Customer Reviews

The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1917-1933 (Harvard Papers in Ukrainian Studies)

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This is an excellent, short treatment of the Peasant War, with an emphasis on Ukraine.

This book uses newly released information - it is one of the first of many books that will be written on this fascinating, important and inexplicably ignored part of history.

Approximately 7 million Ukrainians died in the 1932 famine, while millions more died in the years before. This book is one of the few in English that deals with this terrible holocaust, which has been ignored or denied by so many historians.

The author touches on the ethnic component of the war (which is very brave considering the climate of academe today), yet fails to spell things out clearly. This is extremely unfortunate, considering that ethnicity clearly coloured the events during the Peasant War and the later conflict known as World War II. If nothing else, the author should have compared the Peasant War's nature to previous conflicts before the Revolution, as many reading this book are ignorant of t! he nature of those peasant revolts.

Andrea Graziosi, Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Naples, published this essay in 1996. That was in the relatively early days of post-Soviet studies, when many archives were opened for the first time. They were exciting times, with much new information becoming available on official statistics, Politburo decisions and more, some of it entirely new, some of it - as Graziosi remarks - confirming what was already widely known. Graziosi used the newly available documents to inform his study of the ongoing difficult relationship between the peasantry of the Soviet Union (throughout this period the very great majority of the population) and government, which from 1917 was that formed and imposed by the Bolsheviks. He calls it the Great Soviet Peasant War, and makes a good case for it indeed being regarded as war.

The essay reads as if it were a lecture, with the many footnotes as asides. Its great achievement is to unify discussion of the several famines and many government actions of the period. For once, the upheaval of the Civil War that followed the October 1917 revolution, the famine of 1920 and the famine of 1932-33 are considered together, along with very many peasant revolts and government interventions. Linear developments, contexts and precedents thus become much clearer; Stalin's de-Kulakization campaign of the late 1920's and early 1930's, for instance, being modeled on actions taken against residents of the Tambov district and rebellious Cossacks almost ten years earlier, fine-tuned in the light of those experiences.

Graziosi has a better grasp than most of the Civil War upheavals in Ukraine following the Revolution (Bulgakov noted that Kiev changed hands 14 times during 1918-19) and I wished he had made more of that, but in a short treatment of a lengthy period that would have been to overweight just one part.

Fourteen years after publication of this essay, the numbers who died during the 1932-33 famine remain controversial. They can only ever be estimated, and there will undoubtedly be those who would question Graziosi's suggestions. However, tables of population data from 1917 to 1937 and of births and deaths between 1927 and 1936 are useful. In the latter, only in 1933 did deaths exceed births (by close to 6 million), but births fell steadily from 1927 onwards, with a particular dip in 1934. Total population showed a marked decrease between 1917 and 1922 (-12.7m) and in 1933 (-6.2m). The latter figure represents a 3.8 per cent decline on the 1932 total.