Hungry Ghosts

by Jasper Becker

  At the same time the authorities organized a deliberate conspiracy of silence. Doctors were forbidden to disclose on death certificates that the deceased had starved to death, as one eyewitness reported to the US Congressional investigation: ‘The Soviet government told officials on the oblast [region] and raion [district] levels that they must never write on a death certificate that someone had died of starvation. Since the authorities had to account for every single death, even the people who died on the roads and streets, they would make up all sorts of illnesses – intestinal disorders, heart attacks – as causes of death.’

  At the height of the famine in 1933, the Party even invited the former French prime minister Edouard Herriot to make a state visit to Kiev. Before he arrived, mounted police dispersed people queuing for food, killing some. Other influential figures added their weight to Moscow’s vehement denials that a famine was taking place. The Moscow correspondent of The New York Times, Walter Duranty, the American journalist Anna Louise Strong (who would later deny the Chinese famine) and the British social reformers Beatrice and Sidney Webb were among those who joined organized visits to collective farms and then poured scorn on those who said there was mass starvation. The few who did go and report the truth, like the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent Malcolm Muggeridge, were ignored.

  The Ukrainian famine finally ended in 1934 after Stalin ordered a stop to the forced seizure of grain. Within three years, he was to launch the Great Terror, purging the old Party apparatus, executing his colleagues after show trials and sending huge numbers of other Party members, military officers and intellectuals to labour camps. One of those who made a direct link between the famine and the purges was the writer Boris Pasternak. In Dr Zhivago he wrote: ‘Collectivization was an erroneous and unsuccessful measure and it was impossible to admit the error. To conceal the failure, people had to be cured, by every means of terrorism, of the habit of thinking and judging for themselves, and forced to see what didn’t exist, to assert the very opposite of what their eyes told them.’

  The existence of the famine and the extent of the man-made disaster remained a closely guarded secret until after Stalin’s death in 1953, a silence only partly broken in 1956 by Nikita Khrushchev in his speech denouncing Stalin’s crimes, and in his memoirs Khrushchev Remembers, published long after he had lost power. After 1956 a few writers in the Soviet Union such as Pasternak were permitted to allude to it in novels, but it was only in the late 1980s that detailed accounts were published. Until the Gorbachev era, the official Soviet line remained that the Soviet state was blameless but that local officials had committed crimes by exceeding their authority.

  In Harvest of Sorrow, the historian Robert Conquest estimated that between 1930 and 1937, 11 million peasants died in the Soviet Union and a further 3.5 million died in labour camps. In the Ukraine he believed that out of a farm population of between 20 and 25 million about 5 million perished in the famine. More recently, fresh statistics have come to light with the release of the 1937 census. One expert, Michael Ellman, has recalculated the death toll from the famine and has concluded that perhaps 7.2 to 8.1 million died of starvation in 1933; and the investigation by the US Congress in 1988 judged that Stalin knew that people were starving to death and that he and those around him were guilty of genocide against the Ukrainian nation.2

  In 1946, when Khrushchev became First Secretary of the Ukraine, the area was again experiencing famine and he later recounted that at the time people were suffering from oedema and had once more resorted to cannibalism. Soviet agriculture and the collectives were never a success. Not once during the 1930s did per capita grain yields regain the levels seen before 1914, and after the Second World War food supplies never matched those available in Western countries, despite the fact that the Soviet Union imported grain. Most of the food that was grown came from private plots. After 1934, Stalin had staged a retreat from his policy by allowing each household a small plot of land on which to grow vegetables and raise a cow, a pig and up to ten sheep. For the next fifty years, these private plots would provide most of the food consumed in the Soviet Union.

  How much of all this the Chinese Communists knew in 1949 when they established the People’s Republic of China it is hard to say. Many of them had studied and worked in the Soviet Union during the previous three decades and could scarcely have avoided hearing something of the famine or have failed to notice the food shortages. Even if they had not done so, they would have known what had happened once Khrushchev and Soviet writers began to expose the terrible deeds of Stalin, and some must have counselled against rashly copying Stalin’s policies. Yet, astonishingly, Mao proceeded to do just this, though not without considerable opposition from within the Chinese Communist Party.

