REMEMBRANCE IN TIME - Index of

THE LENINIST ALIMENTARY
DICTATORSHIP - THE MODEL FOR
STALINIST HUNGERS OF 1931-1933
AND 1946-1947
Vadim GUZUN 1
Abstract: One of the means having favoured the power conservation by the Bolsheviks was the
alimentary one. Taking control over the alimentary resources meant not only supplying the
proletariat, the army, the emerging huge repressive apparatus, but also subordinating the great
mass of the population. Amid the civil war, the economic disorganization and the international
isolation, the regime’s solution consisted in draining the survival-necessary resources from the
rural environment. The study deals with the “fight for bread” – a process having ended in the
hostile peasants’ physical liquidation and in converting the survivors to the ideology underlain by
communist-socialist principles. Based on sources from the former Soviet archives, published after
the USSR disintegration, but also on autochthonous thematic sources, we set out to reconstitute
the internal political context from Soviet Russia and Ukraine. The use of violent means applied on
a large scale by the Bolshevik regime explains the Sovietization by starvation of tens of millions of
people in an extremely short time, the population’s massive resistance. This approach facilitates
comprehending the subjective and objective factors having determined the essence of the Soviet
hungers, the reaction of the authorities and of the affected population. The model of Stalinist
hungers from 1931-1933 and from 1946-1947 may be found in Leninist great hunger, which
peaked in the years 1921-1922.
The Bolshevik revolution and the civil war deeply and irrevocably undermined the
internal situation in the former Russian Empire. The sanitary and alimentary situation in
towns had become unbearable. In the year 1918, the living conditions, well below
endurance, were marked by the lack of food: a worker’s daily ration was below half the
minim level necessary for survival. Intellectuals made no exception, internationally
renowned scientists suffered from the urban food crisis, reckoned by some researchers
rather a distribution and exchange issue than a production one, given that the paralyzed
rail was not able to ensure the normal food flow. Another main cause of the urban crisis
was the peasants’ refusal to sell their products in exchange of the money that had no
longer value. The executive’s attempt to acquire agricultural products at fixed prices had
the opposite effect, obliging the peasants to reduce the cultivated surfaces 2 .
In this context, the assertion that Russia returned to the Middle Ages-specific
production and living means seems pertinent. Furthermore, amid the not very good
harvest of 1917, the food supplies from 1918 were correspondingly affected. In some
1 Romanian Academy, Bucureşti, Romania.
2 O. Figes, A people`s tragedy: a history of the Russian Revolution, New York, Penguin Books,
2007, pp. 607-608.