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...Around 6 to 10 million people died from famine in the Soviet Union in 1932 and 1933, and 22 to 45 million died from famine in China between 1959 and 1961. In terms of total deaths, these are the most devastating famines in the history of human civilization. They are also the most documented. Jasper Becker and Robert Conquest give illuminating accounts of these episodes. Recent books have provided additional, and often very controversial, explanations of the causes of these famines, ranging from bad luck to genocidal intent (see, for example, contributions by Anne Applebaum, R.W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, Frank Dikötter, Andrea Graziosi, V.V. Kondrashin, and Timothy Snyder).
Most of the evidence in this work relies on personal narratives and descriptive evidence. Without systematic and disaggregated data, one cannot distinguish among competing hypotheses. To address this lapse in knowledge, my co-authors (Xin Meng, Pierre Yared, Andrei Markevich, and Natalya Naumenko) and I have spent the past 15 years piecing together archival data, and combining these data with recently available geospatial data for the U.S.S.R. and China, to understand the root causes of the Soviet and Chinese famines
Early Soviet and Chinese communists were ideologically committed to a planned economy, where there were no markets. Instead, the government procured the surplus grain from peasants and distributed it other workers and for export, the profit from which the government kept. Agricultural collectivization was the main policy for achieving this. The procurement grain is the tax in this economy. The ambitious governments of these two countries aimed to have a 100% tax, where all surplus is procured, but peasants are left with ample food to subsist (and stay productive).
Planned and market economies have very different implications for the incentives of the farmer. In a market economy, farmers are paid for their effort, so they are incentivized to exert effort to produce more food. In the planned economies, farmers always get their subsistence level and no more. So, they are incentivized to produce up to what they need to subsist and no more.
Producing no surplus would leave the government with no tax revenue, or with debt if feeding non-agricultural workers is taken into account. To incentivize farmers, the central planners introduced production quotas. These set the amount of grain each region needed to produce. The difference between the quota and subsistence need is the government tax (procurement). This provides a very strong incentive to farmers because if they do not meet the quota, they will be left with too little food for subsistence and starve.
The planned economy depends critically on setting the correct quotas. If the quota is too high, then too much will be taken away and there will be famine. If the quota is too low, then the government is not maximizing revenue.
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..Internally within the leadership, the famine was seen as a mistake on the part of Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong, who suppressed those, such as Peng Dehuai, who warned of famine in 1958. He was forced to step down as the Chairman of the People’s Republic of China in 1959, the first year of the famine. To regain political power after having lost much of his prestige and support from top leadership, Mao waged a grassroots-powered Cultural Revolution starting in 1966 until his death in 1976.
None of these things happened in the U.S.S.R. The government denied the famine until the 1980s. Stalin viewed the low harvests as the fault of the peasants, whom he believed intentionally used famine to undermine the regime. In 1932, when low production numbers were verified, the government decreed that procurement quotas needed to be fulfilled and non-compliant bureaucrats arrested.
https://broadstreet.blog/2021/04/30/a-tale-of-two-famines/The key cause of the divergence in political response to the famine between the Soviets and Chinese was political. The two governments faced the same fundamental tradeoff: obtain the political support of the people versus force them to work and repress resistance. However, their support and political legitimacy differed in relation to the famine.
The Stalin-led Soviet Bolsheviks were a workers’ party. The government could afford to lose the support of the peasants and repress them until they obeyed. The Chinese Communist Party was a peasants’ party. They could not afford to lose the support of the peasants. This ostensibly small difference caused famine political-economic dynamics to play out in very different ways in the U.S.S.R. and China.