A ranking politburo member is touring the farmlands in the country and in order to inspect that year's potato crop on the collective farms. He approaches a farmer and asks him, "Comrade farmer, how large will the potato harvest be this year?"
The farmer replies, "Excellent comrade! Why this year's potato harvest is so good that were you to pile them up, they'd tickle the feet of God himself!"
The politburo member nods and says "That's excellent comrade farmer, but I must remind you that there is no God in the Soviet Union"
The farmer smiles and responds "that's okay Comrade Inspector, there's aren't any potatoes either!"
My old Soviet History prof used to begin every class with a joke, either about some aspect of soviet history or Michael Jackson. I distinctly remember the one he told above (and why not? It's hilarious), and it came to mind as I was reading about the US drought a few days back.
It seems to me that the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s and the American Dustbowl of the same era share a lot of commonality - I think both can be seen as the result of their respective country's economic systems taken to their (il)logical extremes. Both events occurred because the governments presiding over them simply could not imagine acting in anything other than a doctrinaire fashion.
If you'll remember, right in the middle of the Great Depression, drought took hold in the American west. A region that saw little rainfall in good years saw that meagre total vanish at the very moment that industrial work was disappearing in the east. Farming in this part of the country was always a risky proposition, the land simply wasn't made for large scale farming - it was only after the Columbia River was brought under control and rerouted in the 19th century that irrigation became feasible. Even then, homesteaders had to hope for better than average rainfalls in order to eke out a living in this environment. [Anybody who has ever visited the region surely has noticed the complete lack of suburbs - there is city, then country. This is because of the limits caused by water scarcity]. The result was predictable, farmers who were already struggling to make ends meet found it impossible to survive successive years of crop failure. Heavily mortgaged farms were forclosed on by the banks. Whole families were forced from the land that had been in their families for generations. Many ended up working as fruit pickers in California (which had far better irrigation), anyone who has read any Steinbeck (especially The Grapes of Wrath) should be familiar with the story of the Okies and itinerant labour in the 1930s.
What turned drought to dust however had very little to do with natural factors beyond the control of man. Instead it was a strict adherence to capitalist principles that turned a disaster into a tragedy. The banks who had repossessed these farms were now faced with an equally perplexing problem - they now owned huge tracts of land that no one wanted to buy but cost money to own. Rather than letting these farms lie fallow, the banks instead planted fast-growing (and nutrient sapping) crops like wheat and paid a few recently foreclosed farmers to harvest the yields. These crops were simply not suited to the land on which they were grown. They eroded the soil of nutrients and turned the delicate grassland into a veritable desert in a few short years. The banks though, had little concern for long-term implications of their actions. They needed money right away (remember, this was during the Depression when American banks were closing regularly) and these fast growing crops would maximize whatever profits they could wrest from the land. In other words, the banks were acting completely in accordance with capitalist principles - they had to, or else they themselves would go under.
How does all of this lead to the Dustbowl? Where 50 ft high walls of dust swept across the country, burying houses in a fine silt, even leaving a coating on Boston? The drought and windstorms certainly played a part, but it was the factory farming employed by the banks that caused the Dustbowl. The land in the southern plains had been so overfarmed that by the time the winds started to blow, the soil was now dust. Completely sapped of both nutrients and the native grassland roots that would keep it in place, the wind simply picked up the dust and when the wind stopped the entire region was barren. At the very moment when agriculture could save the displaced industrial workers, farmers themselves were displaced.
Meanwhile, over in the USSR, farming was causing equally as many problems for the ruling ideology of the day. Under Joseph Stalin, the country had begun the first of successive "five year plans", which was a completely insane attempt to modernize an overwhelmingly agrarian society in a short period of time to meet the standards set by the western democracies. Farming under Lenin and Stalin had a troubled history. Initially it was thought that under the command economy, farmers would feed the urban workers and the surplus would be sold by the government on the international markets who would then use the money that created to further build their socialist utopia. There were obvious and numerous problems with this (relatively simple) plan, not the least of which was that the rural peasantry didn't really care too much for Bolshevism and found little reason to farm over and above what they needed for subsistence (as it was just going to be taken from them anyway). It was unsurprising then that in the early years of the Soviet Union, crop yields were far below what was needed to keep the system afloat. Lenin's compromise, the New Economic Policy (NEP), allowed for low level capitalism for farmers (they could sell a certain percentage of their yields at local markets) solved many of their agricultural problems, but just as farm yields were rising, the Great Depression was setting in, and the sale of wheat brought in far less money than was anticipated/needed.
Which brings us to Ukraine and Stalin. There were two factors over and above everything else that led to the famine of 1932-1933. The first was collectivization of the farms and the second was the level of distrust between Moscow and the republics. Even mores than Lenin, Stalin traded heavily on the rhetoric of "class enemies". While that worked fairly well in the cities (where the rich were easy to spot), it was far more problematic in the countryside (where serfdom only ended in 1863!). Stalin argued that poor crop yields were obviously caused by enemies of the state - upper class farmers (kulaks) who were resistant to the revolution. Lenin had called them "bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers who batten on famine.”. The solution then was to send the kulaks to forced labour camps, nationalize their farmland, and collectivize the farms across the republics. Collective farming was, bluntly, a disaster, farmers still had little incentive to farm beyond subsistence levels as any surplus would be taken from them, and Party officials were deeply suspicious that the farms were not working at top capacity. As the crop yields dipped lower and lower, the Party Officials in Moscow demanded a greater portion of their yields - leaving the Ukrainian farmers with not enough to eat. Pleas of starvation fell on deaf ears and in early 1933 "corpses lined the roads, whole families disappeared, and instances of cannibalism were reported". The total number of deaths is debated but the most accepted number seems to be around 5 million Ukrainians.
So where does this leave us? Well obviously, the Ukrainian Famine is FAR worse an episode in world history. A country not only let its people starve to death, but called them liars when they said they were starving. That's not to deny that the Dust Bowl finally exposed some of the fatal flaws in free market capitalism that had been ignored in North America - that government intervention is not only to be tolerated but is necessary.
Watching the footage of the prairie drought of 2012 gives me the sneaking feeling that we've forgotten what we learned in the 1930s
