Since old posts are no longer accessible, I will be posting the preface of Davies and Wheatcroft's The Years of Hunger, a scholarly work by mainstream historians, in the comments. The full work is available on Sci-Hub, but it isn't really about debunking the nazi's holodomor narrative. It covers the Soviet famine of the 1930's, the last in a long series of famines in that part of the world. The preface is the only part that is specifically dedicated to debunking, and the explanations for that are in the text of the preface. I found this work in an old post on here while debate-broing on Discord with a bunch of European liberals utterly convinced that Stalin had personally eaten all the grain with his giant spoon. Maybe this can help you when liberals try to label you a genocide denialist.
:soviet-chad:
Since our book was published, some of its conclusions have been the subject of strenuous criticism, especially from Mark Tauger and Michael Ellman, writing from very different positions. Ellman concurs that some deaths were caused by ‘exogenous non-policy-related factors’ such as the drought of 1931, and that others were ‘unintended consequences of policies with other objectives’ including the ‘tribute model of rapid industrialisation’. But he also claims that some deaths were the deliberate result of what he called ‘the starvation policy of 1932–33’. Tauger claims on the basis of kolkhoz reports that the harvest of 1932 was as low as 50 million tons with an average yield of 5.2 tsentners per hectare, and that our criticism of his estimate as too low is mistaken. In view of his low estimate of the harvest, Tauger interprets the 1932–33 famine as ‘the largest in a series of natural disasters’.15 In a reply to Tauger, Wheatcroft apologises on our behalf for an error in our calculations of the 1932 yield based on kolkhoz reports, and in the present edition of our book (pp. 444–5) we have replaced our previous estimate of the grain yield based on these reports, 6.2 tsentners per hectare, by a new estimate, 5.8 tsentners.16 This gives grain production in the 1932 harvest derived from kolkhoz reports as in the range 55–7 million tons. We had also made alternative estimates, which fall within the same range. See for example our estimate based on the secret Soviet grain-fodder balances, p. 447 below. Our general conclusion remains that the 1932 was between 55 and 60 million tons, a low harvest, but substantially higher than Tauger’s 50 million.
In a further contribution to the discussion, Hiroaki Kuromiya judiciously summarises his provisional conclusions about various strands of these Ukrainian, Russian, and international debates: Although Stalin intentionally let starving people die, it is unlikely that he intentionally caused the famine to kill millions of people. It is also unlikely that Stalin used famine as a cheap alternative to deportation. True, the famine affected Ukraine severely; true, too, that Stalin distrusted the Ukrainian peasants and Ukrainian nationalists. Yet not enough evidence exists to show that Stalin engineered the famine to punish specifically the ethnic Ukrainians. The famine did not take place in an international political vacuum. The sharp rise in the foreign threat was likely to have been an important aggravating factor. These debates may be followed in the journal Europe-Asia Studies.17 Since the first publication of this volume, our colleague Viktor Danilov has died. We take this opportunity to express our gratitude for his enormous contribution to peasant studies, and for his staunch friendship over thirty years, in good times and bad.
June 2009 RWD
SGW
1 ‘Holodomor’ – a Ukrainian word meaning ‘death by hunger’ (in Russian rendered as ‘golodomor’).
2 See http://www.ucc.ca/holodomor/files/IHC-The-Case-for-7-Million (accessed April 29, 2009).
3 Golod v SSSR 1930-1934; Famine in the USSR 1930–1934 (2009), 518 pp.
4 Op. cit. 7.
5 S. Kul’chitskii, Pochemu ON nas unichtozhil? Stalin i ukrainskii golodomor (Kiev, 2007), 120.
6 Demografichna katastrofa v Ukraini vnaslidok golodomoru 1932–1933 rokiv: skladovi, masshtabi, naslidki, Institut Demografii ta sotsial’nykh doslidzhen’, Natsional’na akademiya nauk Ukraini (Kiiv, 2008), 76, 82, 84. For our own lower estimate, see pp. 412–17 below.
7 See for example the school syllabus in http://faminegenocide.com/resources/ teachingkuryliw.html (accessed April 30, 2009).
8 See below, pp. 190–1, 413–14.
9 S. Mironin, ‘Golodomor’ na Rusi (2008), 9–10 (a 221 page book, published in 5,000 copies).
10 V. P. Danilov and I. E. Zelenin, ‘Organizovannyi golod’, OI, 6, 2004, 97–111, especially p. 108. This view is broadly endorsed by the principal Russian specialist on the famine, Viktor V. Kondrashin – see his Golod 1932–1933 godov: tragediya Rossiiskoi derevni (2008), especially p. 376, where he writes (somewhat cautiously) that ‘it may be defined as an “organised famine” ’.
11 These measures are described below on pp. 163–8, 187–8, 426–7, and in vol. 4 of this series, pp. 290–1.
12 It is regrettable that many of the advocates of the genocide thesis continue to claim Conquest to justify their position, despite his clearly expressed views on this matter. See the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Conference on Holodomor on November 18, 2008, http://www.huri.harvard.edu/na/2008_11_17-18_famine_ conf/2008_11_18_werth-graziosi-flier.html (accessed May 18, 2009). At the conference Nicolas Werth was asked by a participant in the conference, who had attended a lecture given by Wheatcroft, whether Conquest accepted the view that the famine was genocide. Werth strangely replied that ‘we all know in scientific circles the very complicated relations between Conquest and Wheatcroft’; he repeated this several times, but declined to reply to the question. Kul’chitskii more straightforwardly has explained that in June 2006 a Ukrainian delegation of experts on the Holocaust and the Golodomor met Robert Conquest in Stanford University and enquired about his views, and were told directly by him that he preferred not to use the term genocide (Kul’chitskii (2007), 176).
13 For these developments, see vol. 4 of this series: R. W. Davies, Crisis and Progress in the Soviet Economy, 1931–1933 (1996), pp. 164–76 (defence), 118–21, 155–64 (foreign trade and import cuts), 176–92 (food shortage), 419, 539 (reduction in nonagricultural employment).
14 For Syrtsov’s views, see vol. 3 of this series, The Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 1929–1930 (1989), especially pp. 400–3, 411–15, and Oleg Khlevniuk’s article in The Lost Politburo Transcripts (New Haven and London, 2009), especially pp. 86–92.
15 Tauger, The Carl Beck Papers, no. 1506 (2001), 46.
16 For the revised table of grain production by region, see http://www.sovietarchives- research.co.uk/hunger and Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 59, 864–6. Some misprints and minor errors elsewhere in our book have also been corrected in the present edition.
17 Vol. 57 (2005), 823–41 (Ellman), vol. 58 (2006), 625–33 (Davies and Wheatcroft), 973–84 (Tauger), vol. 59 (2007), 663–93 (Ellman), 847–68 (Wheatcroft), vol. 60 (2008), 663–75 (Kuromiya), and vol. 61 (2009), 505–18 (D. R. Marples).