An Edible History of Humanity (19 page)

Unsurprisingly the farmers themselves were less than enthusiastic about this new policy. Collectivization, in practice, meant
herding the farmers into communal accommodation and, in some cases, forcing them to renounce private property and destroy
their possessions. The more productive (and hence wealthier) farmers were particularly reluctant to go along with this. In
some cases they chose to burn their crops or slaughter their cattle rather than surrender them to the new collective farms.
Stalin decreed that since all crops, cattle, and agricultural produce now belonged to the state, anyone who refused to hand
it over or destroyed it was an enemy of the people or a saboteur, and deserved to be deported to the Soviet network of penal
labor camps, which later came to be known as the Gulag.

Since the most productive farmers were most likely to object to collectivization, the impact on agricultural productivity
was predictable. With their produce now belonging to the state, there was no incentive for farmers to maximize production.
Drought, bad weather, and a lack of horses to work in the fields also meant that the harvests of 1931 and 1932 were poorer
than usual. The result was that just as Stalin was demanding more agricultural goods to fund his industrialization program,
the level of food production actually fell. But admitting that collectivization had made farms less productive was unthinkable
to the Soviet leadership. Stalin insisted instead that there had been record harvests, but that some farmers were hiding their
produce to avoid having to hand it over. This explanation justified the state’s continuing procurements of large amounts of
grain. But it meant that many farmers were left without enough to eat. And those who failed to meet their grain quotas or
were suspected of hiding grain were punished by having other crops removed as “fines,” so that they had even less food. Meanwhile
the industrial workers in the cities had plenty to eat, and exports of grain doubled, giving the outside world the impression
that Stalin’s scheme was proceeding as planned.

On average, farmers ended up with one third less grain for their own consumption than they had had before collectivization.
But in some areas the situation was much worse. In particular, in Ukraine, a rich agricultural region that traditionally produced
large grain surpluses, the state set ambitious procurement quotas. When the expected bumper harvests failed to materialize,
local officials were ordered to step up their searches for hidden stores of food. Stalin decreed that retaining so much as
one ear of wheat from the state was punishable by death or ten years’ imprisonment. One participant recalled: “I took part
in this myself, scouring the countryside, searching for hidden grain, testing the earth with an iron rod for loose spots that
might lead to hidden grain. With the others I emptied out the old folks’ storage chests, stopping my ears to the children’s
crying and the women’s wails. For I was convinced that I was accomplishing the transformation of the countryside.” As people
began to starve, soldiers were posted to guard the large stores of grain that had been amassed by the state. Vasily Grossman,
a Soviet writer, recorded the plight of those starving in rural villages: “People had swollen faces and legs and stomachs
. . . and now they ate anything at all. They caught mice, rats, sparrows, ants, earthworms. They ground up bones into flour,
and did the same thing with leather and shoe soles; they cut up old skins and furs to make noodles of a kind and they cooked
glue. And when the grass came up, they began to dig up the roots and ate the leaves and buds.”

In a speech in November 1932, Stalin argued that the difficulties with grain collection were being caused by saboteurs and
“class enemies.” He regarded this as a challenge to the authority of the regime by farmers who were deliberately obstructing
his collectivization scheme. “It would be stupid if Communists . . . did not answer this blow, by some collective farmers
and collective farms, with a knockout blow,” he declared. But sending hundreds of thousands of farmers to the Gulag would
be difficult and expensive. Letting them starve was much easier. In another speech in February 1933, Stalin approvingly quoted
Lenin’s dictum “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.” An official report in March stated: “The slogan ‘He who does
not work, neither shall he eat’ is adopted by rural organizations without any adjustment—let them perish.” Stalin did not
initially intend collectivization to lead to starvation, but if “idlers” who refused to go along with it starved, that was,
he implied, their own fault for being too lazy to grow enough food to feed themselves.

In early 1933 a system of internal passports was introduced to prevent people fleeing to the cities from the starving villages
in Ukraine and the North Caucasus. Stalin also sent in agents of the OGPU, the state security agency, to step up the collection
of grain in Ukraine, which he felt the local authorities were pursuing with insufficient vigor. A Politburo memo had complained
of the “shameful collapse of grain collection in the more remote regions of Ukraine” and called for officials to “break up
the sabotage of grain collection” and “eliminate the passivity and complacency toward the saboteurs.” And a report sent to
Stalin in March 1933 by Stanislav Kosior, who was in charge of the collectivization program in Ukraine, noted that the famine
had not yet taught the peasants enough of a lesson. “The unsatisfactory preparation for sowing in the worst affected regions
shows that the hunger has not yet taught many collective farmers good sense,” Kosior declared.

Malcolm Muggeridge, a British journalist who visited Ukraine in May 1933, reported that officials “had gone over the country
like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible; they had shot and exiled thousands of peasants, sometimes whole
villages; they had reduced some of the most fertile land in the world to a melancholy desert.” But his report was ridiculed
by other journalists who had been taken on stage-managed visits to model communes and who insisted there was no famine. Yet
in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev the Italian consul reported “a growing commerce in human meat,” and the authorities were
putting up posters saying. At the same time, grain exports were increased in order to maintain the pretense that there was
no problem, and that agriculture was booming under the Soviet regime. When some foreign aid organizations offered food aid,
it was refused.

The political nature of the famine was most starkly outlined by Comrade Hatayevich, a senior official in the Ukraine, who
explained in 1933 that “a ruthless struggle is going on between the peasantry and our regime. It’s a struggle to the death.
This year was a test of our strength and their endurance. It took a famine to show them who is master here. It has cost millions
of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay. We’ve won the war.” It was a war waged by the regime against its
own people, using food as a weapon. The famine ended in 1934 when Stalin scaled back the state procurements of grain and conceded
that households should be allowed a small plot of land on which to grow vegetables and keep a cow, a pig, and up to ten sheep.
These private plots, rather than collective farms, provided most of the country’s food for the next fifty years.

