by Tom Standage
In a speech in November 1932, Stalin argued that the difficulties with grain collection were being caused by saboteurs and “class enemies.” He regarded this as a challenge to the authority of the regime by farmers who were deliberately obstructing his collectivization scheme. “It would be stupid if Communists . . . did not answer this blow, by some collective farmers and collective farms, with a knockout blow,” he declared. But sending hundreds of thousands of farmers to the Gulag would be difficult and expensive. Letting them starve was much easier. In another speech in February 1933, Stalin approvingly quoted Lenin’s dictum “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.” An official report in March stated: “The slogan ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat’ is adopted by rural organizations without any adjustment—let them perish.” Stalin did not initially intend collectivization to lead to starvation, but if “idlers” who refused to go along with it starved, that was, he implied, their own fault for being too lazy to grow enough food to feed themselves.
In early 1933 a system of internal passports was introduced to prevent people fleeing to the cities from the starving villages in Ukraine and the North Caucasus. Stalin also sent in agents of the OGPU, the state security agency, to step up the collection of grain in Ukraine, which he felt the local authorities were pursuing with insufficient vigor. A Politburo memo had complained of the “shameful collapse of grain collection in the more remote regions of Ukraine” and called for officials to “break up the sabotage of grain collection” and “eliminate the passivity and complacency toward the saboteurs.” And a report sent to Stalin in March 1933 by Stanislav Kosior, who was in charge of the collectivization program in Ukraine, noted that the famine had not yet taught the peasants enough of a lesson. “The unsatisfactory preparation for sowing in the worst affected regions shows that the hunger has not yet taught many collective farmers good sense,” Kosior declared.
Malcolm Muggeridge, a British journalist who visited Ukraine in May 1933, reported that officials “had gone over the country like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible; they had shot and exiled thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages; they had reduced some of the most fertile land in the world to a melancholy desert.” But his report was ridiculed by other journalists who had been taken on stage-managed visits to model communes and who insisted there was no famine. Yet in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev the Italian consul reported “a growing commerce in human meat,” and the authorities were putting up posters saying. At the same time, grain exports were increased in order to maintain the pretense that there was no problem, and that agriculture was booming under the Soviet regime. When some foreign aid organizations offered food aid, it was refused.
The political nature of the famine was most starkly outlined by Comrade Hatayevich, a senior official in the Ukraine, who explained in 1933 that “a ruthless struggle is going on between the peasantry and our regime. It’s a struggle to the death. This year was a test of our strength and their endurance. It took a famine to show them who is master here. It has cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay. We’ve won the war.” It was a war waged by the regime against its own people, using food as a weapon. The famine ended in 1934 when Stalin scaled back the state procurements of grain and conceded that households should be allowed a small plot of land on which to grow vegetables and keep a cow, a pig, and up to ten sheep. These private plots, rather than collective farms, provided most of the country’s food for the next fifty years.
Some seven to eight million people had died of starvation, the victims of Stalin’s desire to maintain grain exports at all costs, both to convince the world of the superiority of communism and to fund Soviet industrialization. The famine’s greatest impact was in Ukraine, where the millions of dead are now widely considered to have been the victims of genocide. One eyewitness, Fedor Belov, called the famine “the most terrible and destructive that the Ukrainian people have ever experienced. The peasants ate dogs, horses, rotten potatoes, the bark of trees, grass—anything they could find. Incidents of cannibalism were not uncommon. The people were like wild beasts, ready to devour one another. And no matter what they did, they went on dying, dying, dying. They died singly and in families. They died everywhere—in yards, on streetcars, and on trains. There was no one to bury these victims of the Stalinist famine. A man is capable of forgetting a great deal, but these terrible scenes of starvation will be forgotten by no one who saw them.”
THE WORST FAMINE IN HISTORY
After the Communists, led by Mao Zedong, seized power in China in 1949, they were very keen to follow the Soviet model of collectivization, which had supposedly been such a success in increasing food production and underwriting industrialization. Leaflets, pamphlets, and propaganda films distributed in China lauded the Soviet triumph. As one Chinese woman later recalled: “We heard a lot of propaganda about the communes in the USSR. There were always films about the fantastic combine-harvesters with people singing on the back on their way to work. In the films there were always mountains and mountains of food. So many films showed how happy life was on the collective farms.” Groups of Chinese peasants were sent on tours of Ukraine and Kazakhstan to visit “model” collectives and see how they worked. They noted that there was always lots of food on the table and modern equipment to work the fields. Mao Zedong decreed that China would adopt the same approach.
