Limits??? To Uncle Joe??? Adolph was an altruist next to Uncle Joe. A bit if History:
1924.
After Lenin's death, Joseph Stalin ascends to power.1928. Stalin introduces a program of agricultural collectivization that forces farmers to give up their private land, equipment and livestock, and join state owned, factory-like collective farms. Stalin decides that collective farms would not only feed the industrial workers in the cities but could also provide a substantial amount of grain to be sold abroad, with the money used to finance his industrialization plans.
Russia was in the grip of a famine even before the end of WWI. Using outmoded farming techniques, with an obsolete or non-existent transport system, the Soviets found that the peasants resisted changes to agricultural practices, extorted the rest of Russian society with high prices, and to boot, in the Ukraine, the main basis to opposition to the Bolsheviks during the civil war were the wealthy Ukrainian kulaks. Small wonder that Stalin came down on them harshly. They had themselves been responsible for millions of deaths in Russia itself by their opposition and their own methods of farming were just not going to curt it. Not that Stalin was known for his humanity, but the issue of collectivisation is one of the least understood issues confronting the new regime. It is often dealt with in a deliberately obtuse manner, as I believe in this case for a further unspecified agenda, generally about how superior the capatialist system is over communism.
The Soviets had no choice but to break up what amounted to a strangling medieval style of agriculture and try and replace it. This was made severe with the worst drought on record, 1929-33. That collectivization failed to deliver everything that was expected of it, dodges the fact that the Soviets were already heading towards continual famine and disaster unless they did something to address the chronic food shortages they faced anyway. Bashing up the Kulaks was a convenient way to deal retribution to a group already in opposition to the regime as well. Crude politics, but effective. I don't condone it, but I understand why it was done.
1929
Many Ukrainian farmers, known for their independence, still refuse to join the collective farms, which they regarded as similar to returning to the serfdom of earlier centuries. Stalin introduces a policy of "class warfare" in the countryside in order to break down resistance to collectivization. The successful farmers, or kurkuls, (kulaks, in Russian) are branded as the class enemy, and brutal enforcement by regular troops and secret police is used to "liquidate them as a class." Eventually anyone who resists collectivization is considered a kurkul.
The Kulaks didn't care that there was a return to serfdom. Serfdom had existed in Russia officially until 1860, but continued more or less unchanged, until the Soviets arrived. What was different, was that the Kulaks, rather than being the landlords, became part of the workforce. They lost their priveleges by birth and joined the queue like everybody else. So many were executed because of the resistance that continued and continues to this day in the Ukraine to Russian presence. Stalin was brutal, but there were reasons behind why he did what he did. I put his actions on a par with the 1916 uprisings or what the US should have done to the KKK after the civil war. Distasteful but necessary
1930
1.5 million Ukrainians fall victim to Stalin's "dekulakization" policies, Over the extended period of collectivization, armed dekulakization brigades forcibly confiscate land, livestock and other property, and evict entire families. Close to half a million individuals in Ukraine are dragged from their homes, packed into freight trains, and shipped to remote, uninhabited areas such as Siberia where they are left, often without food or shelter. A great many, especially children, die in transit or soon thereafter.
Yep, and what choice did stalin have after continual famine since at least 1913, a most brutal civil war that almost tore the country apart, a resistance led by an ethnic and social group opposed in every sense to the principals of the new Soviet. Stalins methods were brutal in the extreme, as he dragged a bankrupt and redundant nation, deeply divided in itself kicking and screaming from the 16th century to the 20th. This was always going to be a difficult, bloodthirsty process, but it did work. Under the Soviet control, between 1920 and 1940, agricultural outputs roughly doubled, industrial outputs I think quadrupled. It was an evil process, fast tracked forcibly to get the results needed quickly rather than accepting a more gentle process of change, but it worked, and as history shows, was found to be absolutely essential given what happened 1941. As it turned out, Stalins Psychotic phobias and xenophobia turned out to be pretty well founded.
1932-1933
The Soviet government sharply increases Ukraine's production quotas, ensuring that they could not be met. Starvation becomes widespread. In the summer of 1932, a decree is implemented that calls for the arrest or execution of any person – even a child -- found taking as little as a few stalks of wheat or any possible food item from the fields where he worked. By decree, discriminatory voucher systems are implemented, and military blockades are erected around many Ukrainian villages preventing the transport of food into the villages and the hungry from leaving in search of food. Brigades of young activists from other Soviet regions are brought in to sweep through the villages and confiscate hidden grain, and eventually any and all food from the farmers' homes. Stalin states of Ukraine that "the national question is in essence a rural question" and he and his commanders determine to "teach a lesson through famine" and ultimately, to deal a "crushing blow" to the backbone of Ukraine, its rural population.