  4

  The First Collectivization, 1949-1958

  ‘The people are hungry. It is because those above devour too much in taxes.’ Lao Tzu

  After the People’s Republic of China was formally proclaimed in October 1949, Mao Zedong wanted to press ahead as quickly as possible with the creation of collectives. Some of his colleagues advocated a gradualist approach, however, and a major debate opened up within the Party as to how, and at what pace, the peasants should be collectivized. Many felt China had other priorities – to heal the wounds inflicted by civil war, to establish a new civilian administration and to end the food shortages still plaguing some provinces. Officials in the countryside already had their hands full supervising land reform and persecuting landlords. On the periphery of China, the Party was still establishing its control over Tibet, Xinjiang, Manchuria and Hainan Island. Furthermore, China’s leaders were still preoccupied with the threat posed by the Nationalists, who had retreated to Taiwan, and before long were committed to a war in Korea where a million troops fought the American-led United Nations forces.

  The issue of collectivization divided the Party into two groups. The moderates argued that collectivization should be a distant goal and that it should be preceded by industrialization to provide the tractors and other machinery needed to modernize China’s backward agriculture, and they quoted Lenin in support of their view: ‘If we had 100,000 tractors... then the peasants would say: we are for Communism.’ At the time not only did China lack a single plant to produce tractors but hardly anyone had seen one. Some estimated that, given China’s size, 1.5 million tractors would be needed to mechanize farming; and to make effective use of such tractors, the tiny peasant plots would first have to be amalgamated into large fields.1 China’s first tractor factory only went into operation in 1958. In addition to tractors, mechanics, spare parts and deliveries of fuel would all be needed, involving innumerable logistical problems. Unless the peasants could plainly see the advantages of this modern technology, it would be hard to persuade them to give up their land. The moderates talked in terms of fifteen to twenty years to achieve their aim.

  Ranged on the other side were those who believed that the only way to finance industrialization was to squeeze the peasants. Stalin had done this, and Soviet economists had pointed out that when Japan had industrialized, 60 per cent of the necessary capital had been raised by taxing the peasants. To squeeze the peasants, the agricultural economy had to be brought under government control which meant establishing a monopoly over grain purchase and distribution. This would allow the state to buy grain cheaply and sell it dear, and with these funds China could make the steel and build the tractors that she wanted. It also soon became apparent that China’s ‘big brother’, the Soviet Union, was not willing or able to provide loans, grants or gifts of tractors in any quantity. Perhaps, too, Mao hoped to catch up with the Soviet Union and to emulate what Stalin was doing. For Khrushchev, then in charge of agriculture, was implementing Stalin’s plans to create still larger collectives – giant farms, as big as provinces, that were organized around agro-cities.

  It was clear, though, that establishing a state monopoly of food and depressing prices would provoke considerable opposition from the peasants and cause grai
n production to fall. Inevitably, the more productive peasants with the most to lose would put up the toughest resistance. These could only be brought under Party control if they were amalgamated into collectives. This was, in any case, considered a desirable objective since by sharing tools and draft animals the weaker farmers would be helped.

  Those Party leaders who had studied in Russia during the period of War Communism were aware of the catastrophic famine which Lenin had created by hastily establishing a state grain monopoly. They did not want China to follow the Soviet Union’s path and see civil war renewed by large-scale peasant resistance to grain seizures. In China this would be an even greater folly since the Chinese Communist Party owed its victory over the Nationalists to peasant support.

