Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History

For generations, scholars have presented the Soviet past primarily as a story of victimhood, one fraught with tragedy, trauma, and catastrophe. Yet, after much fruitful research, a clear understanding of how Soviet citizens endured decades of brutality and upheaval and how those experiences continue to inform their lives in the post-Soviet era remains elusive. The two books under review provide fresh takes on these themes of tragedy and loss. Nicholas Ganson’s historical work reconstructs a greatly understudied event, the famine of 1946–47, which took between one and two million lives. Serguei Oushakine’s anthropological study examines a catastrophe of a very different sort, the collapse of the Soviet Union. It investigates how residents of the Siberian province of Altai have struggled to cope with the transition to post-Soviet life.

Ganson’s heavily archival and lucidly written study of this human tragedy centers on the question of state culpability: did the postwar Stalinist regime deliberately engineer or prolong the famine as a way to reassert its authority over the countryside? Ganson’s answer is a definite no, and by taking this stance, he breaks with the existing (albeit limited) historiography on the 1946–47 famine, as well as with many prominent scholars, from Robert Conquest to Lynne Viola, who have likened Stalinist agricultural policies (particularly of the 1930s) to acts of terror and genocide.¹ Although much [End Page 207] of Ganson’s study delineates the regime’s brutal policies on postwar food production, he cautions against the assumption that the famines of the 1930s and 1940s fit the same model. Instead, he emphasizes the factors that preceded the state’s (mis)handling of the agricultural crisis: the devastation of the war and the onset of drought and crop failure. Ganson argues that the shortages and material damage caused by the war precipitated the famine, but that other conditions created by the war—such as the experience of occupation and the rise of a Ukrainian nationalist movement in the heart of the affected region—did not.

Ultimately, Ganson presents the famine not as an instance of state brutality or of the Soviet regime’s general hostility toward the countryside but as another example of its long-standing practice of squeezing the peasantry to make agriculture more productive. The regime did not cause the famine, he contends, but its policies did extend the scope and duration of the crisis. A key assumption Ganson makes, one that deserves further inquiry, is that if the food supply had been better, Soviet policymakers would have acted less aggressively toward the countryside. In chapter 2, for instance, he describes how the Ministry of Health, the Red Cross, and the Red Crescent tried to intervene in the countryside and help the hungry. Ganson’s evidence of the regime’s good intentions is compelling. At the same time, while describing hunger-related illnesses, he uses the term “dystrophy” (distrofiia) neutrally, without noting the controversy surrounding the term as a possible euphemism for starvation, one that the Soviet regime used to obscure its responsibility for mass hunger during the war.²

Although Ganson deemphasizes the role played by domestic political concerns, he argues that international politics strongly determined the postwar regime’s policies toward the famine. In one of the most intriguing sections of his study, Ganson demonstrates that, to compete with the United States for international political prestige, the Soviet Union kept the famine a secret and (perhaps before it understood the severity of the famine) exported grain to France, Poland, Germany, and Finland, hoping to rival the United States and the United Nations as providers of international aid. President Harry Truman also knew of the famine and...