Some seven to eight million people had died of starvation, the victims of Stalin’s desire to maintain grain exports at all
costs, both to convince the world of the superiority of communism and to fund Soviet industrialization. The famine’s greatest
impact was in Ukraine, where the millions of dead are now widely considered to have been the victims of genocide. One eyewitness,
Fedor Belov, called the famine “the most terrible and destructive that the Ukrainian people have ever experienced. The peasants
ate dogs, horses, rotten potatoes, the bark of trees, grass—anything they could find. Incidents of cannibalism were not uncommon.
The people were like wild beasts, ready to devour one another. And no matter what they did, they went on dying, dying, dying.
They died singly and in families. They died everywhere—in yards, on streetcars, and on trains. There was no one to bury these
victims of the Stalinist famine. A man is capable of forgetting a great deal, but these terrible scenes of starvation will
be forgotten by no one who saw them.”

After the Communists, led by Mao Zedong, seized power in China in 1949, they were very keen to follow the Soviet model of
collectivization, which had supposedly been such a success in increasing food production and underwriting industrialization.
Leaflets, pamphlets, and propaganda films distributed in China lauded the Soviet triumph. As one Chinese woman later recalled:
“We heard a lot of propaganda about the communes in the USSR. There were always films about the fantastic combine-harvesters
with people singing on the back on their way to work. In the films there were always mountains and mountains of food. So many
films showed how happy life was on the collective farms.” Groups of Chinese peasants were sent on tours of Ukraine and Kazakhstan
to visit “model” collectives and see how they worked. They noted that there was always lots of food on the table and modern
equipment to work the fields. Mao Zedong decreed that China would adopt the same approach.

He started by establishing a state monopoly on grain. Grain was to be sold to the state at a fixed low price, ensuring that
it could be sold abroad at a profit to raise money to pay for industrialization. Markets were closed, production quotas were
assigned in each region, and a system of rationing was introduced to distribute grain in the cities. The state gradually took
control of the grain supply. Mao then embarked on a collectivization program in order to increase production. Small groups
of households, then dozens at a time, and finally hundreds at a time were combined to form collective farming communities.
Tools, animals, and grain had to be pooled. This system was imposed by inviting farmers in a particular area to a meeting,
and then not allowing them to leave until they “agreed” to form a collective—a process that sometimes took several days. As
in the Soviet Union, a system of internal passports was introduced in 1956 to stop farmers fleeing to the cities.

Mao was following the Stalinist model closely, with predictably similar consequences. Grain production fell by 40 percent
in 1956 alone, as collectivization robbed farmers of any incentive to maximize their output. People in some areas began to
starve. Animals were killed and eaten, so that there were fewer of them to work the land. Meanwhile the Communist Party boasted
of its great success in collectivizing agriculture. The harvest figures for 1949 were revised downward, to make subsequent
years’ figures look bigger, but food production had in fact fallen to a level below that of the 1930s. But Mao wanted to outdo
the Soviet Union, and he began planning a “Great Leap Forward” that would, he hoped, industrialize China almost overnight.
When some of his colleagues argued for a more gradual approach, he purged them from the Party. Even Nikita Krushchev, the
new Soviet leader, who had come to power after Stalin’s death in 1953, warned Mao not to go ahead with his program, which
Krushchev understood was intended to “impress the world—especially the socialist world—with his genius and leadership.” Krushchev
was aware of the harm that Stalin’s agricultural policies had done, and had quietly unwound many of them. But the growing
rivalry between the Soviet Union and China meant that Mao did not just want to emulate Stalin’s supposed achievements, but
to outdo them. He promised that food production would double or triple within a year, along with the output of steel.

To make this happen, Party officials ordered the establishment of backyard furnaces and told everybody to hand over a certain
quota of metal items. These would be transformed into steel in the furnaces, and the resulting metal would be used to mechanize
agriculture. But steelmaking is rather more complicated than Mao realized. Large numbers of trees were cut down to fuel the
furnaces, which merely turned perfectly good pots and pans into worthless pig iron. This unpleasant truth was kept from Mao
by those in his inner circle. He was shown a backyard furnace that was seemingly producing high-quality steel, but the steel
had actually been made elsewhere.

Mao’s understanding of agriculture was even more tenuous than his grasp of metallurgy. In order to boost agricultural yields,
the other main component of his Great Leap Forward, Mao drew up his own list of instructions for farmers, based largely on
the barmy theories of Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet pseudoscientist. Mao advocated dense planting of seeds (which meant the soil
could not sustain them), deep plowing (which damaged the fertility of the soil), greater use of fertilizer (but without chemicals,
so household rubbish and broken glass was used instead), concentrating production on a smaller area of land (which quickly
exhausted the soil), pest control (killing rats and birds, which caused the population of insects to explode), and increased
irrigation (though the small dams and reservoirs that were constructed, being made of earth, soon collapsed).

Party officials, fearing for their own positions, went along with all this and pretended that Mao’s instructions had resulted
in amazing improvements in yields. Across China, bizarre achievements were announced: the growth of giant vegetables, and
the crossbreeding of sunflowers with artichokes, tomatoes with cotton, and even sugarcane with maize and sorghum. Photographs
were faked of miracle crops and plots where wheat had grown so densely that children could sit on top of its stalks. (The
plants were actually transplanted into the field, and the children were sitting on a concealed table.) On one occasion peasants
were told to transplant rice plants to fields along the route that Mao was traveling, to give the impression of an abundant
crop; on another occasion vegetables were piled up by the roadside so that he could be told that peasants had abandoned them,
having grown so much food that they had more than they could eat.