Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 полностью

47. Piatiletnyi plan, II/i: 328–9, 330–1; Kollektivizatsiia sel’skogo khoziaistva, 350. These harvest numbers reflected multiplication of planned sown area by planned yields, neither of which was based on actual data. Davies and Wheatcroft, Years of Hunger, 65–6. Yields had been declining since the mid-1920s, a trend whose causes were not well understood. Nove, Economic History of the USSR (1992), 176.

48. Drought, in different ways, affected other world regions around this time. In the United States the “great southern drought” of 1930–31, which coincided with a price collapse and banking failures, inflicted hardship across twenty-three states from West Virginia to Texas; President Herbert Hoover sought to have the Red Cross, a private agency, be wholly responsible for relief, opposing federal drought relief (seeing it as opening the door to general federal relief). French West Africa suffered drought, locusts, and its worst famine ever; the French authorities did not relent on tax demands. Mortality in French West Africa was disproportionately higher (in an immensely smaller area and overall population) than in the Soviet Union. China in 1931–32 suffered the opposite problem: large snowmelt and tremendous rainfall that inundated an area equivalent in size to England and half of Scotland, flooding some 52 million people, and killing as many as 2 million from drowning and especially starvation. Tauger, “Natural Disaster,” 8, citing Woodruff, Rare as Rain; Report of the National Flood Relief Commission, 1931–32 (Shanghai, 1933); Fuglestad, “La grande famine.” See also Buck, 1931 Flood.

49. A secret OGPU report addressed to Stalin in early June 1931 complained that that machinery and buildings were unready for the harvest. On June 5, the politburo belatedly approved purchase of 2,500–3,000 additional trucks in the United States and Europe, beyond the 4,000 already ordered. Davies and Wheatcroft, Years of Hunger, 68–9 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 883, l. 3: June 30, 1931; op. 162, d. 10, l. 66; RGAE, f. 7486, op. 37, d. 194, l. 273–253: June 10, 1931). On June 8, 1931, the regime felt constrained to redirect 30,000 tons of wheat and rye from export to consumption in Moscow and Leningrad. Davies and Wheatcroft, Years of Hunger, 85–6 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 10, l. 80).

50. Kvashonkin, Sovetskoe rukovodstvo, 153 (RGASPI, f. 667, op. 1, d. 17, l. 28–9).

51. Wheatcroft and Davies, “Agriculture,” 125.

52. “Settlement is the liquidation of the bai semi-feudals, . . . the destruction of tribal attitudes,” intoned Isay Goloshchokin, known as Filipp, the Jewish-born party boss of the autonomous republic. Zveriakov, Ot kochev’ia k sotsializmu, 53; Iz istorii Kazakhskoi SSR, II: 255; Aldazhumanov et al., Nasil’stvennaia kollektivizatsiia, 28, 34–9 (APRK, f. 141, op. 1, d. 2968, l. 141–8); Tursunbaev, “Torzhestvo kolkhoznogo stroia,” 259–308 (at 266, citing APRK, f. 141, op. 1, d. 2404, l. 23).

53. While the overall share of grain procurement from grain surplus regions declined between 1928 and 1932 from 67.5 to 50 percent, the share from grain-deficit regions grew from 9.4 to 16.9 percent. Davies and Wheatcroft, Years of Hunger, 329 (citing RGAE, f. 4372, op. 30, d. 881, l. 82: Aug. 4, 1932).