Political Famines in the USSR and China a Comparative Analysis
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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 com- parative 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– Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 19, No. 3, Summer 2017, pp. 42–103, doi:10.1162/JCWS_a_00744 © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 42 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_a_00744 by guest on 27 September 2021 Political Famines in the USSR and China 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 genoci- dal.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 al- ready 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. 43 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_a_00744 by guest on 27 September 2021 Graziosi 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 him- self 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 imposi- tion 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. 44 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_a_00744 by guest on 27 September 2021 Political Famines in the USSR and China again after the Lushan Conference, concerning “rapid grain procurements, large investments in construction projects, and an early transition to com- mune 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.