  One of the moderates was Liu Shaoqi, who had joined the Party in 1921, and had been a member of the first group of Chinese to go to Moscow and study at the Sun Yat-sen University of the Working Chinese. There he may have witnessed the horrors of War Communism at first hand. On his return to China he began to play a major role in the Party and by 1949 was a member of the Politburo’s Standing Committee. In 1959 he would become President of China and Mao’s second-in-command but he would end his life as the chief victim of the Cultural Revolution. Although he was no liberal, materials published during the Cultural Revolution claim that already in 1950 he was arguing in favour of protecting the property of rich peasants and against requisitioning surplus land: ‘This is a long-term policy... Only when conditions are mature for the extensive application of mechanised farming, for the organisation of collective farming and for the socialist reform of the rural areas, will the need for a rich peasant economy cease, and this will take a long time to achieve.’2 Mao, however, stated that ‘co-operatives must come first and only then can we use large machines’. A year later Liu went further and attacked Mao’s plans to set up large collectives overnight as ‘false, dangerous and Utopian agrarian socialism’. In a lecture to the Marx-Lenin Institute of Higher Cadres, he said that the peasants’ desire to own their land ‘cannot be checked... hiring labour and individual farming should be unrestricted... no collectivization before mechanization... production and financial reconstruction are top priorities’.3 He was backed by other senior leaders such as the head of the North China Bureau, Bo Yibo, who said it was sheer ‘fantasy’ and ‘Utopianism’ to imagine that the peasants’ desire to own their land would be erased by fostering co-operative peasant organizations.4

  Mao, however, could not be dissuaded and the moderates were defeated. The government soon began to establish a state monopoly of grain on the grounds that it was necessary in order to curb inflation and guarantee supplies. Chen Yun, who drafted the Party’s first five-year plan (1953-7), opposed these arguments and proposed that instead of closing rural markets, procurement prices should be raised. But he was ignored, the grain markets were closed, state procurement prices were kept low and state purchases began to account for a larger and larger share of the harvest. The peasants were now paying more in grain taxes than before 1949 but state investment in agriculture was pegged at only 7 per cent of government spending under the five-year plan. By the mid-1950s the Party was able to control the distribution of grain sufficiently to establish a grain rationing system for the cities. Cadres were dispatched to the villages to extract state procurement quotas by force and to push the peasants into signing promises to deliver still more grain. Such was the pressure exerted that local officials or peasants who failed to meet their quotas were beaten in struggle sessions. Some even committed suicide when they could no longer feed their families.5

  Determined to press ahead with collectivization, in 1955 Mao impatiently castigated the doubters as behaving ‘like old women with bound feet’ and launched what has been termed the ‘little leap forward’ in which the peasants were forced to join higher or advanced co-operatives. After 1949, the peasants had been pushed into joining ‘mutual aid teams’ which grouped 5-15 households together. Then, in 1953, the pace was stepped up and they joined ‘elementary agricultural cooperatives’ of 20-40 households. In October 1955, Mao ordered that peasants must be grouped in higher or advanced co-operatives which brought together 100-300 families. These were as big as or even bigger than the average Soviet collective farm of 245 families. Mao repeated Stalin’s condemnation of the small peasant holder as ‘inherently capitalistic’ and some 400 million of China’s peasants were dragooned into joining 752,000 of these collectives.

  The land had not been formally appropriated from the peasants but they were forced to pool their draft animals, tools, seed grain and harvest grain, and to work in teams under the authority of the Party secretary. The methods used were the same as in the Soviet Union – the peasants were summoned to a meeting and made to stay there for days, or weeks if necessary, until they ‘voluntarily’ agreed to join the collective. Mao claimed that only by abolishing the small peasant holder could China escape from its constant food shortages: ‘For thousands of years a system of individual production has prevailed among the peasant masses under which a household or family makes a productive unit: this scattered individual form of production was the economic foundation of feudal rule and has plunged the peasants into perpetual poverty.’6

  Mao’s ambitious plans for the peasantry also extended well beyond the economic sphere and, in the early 1950s, under what were termed ‘democratic reforms’, the whole world of the peasant was torn apart. The Party launched an assault on every aspect of peasant life in a bid to create a new society. On the positive side, there were renewed efforts to increase literacy, raise the status of women, improve public health and sanitation, and end foot-binding, child marriage and opium addiction. Yet other changes diminished the life of the peasant.

