cater first and foremost to the needs of the state, not of peasant families, so that the latter were to be assigned small patches of land sufficient to feed them. The LPKhs (0.2–0.5 hectares each) rapidly became the mainstays of peasant survival and proved their worth during the war, when the state seized a huge percentage of a very meager harvest but no mass famines comparable to those of the early 1930s took place. In the postwar years, Stalin cruelly repressed the “abuses” of the LPKhs, but he firmly opposed any attempt to eliminate the units, something Khrushchev, who resented their existence, dreamed of doing during his own small leap forward of 1958–1961. In China, which initially adopted the Soviet model, ziliudi were introduced soon after 1949, and Chinese peasants were therefore ostensibly better equipped than their Soviet counterparts to cope with difficult times— especially because, in 1953, they were left with 5 percent of the land, a percentage almost double the allocation to LPKhs in the USSR. Mao, however, practicing in the name of Communism what Khrushchev longed to do, ordered their abolition in 1958. An ideological choice thus deprived Chi- nese peasants of the most important means available to them to survive a famine. In June 1959, at the height of the first retreat caused by the failure of the GLF, a CCP directive briefly reintroduced LPKhs, but they were again abolished after Lushan. Peasants thus went through the terrible year of 1960 without them, and the abolition of the ziliudi was likely the most important cause of the subsequent demographic catastrophe. Party leaders possibly thought so as well: The emergency directive that restored the ziliudi in November 1960 also marked the end of the GLF and introduced the possibility of halting mass starvation.70

70. Andrea Graziosi, “Stalin, krest’yanstvo i gosudarstvennyi sotsializm: Evolyutsiya vzaimootnoshenii, 1927–1951 gg,” in Istoriya Stalinizma: Krest’yanstvo i vlast’ (Moscow: Rosspen, 2011), pp. 12–32; Zhores Medvedev, Soviet Agriculture (New York: Norton, 1987), pp. 143, 361; Yang Jisheng, Tomb- stone, p. 178; Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, p. 118; and Dali L. Yang, Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society and Institutional Change Since the Great Leap Forward (Stanford, CA; Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 96.

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Difficulties and Crisis in the Center and in the Periphery The GTP and the renewal of the industrial drive in 1931 provoked a general crisis in the USSR, where large cities went through difﬁcult times, small towns suffered, and life in villages became extremely hard. Yet, for all the suffering, the system did not break, and the center continued to maintain a certain degree of control over the situation. Even in the summer and early fall of 1932, when the crisis reached its peak, Stalin and the Politburo were able to act swiftly, and the measures they took—a serious retreat on the urban and industrial front coupled with a ferocious but selective political attack on the most difﬁcult rural and national fronts—met with success. With the exception of the republics and regions Stalin decided to strike, as well as Kazakhstan (which experienced collapse in 1931 but was considered a marginal area), the USSR at large experienced extreme suffering but not mass, collective death from starvation. Because of a much more fragile food balance and, most importantly, because of Mao’s decision after Lushan to launch a new offensive on all fronts, China instead experienced a much deeper general crisis. Even central institutions were hit hard, and in cities like Nanjing even in top hospitals reserved for party members the heating systems broke down and nurses wore rags. Of course some regions in China—especially food-producing areas served by railroads and headed by Mao’s followers—suffered more than others. How- ever, one gains the impression of a country on the verge of collapse, where mass death by starvation was not the result of a central decision to use hunger as a tool, as in Ukraine and the North Caucasus in 1933; rather, it was the unde- sired result of wrong policies and actions, as it had been in the USSR before 1932, when famines, with the exception of Kazakhstan, had been mostly local phenomena, causing scores of thousands, not millions, of deaths.

Famine and Nationality Most signiﬁcant, in the Soviet Union “national” famines—such as the Holodomor and the Kazakh tragedy—were responsible for approximately 80 percent of the victims. Except for a few other major foci (where the national factor often played an important role, as in the Kuban or in the German Volga Republic), the pan-Soviet famine was relatively “mild,” with victims amounting to several hundred thousand. In China, by contrast, the famine was ﬁrst and foremost a Chinese tragedy—Chinese peasants constituted the overwhelming majority of the victims—and hunger was not deliberately used

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by the center to subdue some nationality or other, also because the national problem played a far lesser role in China than it did in the USSR. The Chinese mass famine thus seems to have been the direct product of political and ideological exaltation and of erroneous and irresponsible choices. In the USSR, these factors, which determined the overall picture of depriva- tion already evident in early 1932, were compounded at the end of that year by a political decision to use hunger, and national/linguistic/cultural repression, to strike specific targets, thus causing—especially in Ukraine—a tragedy that had few parallels with the military and political suppression of the 1959 Tibetan revolt.71 The 1931–1932 Kazakh catastrophe was also different. Here, too, the center’s decisions played a direct, crucial role in causing a national tragedy, but without “wanting” it. As Niccolò Pianciola has shown, Kazakhstan (then a Russian autonomous republic) became central to pan-Soviet meat and livestock procurements in July 1930, when a secret Politburo decision ordered their intensification in nomadic regions to remedy the catastrophe that collectivization, and the resistance to it, had inflicted on the animal stock of the Slavic republics. In 1931, Kazakhstan’s most tragic year, half of the meat and livestock imported by large Russian cities came from the republic, which was soon ravaged by hunger. Elsewhere, the USSR experienced serious food problems but not famine. However, Kazakhstan and especially its nomadic population were not considered important enough and were consequently left to their own devices. Stalin never even considered sending troops there, nor did he consider adopting direct anti-Kazakh policies. As he wrote in 1933 to Levon Mirzoyan, the new leader of Kazakhstan, it was not necessary to reverse indigenization policies in the republic (as had been done in Ukraine at the end of 1932) because Kazakhstan’s geopolitical position was different from Ukraine’s and it was “more difficult for Kazakh nationalism to connect with international interventionism than in Ukraine.” Perhaps the only comparison to the Kazakh events is what happened in Serthar, a district of the Ganzi autonomous region whose Tibetan pastoral population revolted in 1958–1959. Chinese cadres, who controlled grain, stopped supplying a population they considered hostile and extracted as much as possible from it. As in Kazakhstan, “corralled into makeshift communes many people died of diseases,” and perhaps 15 percent of the population (i.e. scores of thousands of people) died in 1960 alone. According to Pianciola, however, “even if systematic research still does not exist for China’s pastoral

71. Graziosi, Uses of Hunger.

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regions during the Great Leap Forward, we can conclude that no pastoral region in China was subjected to the same degree of extreme meat and livestock requisition as Soviet Kazakhstan was from 1930 to 1932.”72

Mortality Peaks Mortality peaks precisely mirrored the political, national, productive, and— especially in China—infrastructural (i.e., the presence of railroads and chan- nels) situation.73 In the USSR, of the approximately 7 million excess deaths of 1930–1934, a few hundred thousands were directly caused by dekulakization, which affected all of the country’s grain-producing regions. In 1930–1931 most of these victims died during transportation or in their ﬁrst months in deporta- tion sites lacking facilities or supplies. In the two following years, however, deported peasants mostly died of hunger in the special villages that had been established (90,000 in 1932 and 150,000 in 1933, according to ofﬁ- cial sources, but some of the 200,000 recorded “fugitives” possibly met with a similar fate). Another 100,000–150,000 peasants died of hunger in Gulag camps.74 In 1931–1932, up to 1.5 million people, most of them Kazakhs (35–40 percent of the indigenous population) died of hunger and disease in Kaza- khstan, where nomads perished even in the months following the harvest. In the spring of 1932, local famines caused by previous excess requisitions hit grain-producing areas. In Ukraine alone, perhaps 100,000 people died, as did scores of thousands in other regions. Then came the “political” famines of 1933, when economic retreat was accompanied by the decision to strike

