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Arquivo de Escritos Do Professor Mark Tauger Sobre Os Flagelos Da Fome Nos Primeiros Anos Da União Soviética
Arquivo de Escritos Do Professor Mark Tauger Sobre Os Flagelos Da Fome Nos Primeiros Anos Da União Soviética
Arquivo de Escritos Do Professor Mark Tauger Sobre Os Flagelos Da Fome Nos Primeiros Anos Da União Soviética
One of the world’s leading scholars on the development of agriculture in the Soviet
Union during its early years is Mark Tauger. He is an associate professor of history at
West Virginia University. He is the author of the 2010 book Agriculture in World
History. His writings on Soviet agriculture— articles, book chapters, and reviews–
are listed on his website at West Virginia University. The list is enclosed below.
The most common and aggressively argued of the interpretations of the several famines
which struck post-1918, independent Soviet Ukraine in the late 1920s and early 1930s is
that of ‘Holodomor’—the claim that famines were the result of deliberate policies by
the leadership of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin to weaken and destroy the
political and economic independence of Soviet Ukraine, including by killing large
numbers of its citizenry through deliberate starvation. The proponents of ‘Holodomor’
posit a genocide equivalent in numbers to the Holocaust of World War Two. Tauger
argues sharply against this thesis.
Much scholarly literature sees the 1920s-1930s as a period in which peasant farming
had no problems when left alone and allowed to operate in a capitalist setting. The only
problems, it is argued, occurred when the Soviet government intervened with policies
that exploited the peasants. Professor Tauger documents the series of natural disasters
that devastated harvests repeatedly in the 1920s and 1930s. He argues that Soviet
policies were not aimed to exploit the peasants but to overcome natural disasters by
emulating American large-scale industrialized farming methods in their own Soviet
way.
Among the writings of Mark Tauger which summarize his overall research and writing
are the following four. The first three are attached as pdf files :
Stalin, Soviet Agriculture and Collectivization, (29 pages, plus notes), chapter
six in Food and Conflict in Europe in the Age of the Two World Wars, edited by
Frank Trentmann and Flemming Just, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006
Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-33, (2001,
65 pages), Carl Beck Papers No. 1506, The Center for Russian and East European
Studies (University of Pittsburgh). This is the only study documenting the
underlying environmental causes of the famine of those years.
The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933, Slavic Review 1991
Grain Crisis or Famine (on the 1928 famine in the Soviet Union, 25 pages, plus
notes), chapter seven in Provincial Landscapes: Local Dimensions of Soviet
Power, 1917-1953, Donald J. Raleigh editor, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001
Mark Tauger is preparing a book to be published later in 2015 on the history of famines
in Russia and the USSR. Among the subjects to be examined are the repercussions of
the environmental causes of the Soviet famines of 1931-33. One of the key scientists to
discover these causes was a plant breeder who went on to breed important new high-
yielding grain varieties that created a kind of Soviet green revolution.
***
Read also:
Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921, by Lars Ti Lih, University of California
Press, 1990 (full text here)