The Ukraine was a region under military occupation by 1932. Moreover the early failures of collectivization meant the regime had to make difficult and brutal decisions about who was to live and who was not. They made a choice. Those who had resisted in the past and were going to die anyway, would be robbed and allowed to die, so that others more sympathetic to the regime might have a chance at survival. Sitting back today, sipping on our lattes and watching the sunsets across rolling fields of wheat and corn, we often just don't understand the absolute stark realities facing the Soviets from 1924 through to 1947. It was a brutal, bitter situation, with no easy choices and no soft answers. I don't think anyone bu Stalin had the stomach to face this situation.
1933
By June, at the height of the famine, people in Ukraine are dying at the rate of 30,000 a day, nearly a third of them are children under 10. Between 1932-34, approximately 4 million deaths are attributed to starvation within the borders of Soviet Ukraine. This does not include deportations, executions, or deaths from ordinary causes. Stalin denies to the world that there is any famine in Ukraine, and continues to export millions of tons of grain, more than enough to have saved every starving man, woman and child.
November 1933, the United States, under newly elected president Franklin D. Roosevelt, chose to formally recognized Stalin's Communist government and also negotiated a sweeping new trade agreement. The following year, the pattern of denial in the West culminated with the admission of the Soviet Union into the League of Nations. Stalin's Five-Year Plans for the modernization of the Soviet Union depended largely on the purchase of massive amounts of manufactured goods and technology from Western nations. Those nations were unwilling to disrupt lucrative trade agreements with the Soviet Union in order to pursue the matter of the famine.
No idea where you got this idea that the USSR was swimming in excess grain production sometime after 1932. Sounds like convenient propaganda to me.
In actual fact Russian grain outputs fell sharply between 1913 and 1935. My source for this information is Wheatcroft and Davies, 1994.
Known or confirmed grain production in this period are as follows (millions of tons):
1913: 68
1921: 55
1928: 65
1929: 63
1930: 65
1931: 56 ;
1932; 55
1933: 54
1934: 60
1935: 75
1936: 56
1937: 97
1938: 75
1940: 107
The planned target for 1931 was fixed at 97.9 million tons but already by 1 June, when drought manifested itself in many productive regions, the authorities had to lower the plan to 85.2 million tons. The drought continued and the target was revised again to 79.2 million tons. Already with these estimates, there was a net deficit for grain production, a famine of the most severe order was now known to be inevitable. However, this was not the end of the crisis. The target was then lowered once again to 78.5 million tons, and in the autumn more realistic estimates were already assessing the harvest to be as low as 70 million tons. The plan for state grain provision was reduced as well from 26.6 million tons to 22.7 million tons. In 1931 the USSR did manage to export 5.2 million tons, which does seem anomalous, but far from your claim of being suffificnt to avoid the famine. By this stage, the country was in deficit for grain production to the tune of 25 million tons. 5 million tons was not going to change anything.
In spite of the very poor harvest that year (Yutkropht, 2001), in the autumn of 1931, one of the Soviet party leaders, Anastas Mikoyan, even stated that the grain problem had been solved in the USSR. One official source reported that 69.4 million tons of grain were collected, but this was mere propaganda as the Soviets attempted to hide from the world the depth of their crisis. more realistic Western estimate was only 55.8 million tons, the lowest for many years.
In 1932, the next planned target was set at 84.8 million tons, including 29.5 million tons for the state grain provision. Within a few months the plan for grain delivery had been cut to 23.5 million tons (for the collectives). This was then lowered to 22.1 million tons. Finally, the plan for gross grain production was lowered to 73.3 million tons. The actual gross grain production officially announced was even lower, at 69.9 million tons, 34 percent short of the planned target for the final year of the five-year plan, and still shy of the absolute minimums needed to avoid starvation. . The actual size of the harvest ought not to have been unexpected as many regions were still suffering from the previous year's famine which had begun in 1931 and continuing with the worst drought on record. The USSR exported a mere 1.8 million tons that year, none of it of a type suitable for human consumption (Yutkropht, 2001).
In January 1933, Stalin reported that the five-year plan had been fulfilled completely in four years and three months. He was lying. The main targets, even in industry, were nothing like achieved. In agriculture it was even worse: a mere one-eighth of the mineral fertilizer and less than a third of the tractors had been produced. The failure of the grain production sector was evident as the harvest in 1932-1933 was significantly lower than in 1928-1929. Grain exports had declined during the period. In 1933 only 0.8 million tons were exported (Conquest, 2002). Your claim that vast amount of grain were being exported in this early 1930's period is, im afraid not supported by reputable sources.