72. Niccolò Pianciola, “Sacrificing the Kazakhs: The Stalinist Hierarchy of Consumption and the Great Famine in Kazakhstan of 1931–33,” in Tomohiko Uyama, ed., Thirty Years of Crisis: Empire, Violence, and Ideology in Eurasia from the First to the Second World War (Sapporo: Slavic-Eurasian Re- search Center, forthcoming); Niccolò Pianciola, “Towards a Transnational History of Great Leaps For- ward in Pastoral Central Eurasia” (paper presented at the “Communism and Hunger: The Ukrainian, Chinese, Kazakh and Soviet Famines in Comparative Perspective,” conference, Toronto, Septem- ber 2014); Pianciola, Stalinismo di frontiera, pp. 397–480; Ohayon, Sédentarisation des Kazakhs, pp. 225–288; Robert Kindler, Stalins Nomaden: Herrschaft und Hunger in Kasachstan (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2014); Sarah Cameron, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Mass Violence and the Mak- ing of Soviet Kazakhstan (forthcoming); Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, p. 360; Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, p. 311; Wemheuer, Famine Politics, pp. 162–190; and Bianco, Récidive, pp. 181–240. 73. Garnaut, “The Geography of the Great Leap Famine.” In the USSR, too, deaths concentrated along railroad lines, depots, and stations because the areas closest to them were subjected to more intense requisitions and because fleeing, destitute peasants flocked to them looking for food. Werth, “Food Shortages, Hunger and Famines in the USSR.” 74. Khlevniuk, History of the Gulag, pp. 54–82; and Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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politically “problematic” areas, Ukraine first of all, but also the Ukrainian Kuban, North Caucasus, and the Volga. Almost 4 million people died over a few months in Ukraine alone (compared to the approximately 200,000 of the 1930–1932 period), and hundreds of thousands in the latter regions (according to Kondrashin, 700,000 in Volga-Tsentrozem alone for the entire 1930–1934 period), without counting indirect losses. Stephen Wheatcroft maintains that registered deaths per year for the urban population almost doubled throughout the Soviet Union from 1926 to 1933 (from 17.3 per 1,000 inhabitants to 29.5), with a greater increase in Ukraine, where it rose from 14.2 to 32 per 1,000. For the rural population, however, the figures are much more dramatic and the variability much more striking. In 1926, 21 of every 1,000 people died in Soviet rural areas, 22 in the Russian Republic, and 18.9 in Ukraine. In 1933, the figures were 39.5, 30.4, and 69.5 respectively. In Ukraine, therefore, mortality multiplied almost fourfold, and in the Russian Republic it increased by 38 percent. If we consider that the Kuban, the Northern Caucasus, and above all Kazakhstan, were then parts of the Russian Republic, we can better understand the essentially different picture these figures—and Stalin’s policies—depict.75 We have recently learned that famine had its own, possibly politically determined, geography also within Ukraine, where the Kyiv and Kharkiv regions, which had been the areas most affected by the 1918–1920 anti- Bolshevik revolts, suffered the most: almost twice as much as the Dnipropetro- vsk, Odesa, and Vinnytsia oblasts and almost four times as much as the Donets’k (Donbas) and Chernihiv oblasts.76 Estimates of Chinese victims became possible after 1984, when data from the 1953, 1964, and 1982 censuses were released. The estimates ranged from 18 to 38 million, a variation stemming in part from the presence of three different sets of figures (political police, CCP, and statistical records), which fueled often-sharp disagreements and still greatly complicate the picture. In 1979, however, after a tour of the provinces, a commission comprising 200 high officials and headed by Zhao Ziyang calculated a much higher figure, 43–46 million, on the basis of party documents. This estimate reached the West when one of the commission’s members, Chen Yizi, fled to the United

75. Werth, “Food Shortages, Hunger and Famines in the USSR, 1928–1933”; Kondrashin and Penner, Golod; and Wheatcroft, “Toward Explaining the Soviet Famine of 1931–33.” 76. Serhii Plokhii, ed., “The Great Famine Project,” MAPA: Digital Atlas of Ukraine, http://www.gis.huri.harvard.edu/; France Meslé and Jules Vallin, Mortalité et causes de décès en Ukraine au XXe siècle (Paris: INED, 2003); and Oleh Wolowyna et al., “Famine Losses in Ukraine in 1932– 1933 within the Context of the Soviet Union,” in Curran et al., eds., Famines in European Economic History, pp. 192–221.

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States after the June 1989 massacre. At first, only Jasper Becker, who inter- viewed Chen Yizi for his book, took him seriously, but later on Frank Diköt- ter reached similar conclusions and proposed a “conservative” estimate of 45 million deaths for the 1958–1962 period. Not everybody, however, is willing to accept that figure. All authors do agree that the number of victims reached a peak in 1960. Using underestimated 1984 Chinese data, Thomas Bernstein has estimated 11.07 rural deaths per 1,000 inhabitants in 1957, 12.5 in 1958, 14.61 in 1959, 28.58 in 1960, 14.58 in 1961, and 10.32 in 1962. According to Lucien Bianco, of 34.5 million deaths, 17 million (50 percent) occurred in 1960, 8.5 million (25 percent) in 1961, 4 million (12.5 percent) in 1959, 3.35 million in 1962, and less than 1 million in 1958, figures that confirm the role played by Mao’s Lushan decisions.77 Bernstein’s data are of the same magnitude as the pan-Soviet figure but fall short of the Ukrainian and Kazakh tragedies, which can instead be compared with, though are still higher than, those of certain Chinese provinces. According to Yang Dali, who based his calculations on probably underestimated statistics, in Anshui, the hardest-hit region, deaths reached 68.6 per 1,000 in 1960 (that is, less than half the Kyiv or Kharkiv amounts). Anshui was followed by Sichuan with 54 per 1,000 Guizhou with 45.4, Gansu with 41.3, Quinhai with 40.7, and Henan with 39.6. Guanxi, Hunan, and Yunnan recorded just below 30 deaths per 1,000 population, and in other provinces deaths increased to a lesser extent. These differences have been explained by the concentration of state procurements in some regions (grain-producing areas especially, as in the USSR) and, in particular, by the extremism of local leaders, whose Maoist zeal caused village, district or even regional disasters. These leaders first promised Beijing the impossible, then boasted of successes that simply had not happened. They then applied ferocious anti-peasant policies to extract something to show the center. Finally, they covered up the results of their actions, denying all difficulties (when Liu Shaoqui visited his native region, for example, trees were covered with mud and straw to hide the fact that peasants had eaten the bark)—much as Aleksei Larionov was then doing in the USSR (although he

77. Bernstein, “Mao Zedong and the Famine of 1959–1960”; Lucien Bianco, “Comparing Soviet and Chinese Famines as well as their Perpetrators, Actors and Victims” (paper presented at the “Commu- nism and Hunger: The Ukrainian, Chinese, Kazakh and Soviet Famines in Comparative Perspective,” conference, Toronto, September 2014) (quoting estimates put forward by Li Che in 2012); Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, pp. 324–334; Becker, Hungry Ghosts, pp. 266–274; and Yang Jisheng, Tombstone, pp. 394–430.

