Almost a century ago, the great Soviet famine of 1932-33 killed up to 10 million people, and those deaths fell disproportionately on Ukrainians, whose death rates were about 6 times higher than those in Russia. The cause of the famine and resulting deaths in Ukraine has been the subject of intense debate among European politicians and historians.
In Ukraine, the famine is called “Holodomor”, which means an artificial famine organized on a huge scale by a criminal regime against the population of a country. Indeed, Ukrainians and popular historians have long claimed that the famine was a deliberate genocide intended to destroy the Ukrainian people. At the same time, some historians have pointed out that Ukrainians may have simply been unlucky because they lived in rural areas that experienced crop failures due to factors such as bad weather.
To explore the issue, Nancy Qianprofessor of managerial economics and decision sciences, and her colleagues Andrei Markevich of the New School of Economics in Moscow and Natalia Naumenko of George Mason University built a massive dataset of Soviet-era agricultural records, population data and secret police reports. This data was not available to the public until the fall of the Soviet Union and then spent decades buried in library archives. The researchers combined these records with state-of-the-art geographic and climate data.
Before the study, Qian thought the famine’s large effect on Ukrainians might be a case of misunderstanding that the data could clear up. After all, Ukrainians lived in different places that experienced different conditions and historical policies, and had a different age and gender composition than other groups. Once these differences were accounted for, he reasoned, famine death rates in Ukraine might become more similar to death rates of other ethnic groups.
Instead, she and her colleagues were stunned to eliminate any possible explanation that had been offered to counter the prejudice against Ukrainians in the famine.
The data showed that even if one accounted for all the differences in climate, geography, and demography, and all the differences in Tsarist and early Soviet policies for the hundred and fifty years before the famine, Ukrainians died at much higher rates during of hunger.
To understand whether this bias was intentional or accidental, the authors collected data from the First Five-Year Plan, which was drawn up in 1928 by the central economic planners of the Soviet Union administration. This plan clearly states how much grain each region was expected to produce and how much grain the central government planned to procure and remove, which allowed researchers to understand how much grain the central planners intended the local population to keep and eat. These targets show that for two regions destined to produce the same amount of grain, the more Ukrainians there were, the less grain per person the region would hold.
“For us, this was amazing,” says Qian. “They planned to get more grain per person from Ukrainians than Russians. At first, we couldn’t believe it, but that’s what the data shows.”
The data eventually revealed that deliberate prejudice against Ukrainians explained as much as 77 percent of starvation deaths in the Soviet states of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. And when they looked at Ukraine alone, that number rose to 92%.
The results are shocking, Qian says, all the more because Ukrainians and Soviet leaders lived in relative peace before this, and the Soviets had no specific anti-Ukrainian policy.
However, several political, geographic, and economic factors came together in the early 1930s, leading to repression, starvation, and ultimately generations of mistrust even before the current war began.
“It was about Soviet control of agriculture,” says Qian. “Ukrainians in non-agricultural areas were not targeted. It shows us that there doesn’t have to be a turbulent history between groups for repression to happen. It can happen unexpectedly for new financial reasons.”
Mining Soviet data for answers
Remarks and letters written at the time detail Ukrainians starving in the streets. The researchers hoped to discover how exactly the Soviet regime created such a famine and how much of it was due to prejudice against Ukrainians.
Because the Soviet regime was so controlled, it kept meticulous records of everything from grain production to mortality data to peasant uprisings.
For seven years, Qian’s co-authors, Naumenko, who was a Ph.D. student at Northwestern at the time, and Markevich, spent their days in basement libraries in Moscow paging through these records and coding them into the largest dataset ever compiled of economic, political, historical, geographic, and climatic factors from the years 1922 to 1940 They even found secret police reports on peasant resistance to the regime to better understand the political ramifications of Soviet policies.
The team then began by cross-referencing the data with the economic policies enacted during this period.
One of the most consequential of these policies was collectivization, in which the Soviet regime organized peasants into large collective farms controlled by the government. The government then procured grain directly from these farms and distributed it to the urban industrial population while, in theory, leaving enough for the peasants.
This collectivization began in 1929 and was unpopular with Ukrainians. Until this point, Ukrainians had been able to live relatively autonomously, with their own culture, language and schools. When the new policy began, Ukrainians resisted more than other ethnic groups by slaughtering animals, burning buildings and killing local officials, according to secret police reports. These reports also indicate that 2 million peasants were persecuted and exiled to Siberia. But those who remained also faced a grim fate.
In 1931, grain production decreased in Ukraine, but it was still enough to feed all of Ukraine. And production in the rest of the Soviet Union was enough to feed the people there. In other words, if Moscow had procured less from Ukraine, everyone would have enough food. But that didn’t happen. The Ukrainians were left with very little food and about a fifth of them died.
Prejudice crossed administrative boundaries
While much of the controversy surrounding the famine has focused on Ukraine, the researchers wanted to examine data on the 6 million Ukrainians living elsewhere. They found that while death rates fell when crossing the border from Ukraine to Russia, this decline disappeared when they controlled for the share of each region’s ethnic-Ukrainian population in rural areas.
“Administrative boundaries didn’t matter – ethnic boundaries did,” says Qian. “We were amazed at how perfect this result was. This means that the regime was systematically targeting Ukrainians everywhere.”
Interestingly, Ukrainians in urban areas did not experience higher mortality. This shows that the government was targeting rural Ukrainian villages because of their agricultural importance and history of particularly high resistance to the regime, Qian says.
The researchers looked at other factors that could have led to the famine, including weather conditions and cultural norms, but none could explain the additional deaths among Ukrainians. A famine in the region in the late 1800s, for example, did not kill more Ukrainians than other ethnic groups.
“It is clear that the high mortality due to famine between national and Ukrainian was the result of policy,” says Qian.
Replacing humans with machines
The Soviet regime had briefly tried to gain control of agriculture before, in the early 1920s. But farmers resisted and agricultural production declined so much that the economy was close to collapse. The regime gave in.
But this time, Qian says the data suggests the regime “came in with guns blazing.” The government was more secure in its power, he says, and could afford to lose millions of people to gain control of agriculture.
And, indeed, production in the areas most affected by the famine suffered only briefly.
“The regime replaced the dead with machines,” he says. “The famine turned out to be a temporary economic hit, which they could afford because they were industrializing. And once they got control, they had it for the next 70 years.”
The regime also brought in Russians to replace lost Ukrainian labor. The data show that in these areas, the total population of Ukraine fell sharply during the famine and remained at low levels for decades. But the overall population of ethnic Russians grew and remained higher for decades.
Before the famine, Ukrainians were the largest ethnic group in agriculturally productive areas. After the famine, Russians were the largest ethnicity.
Understanding the effects of ethnic bias
Famine has led to generations of grievances. Studies have shown that how Ukrainians feel about Russia today is highly correlated with how severe the famine was in their region for their great-grandparents.
And Qian says the current war between Russia and Ukraine has corresponding needs for control.
“To me, there’s a striking resemblance to the early Soviet era,” he says. “They want control of everything to advance some vision of the glory of a Russia-centered empire, and they’re willing to pay a staggering human cost to get what they want.”
