Petrenko I.

Food exports to Russia during the food and tax campaigns of 1921–1922 and their impact on the emergence of famine in the Ukrainian SSR

Section: State terror of the soviet era

Abstract: The aim is to study the problem of the export of Ukrainian grain from the 1921 harvest to Soviet Russia and its impact on the emergence and intensification of mass starvation in the southern regions of the Ukrainian SSR in 1921–1923. The research methodology is based on the principles of historicism, objectivity, scientific rigour and comprehensiveness. To achieve this goal, problem-chronological, comparative-historical, logical-analytical and descriptive methods were used. Conclusions. Occupied by Soviet Russia at the end of 1920, Ukraine was viewed by the Russian communist regime, among other things, as an important agricultural and raw materials appendage – a source of unlimited food resources. First and foremost, Ukrainian grain was used to cover shortages in supplies to Russian industry and key consumers, who were the social backbone of the Bolshevik dictatorship. At the same time, Ukrainian grain was to be used to save starving Russian regions, mainly the Volga region, and to supply the occupying Red Army. The latter could be used at any moment for another revolutionary campaign in Europe, should the appropriate socio-political conditions arise. The repressive confiscation of food rations in the autumn of 1920 and summer of 1921 caused the impoverishment of a significant part of Ukrainian farmers. It was particularly noticeable in the southern provinces of the Ukrainian SSR, where the Bolshevik food authorities and Red Army soldiers carried out the largest seizures of grain. This was mainly due to the high grain yields in these regions and the activity of anti-Bolshevik rebel groups, which had significant social and material support there. As a result, when the crop failed in southern Ukraine in the summer of 1921, the local peasants had no transitional reserves or grain stocks that could save them from starvation. The Communist Party and Soviet leaders were well aware of the scale of the crop failure and the growing food crisis in Soviet Ukraine. However, no preventive measures were taken to avert the disaster. Instead, the Kremlin and its henchmen in Kharkiv chose to increase food tax pressure, using terror and military force, especially in those counties and districts that were most affected by the insurgency. A policy of information blockade was pursued, with the authorities and the press focusing their attention on events in the Volga region and ignoring the famine in Ukraine. Instead of redirecting grain resources from the fertile Ukrainian provinces to the regions affected by crop failure, which would have curbed the spread of famine and even prevented it from occurring, the communist regime sent tens of millions of poods to Soviet Russia. The largest share of food collected in Ukraine for the starving was also transferred to the northern neighbour. These processes reached their peak in the autumn of 1921 and winter of 1922 (at the height of the food tax campaign) and were one of the key unnatural (artificial) factors in the emergence and deepening of mass starvation in the steppe regions of the Ukrainian SSR.

Keywords: famine of 1921–1922, food exports, food requisitioning, food tax.

  Full-text PDF    https://doi.org/10.15407/vuchk2024.02.005     Citation

• Petrenko I. (National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide, ivanpetrenko753@gmail.com) ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7759-5298

Cite:
Petrenko I. (2024). Food exports to Russia during the food and tax campaigns of 1921–1922 and their impact on the emergence of famine in the Ukrainian SSR. From archives of VUChK–GPU–NKVD–KGB, ( 2 (62)) 5-52. (In Ukrainian). doi: https://doi.org/10.15407/vuchk2024.02.005

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