  In the first eight years after 1949, the peasant’s spiritual life came to an end as the Party closed temples, shrines and monasteries. The gallery of shamans, astrologers and fengshui (geomancy) experts, and the priests from various organized faiths – Daoism, Buddhism, Catholicism and Protestantism – who provided solace and guidance were all banished, disrobed or arrested. The ceremonies, rites and rituals that gave meaning to each phase of the agricultural cycle, and which marked the peasant’s life from cradle to grave, were discouraged or forbidden. In place of traditional culture and festivals, the Party organized endless political meetings and agit-prop performances. The folk culture of the peasants had included songs that people sang while they worked, or operas that they performed at market festivals.7 In Jiangsu province, peasants had performed different songs for weeding, hoeing or washing and, when they laboured in the paddy fields, would listen to long epics that went on for days. Now, even their love songs and operas were banned. The markets were closed. The holding of weddings and other feasts was also discouraged in order to avoid waste and extravagance at a time of national reconstruction.

  From 1956 Mao introduced to China Stalin’s internal passport. The peasant could no longer travel without permission to attend fairs, or to seek work outside the village in slack seasons. News from the outside world was no longer brought by pedlars, strolling beggars, wandering musicians and mendicant priests. The emphasis on grain production in the collectives and the travel restrictions discouraged handicrafts like embroidery or woodcarving that had been a part of peasant culture. All the small-scale private enterprises of village China withered and died, leaving the peasants dependent on what the state could supply from its factories. Yet the peasants were at the very bottom of the state’s distribution chain, and many goods became unobtainable. Highest priority was now given to the urban proletariat for whom a fully fledged welfare state was created.8 So while, for example, the Party outlawed traditional medicine and its practitioners, it was hard for peasants to obtain modern medicines or find an approved doctor to treat their ailments. ‘The Party treated popular mores and peasant norms as enemy forces,’ concluded the American authors of a study of one Hebei village, Chinese Village, Socialist State.9 Even the tombs of the peasants’ revered ancestor
s were not left alone but were dug up, or ploughed over, because they occupied valuable farming land.

  Yet despite all these changes, or indeed because of them, agricultural output plummeted and there was widespread famine. In 1956, grain yields alone fell by as much as 40 per cent. The authors of Chinese Village, Socialist State recorded that in one part of Hebei province: ‘Some villagers recalled 1956, the first year of collectivisation, as the low point of their economic fortunes. The data is fragmentary but it seems that Wugong [village], as with many Hebei communities, suffered a catastrophe exceeded in living memory in its toll of human life only by the great famine of 1943.’ Reliable figures on the scale of the disaster are hard to obtain but some interviewees reported hearing of large-scale famine deaths in the provinces of Yunnan, Gansu, Guangxi and Sichuan. In Fujian province peasants were reported to be eating the bark off the trees. In Shunyi county, not far from Beijing, one source said peasants were reduced to living off nothing but ‘cakes’ made of chaff and bark. Peasants in different parts of the country began to flee their homes in search of food and among the Tibetans in Sichuan and Qinghai provinces a full-scale rebellion erupted.

  The collectivization of farm animals led peasants to kill them and sell their meat before the collective appropriated the animals. In Fengyang county in Anhui, records show why: the collective paid a peasant only 5.5 yuan for an ox but by selling it for meat he could earn 30 or 40 yuan. And since those animals that survived collectivization were now publicly owned, no one felt responsible for them. Peasants worked the animals to death and fed the fodder to their own pigs. In the autumn of 1956, 2,100 draught animals in Fengyang died: a further 440 died after the first big snow. Peasants sang a song which went: ‘In the past when a cow died we cried because it was our own, but when a cow dies now, we are very happy because we have meat to eat.’ In Hebei province, the number of draught animals fell from 4.3 million to 3.3 million in 1956.10 By the following year the First Secretary of Henan, Pan Fusheng, was complaining that women were forced to yoke themselves to the plough with their wombs hanging down, such was the shortage of draught animals.