The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933 by R. W. Davies; Stephen G. WheatcroftReview by: Andrea GraziosiSlavic Review, Vol. 67, No. 3 (Fall, 2008), pp. 774-775Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27652988 .

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774 Slavic Review

fluences of many non-Marxist discourses (Romantic, quasi-religious, neotraditionalist,

enlightened). The contextual analysis of the statements made by political leaders revealed several

patterns in the development of positions within Bolshevik politics and debates. First, "the

zigzag" movement: faced with the destabilizing effects of the mobilization campaigns launched to achieve ideological unity, the leadership had to retreat to pragmatism. Sec

ond, due to the constant tensions between the desire to mobilize and the desire to main

tain order, the leadership veered between populist revivalist strategies (mobilization of

the masses against the elite) and elitist revivalist strategies (oriented toward support of

officials). Third, the evolutionary change revealed itself in the return to more radical

mobilization campaigns to resume the party's ideological mission and restore its revolu

tionary purity. These revealed patterns (a zigzag, a cumulative radicalization, a change) in the devel

opment of Bolshevik strategies are not entirely new to the historiography (see, for instance,

the works of R. W. Davies, Julie Hessler, and my own research on the phases of offensives

and retreats in the socioeconomic development in the 1930s) ; what is new, however, is that

Priestland reveals the symbiotic interaction among these patterns. The Stalinist revivalist policy culminated in the Great Terror. Priestland presents the

terror as a series of mobilization campaigns against "the internal unbelievers"?"the bu

reaucrat," "the class alien," "the fifth-columnist member of the diaspora nationality" (309). The terror became a

zigzag return to the mobilization policy of the late 1920s, although it was conducted under different circumstances. An evolutionary change revealed itself in

the radicalization of terror due to the more threatening international situation and the

difficulties with the mobilization of the masses.

Priestland understands Stalinism as a drive for ideological commitment. Despite tem

porary concessions and retreats, Stalin remained a "revivalist" who put ideas and con

sciousness over science and economic incentives. For him the party's victory depended on

the mastery of ideology. By the end of his life, however, he abandoned populist revivalist

strategies and placed his hope in the believing officials who would mobilize the masses

rather than in the believing masses who would control the officials.

Priestland introduces new terminology that, in several cases, replaces the terms cur

rently in use in the historiography. This piling up of new terminology makes the book less

accessible to students. The book's primary readers will be experts on Stalinism.

Elena A. Osokina

University of South Carolina

The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933. By R. W Davies and Stephen G. Wheat

croft. The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia, no. 5. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,

2004. xvi, 555 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index. Tables. $110.00, hard bound.

This is an important, solid, useful, yet flawed book, whose strength lies in its reconstruc

tion of the measures taken by the Soviet regime that created the 1931-33 famines. The

first 200 pages offer a convincing picture, grounded in a wealth of archival sources and

complemented by a highly professional statistical appendix, with plenty of important and

accurate tables. The pages on the 1932 and 1933 spring sowing are particularly impressive,

as are the data on grain exports and the state grain reserves. They prove that the majority of the famine's victims could have been saved, perhaps even without resorting to foreign aid. This, together with the fact?ascertained by the authors?that grain was given only to those who worked in the fields, and only for the duration of their work, proves that the

famine was indeed used to teach the peasants a lesson based on the precept of "he who

does not work (that is, does not accept the kolkhoz system), shall not eat."

The problems come with the sources upon which the book almost solely relies and

the perspective from which it was therefore written. Its protagonists are the regime's upper cadres, and the story?a tale of decrees and deliberations?is almost always reconstructed

and seen through their eyes. The book therefore ends up worrying about what they wor

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Book Reviews 115

ried about, which?given what was happening?is often disconcerting. The term modera

tion, used for policies that were causing millions of deaths, is just an

example, as is the term

neoNep applied to measures that were mainly

a coy to calm the peasants before sowing and

that had a very limited impact. The result is a traditional, statist approach to history, of the administrative variety. The

quality is high but, leaving repetitions aside, such an approach led the authors to produce

a book based on questionable priorities. As many pages are devoted to "crops other than

grain" as to weeks in which millions died. It is as if the authors, taken aback by the enormity of what they

were discovering, honestly and competently registered it (given previous po

lemics, the recognition of Robert Conquest's work is to be commended) without, however,

using their discoveries to rethink the structure of their book and their methodology. On the one hand, though Iosif Stalin and his henchmen are there, high politics and

ideology play a limited role. Yet they did count. Ideology inspired the action of people whose astounding ignorance and brutality are well proven (even crop rotation was aban

doned), but who continued nonetheless to justify and frame their action in Marxist terms,

as did Stalin with his law on the defence of socialist property. What the authors write about

was revolution, not industrialization or modernization.

On the other hand, one feels the lack of the perpetrators' and the victims' voices,

which make only brief and tantalizing appearances. Yet sources are not completely want

ing and the authors' choice not to use them is hard to understand. Testimonies such as

Viktor Kravchenko's or those collected by American-Ukrainians in the 1950s, diplomatic

documents, and even OGPU dispatches on

peasants' moods, are but seldom used. The

result is a history of a human tragedy almost without human beings.

The national question too is unsatisfactorily dealt with, not surprisingly perhaps in

a book belonging to a series bearing

a title?The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia?that

both Vladimir Lenin and Stalin would have condemned, Russia not being the USSR. In

particular, the Ukrainian case, whose crucial role keeps emerging in both the documents

and the data the book relies upon, is never addressed per se. Yet, as Terry Martin proved,

Stalin based his post-1932 summer policies

on a "national interpretation" of the famine,

developed on the basis of Ukrainian events. The word Holodomor is never mentioned (see

the list of famines at p. 406), nor is the 1933-34 national repression, which Stalin himself

linked to the famine.

The authors thus miss the fundamental turn that occurred in the autumn of 1932,

when Stalin's decisions transformed a famine that was the unwelcome and unexpected

result of his policies into an instrument for punishing peasants everywhere, and Ukrainian

ones in particular, as well as the cadres and the intelligentsiia supporting them. A famine

that could have caused scores or hundreds of thousand of deaths was thus willingly turned

into a catastrophe killing millions.

The treatment of the Kazakh case is also disappointing. A tragedy with 1.3 to 1.5 mil

lion victims, more than 30 percent of the indigenous population, is allotted as much space

as sugar beets, and the key 1931 decrees (the 1931 "mistakes") are not sufficiently treated,

nor is the fact that nomads also died because it was decided to take their livestock and ship

it to the Slavic Republics in order to remedy the catastrophe caused by Stalin's policies.

The scholarly value of the volume is thus high, but, though constituting an important

step in the right direction, it cannot claim to be the book on "The Years of Hunger" the

profession and the public are waiting for.

Andrea Graziosi

Rome, Italy

Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953. By Geoffrey Roberts. New Haven:

Yale University Press, 2006. xxii, 468 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Chronology. Index.

Illustrations. Figures. Maps. $35.00, hard bound.

No serious historian would dream of arguing that, despite immeasurable Nazi crimes, the

F?hrer did a great deal of good. As Geoffrey Roberts's new book shows, we are far from

such a consensus when it comes to Adolf Hitler's contemporary, Iosif Stalin. The flood of

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