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caused only economic, not human, disaster).78 Some leaders later repented: Anhui’s Zeng Xisheng, for instance, supported the 1962 pro-peasant turn, including household contracting, and was beaten to death for it by the Red Guards in 1967. In Hunan’s Xinyang, whose “incident” was to become the pretext for correcting CCP policies in 1961–1962, from the spring of 1959 to the winter of 1960, “after false reports of a record harvest, the state even purchased the peasants’ grain rations and seed grain.” The local government then “blockaded the region in an attempt to prevent anyone from leaving,” even as—according to a Chinese historian who had access to local archives— “over two million peasants starved and were beaten to death” out of a total of ten million inhabitants.79 After noting that urban centers, the industrial crop-growing areas, and most of the regions that were poorly served by modern transport were not severely affected, Anthony Garnaut concluded that the pan-Chinese famine “was in fact composed of a number of regional famines concentrated in the areas that supplied most of the grains of the country and bore the burden of providing grain to urban and industrial centers.”80 Although Garnaut did not exclude the responsibility of local leaders, he strengthened the link between famine and state-led requisitions, which was also crucial in the USSR. The direct connection between the size of the requisitions and the grain-producing capacity of certain regions—already stressed by Khlevniuk and others for the USSR—is qualiﬁed in the Soviet case by the role of Stalin’s political and security considerations. These were present in China, too, but seem to have concerned Mao’s determination to survive politically in Lushan more than the fear of “losing” a republic, as Stalin wrote in regard to Ukraine in August, 1932.

The Party Immediately before and during the initial stages of both the GTP and the GLF, the moderate, “rightist” cadres in the Soviet and Chinese parties were

78. A regional party secretary, in 1958 Larionov boasted of huge production increases, especially but not solely in meat production, and was repeatedly decorated by Khrushchev. He committed suicide when it was discovered that most of his achievements were either lies or based on the devastation of his own and the adjacent oblasti—where, for example, he sent predatory expeditions to steal stock and thus inﬂate his “successes.” See A. Agarev, Tragicheskaya avantyura: Sel’skoe khozyaistvo ryazanskoi oblasti 1950–1960 gg. (Ryazan: Russkoe slovo, 2005). 79. Yang, “China’s Agricultural Crisis and Famine of 1959–1961”; Yang Jisheng, Tombstone, pp. 23– 68; Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, p. 317; and Wemheuer, “Dealing with Responsibility,” p. 187. 80. Garnaut, “The Geography of the Great Leap Famine.”

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massively repressed. Despite the clampdown on some major leaders, however, the Chinese party had not yet undergone anything like the taming of the Left opposition in the USSR in the 1920s, when thousands of leading cadres (followers of Leon Trotsky, Grigorii Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev represented a sizable percentage of the central apparatus) had been persecuted and were not readmitted to the party and given new positions unless they “capitulated” to Stalin.81 This helps explain why in the late 1950s the CCP’s central leaders were not as beholden to Mao as Soviet officials were to Stalin. Although it is true that, as Bianco maintains, Chinese leaders—including Deng and Liu—did recognize Mao’s authority, internal party dissent in China in 1958–1961 was much more widespread than in the USSR in 1930–1934, when Stalin kept the VKP(b) under strict control. As the 1930 Syrtsov-Lominadze affair and the paucity of the 1932 opposition indicate, a stance like that taken by Peng Dehuai and other major leaders at Lushan in 1959 was unthinkable in the USSR in the 1930s.82 Confirming the importance of the national question, the most significant party opposition was offered in the USSR by the Ukrainian Communists, whose leader, Mykola Skrypnyk, committed suicide in July 1933 soon after the peak of the Holodomor. In the following years, only one important member of Stalin’s inner circle, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, came to question the policies of his “main friend” (he committed suicide in 1937). Ordzhonikidze’s con- cern, however, was not how the peasants or nomads had been treated but Stalin’s decision to eliminate party leaders in the great purges. In China, even immediately after Peng’s humiliation at Lushan, a major leader like Liu, standing on the Tiananmen podium to celebrate the GLF’s new life, could tell another senior leader, Deng Zihui, that “the method that is being applied is terribly destructive.” In the following months Mao had to persecute hundreds of thousands of party cadres who shared Liu’s view, proving the magnitude of the opposition within the CCP to the GLF policies

81. Pierre Broué, Trotsky (Paris: Fayard, 1988); and Yuri Felshtinsky, “Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and the Left Opposition in the USSR, 1918–1928,” Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique,Vol.31,No.4 (1990), pp. 569–578. 82. Oleg Khlevniuk, “Stalin, Syrtsov, Lominadze: Preparations for the ‘Second Great Breakthrough,’” in Paul R. Gregory and Norman Naimark, eds., The Lost Politburo Transcripts: From Collective Rule to Stalin’s Dictatorship (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 78–96; Frederick C. Teiwes, China’s Road to Disaster: Mao, Central Politicians, and Provincial Leaders in the Unfolding of the Great Leap Forward, 1955–1959 (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1999); and MacFarquhar, Origins of the Cultural Revolution,Vol.2.

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and their consequences.83 Then, in 1960–1961, Liu and Deng Xiaoping, who until 1959 had supported Mao, changed their stance and gained at least partial control over the party center, implementing policies that reversed Mao’s anti- peasant choices and served as a model for Deng’s radical reforms once the Great Cultural Proletarian Revolution (GCPR) was over and Mao was dead. There were of course similarities too. In both the USSR and China, for instance, the little Stalins and little Maos proliferated, and both parties saw their membership rolls increase. In the USSR, membership doubled from 1929 to 1933, reaching a peak of 3.5 million in 1933, and in China—despite the massive anti-rightist purges—it rose from 12.45 million in 1958 to 17.38 in 1961. The powers and privileges that membership afforded in desperate times were appreciated, and some people, especially the younger generation, were willing to participate in the “great construction” under way, despite its consequences.84 Another striking similarity is the personal reactions of some of the Soviet and Chinese Communist leaders to what they saw and experienced. The dramatic personal evolutions of Skrypnyk and Ordzhonikidze (and also Lavrentii Beria, Georgii Malenkov, and Khrushchev) on the Soviet side and of Peng, Liu, and Deng on the Chinese side—as well as Anhui’s leader, Zeng Xisheng, and Zhao Ziyang, then secretary of Guangdong, who changed from a per- secutor of peasants in 1959 into China’s most radical reformist leader of the 1980s—indicate that “repentance” and radical inner transformation were an important part of the Communist leaders’ experience (Alexander Dubcek’sˇ and Aleksandr Yakovlev’s memoirs conﬁrm this was their experience as well).85

Stalin and Mao in the Light of the Famines The two despots shared some traits, but they had essentially different cul- tures, mentalities, and attitudes. Both were extremely able politicians, capable of manipulating those around them and of bending their circles to their will. Both favored informal ways of ruling, convening meetings with leaders of their

83. Xiaohong Xiao-Planes, “Famine et commune populaire: Deng Zihui en 1958–1962” (paper presented at the Journée d’étude INALCO-EHESS “Famines soviétique et chinoise”). 84. Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, p. 41; Moshe Lewin, “The Social Background of Stalinism,” in Making of the Soviet System, pp. 258–285. 85. Hennadii Yeﬁmenko, “The Kremlin’s Nationality Policy in Ukraine after the Holodomor,” in Graziosi et al., eds., After the Holodomor, pp. 69–98; Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin i Ordzhonikidze (Moscow: Rossiia Molodaya, 1993); Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, pp. 85, 88; Zhao Ziyang, Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009); A. Dubcek,ˇ Hope Dies Last (New York: Khodansha International, 1993); and Aleksandr. Yakovlev, Sumerki (Moscow: Materik, 2003).

