austin-murphy-the-triumph-of-evil

84 THE TRIUMPH OF EVIL
Soviet Union for over ten million famine-related deaths in the Soviet
Union in the 1930s (Conquest, 1986); although the facts indicate Stalin
and the Soviet Union actually saved the lives of millions of people. The
1930s in the Soviet Union represented a time of severe civil strife, widespread
banditry, and even guerrilla warfare (Getty, 1985), which started
when rich Russian farmers and rural merchants (called kulaks), who
controlled most of the agricultural machinery and capital in the 1920s,
and who often charged peasants interest rates of 100% or more fo r use
of the needed equipment, sought to increase their profits by refusing
to supply food to the cities at prices set by the government (Meurs,
1999). Stalin countered this attempt to extort higher prices with a collectivization
of the farms that many farmers resisted. 11 The rich farmers
and rural merchants themselves were initially allowed to join the collectives,
but their resistance to the process later caused the government
to assign most of these millions of people to jobs elsewhere (Conquest,
1986). Many were sent to other provinces, or to work camps, such as
in Siberia, especially if there was evidence they been involved in the
widespread activity of destroying food or committing sabotage in protest
against collectivization (Campbell, 1974). Farmers indeed commit­
ted about 10,000 separate acts of terrorism (about half being violence
against people and the other half being destruction of property) in each
of the years 1929 and 1930 alone (Meurs, 1999).
Meanwhile, because of the frequent practice of farmers refusing to
work and even destroying food, and because of bad weather, many
farmers did not have enough food to make the mandatory sales of grain
to the state at a fixed price (Conquest, 1986), with such sales representing
a sort of land tax except that consumer goods were provided
in return fo r the tax payment. Although the government procured less
food than it had in the late 1920s to keep the city dwellers fed (Meurs,
1999), there was insufficient grain left for some farmers, and hunger and
related disease existed in this environment, especially in the Ukraine
in the early 1930s (Koenker and Bachman, 1997). Nevertheless, Tottle
( 1987) has documented an enormous body of evidence indicating that
much of the information on the famine-related deaths are completely
fraudulent or wildly exaggerated, with the sources of the false propaganda
being Nazi Germany in the 1930s, rich anticommunist Americans,
and various Ukrainians who fled to the West after collaborating with the
CHAPTER J
Nazis during Hitler's occupation in the early 1940s. For instance, many
pictures alleged to have been taken of victims of the 1932-33 . �amine
were actually from the famine that resulted from the 1918-22 clVll war,
and many of the stories were made up by people who had never even
visited areall they claimed to have witnessed.
Despite these facts, Conquest (1986) claims that Stalin is responsible
for about 15 million deaths in the 1930s. He bases his numbers on his
citation that the Soviet population grew from 158 million to about 169
million between early 1930 and early 1939, whereas a population of
184 million would have been expected with a more "normal" popula­
tion growth based on the growth rates of the late 1920s. 12 However, this
computation ignores the fact that birth rates tend to be lower during
periods of rapid. industrialization (Schmid, 1998), such as during the
1930s in the Soviet Union. The erroneous population growth extrapola­
tion also does not fully take into account the lower birth rate that can be
expected to occur during periods of civil strife, famine, hunger, disease,
and massive displacement of people, it fails to take into consideration
the deaths stemming from armed conflict which included widespread
guerrilla warfare and even an invasion by Japan in 1938 that had to be
defeated by the Soviet Union (Conquest, 1986), and it ignores the fact
that many left the Soviet Union as refugees from this situation (Nove,
1993). Wheatcroft (1993) provides concrete information on newborns
in the Soviet Union, indicating that birth rates were about 1.5% lower
in the 1932-36 interval than in the 1920s and were about 0.5% lower
during the other years of the 1930s. These lower birth rates alone
explain all of the lower growth in the population during the 1930S.13
With the exception of 1933, documented death rates in the Soviet
Union averaged less than 2% per year in the 1930s and were even lower
than the approximate 2% average death rate reported for the late 1920s
(which was a time of relative tranquility), and the death rate of 3.7%
reported for the catastrophic year of 1933 was very close to the annual
death rate (also over 3%) in Russia under capitalism in 1913 (Wheat­
croft, 1993), which had been a year of peace and an abnormally abun­
dant harvest there. 14 Thus, it appears that, despite the tragic executions
and famine, Stalin and communism actually saved millions of lives.
85