Hey comrade, thanks a lot for the story and the links! I know that this is not the main point of your story, but can you please elaborate more about this?
I bit my lip. “Well, even if it wasn’t deliberate…”, I said, “There always is enough food for everyone, and so all famine is a man-made disaster one way or another, caused by inadequate distribution of resources. So it was a failing of the Soviet system in any case.”
I’m afraid you’ve blindsided me here. I can’t really say much other than that the idea that famine in the modern age is necessarily caused by an ample food supply not getting to hungry mouths, was something that I read somewhere I don’t remember, and still see repeated in various places now. Just look up the phrase “famine is a man-made disaster” and you’ll get a number of results about this idea, describing any number of historical or contemporary famines using more or less that exact phrasing. The idea is essentially that famines tend to have environmental/natural factors as catalysts, such as failed crops, but that food itself is not a scarce resource.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that any time someone goes hungry, that it was a deliberate act of an Eeeeevil Regime; but what this does mean is that I ultimately still feel like a more sort of decentralized or horizontal system should be able to better distribute food when a socialist project is still establishing itself and reorganizing or rebuilding its agriculture, right? As a certified know-nothing, though, I can’t really give any sort of coherent analysis on what specifically failed with the Soviet system, other than that it was Something and future socialist projects should Learn From It. I hear all these big words like “collectivization” and “mechanization” thrown around, but I just can’t really trust myself to really understand all the factors that were at play.
Though I believe that after their more notable famines in the Early Days™, the USSR and the PRC got pretty good at food security. So I guess that that learning from historical tragedies has already happened, on top of the factors relevant to the Early Days™ just no longer being relevant now.
I also know that a large portion of the famine in the DPRK was a result of outside sanctions, though I honestly can’t speak for how sanctions might’ve impacted famines in the early USSR.
a more sort of decentralized or horizontal system should be able to better distribute food when a socialist project is still establishing itself and reorganizing or rebuilding its agriculture, right?
That’s definitely not a takeaway from the famine of '32-'33. It took months for a powerful central government to sort through the conflicting reports from local officials, get an accurate picture and mount an alleviation. I don’t think it’s possible that decentralised system would’ve grasped the extent or even the fact of a famine in a more timely manner.
Alright, “if you say so” is probably a bit dismissive of me. What I mean to say is that my impression is that decentralized systems are more flexible, but there’s probably some very obvious fact refuting this WRT the '30s famine, which is right behind me, isn’t it?
No obvious fact I’m afraid. It’s only meagre analysis. If some disaster befell random oblasts scattered across the Union it may be true that a decentralised system could deal with it better. I wouldn;t make that argument but I’m willing to hear one out. Famine-causing disasters on the other hand, namely floods and drought, occur in lumps, in this case a large swathe from Belarus to Kazakhstan.
Reading the correspondences in this matter, there seems to be nothing but confusion. Collective farms asking for seed, CPU members vaguely hinting at low sowing without ever explicitly saying there’s a famine to be alleviated and leadership of the Ukrainian SSR bemoaning the grain procurement demands of the CC of CPSU while working to over-export as late as December 1932. Kaganovich was sent to the Ukraine to sort out what was going on and it took him months to realise they were facing a famine and officials in Belarus were questioning the state of affairs since historically Ukraine had fed Belarus and not the other way around. I don’t really see any sort of decentralised system, be it at a soviet or oblast level, figuring out the situation to a significant degree, finding who might spare the grain and establishing the connection to get that grain over many hundreds of kilometres. I’ll hear out if you’ve got any ideas, but I just don’t find it realistic.
Hey comrade, thanks a lot for the story and the links! I know that this is not the main point of your story, but can you please elaborate more about this?
I’m afraid you’ve blindsided me here. I can’t really say much other than that the idea that famine in the modern age is necessarily caused by an ample food supply not getting to hungry mouths, was something that I read somewhere I don’t remember, and still see repeated in various places now. Just look up the phrase “famine is a man-made disaster” and you’ll get a number of results about this idea, describing any number of historical or contemporary famines using more or less that exact phrasing. The idea is essentially that famines tend to have environmental/natural factors as catalysts, such as failed crops, but that food itself is not a scarce resource.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that any time someone goes hungry, that it was a deliberate act of an Eeeeevil Regime; but what this does mean is that I ultimately still feel like a more sort of decentralized or horizontal system should be able to better distribute food when a socialist project is still establishing itself and reorganizing or rebuilding its agriculture, right? As a certified know-nothing, though, I can’t really give any sort of coherent analysis on what specifically failed with the Soviet system, other than that it was Something and future socialist projects should Learn From It. I hear all these big words like “collectivization” and “mechanization” thrown around, but I just can’t really trust myself to really understand all the factors that were at play.
Though I believe that after their more notable famines in the Early Days™, the USSR and the PRC got pretty good at food security. So I guess that that learning from historical tragedies has already happened, on top of the factors relevant to the Early Days™ just no longer being relevant now.
I also know that a large portion of the famine in the DPRK was a result of outside sanctions, though I honestly can’t speak for how sanctions might’ve impacted famines in the early USSR.
That’s definitely not a takeaway from the famine of '32-'33. It took months for a powerful central government to sort through the conflicting reports from local officials, get an accurate picture and mount an alleviation. I don’t think it’s possible that decentralised system would’ve grasped the extent or even the fact of a famine in a more timely manner.
If you say so.
Alright, “if you say so” is probably a bit dismissive of me. What I mean to say is that my impression is that decentralized systems are more flexible, but there’s probably some very obvious fact refuting this WRT the '30s famine, which is right behind me, isn’t it?
No obvious fact I’m afraid. It’s only meagre analysis. If some disaster befell random oblasts scattered across the Union it may be true that a decentralised system could deal with it better. I wouldn;t make that argument but I’m willing to hear one out. Famine-causing disasters on the other hand, namely floods and drought, occur in lumps, in this case a large swathe from Belarus to Kazakhstan.
Reading the correspondences in this matter, there seems to be nothing but confusion. Collective farms asking for seed, CPU members vaguely hinting at low sowing without ever explicitly saying there’s a famine to be alleviated and leadership of the Ukrainian SSR bemoaning the grain procurement demands of the CC of CPSU while working to over-export as late as December 1932. Kaganovich was sent to the Ukraine to sort out what was going on and it took him months to realise they were facing a famine and officials in Belarus were questioning the state of affairs since historically Ukraine had fed Belarus and not the other way around. I don’t really see any sort of decentralised system, be it at a soviet or oblast level, figuring out the situation to a significant degree, finding who might spare the grain and establishing the connection to get that grain over many hundreds of kilometres. I’ll hear out if you’ve got any ideas, but I just don’t find it realistic.
Understood, thank you.