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choice and bypassing formal bodies, including the Politburo. They carefully built personality cults that they used as powerful tools; they did not toler- ate any opposition or even the possibility or suspicion of it; they frequently resorted to scapegoating; and they were personally cruel and greatly enjoyed revenge. They would also stop at nothing. Both thus belong in the category of twentieth-century revolutionaries for whom “everything was possible,” including the deaths of millions.86 Yet Stalin was a self-taught intellectual with an extremely rational, if para- noid (obsessive-compulsive), disposition. He was a cold thinker, who read Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin and liked to micromanage the policies he devised. Mao, by contrast, had an extremely limited knowledge of Marxism and Western political thought. He enjoyed reading Chinese classics and “had no modern education and no idea of what the modern world was.”87 He was also prone to general speculations and powerful flights of fancy rather than to rational thought and micromanagement. He preferred to stay aloof from policies after he had launched them, and he possessed a populist bent that Stalin lacked, even though Stalin, too, used populism and workerism as political tools. At first, Stalin and Mao did not want famines to happen. In both countries, however, the initial waves of difficulties and mass starvation (1930–1932 in USSR and 1958–1959 in China) were the direct outcomes of their policies, and they were soon aware of the impact of those policies because they both received ample information on what was happening in the countryside. Stalin possibly knew more and maintained firmer control over developments. As Khlevniuk points out, Stalin received two kinds of documents: letters and accounts from local party leaders and luminaries he knew personally (e.g., Turar Ryskulov’s amazing March 1933 report on the Kazakh tragedy and Mikhail Sholokhov’s April 1933 letters on the famine in the Don area); and regular state security (OGPU) reports from various republics and regions, as well as from the central OGPU. These reports were relatively “objective” in character and gave accurate information on the famine, mass mortality, cannibalism, the burgeoning anti-Soviet attitudes in the countryside, and so on.88

86. “Nikolai Valentinov, “Tout est permis,” Le contrat social, No. 1–2 (1966), pp. 17–28, 77–84. 87. Li Zhisui, Private Life of Chairman Mao, p. 351; and A. V. Pantsov, Mao: The Real Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012). 88. Chlevnjuk, “Stalin e la carestia sovietica”; Sholokhov, Pisatel’ i vozhd’; Aleksandr Ia. Livshin, ed., Sovetskoe Rukovodstvo. Perepiska, 1928–1941 (Moscow: Rosspen, 1999), pp. 205–225; Danilov and Berelowitch, eds., Sovetskaya derevnya,Vol.3;Werth,État soviétique contre les paysans;andBlum, Anarchie bureaucratique.

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The fact that Stalin knew the reality does not necessarily mean that he “accepted” it and did not defend himself against it. His first strategy, employed in the official discourse and in his relationships with the outside world, was denial. This was a cynical strategy, with foreign policy officials orchestrating the blackmailing of, and threats against, foreign journalists and diplomats to prevent them from reporting on the famine, while admitting its existence in private conversations with them.89 The second strategy led to the construction of the discourse that Stalin and his associates used in private. In the late 1920s, when faced with the crisis of procurements that his own policies had provoked, Stalin had maintained that the crisis was the result of machinations by enemies and saboteurs, as well as of the mass behaviors of peasants unable to understand their real interests and who were thus the puppets of anti-Soviet elements. Following a similar pattern, in 1931–1933 Stalin denied any relationship between his policies and the famines. As he wrote to Sholokhov, the real culprits were the peasants who stole grain, refused to work in order to sabotage collectivization, and put their own interests before those of the state. To this “guilt-reversal” mechanism he added the theory that Soviet enemies and their agents deliberately overesti- mated the real magnitude of the difficulties to agitate against Soviet power. But if peasants were the real culprits of a situation that was artfully depicted as bleaker than it actually was, Stalin and his henchmen could rightfully refuse to extend help to the villages, except for guaranteeing the next harvest if and when the surviving peasants agreed to work for the state. As Terry Martin has demonstrated, in Ukraine Stalin’s conspiracy theory assumed clear-cut national overtones in the summer of 1932. Here the saboteurs that abetted peasants’ interests and covered their resistance against the state were none other than the Ukrainian Communist Party’s leaders and cadres, whose actions and policies threatened Moscow’s hold on the republic (in letters to Kaganovich, Stalin accused them of being Józef Piłsudski’s agents).90 In the fall of 1932 Stalin could thus decide to use the famine in selected areas to win his war (at the November plenum he spoke of the need to deliver the peasants a “crushing [sokrushitel’nyi] blow”), at the same time denying its existence, and forbidding the use of the term “famine” even in private communications. Hunger thus became a political tool deployed to impose the

89. Lyons, Assignment in Utopia. Exploring German archives, Paolo Fonzi found the minutes of an August 1933 meeting between Otto Schiller, the agricultural expert at the German embassy in Moscow and the head of the Western Section of the Soviet Commissariat on Internal Affairs, D. G. Shtern, during which the latter explicitly urged Schiller not to mention any crisis or “famine” in his reports and to write optimistically about Soviet agriculture. 90. Chlevnjuk, “Stalin e la carestia sovietica”; and Martin, Afﬁrmative Action Empire, pp. 273–308.

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despot’s will, possibly imitating Lenin’s use of the 1921–1922 famine against the Orthodox Church.91 In Ukraine it was coupled with harsh anti-Ukrainian policies to tame the republic’s peasants and elites. This happened while Stalin himself supervised a policy of economic retreat and consolidation that was in full sway even as millions died in Ukraine. He thus never lost control over the party, which in the late summer of 1933 started to celebrate a “victory” that was rightfully presented as Stalin’s personal success.92 Mao, too, received abundant news about the catastrophic consequences of the GLF from the fall of 1958 to the early summer of 1959. He responded by curtailing the assault, much as Stalin had done in the spring of 1930 and in 1932. Mao even spiced his comments with pro-peasant statements, so much so that when the Lushan conference was convened many thought its aim was to criticize the GLF’s flaws. But, feeling his grip over the party center endan- gered by Peng’s and other major leaders’ criticisms, Mao reacted by launching a new, major offensive directed against the party rather than the peasants, who nevertheless ended up being its main victims. In the summers of 1932 and 1959, Stalin’s and Mao’s paths thus diverged. Mao, too, was unquestionably and directly responsible for the human catastrophe that took place in 1960–1961, but it was a catastrophe he did not want—unlike Stalin in the fall of 1932 who ordered certain areas to be hit while otherwise overseeing a full-scale general retreat. Apparently, in the months after Lushan until the beginning of 1960, Mao did not receive information about the tragedy his policies were causing. In part, this was because the new, fiercer anti-rightist campaign discouraged cadres from speaking the truth even in secret reports. Then, in February, news about what was happening in the countryside—mass edema, mass flight, and mass death—started to spread. The catastrophe was soon conceptualized as a national tragedy. After tour- ing the Xinyang region in late 1960, Li Xiannian, a veteran of the Red Army, wept, as apparently Mao himself did later. Earlier in the year, in March 1960, Mao had ordered the circulation of instructions prepared by the Guangdong party committee to fight the five leftist evils denounced in early 1959 and stressed the need to correct errors. However, because the disaster’s magnitude was then still unclear, he also ordered the circulation of a report stating that mass welfare and health were generally good. He did so possibly to prevent his actions from being read as an admission that Peng had been right at Lushan.

91. “V. I. Lenin to V. M. Molotov,” 19 March 1922, in Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 152. 92. Graziosi, Uses of Hunger.