He started by establishing a state monopoly on grain. Grain was to be sold to the state at a fixed low price, ensuring that it could be sold abroad at a profit to raise money to pay for industrialization. Markets were closed, production quotas were assigned in each region, and a system of rationing was introduced to distribute grain in the cities. The state gradually took control of the grain supply. Mao then embarked on a collectivization program in order to increase production. Small groups of households, then dozens at a time, and finally hundreds at a time were combined to form collective farming communities. Tools, animals, and grain had to be pooled. This system was imposed by inviting farmers in a particular area to a meeting, and then not allowing them to leave until they “agreed” to form a collective—a process that sometimes took several days. As in the Soviet Union, a system of internal passports was introduced in 1956 to stop farmers fleeing to the cities.
Mao was following the Stalinist model closely, with predictably similar consequences. Grain production fell by 40 percent in 1956 alone, as collectivization robbed farmers of any incentive to maximize their output. People in some areas began to starve. Animals were killed and eaten, so that there were fewer of them to work the land. Meanwhile the Communist Party boasted of its great success in collectivizing agriculture. The harvest figures for 1949 were revised downward, to make subsequent years’ figures look bigger, but food production had in fact fallen to a level below that of the 1930s. But Mao wanted to outdo the Soviet Union, and he began planning a “Great Leap Forward” that would, he hoped, industrialize China almost overnight. When some of his colleagues argued for a more gradual approach, he purged them from the Party. Even Nikita Krushchev, the new Soviet leader, who had come to power after Stalin’s death in 1953, warned Mao not to go ahead with his program, which Krushchev understood was intended to “impress the world—especially the socialist world—with his genius and leadership.” Krushchev was aware of the harm that Stalin’s agricultural policies had done, and had quietly unwound many of them. But the growing rivalry between the Soviet Union and China meant that Mao did not just want to emulate Stalin’s supposed achievements, but to outdo them. He promised that food production would double or triple within a year, along with the output of steel.
To make this happen, Party officials ordered the establishment of backyard furnaces and told everybody to hand over a certain quota of metal items. These would be transformed into steel in the furnaces, and the resulting metal would be used to mechanize agriculture. But steelmaking is rather more complicated than Mao realized. Large numbers of trees were cut down to fuel the furnaces, whi
ch merely turned perfectly good pots and pans into worthless pig iron. This unpleasant truth was kept from Mao by those in his inner circle. He was shown a backyard furnace that was seemingly producing high-quality steel, but the steel had actually been made elsewhere.
Mao’s understanding of agriculture was even more tenuous than his grasp of metallurgy. In order to boost agricultural yields, the other main component of his Great Leap Forward, Mao drew up his own list of instructions for farmers, based largely on the barmy theories of Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet pseudoscientist. Mao advocated dense planting of seeds (which meant the soil could not sustain them), deep plowing (which damaged the fertility of the soil), greater use of fertilizer (but without chemicals, so household rubbish and broken glass was used instead), concentrating production on a smaller area of land (which quickly exhausted the soil), pest control (killing rats and birds, which caused the population of insects to explode), and increased irrigation (though the small dams and reservoirs that were constructed, being made of earth, soon collapsed).
Party officials, fearing for their own positions, went along with all this and pretended that Mao’s instructions had resulted in amazing improvements in yields. Across China, bizarre achievements were announced: the growth of giant vegetables, and the crossbreeding of sunflowers with artichokes, tomatoes with cotton, and even sugarcane with maize and sorghum. Photographs were faked of miracle crops and plots where wheat had grown so densely that children could sit on top of its stalks. (The plants were actually transplanted into the field, and the children were sitting on a concealed table.) On one occasion peasants were told to transplant rice plants to fields along the route that Mao was traveling, to give the impression of an abundant crop; on another occasion vegetables were piled up by the roadside so that he could be told that peasants had abandoned them, having grown so much food that they had more than they could eat.
Mao was told that the grain harvest for 1958, the first after the launch of the Great Leap Forward, had doubled; in some cases yields in particular fields were said to have increased over 150-fold. Officials who could see what was really happening dared not question these claims. Where possible, farmers had ignored Mao’s crackpot list of instructions, and the harvest was not much worse than that of previous years. But the redeployment of farmers in the misguided effort to make steel meant that not all the crops were gathered, and a lot of food rotted in the fields. Official figures said the harvest had doubled, however, so the procurements of grain demanded by the state’s central granaries were much larger than in previous years. As different provinces vied to outdo each other in apparent productivity, they submitted larger and larger deliveries. Exports of grain doubled, providing apparent proof of China’s agricultural miracle to the outside world. And in the autumn of 1958 Chinese farmers were told that there was abundant food, and that they could eat as much as they wanted in the communal kitchens. They did so, and by winter there was no food left.
