The Years of Hunger, Mark Tauger’s findings about the 1932 Soviet grain harvest, and the causes of the Soviet famine of 1931-1933

1. My research showed that the “official” harvest data for 1932 as well as the data for the previous years back to at least 1920 are not in fact harvest data, but pre-harvest estimates or even guesses.

My research presented new harvest data from kolkhoz annual reports, which are in fact final measured harvest data from those farms, and consequently belong in a different category from the official data which are not final harvest data.

These data from the kolkhoz annual reports show that the 1932 harvest was much smaller than implied by the official data. In fact the gap between the low harvests from the annual reports and the official data is on the same order of magnitude as the gap between the “biological yield” and the later much lower data for the later 1930s published in the Khrushchev period. This makes sense because, as I showed in my research, the agencies that gathered harvest data in the early 1930s were the same types of agencies as the State Commission for Harvest Yields that was set up in 1933 to obtain the pre-harvest “biological yield” that was considered so notorious a falsification. In fact the actual story of the origins of that agency is much more complex, and has similarities to other attempts to obtain pre-harvest estimates in several other countries. I discuss this international comparison in my Treadgold Paper, Statistical Falsification in the Soviet Union (Seattle: University of Washington, 2001).

The annual report data for 1932 come from nearly half of the collective farms of that year, which encompassed between 60 million and 70 million peasants, so these data come from more than 30 million peasants. In Ukraine these data come from half of the kolkhozy, encompassing more than 10 million peasants. No one knows and probably no one will ever be able to determine the scale of the source base for the official data, but it is certain that the sources for that data are a much, much smaller sample of the farms.

The annual report data in almost every region show a much smaller yield that the official data. The official harvest yield for Ukraine in 1932 was 8 centners [800 kilos] per hectare. The annual report data show the yield to have been less than 5 centners [500 kilos] per hectare.

2. Davies and Wheatcroft published The Years of Hunger in 2004. In it they cite my work several times but only to criticize it. All of their criticisms are invalid, as I documented in my article “Arguing from Errors,” published in Europe-Asia Studies, the number one British journal in Eastern European studies, in 2006 [vol 58 no. 6, September 2006].

The most important attack – and mistake – they made in dealing with my work is on page 444 of their book and in a table on a website. They asserted in the book that I misused my statistical data and miscalculated the harvest. They draw this conclusion on the basis of a “re-weighting” of the harvest statistics. The problems here are that

a. Their “re-weighting” is a near-duplicate of the weighted average that I calculated and included in my 1991 article, and they did not acknowledge that I had done that calculation.

b. This is crucial: the key data they used for this “re-weighting” , namely the sown areas for different provinces, were incorrect, in some cases grossly incorrect. In particular, they used a sown area of 30 million hectares for Western Siberia, when the source they cited had an area of 4.4 million hectares. This error (if not intentional falsification) explains the difference between their incorrect calculation and my accurate one.

Here is the link to there website.

Here is a link to their original table in case they try to change it without acknowledging their error, in an attempt to cover it ups.

This action by Davies and Wheatcroft in my view is a very serious incident in Western historiography of the USSR. This action on their part is quite similar to Soviet attempts to discredit “bourgeois falsifications” of Soviet history by various misrepresentations, misleading or false statistics, and omissions. Another analogy between that precedent and this case is that the objective of these two scholars in this case was to build up their reputation by discrediting mine, in manner similar to the attempts by Soviet propagandists to build up the USSR’s reputation by inaccurate writings purporting to discredit the West or Western critics.

If two scholars previously considered to be among the top in the field resort to this, and fail to acknowledge their actions, apologize for them, and make amends (see below), then the credibility of Western historiography of the USSR is even more seriously undermined than it has been up to now. Now the problems of the field go beyond the broadly political and reach the personal, the field becomes a vehicle for status and reputation instead of , and I emphasize instead of, legitimate research.

I wrote apologize and make amends for the following reasons.

1. If they do not apologize but try to discredit me again by failing to acknowledge their errors, that type of behavior will in the end further discredit them.

2. Their failure to acknowledge these errors will also tend to discredit serious scholarship in the field, and give more credence to rigid and stupid writings such as those of the Ukrainian nationalists and the followers of Robert Conquest and other Cold-War writers whose work has been shown repeatedly to represent Soviet history in extremely inaccurate and misleading ways. When people who try to do careful and legitimate research have their work weakened, in my case by false attacks and in Davies’ and Wheatcroft’s case by perpetrating false attacks, this can only hurt the field.

I believe that the best amends they could make would be to remove the table from their website and replace it with a public acknowledgement that the table had false data, that they regret this, and that they now, on the basis of my article in Europe-Asia Studies, they agree with my arguments and evidence about the 1932 Soviet grain harvest.

Such a statement will serve to benefit their reputation and research, and will provide a fair acknowledgement of my work. They attempted in their book to make it appear that everything I did was wrong, but in fact, every one of their criticisms of my work was wrong, even to the point of using false data. My work still stands despite their disreputable efforts, and I think that I deserve an acknowledgement of my contribution, not grossly unjustified, veiled ad hominem attacks based on falsehoods.