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This is probably why in May, even as the news from the provinces grew increasingly grim, Beijing’s only response was to scale back production targets. One year later, in 1961, Mao added that the conﬂict with Moscow, which mounted throughout the summer of 1960 (mostly because of Mao’s personal choices), had prevented him from realizing the extent of the tragedy. In fact, the Beidaihe Central Work Conference (July 7–August 10, 1960) devoted 70–80 percent of its meetings to international questions, and only marginally dealt with the food situation. In the late summer and early fall of 1960, however, the reality could no longer be denied, especially because of the reports coming from Henan. Mao then lost weight and became so depressed “that he took to his bed, seemingly incapable of confronting adverse news. He was in retreat, trying to ﬁnd a way out of the impasse,” a mental state Stalin seems to have entered for only one or two days after the catastrophic failure of the counteroffensives that he launched at the end of June 1941 to stop the German attack. In late 1960 and early 1961, when acute food shortages were felt even in Zhongnanhai, Mao asked city-dwellers to help peasants. He started to seek scapegoats for a disaster that nobody denied (in contrast to the USSR in late 1932, when the word “famine,” widely used until the summer, was instead banned even from secret reports). Mao found his scapegoats in local cadres, many of whom were now presented as “class enemies” who had exploited the anti-rightist campaign that Mao himself had launched to penetrate the party. After statements such as, “Who would have thought that the countryside harbored so many counter-revolutionaries? We did not expect that the counter-revolution would usurp power at the village level and carry out cruel acts of class revenge,” Mao launched a new campaign to root out the class enemies nestling in the party— that is, the very cadres who had zealously obeyed him. At the same time, he let Liu and Deng draw up a reform program and asked for 1961 to be a year of a “realistic approach,” much as Stalin had done for 1933, when, however, he had also let the Holodomor run its course.93

Emerging from the Crises, and Their Legacies Stalin’s 1933 victory and Mao’s 1960 catastrophe determined two very different kinds of exits and left two different legacies.

93. Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, pp. 118, 437; Li Zhisui, Private Life of Chairman Mao, pp. 351–393; Bernstein, “Mao Zedong and the Famine of 1959–1960”; Wemheuer, Famine Politics, pp. 141–147; Bianco, “Communisme et famine”; and Yang Jisheng, Tombstone, pp. 431–464.

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The demographic damage reached similar proportions but was more re- gionally concentrated in the USSR (in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and regions like the Kuban and the Volga). In both countries, the extraordinary human energy intrinsic to modernizing rural societies was able rapidly, if only partly, to remedy the damage. However, in the Soviet Union, World War II, the urbanization of the 1950s and 1960s, and alcoholism soon complicated the picture—as did the GCPR and, especially, the one-child policy in China. At the socioeconomic level, differences are even more noticeable. Al- though the Chinese economy collapsed because of the GLF, the Soviet economy was stabilized by the measures taken in 1933–1934. However, estimates, such as Grigorii Khanin’s, indicate that in general economic terms the 1928– 1934 period was a negative one for the USSR, too, just as 1958–1962 was for China. Far from contributing to industrialization, the severe extraction of tribute from the countryside via collectivization proved to be a burden on the modernization effort, even though the Soviet state was eventually able to build, after many vicissitudes and at extremely high cost, its own military- industrial sector.94 In the USSR the 1932–1933 agricultural crisis was rapidly overcome because—except for the areas Stalin intentionally targeted—it had been less intense and therefore did not require radical responses. Once the peasants had been tamed, it was enough to stop the special requisitions and policies of late 1932 and early 1933 to return to the more normal state of affairs already pre- vailing in much of the country. In the long run, however, precisely because of the successful imposition of the new collective-servile system, the Soviet countryside slowly declined, and eventually died in the 1960s, bled out by the tribute it paid ﬁrst during World War II and then during the state-controlled postwar urbanization efforts. Hunger-enforced collectivization, which was initially successful insofar as it allowed the Soviet state to live, thus acted like a slow poison on Soviet society. In China the gravity of the crisis called for radical reforms, which Mao at ﬁrst tolerated and then fought against as soon as the country started to breathe again. As a consequence of the new assault Mao unleashed with the GCPR, the Chinese countryside almost crystallized, and urbanization almost halted. In 1980 the rural population still averaged around 80 percent of China’s total population, and rationing was still in force. Paradoxically, this may help explain why villages preserved their vital potential, which Deng was then able to tap at the end of the 1970s when China began to modernize along lines that

94. Girsh I. Khanin, Dinamika ekonomicheskogo razvitiya SSSR (Novosibirsk: Nauka,1991).

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were the opposite of the Soviet ones of the 1950s and 1960s. This was what Mikhail Gorbachev could not do when in the 1980s he decided to reform the Soviet system. Far from being a reservoir of energy, the Soviet villages, devastated by decades of collectivization, instead required assistance, something that should be kept in mind when comparing the success of Deng’s reforms with the failure of Gorbachev’s. On closer consideration, in the USSR the swift stabilization of 1934, sig- naled by the abolition of rationing, was followed by the 1935 compromise that granted Soviet peasants the small family holdings through which Stalin stabilized the new collective system. However, even though the new system ameliorated the situation, it pulled in opposite directions. What Stalin called the “big, social, decisive” collective sector did not interest collective-farm laborers, who knew that their work for it was not rewarded and that its produce belonged to the state. The state, on the other hand, worked to prevent the small, private sector from growing, for fear that the mini-muzhik would devote most of his energy to his plot. The state was thus opposed to the development of the private sector, and the collective farmers to that of the collectivized one. Even though potentially able to guarantee both the survival of the peasantry and the transfer to the state of the bulk of agricultural output, the 1935 “compromise” remained one of the system’s weakest points until its ﬁnal collapse, to which it contributed.95 In China, the reforms started in the summer of 1960. In August, Zhou and Li Fuchun began to shift trade toward the West and to speak of the need for “adjustment” in order to make the switch more palatable to Mao. In September, most of the food continued to be channeled to cities, but urban rations were cut. Then, at the end of October, the center received the report on mass deaths in Xinyang, which left Mao aghast. A decision was taken to send an investigating commission, whose report shocked Beijing even further. More “investigation teams then fanned out over the countryside,” leading “to the removal of a whole series of leaders who had presided over mass death.” In the spring of 1961, Deng, Zhou, and Peng Zhen also toured the country, and Mao and Liu visited their native Hunan, where the latter was deeply shaken by what he saw, much like Skrypnyk had been during his tour of the Ukrainian provinces in the spring of 1932. Upon his return, Liu assumed a

95. Robert W. Davies and Oleg V. Khlevniuk, “The End of Rationing in the Soviet Union, 1934– 1935,” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 51, No. 4 (1999), pp. 557–609; Moshe Lewin, “The Kolkhoz and the Russian Muzhik,” in Making of the Soviet System, pp. 178–188; Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants,pp. 57, 65–67, 72–73; Medvedev, Soviet Agriculture; and Graziosi, “Stalin, krest’yanstvo i gosudarstvennyi sotsializm.”

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confrontational stance, reproaching senior officials in the state security organs for not reporting what was going on in the countryside. In November 1960, personal plots of land were reintroduced, never again to be abolished, not even at the height of the GCPR. In those same weeks, Zhou Enlai and Chen Yu convinced Mao of the need to import grain from the West (as the USSR had done in the late spring of 1932, albeit on a much lesser scale). In 1960–1961, approximately 6 million tons were bought, and imports continued in 1962, this being a crucial difference from what happened in the USSR in 1933–1934. Meanwhile, at the end of 1960, China’s commercial partners, still mostly belonging to the socialist camp, were told that the country “was suffering from an unprecedented natural catastrophe” and was therefore temporarily unable to export foodstuffs—a step Stalin never took in the 1930s. The efforts to fight the famine continued and intensified in 1961. In March and April, Mao told a CCP meeting that perhaps everybody had to stop eating meat (from June 1961 to February 1962 ration cards for meat were suspended even in Beijing, a measure never enacted in Moscow). Deng was willing to put ideology aside and adopt any method to stop the famine (this was when he first uttered his famous remark “I do not care whether it is a white cat or a black cat, it’s a good cat as long as it catches mice”). In May 1961, Liu implicitly condemned Mao’s previous policies and started to propound his “three freedoms and one guarantee” program (freedom to own livestock, to grow vegetables, and to sell them on the market; and the guarantee that a proportion of the collective farm produce — albeit a small proportion — would be reserved to peasant families). As Skrypnyk had done in 1932, Liu openly declared at a top party meeting that the peasants allot- ted 30 percent of the blame for the famine to natural calamities and 70 percent to the party. He himself called it a man-made disaster. He thus “parted company with Mao.” Other major leaders, such as Deng and Li Fuchun, supported him, and Li declared in July that scores of millions were starving because of the CCP’s mistakes. The GLF, Li added, had been “too high, too big, too equal, too dispersed, too chaotic, too fast, too inclined to transfer resources.” In June 1961, public dining halls were abolished, and China’s leaders made the decision to transfer 20 million recent immigrants from the cities back to the countryside in order to reduce the burden of urban grain requirements. In 1962 Liu and Deng continued to work to secure the country’s recovery. Hundreds of thousands of cadres purged since the late 1950s (often by Deng himself) on accusation of “rightism” were rehabilitated, the productive rights