People began to starve in large numbers. One Party leader later estimated that twenty-five million people were starving in early 1959. Mao refused to believe that the vast appropriations of grain being made by the state were causing shortages. If some regions were unable to meet their quotas, he said, it was because farmers were hiding their food. “We must recognize that there is a severe problem because production teams are hiding and dividing grain and this is a common problem all over the country,” he declared. When some officials tried to explain the situation, Mao responded that if there were a few problems in some areas, those were “tuition fees that must be paid to gain experience.” Peng Dehuai, the defense minister, who came from a peasant background and had experienced famine in his youth, accused Mao of sacrificing human lives in the pursuit of impossible production targets. He was stripped of his rank, placed under house arrest, and later exiled. Mao came to regard any reports of food shortages as personal attacks on his leadership, and he became even more determined to press ahead with his program. This meant that those officials who knew what was really going on became even less inclined to try to intervene.
Even higher grain-production targets were set for 1959. The harvest was about one-fifth smaller than in 1958, but officials reported another year of record yields, and to make their claims stand up they set about procuring all the grain they could find for delivery to the central government. (The state procurement quota was set at 40 percent in many areas, and 40 percent of the fictitious and vastly inflated harvest figures meant that in practice the entire harvest was seized.) When their quotas could not be met, even by seizing everything, officials began to search for hidden supplies of food that did not exist, as had previously happened in the Soviet Union. Perhaps the worst atrocities occurred in the province of Henan, where Party officials beat, tortured, and murdered thousands of peasants who were supposedly hiding grain. Some were set on fire; others had their ears cut off, were frozen to death, or were worked to death on construction projects. But there really was no food. People tried to eat grass and tree bark, and there were many cases of cannibalism.
By the end of 1959 millions of rural Chinese were starving. The communal kitchens served watery soup made of grass and anything else that could be found. As the crisis deepened, China cut itself off from the outside world. Relations with the Soviet Union were broken off so that Krushchev would not learn of the disaster. When problems were admitted, they were blamed on natural causes such as drought, but even then officials continued to insist that food was abundant and the people were happy. Mao began planning another big increase in production targets for 1960. But in much of the country the people were too weak to plant anything. Those in the cities suffered less; they were given grain rations from the central granaries, and thus were the last to be affected by the spread of the famine. In the countryside, Party officials had the first claim on what little food was available, so that many of them failed to realize the extent of the catastrophe on the land. Most of those who starved to death were peasants in rural communes.
Famine and starvation were widespread by the end of 1960, but Mao refused to recognize the problem. Senior members of the Communist leadership realized they had to act, if only to preserve the regime. They began to gather evidence to present to Mao and convince him of the scale of the disaster. But in some cases they were thwarted by local officials, loyal to Mao, who went to great lengths to deceive them; in other cases senior officials dared not confront Mao with the evidence, because they feared being punished for disloyalty. Hu Yaobang, one senior official, spent a sleepless night before an audience with Mao, wondering what to say. “I did not dare tell the Chairman the truth,” he later admitted. “If I had done so this would have spelled the end of me. I would have ended up like Peng Dehuai.”
In some areas senior Party officials managed to install local leaders who were prepared to reverse Mao’s collectivization and get agriculture going again, by granting small plots to peasant households for their own use, as had previously been done in the Soviet Union. Collective kitchens were also dismantled, officials who had been dismissed for their opposition to collectivization were given their jobs back, and in some cases punishment was meted out to those who had brutally enforced Mao’s policies. Deng Xiaoping, one of the reformers who had recognized that things had to change, famously declared at a meeting in March 1961 (at which Mao was not present) that “it does not matter whether a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.” In short, ideological considerations were less important than providing food.
But how could the reformers get Mao to agree to a retreat from collectivization, while enabling him to save face? Eventually, in mid-1961, Mao quietly agreed to allow the “lending” of some land to peasants so that they could grow their own food. But officially he refused to acknowledge that anything was wrong, or that anything had changed. Collective farming on communal fields continued, but in many parts of China people were also allowed to raise livestock and grow food on their own small plots on waste ground, and to trade in everything except
grain (a fixed proportion of which still had to be handed over to the state). In Hunan this new policy came to be known as “save yourself production.” Grain was shipped in from Australia and Canada, though it was sometimes repackaged in Chinese sacks to conceal its origin, since officially China was still reporting huge increases in grain yields.
The Great Leap Forward was a disaster that resulted in the worst famine in history. In all, some thirty to forty million died, though the full extent of the disaster only became apparent to the outside world in the 1980s, when American demographers analyzed population statistics released by China in 1979. Mao’s agricultural policies, modeled on those of Stalin, caused overall grain yields to fall by 25 percent, and wheat yields by 41 percent. But the main cause of the famine was not inadequate food production so much as the farmers’ lack of entitlement to it. The food they produced went to feed people in the cities, Party officials, and foreigners. During the crisis years China exported more than twelve million tons of grain and record amounts of pork, poultry, and fruit. Granaries in many parts of the country were well stocked, even as people starved. The famine was not caused by drought or flood, disease or pestilence. It was an entirely man-made disaster, the root cause of which was Mao’s desire to use food to display the ideological superiority of Chinese socialism. Instead, he demonstrated precisely the opposite.