Golod v SSSR, 1946–1947 godov: Proiskhozhdenie i posledstviia (review)

Until relatively recently Western scholars, including economic historians, knew very little about the famine which struck the Soviet Union in the early postwar years. Khrushchev described it in his memoirs some 30 years ago, and Zhores Medvedev devoted several pages to the subject (relying in part on a lengthy citation from Khrushchev) in his excellent study of Soviet agriculture. Medvedev did not, however, venture any estimate of the famine's demographic impact in terms of either mortality or morbidity.¹ It is interesting to contrast this relative dearth of historical literature with Western discussions of the famine of 1932–33. Even without access to archives, historians were able to describe the nature of the earlier catastrophe, analyze its causes, and venture quite informed guesses as to the number of victims. Part of the reason for the dearth of scholarship on the later famine lies with the specific difficulties of doing historical research on the years of so-called "late Stalinism." This was a period of Soviet history from which the published sources, be they newspapers, specialized monographs, or academic journals, are either devoid of meaningful information or – as in the case of the trade union daily, Trud, or the factory newspapers – give such a partial description of events that, even when their accounts turn out to be accurate, you simply cannot use them to venture any kind of reliable interpretation.

Access to archival sources has now made it possible to reconstruct the history of this period, so it is not surprising that historians from the former Soviet Union and Western countries have increasingly made it a focus of their research. It is also not surprising that an event as traumatic as the famine should be one of the first postwar topics to attract scholarly attention, in particular from historians in those parts of the former Soviet Union which it most immediately affected. Articles and books on the famine in Moldavia (Moldova) and Ukraine appeared during perestroika, followed soon after by collections of documents and more general studies on the famine in Russia and the USSR as a whole.²

Among Russian historians the one who has perhaps devoted the most attention to the famine is V. F. Zima. The book reviewed here was originally published in Russia in 1996, and will be found in many, if not most, libraries with large holdings in Russian and Soviet Studies.³ It has certainly been available long enough to be read and cited by a number of Westerners working on the postwar period. Nevertheless, it has been reissued in the West in a far more expensive edition as part of a collaborative series between the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Russian History and the Edwin Mellen Press, under the general heading of Russian Studies in the Humanities. Prior to writing his book, Zima had already published several articles on the famine, and he has continued to take up famine-related issues since.⁴ To the best of my knowledge his book is the only comprehensive monograph on the subject. It is a very solid piece of scholarship, is rich in detail, and situates the famine in a larger historical context than its title implies. It begins with a very good summary of the state of Soviet agriculture as it emerged from World War II, and extends its analysis well past 1947 – for some topics even into the period immediately following Stalin's death in 1953. Even though the famine was most severely felt in rural areas, most intensely in Moldavia and Western Ukraine, Zima traces its impact on most areas of Soviet life: the rationing system, the standard of living of urban workers, rural-urban migration, public health, crime and criminality, and foreign assistance. In this sense this is a book about much more than the famine or even Soviet agriculture: it offers a panorama of the main features of Soviet social history during the postwar reconstruction. I...