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of peasant families were increased, and slogans were launched against the practice of “collectivizing personal property.” By the summer of that year, peasants controlled 15–30 percent of the land in some provinces, such as Henan, a percentage much higher than that of Soviet kolkhozniki, who averaged 3– 4 percent.96

1929–1933 and 1958–1961 in the Dynamics of Subsequent Soviet and Chinese History The political and social victory over the peasantry and Ukraine, as well as that of the economic stabilization launched at the end of 1932, strengthened Stalin’s power. The VKP(b) celebrated its leader in January 1934 at the Seven- teenth “Congress of Victors,” where erstwhile opponents paid homage to the great leader now towering over millions of corpses, the selfsame leader whom, at the height of the crisis in the spring and summer of 1932, many had wished to eliminate. In the following months Stalin began the purges of the VKP(b) that led to the great show trials of 1936–1938 in which thousands of important leaders were liquidated after being tortured to extract confessions of humiliating, un- believable crimes. Although the newly enacted Soviet constitution celebrated socialism’s victory, the purges grew into a bout of mass terror systematically applied to all social, national, and “sociological” categories and groups Stalin deemed dangerous. A cult fed from above, but based on and fueled by subju- gation, pervaded the country as Stalin’s power became absolute. Not even the defeats suffered in the early months of World War II put his grip in danger, even though Stalin himself apparently feared that they might. At the end of June 1941, his lieutenants went to visit him not to question his leadership but to ask for it. A new, greater victory over a terrible enemy then deﬁnitively cemented Stalin’s status and power, putting them beyond question. In the early 1950s the members of his inner circle, who feared the “psychopath on the throne” (Khrushchev’s words) but depended on him psychologically and intellectually, anxiously awaited his death, which in 1953 they welcomed as a personal liberation. In the months and years thereafter, the most abnormal features of the Soviet system—introduced after 1934 and then renewed and increased after

96. Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, pp. 109, 119–121, 328; Wemheuer, Famine Politics, pp. 221–239; Yang Jisheng, Tombstone, pp. 499–512; Becker, Hungry Ghosts, pp. 235–265; and Bianco, “Commu- nisme et famine.”

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1945—were rapidly eliminated, and silence fell on the “greatest and most human leader of mankind.” Soon, however, the very leaders Stalin had nurtured felt the urge to get rid of his shadow as well, which Khrushchev did in 1956 in his secret speech at the Twentieth Party Congress, roundly condemning the despot’s mistakes and cruelty. At the same time, faith in the system Salin created in 1929–1933 was reaffirmed in the name of the 1945 triumph that supposedly had demonstrated the system’s superiority. The epic of the first five plans (i.e., of the GTP) was recited, collectivization was exalted, and mention of the 1931–1933 famines remained taboo. Khrushchev thus accepted the Stalinist GTP’s economic and systemic legacy while dismantling Stalin’s cult and undermining Soviet prestige, Communist ideology, and, above all, the So- viet system’s political stability and legitimation—a decision Soviet Politburo leaders still regretted in the 1980s.97 In China, the contrary took place. At the great party meeting convened at the beginning of 1962 after the height of the famine, the 7,000 cadres assembled in Beijing heard Liu Shaoqi repeat in his report what he had been saying behind closed doors: that the terrible Hunan famine was a man-made disaster; that 70 percent of it had been caused by political mistakes; and that there was no validity to the “nine good fingers versus a single bad one” allegory that Mao had created to rationalize what had happened. When an annoyed Mao interrupted Liu, the latter courageously replied. Although in the end Liu defended Mao’s “general line,” it was clear to everybody that the line had been wrong and that Mao himself was the real culprit. Mao did finally “acknowledge formal responsibility for the leftist mistakes in the name of the Central Committee,” but he intended to take revenge. In the summer of 1962, after Liu informed him of the proposed redistribution of land among peasants, he “exploded in a torrent of invectives. But Liu would not desist. He spoke in haste: ‘So many people have died of hunger! . . . History will judge you and me, even cannibalism will go into the books!’” Mao, however, fought back, and in September he contrived to have the CCP Central Committee approve a resolution condemning all forms of individual land use within the people’s communes. Liu’s and Deng’s reforms were thus stopped, but they were not fully reversed. Small production teams remained the basic units of account, and small peasant holdings were not abolished. Despite this victory, however, Mao knew that a large section of the party center thought him wrong, and he therefore believed it necessary to “bomb

97. Khlevniuk, Stalin, pp. 150–197; Oleg V. Khlevniuk and Yoram Gorlizki, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–53 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Graziosi, Urss dal trionfo al degrado, pp. 139–190.

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the Headquarters,” something Stalin never considered necessary because he always securely occupied them. In 1965, when the occasion arose (it was provided by a play in which a brave sixteenth-century official dared to speak the truth to the emperor, which Mao interpreted as an indirect apology for Peng Dehaui’s behavior at Lushan), Mao launched his attack. The GCPR was openly directed at “big party tyrants”: Liu, who died a terrible death, Deng, and their allies were its main targets. Soon, however, the entire country was ravaged by chaos, mass violence, torture, and persecution.98 After Mao’s death in 1976, the surviving reformist leaders, Deng in particular, devised and applied policies that were the opposite of those Khrushchev pursued in 1956. For a short time, it seemed that something similar to de- Stalinization might take place in China as well. A “democracy wall” opened in Tiananmen Square in October 1978. Two months later, Peng, who had died in 1974 after years of beatings at the hands of the Red Guards, was rehabilitated, with Deng praising him as “courageous in battle, open and straightfor- ward, incorruptible and impeccable, and strict toward himself.” Soon, however, perhaps recalling the upsetting consequences of the Twen- tieth Congress, and fearing the destabilization of a country and a party tested by two consecutive disasters for which it bore responsibility, Deng decided to stop attacking Mao, lest he undermine the political legitimacy of Com- munist rule. At the same time, under the influence of the 1960–1962 experience, as well as the now evident economic failure of socialism (which in 1956 still seemed to have a promising future), Deng reversed Mao’s economic policy, de facto abandoning most socialist economic tenets. The “Mao question” was then closed in June 1981 by an official assessment that blamed Mao for the GLF and the Cultural Revolution while reaffirming his role as the founder of modern China, a leader “whose contribution far outweighs his mistakes.”99

98. Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, p. 337; Yang Jisheng, Tombstone, pp. 409–505; Lowell Dittmer, “Death and Transﬁguration: Liu Shaoqi’s Rehabilitation and Contemporary Chinese Politics,” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 40, No. 3 (1981), pp. 455–479; Harrison E. Salisbury, Heroes of My Time (New York: Walker, 1993); Wemheuer, “Dealing with Responsibility”; and MacFarquhar, Origins, Vol. 3. 99. Domes, Peng Te-huai, pp. 117–118; Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Zhao Ziyang, Prisoner of the State; Yang Zhong Mei, Hu Yaobang: A Chinese Biography (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1988); “Resolution on certain questions in the history of our Party since the founding of the People’s Republic of China”, adopted by the Sixth Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Com- munist Party of China, 27 June 1981, in “Chinese Communism Subject Archive,” Marxists.org, https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/cpc/history/01.htm.

