>>This is =not= why Stalin starved the Kulaks.<<
It's funny, when I told my husband what happened, he was surprised, too. The only part he'd read about was Stalin deliberately starving the Kulaks to get rid of them, which did happen. He didn't know where the grain went, either.
Here's a bit from "The Dark Valley," Piers Brandon (2000), p. 235-236, "Having found that his plans to revolutionize industry were being jeopardized by a shortage of grain, Stalin determined to speed up his programme of forcing peasants (muzhiks) into collective farms and he announced a new policy of "liquidating the kulaks as a class." . . . they preferred to hoard their grain or feed it to their livestock . . . rather than dispose of it to the State. . . .Their persecution would terrify the lesser peasants into joining the collectives. . . . Huge agricultural factories would produce the food without which Russia must remain a backward nation"
However, the grain dumping was part of the Five Year Plan, which began in 1928, op. cit. p. 243, "Stalin claimed that the Depression stopped at the Soviet Border and he contrasted capitalist "economic decline with Communist economic splurge. But he knew perfectly well that the USSR now had to sell twice as much grain abroad to obtain the same amount of machinery. He appreciated the hostility his policy of dumping, or selling below cost price, aroused in the West."
The motivation was industrialization. Op. cit. pp 244-245: "Between 1928 and 1932 investment in industry increased from two billion to nine billion roubles and the labor fource doubled to six million workers. Productivity nearly doubled and huge new enterprises were established - factories making machine tools, automobiles, chemicles, turbines, synthetic rubber, and so on." This summer I spent a great deal of time researching the reliability of Nazi economic statistics - in a nutshell, they are not reliable, being the products of propaganda. Soviet Union statistics have the same problem. But it is true that Stalin did buy a lot of machinery from abroad and hire foreign engineers, etc., to set up factories in the Soviet Union.
What paid for the industrialization was wheat. Op. cit. p. 247,"What they certainly consumed was vast amounts of grain, both directly to feed the workers and indirectly to exchange for the sinews of technology [by this the author means machinery imported from other countries]. In the two years after 1928 government grain acquisitions hand doubled and only a good harvest in 1939 enabled Stalin to commandeer 22 million tons (over one quarter of the total yield) from a countryside devastated by collectivization and "dekulakization." Yet in 1931 he took slightly more grain even though the harvest was poor. The result was massive rural famine. It was the largest organized famine in history until that of Mao Tse-Tung in 1959-60, when some twenty million Chinese starved to death."
I've been reading about it in history journals on-line in a database I can access because I am a student at George Mason, which go into more detail, but that's good for an overview.
The Great Depression was a global phenomenon, which was not caused by the US stock market crash, nor by the Federal Reserve, although the US stock market crash and the Federal Reserve were also what I call triggers. I haven't seen anyone else say that Soviet dumping triggered and exacerbated the Great Depression, but it is a fact that the Soviet Union started dumping wheat on the global marketplace perhaps in 1928, certainly in 1929, in order to get gold to buy factory machinery, and it is also a fact that the collapse in wheat prices in 1929 was a trigger for the Great Depression in the US and Canada. In the US, people did not understand what was happening to wheat prices at the time. |