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Dealing with the “Memory” of Famine Even though Khrushchev mentioned the 1946–1947 famine, and many Ukrainian leaders had personally experienced the Holodomor, the famines of the 1930s remained a taboo subject in the USSR for more than 50 years. Only diaspora communities in the West (especially in Canada and the United States) publicized and discussed the 1930–1933 events. Within the USSR, “memory” was neither recorded nor organized. As participants in the oral history projects of the 1990s were to discover, over time the Stalinist period, 1928–1953, often solidified in the survivors’ minds as a time of suffering in which the hardships of collectivization were difficult to distinguish from those of the war or the postwar period. Once the 1930s famines entered the public discussion in the late 1980s, the importance of their national dimension forcefully emerged. In post-1991 Ukraine, famine became an important tool of state and national building. In Kazakhstan, by contrast, possibly because of the absence of large diaspora communities, as well as worries about frictions with Moscow, but mainly because of the very scale of the devastation it produced, the 1931–1933 catastrophe was officially acknowledged but did not play a central role in the public debate. In Russia, instead, the famine was presented as a pan-Soviet tragedy, with national differences downplayed. In the 1990s, publications highlight- ing these differences were not hindered, and historians in the former USSR were relatively free to discuss the issue with one another. The consolidation of a new national, and nationalist, line slowly made such cross-national discussions much less common, even though many of the scholars had greatly valued such interactions and regretted their diminution.100 In China, by contrast, the highest party leaders mentioned the famine soon after Mao’s death. In 1980, Hu Yaobang referred to 20 million victims, and Deng admitted to having been a “hot head” in 1958.101 They also allowed selected, but important, information to appear, such as the 1953, 1964, and 1982 censuses. Nonetheless, although studying the famine was not wholly forbidden, publication was closely controlled, and no open debate was allowed. As Wemheuer notes, the official interpretation of the events focused on the

100. Commission on the Ukrainian Famine, Investigation of the Ukrainian Famine, 1932–33: Report to Congress, Appendix (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1988); Graziosi et al., eds., After the Holodomor; Serhii Bukov’skyi, Zhyvi (Kiev: “Lystopad Fil’m,” 2008); Viktor Kondrashin, Golod 1932–1933 godov: Tragediya rossiiskoi derevni (Moscow: Rosspen, 2008); and Kul’chyts’kyi, Golod 1932–1933 rr. v Ukraїni yak genotsyd. 101. Pantsov, Mao, p. 475.

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mistakes and shortcomings of the party’s policies, not on the famine. The crisis was, and is, thus explained as resulting from leftist mistakes, a lack of experience with socialist construction, and weather as an external factor. These factors, according to the regime’s narrative, combined to produce a “tragedy of good intentions.” Discussions of Mao’s role have been discouraged, and the suffering of peasants has never entered an ofﬁcial discourse that does not present them as victims. According to Wemheuer, many intellectuals endorsed this narrative, presenting themselves as “naive children who blindly trusted Chairman Mao and the Communist Party.” By 1959, most of them had already left the villages to which they had been sent in 1958 to support the GLF. In their memories, the GCPR rather than the GLF was the real tragedy. Similarly, in urban Soviet memories of the 1930s, the terror of 1936–1938, not the 1930–1933 rural catastrophe, was the true turning point. Local cadres, by contrast, especially those who questioned the GLF or were accused of “rightist” deviation, did evoke the villagers’ horrendous expe- riences and how hunger had been used “as a weapon to control the peasants.” Ordinary villagers themselves vividly recalled their suffering at the hands of the Communist Party. They mentioned no enthusiasm on their part, only “working in the ﬁelds and on the construction sites day and night,” followed by hunger, terror, and cannibalism.102

Historiography and Sources The fact that the first important books on events that took place several decades earlier appeared almost simultaneously—Conquest in 1986 and Becker in 1996—requires explanation. Communism’s loss of aura certainly played a role. Another factor was the opposite judgments the post-Stalinist and post-Maoist leaders offered about the 1929–1933 and 1958–1961 pe- riods respectively. The rhetoric surrounding the first Five-Year Plans in the Soviet official discourse of the 1970s and the taboos imposed on collectivization and the famines until the mid-1980s contrast with the Chinese leaders’ decision to release census data in that same decade, thus starting a debate in which economists participated with special issues of the Journal of Compara- tive Economics (1993) and China Economic Review (1998).

102. Penny Kane, Famine in China, 1959–61: Demographic and Social Implications (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1988); Thaxton, Catastrophe and Contention; and Wemheuer, “Dealing with Responsibil- ity.” Wemheuer quotes the 1981 “Resolution” and the retired central party leader Bo Yibo’s Reﬂections on Certain Major Decisions and Events (1993).

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Diasporas also played crucially different roles. In the West, the Ukrainian community, for example, was active as early as the late 1940s and in the 1980s strongly supported Conquest’s work. In contrast, the Chinese diaspora kept a low proﬁle. In Taiwan, however, the “Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist League” published a series of booklets in the early 1960s, and Hong Kong after the 1980s became the most important locus of discussion and publication, especially in Chinese, where books such as Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone, forbidden on the mainland, could be published.103 Both historiographies on the famines have been highly contentious, especially but not solely in the 1980s and 1990s. Nonetheless, serious scholarly debates based on real research have largely replaced shrill polemics, and the on- going disputes seem not to be warranted by the substantial agreement about what happened. We now have, for example, a rather clear and widely shared picture of the magnitude and causes of the Soviet and the Chinese human catastrophes. The continuing disputes thus at times seem more like legacies of the past than actual disagreements. The debates still animating the two communities of historians also con- ﬁrm some of the already noted differences. The nationality factor is, for example, at the center of the post-Soviet debates, especially regarding Ukraine (and increasingly Kazakhstan as well), stressing Moscow’s crucial role in the respective national tragedies, which some believe to belong within the “genocide” category. In China, by contrast, the poorer and more variable quality of the available sources, including statistical compilations, has fueled some of the most intense controversies, including disagreements about the number of victims. This in its turn directly links with the Soviet and Chinese regimes’ different fates, which are possibly consequences of the different paths on which their leaders embarked in 1956 and 1978 respectively. The limited, but substantial opening of the central Soviet archives after 1991 has furnished scholars with a rich documentary base that includes political police reports, parts of Stalin’s

103. Justin Yifu Lin, “Collectivization and China’s Agricultural Crisis in 1959–1961,” Journal of Po- litical Economy, Vol. 98, No. 6 (1990), pp. 1228–1252; Becker, Hungry Ghosts; Ukrainian Association of Victims of Russian Communist Terror, The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: A White Book,Vol.2,The Great Famine in Ukraine in 1932–33 (Detroit: Dobrus, 1955); Frank Sysyn, “The Ukrainian Famine of 1932–3: The Role of the Ukrainian Diaspora in Research and Public Discussion,” in Problems of Genocide (Toronto: Zoryan Institute, 1997), pp. 74–117; Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist League, Republic of China, The Great Famine in the Chinese Mainland under Communist Regime in 1960, (Taipei: 1960–1962); Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist League, Republic of China, An Unprecedented Famine on the Chinese Mainland and the People’s Communes (Taipei: 1960–1962); and Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist League, Republic of China, Famine as Told by Letters from the Chinese Mainland (Taipei: 1960–1962).

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personal correspondence, sound statistical data (except for Kazakhstan), and so on.104 Unfortunately, the temporal distance from the events has limited the validity of oral history projects. The Chinese Communist regime’s continuity has instead meant there is no access to central archives, even state ones, which in China are directly administered by the party (in the USSR an at least formal distinction between party and state archives survived). Moreover, Chinese statistical data are poorer than Soviet data as a result of the country’s less-developed central administrative structure in the late 1950s. However, after Mao’s death Chinese leaders did not deny the existence of the famine. They allowed cautious study of it, and local archives hold plenty of ofﬁcial documents—such as investigations and inquiries— produced during the 1961–1962 reformist period. In the post-1933 USSR the famines were unmentionable. Other than the 1937 and 1939 censuses, we have no immediate post-famine documentation except for an investigation on collectivization, famine, and sedentarization conducted in Kazakhstan in 1934.105 During the GCPR the Red Guards released some important material, including Lin Biao’s presumed diary, but the authenticity of these materials is not always certain. The GCPR thus played a role similar to that of World War II in the USSR. In German-occupied Ukraine, for instance, famine resurfaced as an issue, but its use was strongly inﬂuenced by Nazi propaganda, which undermined the value of the then-published material.106 The testimonies of foreign engineers and workers are valuable sources for the study of the Soviet GTP, as are consular and diplomatic reports about the famine—the German, Italian, and Polish reports possibly being the best. By contrast, those of foreign—mostly Soviet and East German—advisers in China are less useful because they were not free to record or publish their impressions. The advisers also mostly lived in cities and left the country en masse in the summer of 1960. Unlike the USSR of the early 1930s, China did not have a network of foreign consulates on its territory, especially in

104. In 1941, the Germans captured the Smolensk Archives, which contained rich documentation on collectivization. Merle Fainsod used these data to produce his important Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), the ﬁrst book based on Soviet archival material. The captured archives, however, included little information about the famine, indirectly proving its geographical (and national) concentration. 105. Pianciola, Stalinismo di frontiera, pp. 26–28. The still-secret parts of the central archives may hold some surprises. 106. Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004).

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the vast rural areas. British information services were apparently careless, and the very good work done by Taiwanese intelligence was undermined by U.S. skepticism, fueled by the suspicion that Chiang wanted to “drag [the United States] into an invasion of the mainland.”107 Finally, in both countries the nature itself of the Soviet and the Chinese systems has complicated the work of historians by reducing to a minimum the presence of autonomously produced sources. Scholars have thus been forced to look back at events through the eyes of the state, the political police, and the party information networks. Though not impossible, social history is more difﬁcult, as shown by the problems raised by the letters and petitions sent to authorities in both countries. In China, however, it was still possible—at least until recently and at least in special circumstances—to conduct good oral history projects, and some were indeed carried out.108

Conclusions

The two offensives, the leaders who initiated them, the crises that resulted, the famines they generated, the ways out that were devised, and the impact on the two countries’ subsequent histories were both similar and very different. Having commented on these similarities and differences throughout this essay, I prefer to conclude by raising questions concerning how two of the most important interpretative categories used in analyzing the two regimes— the totalitarian and the genocidal—stand up against the record. Do the images we now have of the USSR in 1928–1933 and of China in 1958–1961 (to which the years of the Great Terror and the GCPR could easily be added) correspond to the ones usually associated with the totalitarian category as deﬁned by its classic proponents? Overall it does not for the

107. Andrea Graziosi, “Foreign Workers in Soviet Russia, 1920–40: Their Experience and Their Legacy,” International Labor and Working Class History, No. 33 (Spring 1988), pp. 38–59; Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, p. 345; Dmytro Zlepko, Der ukrainische Hunger-Holocaust im Spiegel geheimge- haltener Akten des deutschen Auswärtigen Amtes (Sonnenbühl: Helmut Wild, 1988); Marco Carynnyk et al., eds., The Foreign Ofﬁce and the Famine: British Documents on Ukraine and the Great Famine of 1932–1933 (Kingston, ON: Limestone Press, 1988); Graziosi, ed., Lettere da Kharkov;andDi- ana Bojko, ed., Holodomor: The Great Famine in Ukraine, 1932–1933 (Warsaw: Institute of National Remembrance, 2009). Paolo Fonzi recently completed a thorough exploration of German archives, which yielded scores of valuable new documents he will be publishing in translation. 108. Andrea Graziosi, “The New Soviet Archival Sources: Hypotheses for a Critical Assessment,” Cahiers du monde russe, Vol. 40, No. 1–2 (1999), pp. 13–64; Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine, p. 342; Thireau, “Quand la violence contribue à la famine”; Aleksandr Livshin, Vlast’ i obsshchestvo: Dialog vpismakh(Moscow: Rosspen, 2002); Zhou Xun, Great Famine in China, 1958–1962, pp. 142–161; Forgotten Voices; Wemheuer, “Dealing with Responsibility”; and Thaxton, Catastrophe and Contention.

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Soviet Union, the country I have studied at greatest length. Leading experts on China, such as Dikötter, have asked themselves the same question and answered it in the same way. Rather than “strictly disciplined communist societies,” these were societies torn apart by a war waged by the state against the majority of the population, societies in social and moral disintegration. That does not mean we should stop using the category. In fact, “totalitarianism” is a good term with which to define societies over which the state and politics (and thus the leaders’ ideas and mentalities) hold supreme power aggressively employed in brutal ways—often causing unexpected consequences—to achieve what can be termed totalitarian goals. But the category should be qualified to make its “classic” definition fit extremely violent, conflict-ridden, and primitive—not “modern”—realities. The second question concerns the use of a term, “genocide,” that is equally problematic for historians, albeit for different reasons. The problem derives in this case from its legal, and thus crystallized definition, which is difficult to use with the flexibility that historical explanation requires. That definition, moreover, gives rise to controversies of a moral, rather than interpretative, nature. This is not to deny or even diminish the importance of moral judgment in history or to suggest that historians reject the use of the genocide category. Yet it, too, needs to be made more flexible if it is to fit history’s multiform and plastic reality. As the Soviet and Chinese cases indicate, history does not usually present its students with clear-cut, dual options such as capitalism versus socialism, market versus state, premodern versus modern, genocide versus mass murder, and so on. General categories can thus be singled out, but they cannot be studied in isolation. Rather, they must be conceptualized as sets of related phenomena structured like ladders, or fans, whose steps or ribs indicate different intensities or degrees of purity and hybridization. Genocide, for instance, unquestionably reached its purest form, and thus its acme, in the Nazis’ systematic campaign to exterminate all Jews. However, it is possible to maintain that the events discussed here represent different va- rieties and degrees of a broader, and more useful, category of genocide. The Soviet experience of 1931–1933 presents us with two cases, the Ukrainian and the Kazakh, which differ both in that the former was intended and that the latter was more intense and disruptive. In China we are confronted with a national tragedy that was directly if unwillingly caused by the decisions of the Communist leaders—Mao’s decisions first and foremost—and that was soon perceived as such by many of those same leaders, even if never acknowledged publicly. One could claim that, given the scale of the tragedy and the mechanisms that generated it, this, too, was genocide, albeit directed against one’s

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own people. To do so, though, is perhaps to extend the concept too far and to allow its contours to become too blurred.

Acknowledgments

This article originated from a paper I prepared for the conference “Com- munism and Hunger: The Ukrainian, Chinese, Kazakh and Soviet Famines in Comparative Perspective,” organized in Toronto by the “Holodomor Re- search and Education Consortium” in September 2014. I am grateful to the journal’s anonymous referees for their helpful criticisms.

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